Here, in an open letter to two of the most well known, global 3D printing service providers, Paulina Perepelkin, aka, AdditiveFashion, raises some of the issues that USERS are facing. Her letter, originally published on her blog, and reproduced here with full permission, is a brave move, borne of frustration but from a place of love!
Shapeways, i.materialise, I love you guys, but you gotta change. Now have a seat, make yourselves comfortable, because we have to have a heart to heart, and this is not going to be easy (and it will take a bit of time – feel free to scroll down for the main takeaway points). This is coming from a place of love because I want you to grow and be better, so I’ll have to be blunt: you’ve got a serious issue with your online stores. Both of you.
I’ve been chatting with a friend recently, and she told me that her gorgeous earrings have not been selling well through Shapeways. Now, I was really surprised, because her pieces are some of the best I’ve seen out in the 3D printed jewellery world. So I tried to look her up in the store, to see if maybe it was something to do with the pictures, or description … or something. And then I really looked in your stores. And found the problem.
Shapeways today proudly let me know that it currently has 159,899 designs for sale on the site. Although that’s definitely a ‘wow’ factor, and a big testament to your popularity with designers, it is not actually a good thing for a store. No ‘store’ has this sort of inventory, and for very good reasons.
When we go to a store to buy soup, lets say, there might be half an aisle of soups. Which seems like a lot, but then you are able to quickly narrow down the choices. For ‘chicken’ soup or ‘vegetarian’ soup, your actual choice will be about 3-5 items. Now that’s because the store manager knows that people prefer to make choices from a fairly small selection, don’t have all day to evaluate soups, and would end up walking away if the choice of chicken soups included 20+ labels. Similarly, having over 1,000 earrings on your site might seem like a good idea, but it actually overwhelms the viewer and reduces the likelihood of anyone ever finding any earrings they like — and purchasing them.
Now of course, you can bring up Amazon as an example of a store that has every single item imaginable. Which might be true. But the way that Amazon presents that information to the customer is very well thought out – not only does Amazon already know the type of earrings I like and uses that info to give me something I’m likely to buy, but they also let users ‘rate’ their items, helping me further narrow down my choices. In addition, Amazon is now embracing the whole ‘curated store’ idea —carefully picking a small, easy to choose-from selection like you’d find in a boutique.
An overwhelming choice will make your customer give up, but lack of choice loses a sale as well.
i.materialise currently has under 1,000 items in its online store. However, the choices are not ‘curated’, hand picked or well organized. When you want to buy earrings, you have to scroll through the entire jewellery section. And that jewellery section might have a piece or two that are ok, but nothing that I’m in love with (plus – whistles in jewellery?)
What I did love out of i.materialise stuff, however, was the gorgeous headband by Gloria Valli from the last i.materialise fashion show. That’s what you really excel at: you have presented some of the best 3D printed pieces in your fashion shows in the past. The upcoming NEA fashion show will no doubt have some stunning works as well. Yet, if history repeats itself, those pieces will disappear from sight the second the show is over, unavailable for purchase unless you negotiate directly with the designer. The “Woodpecker” headband is nowhere to be found.
Now, i.materialise, please do understand that I’m wishing you the best here, but why don’t you just give up. At 1,000 items you’ll never catch up to Shapeways, and you cannot run a store with the same business model. It’s just not working for you. But that’s ok, because you excel in other ways.
How about, instead, you embrace your inner fashonista, and only feature winning designs from fashion shows, or from some of your fab competitions? How about carefully selecting your inventory to only feature the best designed, the most beautiful pieces? Heck, combine i.materialise store and MGX store, and become an exclusive distributer of the highest caliber of 3D printing designs – if you have a small, well chosen and well-curated selection, you’ll not only attract customers, but you will also appeal to designers who really want to stand out from the rest.
Now both of you, fixing up your stores isn’t enough. Lets talk customers. Both of you are working hard to grow the 3D printing designer base. And I get that. Designers create cool things, and they contribute interesting designs to your sites, inspiring other designers. But the thing is, both of you are doing next to nothing to grow the actual consumer base, to attract people to buy the 3D printed stuff designers create.
Really, think about it, do designers actually buy the stuff made by other designers? Why would they? If they are a ‘designer’, they have an artistic vision, and aesthetic, combined with a skill – if they see a particular design that they like, they are probably going to use it as an inspiration to create something bigger, better, closer to their personal aesthetic. They are not going to buy the item itself.
So, who will?
