We have seen quite a few of your Shapeways 3D Printed Products go viral through social media recently which brings a massive spike in traffic to a particular product, their shop and the rest of the Shapeways site.  Following is a quick case study of how the 3D Printed Rocket Espresso Cup went viral over the past week.

It all started with an awesome design, the Rocket Espresso Cup by Isohedral which was 3D Printed in Ceramics by Shapeways. On June 30th the designer took some beautiful, warm, well composed photographs of the cup in the context of use, uploaded them to Flickr and tagged them with Shapeways as we suggest to help us find them.

On the 3rd of July I was taking a look at the latest Shapeways tags on Flickr when I noticed the beautiful images of the Rocket Espresso so I shared one to our Tumblr feed. 

On 4th of July I checked our Tumblr account and saw that 600 caffeine and rocket lovers online had either shared or liked the image so I quickly posted another image on Tumblr to whet the interets appetite while I drafted a post for the Shapeways Blog. 

Here is where things get interesting… 

While the second image on Tumblr quickly gained momentum being blogged and reblogged over 6000 times Boingboing was the first established blog to pick up the cups from the Shapeways Blog closely followed by a slew of other influential blogs including NotCot and Design You Trust then Swiss Miss to Daily Designer and Uncrate to Gizmodo and The Fancy, while also making it to Laughing Squid via Nerdilicious to Trendhunter and Trendsnow on to hundreds of other sites to many to mention, while from every source it is being shared into the social ocean via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and back into Tumblr from where the original seed grew to propagate and be shared again…

The outcome:

  • A spike in traffic to the Rocket Espresso product page that has lasted over a week, 
  • X number of sales of the cup to people all around the world
  • Traffic increase across the entire site
  • Increased sales to individual shops across the Shapeways site
  • An inspiring story of the little rocket that could…

All this from a great design, beautifully photographed and shared into the social web….

Who’s design is going to be next???