This past week, the Shapeways marketing and community team headed out west for a week of meetups and events in both Northern and Southern California. Of course, California is a huge and diverse state that is known as a place full of creative people driving innovation and turning their ideas into products and projects. We’re always excited to head out there and we were excited to meet a few of them at Shapeways meetups in Stanford and Ventura.

Natalia, Micah and Blair hosted the first meetup at the d.school at Stanford. Arriving in the sunny atrium, we were pleasantly surprised to see we had a huge turnout of almost 40 people! As we all took turns introducing each other it was clear that there was an incredibly diverse mix of students, professors, design professionals, hobbyists, engineers and jewelers. A few people had even been using Shapeways since its introduction at SIGGRAPH in 2008! 
We had a great time chatting to longtime shapeways users like Jonas Neubert, model train maker Richard, and jewelers Ruby and Christina, amongst many others!
Nikolai from Adobe even came and gave us a demo of the Photoshop plugin and Will Tucker, a teacher at Stanford talked about using Shapeways in his classes. All round, it was a great night.

The great thing about the Shapeways community is that Shapies are everywhere. While my team members were in the Bay Area, I (Eleanor) was at Craftcation, a conference focusing on independent, creative businesses, I ran a meet up in Ventura, California. It was wonderful to meet our shop owners and Shapies Lincoln Kamm, Igor Knezevic, David Sun, and Les Karpas. Les even drove all the way from Pasadena (that’s about 2 hours!) to meet us. It was great to discuss the possibilities for growing the Shapie community in California and to get to see the amazing designs everyone brought to share, from jewelry to tiny cars with moving wheels and doors, to home decor. 
We know the community of 3D modelers, designers and Shapeways fans in California is spread out  and we hope that our community there will keep connecting with each other, continue the conversation, and organize future events and meetups using our California Shapie thread in the Shapeways forum. California is a big state and though we wish we could be out there to enjoy the beaches, Redwood forests, and the super talented, creative people who live there all the time, we look forward to keeping in touch until we head west again!