I will. People like me, who struggle to make a power point presentation pretty, let alone create a CAD file (or put together a well-illustrated post). And how am I supposed to find great stuff that you feature on your store, when you are not just competing with each other, but with the rest of the universe when it comes to earrings, for example?
You are expecting the designers to promote their stuff themselves. Well, guess what – designers are not marketers, and are not merchandisers, and are not that well versed in selling stuff. And even if some multi-talented designers take a marketing course, develop those skills and end up better at selling than other designers, they are still struggling. Their platform to connect with customers is still incredibly small. It’s hard to be an independent designer when you are competing with H&M, every ‘hip’ boutique in town as well as the other 150,000 designers on your site.
And I know that engineering types tend to think that if you just made the design good enough, it would sell itself. “Build it, and they would come” sort of mentality. Well, no, that does not actually work. If you build the hippest 3D printed iPhone case in the forest, no one is going to go looking for an iPhone case in some forest if there is an Urban Outfitters around the corner, no matter how amazing that iPhone case is (though watch out for Urban Outfitters, they just might ‘coincidentally’ have a similar design next week).
So, main take-aways from this little rant:
- Shapeways, you gotta shape up. Curate your stuff, trim the weeds, make your content easier to navigate, and amazing new stuff easier to find.
- i.materialise, embrace your inner fashonista. Curate your store to focus on ‘exclusive’ hand-picked designs. You don’t have to be big if you’re special.
- Both of you, you have to help develop a consumer market for 3D printed items. You can’t just expect the designers to find customers for their 3D printed wares. If you help the designers grow their market, your market will grow as well.
To stress once again, love you guys both. Keep growing, keep making beautiful 3D printed stuff, and keep creating. And lets keep the conversation going: call me, you got my number.
Do they really need to fix things? I can’t agree.
This is why: these shops have a great variation of inspirational content and most shoppers like to watch the original designs on both sites. Getting lost in awesomeness is part of the success of these sites! 🙂
How many shoppers on Shapeways search for one specific earring?
Only if you know the model this would be the case. Shapeways has a wishlist option for the regular shopper to save your favorite items.
It’s not that bad to spend some extra minutes looking at cool stuff to find the coolest…;)
Hi Paulina,
“Curate your stuff, trim the weeds”
Would this be something you would like to see more in the future:
https://www.shapeways.com/gift-guide
Although we created this for the holiday season in 2012, I’m sure we can do these kind of things more often.
In addtion, we are actively working on improving the whole shopper experience 🙂
Cheers,
Mitchell from the Customer Service team
I feel the same disappointment looking at the crap all those sites contain. Good article,
though a bit too emotional.
But from the business point of view this is quite understandable. Shapeways, Materialize, Sculpteo and alike remind me the early stages of “print on demand” 2D business. Imagekind, fineartofamerica, redbubble, etc – they all faced the same problem: too many artists, hard to promote for artists, only few buyers. Their solution was simple: let’s increase the offerings and let’s artists work themselves to promote their work. A marketplace works on a percentage basis, so the larger the base, the bigger is a percentage.
The other approach is a curated gallery, like saatchionline (there are a dozen of
others). But still there are thousands of works which is hard to filter. It is just a refined version of a public marketplace.
The same concerns Etsy in a physical world or Turbosquid in a virtual 3D world, or
alike.
All these marketplaces are created to fetch money to the marketplace, not to the artist.
If an artist wants to make money, he or she needs to create a portfolio and promote it. Look at Rodin: he was not just a great sculptor, he was a perfect salesman.
I obviously agree with you and Paulina’s article and that is definitely the vision we share at PrintaBit.
Consumer 3D printing is a small and relatively young market but as it reaches maturity and grows companies in this sector needs to understand the differences in needs and expectations from customers and redefine their value oppositions. “One size does not fit all.” That’s segmentation 101.
Based on this observation, in addition to our manufacturing service, we are developing our own Boutique for promising and talented designers. We will work hand-in-hand with them on the production of limited series of their artistic work for exclusive sales. Let me tell you, we are really willing to disrupt the status quo.
Talking about Rodin, I love his work and recently had the chance to visit its museum in Paris. What was really interesting (and visionary maybe) about his work process was that instead of doing it all by himself, Rodin’s only focus was on the handling of clay, the “design” of his sculptures.
After he completed his work in clay at small scale, he employed higly-skilled people to re-sculpt his compositions at larger sizes and cast the clay compositions into plaster or bronze or to carve his marbles. That was a real partnership with trusted professionals.
