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AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands--Not long ago, I asked Scott Summit, a pioneer in using 3D printing in the design of custom prosthetics and an industrial design expert, who he would recommend I look into if I wanted to see the best in the world at using this young technology to make and sell consumer products. His answer, without hesitation? A small company run by Janne Kyttanen in the Dutch capital called Freedom of Creation.
In the late 1990s, Kyttanen had a vision. As a student in design school, he was turned off by traditional product manufacturing, storage, and distribution methods, and he thought there was a better way.
The vision was of a way to use a technology then barely known--3D printing, which was mainly being used to make medical and auto parts--and selling products that people could design themselves and sell them strictly over the Internet. Production would be fast, design would be key, and individual customization would be easy.
3D like you've never seen it before (photos)
"The joke was, 10 years ago, we were 20 years too early," Kyttanen tells me in his company's conference room here. "I had trouble graduating because people didn't believe" the vision.
But Kyttanen didn't give up on what he saw as a new paradigm in product design, and because he had an older brother who worked in 3D animation, it was an easy transition for him to start thinking about products in terms of the 3D models that they would be made from. He started seeing everything as wireframes. And when "The Matrix" came out, complete with a 3D world filled with imagery like he'd been imagining, he thought, "Hey, I'm not by myself."
Seven thousand dollars
When Kyttanen began thinking about designing and selling products using 3D printers, there was no possible way to build a business around the idea. The machines that were around in the late 1990s were so expensive that any product would have cost $7,000 just to make.
But the technology was clearly going somewhere, and he didn't let go of the vision. He thought, if it was so easy for him to design 3D models, many other people could do the same, and the basis for an all-new industry was right there, staring him in the face.
At 5,000 euros a pop, there was no business, but he managed to get sponsorship from a Belgian company called Materialise, and started a department there called .MGX. Materialise wanted him to focus on a brand of lamps, something that didn't quite fulfill his vision. After a couple of years, they parted ways. He gathered what money he had and started Freedom of Creation, sometimes called FOC.
For 11 years, he and a small team have been building the company, slowly expanding a catalog of high-concept designs that are all 3D printed, all customizable, and many of which are strikingly beautiful. In May, Kyttanen sold FOC to 3D Systems, the company that started the entire industry in the late 1980s and a leader in laser-sintering, a process that uses a high-temperature laser to fuse together materials (see video below). The idea behind the sale, he explained, was that by marrying the design side with the production and materials side, and cutting out the middlemen--the products are made on 3D Systems printers using the parent company's materials--it creates the only way to make a business profitable like the one he had long envisioned and, he said, makes it possible to do production on a global scale.
In the late 1990s, Kyttanen had a vision. As a student in design school, he was turned off by traditional product manufacturing, storage, and distribution methods, and he thought there was a better way.
The vision was of a way to use a technology then barely known--3D printing, which was mainly being used to make medical and auto parts--and selling products that people could design themselves and sell them strictly over the Internet. Production would be fast, design would be key, and individual customization would be easy.
3D like you've never seen it before (photos)
"The joke was, 10 years ago, we were 20 years too early," Kyttanen tells me in his company's conference room here. "I had trouble graduating because people didn't believe" the vision.
But Kyttanen didn't give up on what he saw as a new paradigm in product design, and because he had an older brother who worked in 3D animation, it was an easy transition for him to start thinking about products in terms of the 3D models that they would be made from. He started seeing everything as wireframes. And when "The Matrix" came out, complete with a 3D world filled with imagery like he'd been imagining, he thought, "Hey, I'm not by myself."
Seven thousand dollars
When Kyttanen began thinking about designing and selling products using 3D printers, there was no possible way to build a business around the idea. The machines that were around in the late 1990s were so expensive that any product would have cost $7,000 just to make.
But the technology was clearly going somewhere, and he didn't let go of the vision. He thought, if it was so easy for him to design 3D models, many other people could do the same, and the basis for an all-new industry was right there, staring him in the face.
At 5,000 euros a pop, there was no business, but he managed to get sponsorship from a Belgian company called Materialise, and started a department there called .MGX. Materialise wanted him to focus on a brand of lamps, something that didn't quite fulfill his vision. After a couple of years, they parted ways. He gathered what money he had and started Freedom of Creation, sometimes called FOC.
For 11 years, he and a small team have been building the company, slowly expanding a catalog of high-concept designs that are all 3D printed, all customizable, and many of which are strikingly beautiful. In May, Kyttanen sold FOC to 3D Systems, the company that started the entire industry in the late 1980s and a leader in laser-sintering, a process that uses a high-temperature laser to fuse together materials (see video below). The idea behind the sale, he explained, was that by marrying the design side with the production and materials side, and cutting out the middlemen--the products are made on 3D Systems printers using the parent company's materials--it creates the only way to make a business profitable like the one he had long envisioned and, he said, makes it possible to do production on a global scale.