

3D printing and the future of retail - joeyespo
http://daltoncaldwell.com/3d-printing-the-future-of-retail

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replicatorblog
Interesting notions, but a few counterpoints:

\+ 3-D printers aren't economical — Something like a drywall anchor takes a
couple seconds to produce in a traditional injection molding process. It would
likely take 15-30 minutes using an FDM 3-D printing process and even longer
using a higher resolution SLA system.

\+ Print-on-Demand hasn't taken off on books, why will it with physical goods?
Print-on-Demand technology has been available for the better part of a decade,
but Barnes & Noble and Borders never saw an opportunity to implement it.
Again, this comes down to speed. For undifferentiated products, it will always
be faster to mass produce.

\+ Even taking the argument at face value that 3-D printing will help digitize
inventory and create the same pressures that digital media did, I think more
efficient mass production, rather than 3-D printing will be the likely case.
Zara can produce limited runs of high fashion clothing and get them into malls
all across the US in 2 weeks. Protomold makes low cost, small run injection
molding accessible. We'll likely see more of this rather than fleets of
MakerBots.

\+ The problem with retail is the cost model of keeping store fronts open, not
the way the products in it are produced. Even if we assumed there would be big
box stores full of 3-D printers, they are still slow and do not have a Moore's
Law like effect that will change that any time soon. If I ordered something at
one of these 3-D printer stores, I'd have to wait hours to get my products.
Why not just go straight to ecommerce at that point.

\+ Producing Atoms is REALLY, REALLY hard. There are tens of thousands of
different plastic formulations. Different additives, secondary processes, and
assembly steps that go into high fit and finish products. Even the best 3-D
printers can only handle a few materials — at most. There is no way to produce
something like a pair of "Beats by Dre" headphones or a similarly complex
electromechanical device using those systems. The simple things that can be
produced would be more economical being mass produced and warehoused in a low
cost location and shipped to customers rather than printed on demand.

Think about the difference in quality between a printer at home and one of the
nice photosystems at a pro printer. Even then when dealing with paper stock
and 4 colors of ink the difference is striking. Now increase the difficulty by
several orders of magnitude.

3-D printers will have a huge impact, but more in the way open source
programming languages did. They lower the bar to entry and let more people get
involved with manufacturing, but will be limited utility tools, not everyday
items — at least in the way this post posits.

~~~
mercuryrising
I'll counter some of your counter points :).

 _\+ 3-D printers aren't economical — Something like a drywall anchor takes a
couple seconds to produce in a traditional injection molding process. It would
likely take 15-30 minutes using an FDM 3-D printing process and even longer
using a higher resolution SLA system._

It depends what you're creating to determine how economical it is. A drywall
anchor is obviously going to go down the mass production path as you need more
than just one drywall anchor. A personalized iPhone case (with your name on
it, to differentiate it from all your friend's iPhones) is a different story.
It's significantly more expensive to mass produce truly personalized items
('truly' in the sense that the structure of what you're creating has changed -
you could slap a sticker with your name on it, but that's a sticker on a case,
not a personalized case).

I have an FDM printer, I'll print this
(<http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5489>) out and report back when it's done
(it'll probably be about 15 minutes, but my printer is slow (40mm/s, some get
up to 150mm/s). (before I was done writing this comment, my machine finished
printing the drywall anchor - 10 minutes and 10 seconds of print time, see the
picture here - <http://imgur.com/a/iPnNx>, it broke when I tried to use it
(need to scale it up a little bit)).

The SLA - FDM argument isn't true, a higher resolution should take longer, but
SLA systems can print 2D planes at a time (unless they raster, in which case
their print head speed is limited by how quickly their mirrors can move),
speeding up the process a LOT. I can set my FDM to a .01 layer height, but it
would take 25 times as long to print something as opposed to using a .25 mm
layer height. I can just sand the part in 5 minutes and print something new.

 _\+ Print-on-Demand hasn't taken off on books, why will it with physical
goods? Print-on-Demand technology has been available for the better part of a
decade, but Barnes & Noble and Borders never saw an opportunity to implement
it. Again, this comes down to speed. For undifferentiated products, it will
always be faster to mass produce._

Your last sentence here is the reason 3D printing (if it does) will succeed.
My sister broke the knob for her oven. It's an old oven, the company wanted
$47 to replace the knob. They had a guy come over with a bunch of knobs, and
for some reason none of them fit. I printed one, first try, and wham, it fit
perfectly. No more pliers to turn the oven on! Now you wouldn't buy a printer
specifically for this use case, but when my nieces and nephew come over and I
can print them a glider airplane (that he took to show and tell) and a wand in
the time it takes them to watch a show, that's pretty cool (they get a kick
out of watching the part develop).

My sister brings me lots of stuff to fix (some I can, some I can't). I haven't
done it yet - but having the ability to whip up obscure parts for 'disposable'
toys allows them to stay alive a little longer. With a 3d printer, I can fix
almost any mechanical problem you have with your toys.

It's not for everyone, but for the people who use them it gives them amazing
abilities they did not have before. I don't have much money, so I can't get
nice sheets of acrylic, wood, whatever to shape something out of, but I have a
spool of plastic and can print almost anything.

 _\+ Even taking the argument at face value that 3-D printing will help
digitize inventory and create the same pressures that digital media did, I
think more efficient mass production, rather than 3-D printing will be the
likely case. Zara can produce limited runs of high fashion clothing and get
them into malls all across the US in 2 weeks. Protomold makes low cost, small
run injection molding accessible. We'll likely see more of this rather than
fleets of MakerBots._

Thanks for the protomold link. I made a 3D printer for a product I want to
make (hoping I'd be able to print some cases for it), but it's too slow for
how many I want to sell. I'm debating 1/4" plywood, or injection molding. I
think (as I have no money yet) wood will be the first run, but then I'd like
to injection mold my parts (3D printing helps here too (or rapid prototyping),
I can make sure my parts work before spending $1500 on a mold and crossing my
fingers).

In terms of the actual article, I think 3D printing will compliment big box
purchases, providing a market where add on customization (in many ways like a
tattoo shop - you come in once, talk about what you want, set up a date when
you want to get it done, and come back and the part is fixed / modified).

3D printing is what you use when you want something, but don't have a good way
of getting it.

------
jonemo
The main take-away I have from this blog post, is that the term "3D printing"
is increasingly used to mean "automated manufacturing", even by people who are
sophisticated enough to publish on Svbtle.

There aren't many products out there that can be produced by 3D printing
alone. You can, however, get to the point the author suggests by applying
"high automation" (integrating multiple automated fabrication methods into an
automated manufacturing system).

Nevertheless, can at least those of us in the know insist on using the term
"3D printing" precisely, i.e. only for additive manufacturing processes? That
would be splendid, I think.

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nickpinkston
I'm with replicatorblog below. The article is sensationalist. And psadri is
correct in that "on-demand manufacturing" is the real revolution.

From the article:

Q: "What percentage of the square footage of Home Depot is devoted to items
that could cheaply and easily be 3D printed?"

A: Less than 1%

Here's some thoughts on the real issues in the space:
[http://www.nickpinkston.com/2013/01/some-thoughts-on-
digital...](http://www.nickpinkston.com/2013/01/some-thoughts-on-digital-
manufacturing.html)

