Although it is not live yet, when you visit the placeholder website for online 3D printable model marketplace Kwambio you can already get a taste of what it is aiming to achieve: a smooth and seamless personalization experience that can make 3D printing more accessible to all types of different people. In other words it wants to take 3D printing to the mainstream.
Led by CEO Volodymyr Usov, the 12-person Kwambio team is certainly not the only one with this objective but it has already convinced the judges of IDCEE (Investor’s Day Central and Eastern Europe), a leading event for start-ups in Eastern Europe, of their potential. In fact Kwambio came in first place, which means a cash prize and a ticket to participate and compete at another important event, the U-Start global conference, taking place in Milan.
The young and diversified team behind Kwambio includes CTO Dmitriy Kryvoshey and the well-known Ukranian industrial designer Ivan Zhurba, who has designed most of the items that can already be seen on the private beta testing phase of the site. There are also two more designers and five developers. “These are the guys who make the Kwambio magic happen,” says Usov. “making product interaction feel like a smooth experience.”
“That means you don’t just choose and order different stuff on the web – Usov continues – you create unique products at home. It’s a new lifestyle and we realize that much time is needed to make this new approach more common. So we have invested a lot of time in marketing and PR activities and that’s exactly what our newest member of the team, Kate is responsible for.”
For Usov making 3D printing more accessible and useful has become a personal matter, ever since he fell in love with the technology upon visiting the 3D Printshow in London in 2013. “The idea of creating something great with 3D printing comes to everyone who sees a working 3D printer for the first time. Everyone understands the potential of this truly divine technology, but not everyone understands how complicated it can be.”
Buying a 3D printer, several weeks later, forced Usov to confront himself with the reality of consumer 3D printing: difficulties in setting up the machine, not many useful things to print. “It was not that dream I had seen in my mind, where people could create truly unique objects that suit their personality with just a few clicks.” He had envisioned a new generation of independent shaping a new world with their unique products and he set out to make that dream more real.
“We started in early 2014 with [co-founder and current CTO] Dmitriy Krivoshey, and it took us 8 months to build the first prototype of our platform, which we presented at the the London 3D Printshow in 2014. We had planned to find at most 100 3D printers owners to test our platform, but now have more than 1000 testers. We see people are ready to unleash the power of their creativity. They just need simple tools to do it. That’s what Kwambio is all about: a simple tool for creating unique and personalized products.”
After the successful preview at IDCEE 2014, Kwambio is readying up to invite more beta-testers. They will then proceed to polish the platform and add new products to be customized and personalized. The team verifies all products for all the most common 3D printers. They print them, take pictures and test all social features. The way the software works is by allowing for immediate online customization of a product and then streaming the finished product to a 3D printer.
This makes it possible for designers to protect their creations while having access to digital stores through which they can offer their products to a global audience. The road undertaken by Kwambio is similar to that chosen by other fascinating projects such as Uformit or the recently covered Tingeer: a healthy competition between them is going to make 3D printing go mainstream faster.
