Today we’re excited to announce that we are exploring ways to expand our Global Partner Network so that we can continue to improve upon what’s most important to you: quality of products, speed of delivery, breadth of material choices, and affordable prices. In addition to our 3D printing factories in New York and Eindhoven, we also work with our Global Partner Network, a group of dozens of production partners across the world who help us give our community access to the best and most affordable 3D printing options in the market.
Our goal has always been to be the place for people to make their ideas come to life, and we’re excited to give our community more choice. 3D printing is changing rapidly, with new materials being tested and introduced (including our own!), and we always want to give our community first access.
With that in mind, we’d love to learn more about what 3D printers you own, whether it’s a desktop printer that you use personally or a host of 3D printers you run as part of a business, fab lab, or service. If you have a 3D printer and want to make parts and products for other people, we want to hear from you!
With customers in over 130 countries, over 2M products printed and hundreds of thousands of designers on our platform, Shapeways supports a huge, global community. Give us a shout if you would be interested in joining our Global Partner Network and we’ll reach out in the future if there are opportunities to collaborate.
Does this mean you will be competing directly with 3D Hubs?
We have always worked with production partners, so this program will really extend that. At this point, we’re exploring what that means with the input of our community and interested parties from around the world. Anything is possible, especially if we reframe the question from who are we directly competing against, to what are we all doing to make 3D printing more accessible to everyone?
Does that mean that we will soon have access to materials like ABS or PLA ?
Magic, maybe! It’s too early to tell, sorry to say!
To be honest, I find the development for high quality prints to be at a stand still. For a long time, the most detailed material is FUD, but it’s really not good enough anymore. Also a material like Grey Prime we see at iMaterialize would be a welcome addition: cheap and way more easy to smoothen than WSF.
DWS has really high quality SLA with surface properties that makes FUD look like FDM in comparison. This is far more important than access to random FDM printers from people with different level of experience and machine maintenance. It is hard enough to get consistent quality from the existing shapeways “production partners” let alone an amateur “3D printing engineer”.
Personally, I believe that Global Partner Network would provide a better “3D printing experience”, such as faster delivery, better communication with local 3D printer owners. When we talk about 3D printing, I think that there are two key features: customization design and distributed manufacturing. “Customization design” depends on easy-to-use web app; and “Distributed manufacturing” depends on a worldwide “Global Partner Network”. COOL !
I am from India and and would like to know if it is possible to 3D Print consumer products for selling using a mid range ($2000 – $6000) 3D Printers. Anyone please help me on this.