… and where else 3D printing is likely to impact. We muse over the possibilities for wide-format print providers as the technology gains ground.
Every revolution starts somewhere. For the technology commonly (and slightly misleadingly) known as 3D printing ¬that somewhere is New York. The city’s famous Museum of Modern Art sells 3D-printed jewellery in its store. The 3D printing pioneer MakerBot has a store in Manhattan, while Mary Huang, who helped design the world’s first ready-to-wear 3D bikini, lives in Brooklyn and collaborates with Shapeways, which runs a large 3D printing factory in Long Island. One Manhattan barber has even stuck two 3D printers in the shop window just to look cool.
Last autumn, Alex Daley, chief technology investment strategist at US investment research firm Casey Research, hailed 3D printing as “the greatest growth sector in the world”. The likes of Amazon, Disney, Fujifilm, GE, Google, HP, Microsoft and Samsung are investing in this technology while Audi and Boeing already use it to create parts.
You probably know how the technology works – and that it uses the same kind of heads as an inkjet printer – and the potential is enormous. With 3D printing, a product design could be sent, as a kind of PDF, to anywhere in the world it needs to be manufactured.
As the Atlantic Council think tank noted recently: “Printing a few thousand iPhones on demand (and with instant updates or different versions for each phone) at a local facility that can manufacture many other products may be more cost effective than manufacturing ten million iPhones in China and shipping them to 180 countries around the world”. You can see why some analysts predict this technology could rest the global economy. By 2020, 50-80% of finished products could involve some form of 3D printing. But will this extraordinarily exciting technology have any impact on the wide-format printing industry?
The short answer to this question is yes. The slightly longer version is yes but nobody really knows quite how. Every major customer in the wide-format industry could use 3D printing to redesign their supply chain, increase their product range (because products are so much cheaper to make in smaller runs), accelerate product launches (because new designs will be faster and cheaper to prototype), be kinder to the environment (as this is an additive process, using only material required for production, there is almost no waste) and rethink their channel to market.
Within ten years, millions of consumers will be printing on these machines – which should, by then, be able to change materials at the push of a button – at home. Others will take their 3D designs into a store to be printed, much as we take our digital photos to Happy Snaps. Many large companies will run their own 3D printing plants (be 3D manufacturing plants) while others will send their 3D ‘PDFs’ to a third party to print them. In the US, RR Donnelley has bought a company with 3D expertise and Callprint has indicated an interest in running a purpose-built hub where it can print – ie. make – all kinds of products.
The Callprint approach could create a new revenue stream for wide-format print groups who are large, technically sophisticated and ambitious enough to diversify into what could be a lucrative new market. Much will depend on the customer. For example, it could be profitable for a wide-format printer selling to an architect or interior designer to extend their service by producing models of new designs on a 3D printer. Those large-format firms that already offer design services may also be intrigued by 3D’s potential for rapid, cost effective prototyping.
Such decisions are, at least, in the printer’s own hands. Yet 3D printing’s biggest impact on wide-format could mostly be indirect – a consequence of its effect on the industry’s customer base.
Take the retail industry, which spends millions on wide-format print, as an example. DHL has forecast that “in some sectors, retailers will cease to exist or become ‘shop windows’ for manufacturers, keeping no stock of their own. Orders will be fulfilled directly by the manufacturer, and delivered directly to the home.” This doesn’t sound like good news for wide-format printers servicing retail: fewer traditional retail stores could signify fewer orders. Yet equally, if 3D printing does make it easier and faster to create new products, retailers may buy more wide-format print to promote those launches.
A revolution that started with jewellery, bikinis and barbers showing off could signify a new industrial revolution. Then again it might not. There are so many variables in play, so many decisions ahead that could prove idiotic or inspired that there is not much wide-format printers can do, at this point, but keep their eyes – and their minds – open.