HP Innovation Journal Issue 04: Fall 2016 | Page 8

Shapeways & HP: building a company
and a community of Makers
By P
 eter Weijmarshausen, CEO & Co-Founder, Shapeways
I
started Shapeways in March 2007, with
the vision of building a platform that would
enable people to make amazing products
using 3D printing. I felt we could change the
game, and help realize the potential of digital
manufacturing.
We launched our service in July 2008. It was
a big undertaking because 3D printing was ini-
tially used for prototyping: built for engineers, by
engineers--and we were using it to make final
products. In doing so, we encountered some big
challenges: the cost was too high, the machines
were not really suited for the job, and the produc-
tion lead times too long. I figured we’d find issues,
provide feedback to the 3D printing companies
building the machines, and that they’d improve
their machines accordingly. Unfortunately, that
didn’t happen--at least not fast enough. For six
or seven years after our launch, the technology
didn’t improve much.
In July 2014, I had a phone call with Steve
Nigro, now President of the 3D Printing Business
at HP. He told me HP was working on a new
type of 3D printer built specifically for man-
ufacturing, able to deliver products at lower
cost, higher quality, and far greater speed than
existing printers.
I’ve seen early prototypes of the HP Jet Fusion
3D Printing Solution, and it is heading exact-
ly in the direction the Shapeways community
HP Multi Jet Fusion 3D printer
8 Innovation Journal · Issue 4 · Fall 2016
and consumers have been
asking for. The new HP
machine enables us to
significantly lower lead times and
decrease costs while offering improved quality
of products. In the near future, it will even al-
low us to deliver full-color plastic, which will be
widely embraced because our community who
frequently uses plastic for board game figurines,
Internet memes and scale models.
Speed, color, quality: driving 3D
into the mainstream
This speed breakthrough can play a huge role in
the adoption of 3D printing for consumer prod-
ucts. People are used to the instant gratification
of retail. Even with e-commerce you can gener-
ally get your order fulfilled in a day or two. With
a substantially faster printer, we can offer more
competitive 2-day service. And we’re exploring
the logistics of even offering a same-day service.
Full-color printing will be a huge develop-
ment, making it easy to add color, type, and
pictures to customize existing products. Adding
a picture to the back of a smartphone case or
printing scale trains in full-color are both per-
fect examples.
Materials quality and variety will expand with
the new printer, as well. The model coming this
fall works with nylon, but HP has a roadmap
for multiple types of plastic and other mate-
rials including ceramics. HP has an open-ma-
terial platform, meaning anyone can develop
their own material and use it on the machine.
Another exciting development, I think, is HP’s
work on conductive pathways, so you can make
your own electronics. This will open a whole new
field of creativity, as people can print and embed
RFID chips, antennas, power leads, and other
elements into their products.
Creative confidence
is an additive process
Shapeways is a platform that enables people to
make products they want. We provide feedback
and inspire people by showing them the enor-
mous range of products Shapeway community
members are creating: from scale trains, puz-
zles, board game characters to beautiful ear-
rings, rings and even coffee cups. We support all
major 3D design software and operate on open
standards, to ensure that sure all the content
people want to print will be compatible. Through
our partnership with HP and others, Shapeways
is building a network for digital manufacturing
around the globe to bring manufacturing closer
to the end user, getting it into peoples’ hands
more rapidly. Makers can produce in small quan-
tities, test, iterate, and create many specialized
products. It’s a huge departure from the days of
mass manufacturing with its high cost of entry
and hit-or-miss inventory.
With technology like the new-gen 3D print-
er, and the contributions of an enormous open
source maker community, I think the variety and
sophistication of products we use in the future
will vastly increase. Together, we are fueling
creativity at a massive scale. 

Peter Weijmarshausen is CEO and
Co-founder of Shapeways, the Platform
for Product Creation using 3D printing.