Doesn’t that design-to-production workflow remind you anything?
As sometimes digital artists may be attacked by some people for not manufacturing their own works, I like to take Rodin’s story as an example.
Congratulations for this great article Paulina, we enjoyed it!
Excuse me,but I didn’t get your point other than promoting your service tangentially connected to this theme.
I think Paulina’s point is straightforward: she says it’s hard for a talented designer to get promoted at huge marketplaces like Shapeways or Materialize.
My point isalso straightforward: this marketplaces business is not to promote single artists, but to broaden a customer base, so an artist needs topromote him/herself not relying on attractive, though not effectivemarketplaces.
I’ve been to Musee Rodin maybe 20 or 30 times, so what? All master sculptors delegate a dirty job to pupils. My point was that Rodin spent a lot of his time selling his works, this is a point I argue with Paulina who thinks an artist is just a creator. Unfortunately an artist needs to be a salesman as well. And a trendy marketplace is just is one of the tools, This is my point.
First of all, I am really sorry and I apologize for over-promoting my service. That wasn’t the purpose at all and I didn’t even think about including a link.
I believe Paulina’s point wasn’t only about the promotion of designers in huge marketplaces. It was also about the ease of access for buyers to quality designs and the focus of these marketplaces. That is the reason why I dared talk about segmentation and my vision.
I totally got your point about Rodin as well and just wanted to add the thoughts that came to my mind when I visited his place this summer, nothing more.
But you are right, being an artist requires many skills and sales is one of them. However, I think one can assist them in this process. Companies may also exist to help the designer and facilitate the promotion of her work, on every channels, even if this is not directly business related.
What about artist collectives that even if they doesn’t buy from one another can help promote the entire group. There are plenty of examples of this working in other sectors. I assume here that a company may just play a role and help with this promotion process.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
It was my fault being too aggressive. And you are very right about segmentation.
By the way, as you live in Paris and you seem to really be into 3D printing and the Art sector, I will be glad to meet you to talk about it.
Let me know if you are interested.
Great article!
Interesting article, thanks for the insights Paulina. As a shop owner, we’ve had our shop and products featured on Shapeways. Their internal promotion hasn’t really translate into sales yet. We’re actually coming from an advertising agency background, so we do market our own products. It’s good to have your work in multiple market places. We’re currently on Art Fire, Scout Mob, Layer by Layer, Shapeways, Square Marketplace and Etsy. Out of all these market places, Etsy is the only one actually generating sales for us. Etsy offers internal marketing videos and tutorials via their Etsy Labs – it’s great way to educate designers on how to promote and sell their work (even outside of Etsy). We tend to promote our Etsy shop more than the others for several reasons – Since we fabricate our own products in house (a la makerbot) we have a quicker turn around than Shapeways. Our ABS material is more durable and flexible than their “strong+flexible” material. Our Etsy price is relatively less expensive. Etsy has a lot more traffic and a larger user-base. There’s also internal keyword ads that shop owners can purchase that helps them generate sales. We’ve heard the shop managers at shapeways are ramping up their marketing. We’re hoping Shapeways can follow Etsy’s example and catch up to a be a better marketplace for designers.
Thanks for that insight, I wasn’t even aware that Etsy has that extra service for their vendors. I’ll have to take a closer look at Etsy Labs.
Great points Paulina! Will look forward to seeing how Shapeways and Materialise continue to evolve.
Exactly! I couldn’t agree more with all of your points – giants like shapeways just can’t become Amazon for 3D Printing (at least in the nearest feature), so when you are not just browsing “all cool stuff” but search for something specific to buy (earrings, bracelets, etc.) it becomes clear very fast that you have to sift through hundred thousands of really poor drafts or non-relevant items to find something that is really worth it..
With that in mind we started http://styleshapes.com – an online community and magazine dedicated exclusively to jewelry and other 3D printed fashion items. Where we hand-pick and publish items that are really worth it.
Thank you all for your feedback and great perspectives. I’m happy and amazed by the support this has generated: it looks like a lot of people are on the same page in looking for better alternatives. It will be exciting to see how the market place develops!
We think the curated approach will work best and that’s exactly what we are looking to do at http://www.imagineindustries.com
Thanks for this article. We just launched last week but this is the similar to the approach I have envisioned for us. It’s very true that neither Shapeways or i.materialise have done a very good job, from the marketing front. But how could they? I mean if they have 20 near identical gold rings for sale?