~~~
learc83
I spend hundreds of dollars each year at home depot on products that are _good
enough_ for what I need, but rarely perfect. I make things work, but they
almost never have exactly what I want.

Hopefully there are enough people like me to make some kind of retail
manufacturing on demand worth it.

Lowes has already switched to automated manufacturing for key duplication.

------
fernly
Oven knobs, fine. But there are so many things that can't be machine printed;
they require the assembly of components made of very different materials.

Take "sporting goods" mentioned in the article. Tennis racquet: supposing you
could print a frame that was strong enough (dubious) with an acceptable grip
feel (very dubious), you can't print the strings. They need to be assembled
into the frame. Baseball, baseball mitt, basketball, etc.

Somebody here mentioned you can't print headphones, anything
electromechanical. I'll add, anything with a circuit board in it, anything
with an LCD or OLED screen on it; anything with a motor in it; anything with a
heating element (coffee maker, hot pad). Anything with springs or hinged or
rotating parts (many toys).

------
JumpCrisscross
Retailers aren't just financially leveraged, i.e. by debt, but also
operationally leveraged, too.

A "business that has a higher proportion of fixed costs and a lower proportion
of variable costs is said to have used more operating leverage" [1]. Given the
low sales/fixed costs per square inch most brick-and-mortar retailers incur
they would be vulnerable without a cent of debt.

Note that the prevalence of home inkjet printers hasn't bankrupted
professional printers, just forced them to specialise.

[1]
[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/operatingleverage.asp#ax...](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/operatingleverage.asp#axzz2KS6k8Jb5)

------
chx
Retail won't go away. Shopping is something people like to do to some extent.
Also, as someone mentioned, Starbucks thrives despite you could make your
coffee at home. Even people who can cook well, go to restaurants... etc.

~~~
Scene_Cast2
I think that there is a market for trying out products, but brick & mortar
stores lose out on selection & price. I was toying with an idea for a business
where there is a chain of locations that order in whatever you like to sample
/ try for a flat subscription fee. If you don't like it - it gets sent back or
shipped to another location. If you like the product - you buy it for whatever
is the cheapest online price. And, say, just walking into the store (with
left-over products that weren't sent back yet) would be free.

This way, you get the best of both worlds: selection, price, and trying things
out.

------
shurcooL
An interesting thought: coffee is probably much easier to make than arbitrary
3D objects made of various materials. Yet coffee makers have not become as
ubiquitous as CD burners.

What I want to know is why.

~~~
damian2000
Service, cleaning and maintenance maybe... the coffee from a cafe is prepared
by a barista on a professional machine, perhaps tastes a bit better than the
one at home, you don't have to clean the cups or equipment later and you don't
have anything to maintain.

~~~
shurcooL
That's what I meant to say, why haven't the prices of those professional
machines plummeted down to under $100? They're still very expensive.

You can imagine there being a machine that does all the cleaning, maintenance,
etc. with a push of a button. It's just not as affordable as machines that
burn 650 MB of audio data onto optical disks.

~~~
malandrew
The cost of copper is the reason they haven't dropped in price. Those devices
need to very precisely control temperature at high pressures. They are also
designed to be able to make many expressos in a row while simultaneously
outputting steam for frothing milk. This requires a lot of copper not only for
the assembly that the water goes through but for a high pressure reservoir,
which also needs to be made from copper.

The cost of the copper alone in some of those coffee makers is easily a couple
hundred dollars. You also can't mix in another metal with a high specific head
like aluminum in places to offset the cost because the presence of both copper
and aluminum in the same water path will cause the two to react with one
another.

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mikesmullin3
see also that on-demand book printer that prints double-sided , cuts, and
binds the book with cover. its on-site automated assembly in general. IKEA's
strategy is a bit like this too. its like what if IKEA had a robot that
manufactured the furniture at retail location? what if the lego block catalog
was available from a kiosk in the toy aisle and you could print individual
parts by tapping?

------
psadri
The internet is already doing brick and mortar stores in.

Perhaps on-demand manufacturing (for example, but not necessarily, 3D
printing) will also contribute.

