In the beginning of the year, I wrote that 2015 will be the year of materials and acquisitions, and first up is Mixee Labs, whose team members were just acquired by Amazon!
On their blog, they posted:
“We are happy to announce that the Mixee Labs team is joining Amazon. Last fall, we worked with Amazon to launch customizable products in their 3D Printing Store. We will now bring our software to Amazon and join the 3D Printing team full time.
We want to make 3D printed products more accessible, and Amazon is the best place for that. We have been impressed by Amazon’s focus on customer experience, innovation, and long term thinking.
Andrew Thomas will take over operations of Mixee Labs, which will remain an independent company not owned by Amazon. We expect customer experience and product selection to improve under Andrew’s leadership.
Andrew is a designer and artist living in Brooklyn. He also works at Shapeways and has produced a body of work in a wide range of materials, including the Fantasy Football Trophy creator available on Mixee Labs. You can follow him on Medium and Twitter.
We look forward to bringing product design, customization, and 3D printing to more customers!”
Mixee Labs has an array of apps that allow users to customize their own creations, without having any experience with 3D modeling. You can customize your own cufflinks, bobbleheads, charm jewelry, dog bone tags, rings, wax stamps and slim wallets among other things.
The company was started by two Yale graduates, a computer scientist named Aaron Barnet and a cognitive scientist and former manager of the Materials Product Group at Shapeways Nancy Liang. The goal was to create a destination point for designers and consumers to mix it up. The JavaScript-based Mixee Labs Creators give customers the ability to customize colors, sizes, and other features online.
Recently, they created the first Mixee bag, which was 3D printed out of hinged triangles, which allows the “fabric” to fold, as well as wallets with magnetized clasps to keep them closed.
We will keep updating the story as more details come to light!
Correction: This story previously stated that Mixee Labs was acquired by Amazon, but the firm will remain independent of Amazon.