We want just one. We want the designer to be showcased and rewarded for his design and then when his time has come… A new design will replace that one and so on. We love a great design but we want to encourage designers to reiterate, get feedback and create even better designs.
We are still working on the biz models for our products and it will be a long road to getting our system exactly how we want it. But ultimately we know we want to reward the individual designer and make our shop a place he/she knows they have a chance of making a real income through.
After reading the article and the comments below the bottom line seems to me:
Not many artists are making profit via marketplaces like shapeways.
Paulina finds the places are confusing – in a nutshell.
So why is everybody hailing shapeways, sculpteo and imaterialise?
Could it be that Blogs and media are mostly reporting about the “big five” in the 3D Printing wilderness…what is with the small pearls out there?
Why not reporting more about artist which market/promote their products
themselves, supporting smaller more specialised marketplaces by
reporting about their activities. In a nutshell, big blogs like this one
should/could report more about smaller businesses.
However, artist could do something too:
They could team up with smaller, read local 3D Printing service providers
and galeries all over the world. By doing so, they could probably create more total awareness.
They also would get better quality 3D Prints:
Due to mass production…Shapeways is not able to deliver fast and in an
outstanding quality. IMO many small SLS,SLA or 3DP(multicolor-printing) providers are doing better and printing even objects beyond the requirements set by shapeways.
My dear artist! Think about it!
Create for the world, but produce/promote local! 🙂
I disagree in a way – I think that shapeways should not trim their range – their ethos is that anyone can be a designer and anyone can open a store. Tailoring this will take that away… In the same way that eBay makes anyone a market stand owner, but you wouldn’t say ‘Hey, eBay! Get rid of some of your stuff!’.
As a designer, Shapeways is a great way to get your design into a place where it is salable, if you want to promote it then that is up to you to get the traffic to your page, whether that be with tags/key words, having your own site that links to it or some other form of web promotion.
As a buyer, be more specific with your search, if you’re just browsing with no specific search then you’re probably not focused enough to find the thing you want anyway.
Many of the ‘weeds’ are likely to be the next generation of designers, probably in their teens, who have designed their first thing and uploaded it. These could be the first steps into a design career. I never had a opportunity like this when I was starting out and wouldn’t want to take it away from anyone. (I’m not saying that they all are though).
An alternative to both is Kraftwurx.com. They offer 83 materials now according to their website and I especially like the real precious metals they offer as I am a jeweler.
Great article, just read it because this link: http://i.materialise.com/blog/entry/wanted-your-input-for-our-gallery
Might be even an option if you let people ‘rank’ items but that only works if you have a lot of visitors.
It happened I just sold my first ‘table lamp’ today. And I can’t really imagine someone wanted to pay € 200 euro for a little lamp. But it feels good.
I’m no marketeer but I do let people know I created that lamp once. And that’s easy using social networks. I’m not getting rich if I sell anything in the store and it’s hard for me to tell how much the actual production costs. Lots of things are just very expensive. If you would have a store with 2000 really great (hand picked) items they would be all very expensive (since most designers want more than 5% fee). Not sure if that’s the right approach.
But I loved your post and I wonder how the 3D printing shops will look 5 years from now. Everything improves.
Oscar Rottink
Buy 3D printer first according to their own needs to determine the machine level,after compared to the same level of machine price, choose a suitable machine.
My solution to this would be that both Shapeways and I.materialise should provide a back-end website that would just take care of the printing, shipping and invoices and let every designer have their own website.
If all stores have the same design (and please, don’t reply by telling me you can customize you banner and shop name …), it will be hard to compete with high profile interactive branded websites that use animation/Interaction/etc… to sell their products.
In one of the numerous (and really good) tutorials found on shapeways, it’s said that “one should tell the story behind the object being sold”. Well, that’s a great advice. Shapeways website and sub-stores aren’t telling ANY !
Please give us the freedom to externalise the stores and just keep shapeways as a mainframe.
Thanks for the article, by the way 🙂
You are conflating shapeways site in its entirety with individual shops. Each shop owner can list as many or as few items as they want. Whether anyone buys them depend on how well designer has designed the stuff and how well they have gotten the word out about their products, leveraging social media, youtube, personal sites, existing client base, etc. Even if Shapeways has 10000000 3d files print-ready and publicly viewable it won’t stop good designer from being found by customers. You cannot blame shapeways for your friend’s earrings being lost in the crowd. shapeways desingers must clean up their own shops and make their shop pages inviting. 🙂