We are EXTREMELY happy to let you know that for Shapeways orders in the USA, we will now be shipping your 3D printed products direct from New York.

Previously all of your packages of 3D printed goodness were distributed via our office in the Netherlands but now with US based distribution this will mean an end to nasty import duties and UPS surcharges for all US orders.  

Along with distribution we are also increasing our local production in the USA which result in you getting your items delivered to your door faster than ever before, reducing transportation time, cost and carbon....  We will be sharing more information on this soon.

For those of you outside of the USA you will continue to get the same great service at the same great price and items will begin to ship faster due to the shared load between our distributed production facilities.

This is our (slightly belated) 4th of July gift to our US community members.

As some of you are well aware Shapeways is currently growing very fast.  Along with our continuous growth in numbers of Shapeways users, we are also seeing a massive increase in the number of orders for our latest materials Glazed Ceramics, Silver, Frosted and Frosted Ultra Detail.  To maintain this growth we have invested in more machines to give us more capacity to get your orders through as fast as possible.

Over the past six weeks we have installed a large kiln to handle the firing of ceramics and increasing our capacity by a factor of six.  We have also installed a new wax printer into the silver production facility to handle all of the jewelry we are fabricating for you and also added another machine to produce the frosted and frosted ultra detail models for your miniatures, scale model railways, desktop gaming and other high resolution 3D printed items.

In our Eindhoven facility we have installed an additional EOS P100 to keep ahead of all of the orders of White Strong & Flexible whilst at the same time we are continually fine tuning our logistics facility to ensure your orders are processed as quickly as possible.

All of this within the last six weeks!

Many of the processes, though digitally fabricated, still require man hours in the checking and preparation of the file, the nesting of the parts, cleaning and sorting the 3D printed items, packaging and distribution. 

We understand that many of you have expressed disappointment with the change to the pricing scheme for FUD and the introduction of the start up cost to cover the man hours associated with these processes. We have reduced the cost per cubic centimeter by 17% for Frosted Detail and 21% for Frosted Ultra Detail to counter the start up cost because it is the very small models that are the hardest for us to sort, clean and pack without breakages.  With this pricing model it better reflects the actual cost of production with large items being much easier to process than small ones.

We will continue to work hard on our software development and logistics to ensure 3D printing with Shapeways is as inexpensive as possible. As soon as we can lower the cost of any materials we will pass those savings on to you the Shapeways community.

Thanks you once again for all your input, we appreciate you ideas, creativity and passion.

I met Andrew Simpson of Vert Design as part of the Rise of the Citizen Engineer panel at Vivid in Sydney and Andrew has been generous enough to answer a few questions about his design practice, 3D printing and DIY boats...

Q. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, design practice and why you were invited to be part of the Rise of the Citizen Engineer panel at Vivid in Sydney?