The Shapeways Blog: 3D Printing News & Innovation
Entries from November 2012
Thursday, November 29. 2012
Holiday Shop Owner Tips Series: #6 Promotion
Your shop is ready, your products look great, so now it's time to promote yourself! We love the incredible designs that you create on Shapeways and we do what we can to promote you via our blog, the Holiday Gift Guide and our weekly newsletter. To get the most success for your products you can't just rely on broadcasting, you need to go where your audience is.
The first step is to tell your friends, using your own social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google + and your own blog or website if you have one. The next step is to go beyond your social networks, and spread the word to blogs and magazines, people who have a bigger reach than just you.
Here are two great excerpts of ideas from our community members, read their full posts for more details.
Joaquin Baldwin describes how to make your product go viral in this informative post about his Seed of Ygrassil sculpture.
I wanted prototypes of the models printed, pictures for galleries ready, videos, various other networking and popular sites covered and a website all ready for the first day of my designs going 'public' to the world.
Have any tips to share? Post them in the comments, and let us know what you do to make your holiday season fruitful!
Thursday, November 22. 2012
Holiday Shop Owner Tips Series: #5 Merchandising
Merchandising is all about designing for the occasion. You already have products, you simply need to tweak them to appeal to holiday shoppers.
People usually shop with one of three things in mind: type of gift, price, and recipient. Knowing this, you can make it easier for them to find your products by tagging your products according to potential recipient, theme and occasion. Tagging is the fastest way to help you hit different categories.
Read Tip #3 on discovery for more about tagging your products. Tags relating to themes and occasions can be as broad as holiday, christmas, Valentine's, mother's day, fathers day, birthday, even just the simple tag of gift will help you get found in search. Tags relating to recipients can be broad too: men, women, parents, children, hostess gift, secret santa, teacher, stocking stuffer.
You can also use the description and photos to highlight gift ideas.Gunter Art and Design shows how his jewelry is perfect for a girl by using his own girlfriend in his photos.
Lastly, don't underestimate the power of seasonal gifts! Ornaments, hostess gifts and decorations for the home are all popular choices. This great snowflake generator from Kimotion Arts is a perfect example of an inexpensive ornament that makes a great gift. A lego snowflake? Perfect for the man, child or techie in your life!
Do you have any tips or tricks to share? Share them in the comments!
And for those in the USA, Happy Thanksgiving!
Tuesday, November 20. 2012
Tag Tuesday : The Gift Edition : Are You Ready for Black Friday
To celebrate the launch of the Shapeways Gift Guide and the impending Black Friday avalanche of traffic to your Shapeways shops this weeks Tag Tuesday is gift. Tag your designs with gift to help people find your designs that are suitable for giving this holiday gifting season. Over the course of the day we will take a look back at the tag gift and will try and include more in preparation for Black Friday. We will be doing some promotions over Black Friday so ensure your shop is ready with tags, descriptions and images, yes images!!!!.
Following are a few products in the Shapeways shops tagged with gift, what are yours tagged with?
Thursday, November 15. 2012
Shop Owner Holiday Tips Series: #4 Personalization & Shapeways Co-Creators
You will get this pop-up where you can specify what is able to be customized on your model whether it is adding text, adding an image or even changing the size. You also indicate how long it will take you to make these changes once someone has ordered your model.
Best Practice Examples. Kaetemi makes this customizable keychain that can have custom images.
This is the what the customer sees for kaetemi's model:
As always, if you have tips or any questions, share them here!
Tuesday, November 13. 2012
Goodbye to Glass on December 6th
We're always trying to push the limits of what is possible with 3D printing here at Shapeways, introducing new materials and encouraging innovation. However, sometimes to grow, you have to let things go.
We've noticed that you haven't been as excited about glass over the last year, and we have a great opportunity to use these glass 3D printers for research and development. This means we will soon be bringing you new materials to replace glass!
Please note that December 6th will be the last day we will be offering 3D printing glass, so you have three weeks to place your orders.
What does this mean for you?
If you're a designer who has glass models available for sale, glass will be removed as a material option starting December 6th. You can, of course, still offer them in other materials. All you have to do is ensure those materials are enabled on your product page. We recommend testing these models in new materials before making them available for sale.
If you want to buy glass products, make sure you do so before December 6th to ensure delivery by the holidays.
Tag Tuesday: Picks from the 3D Printing Meme Machine
Shapeways now has hundreds of thousands of 3D models just waiting to be 3D printed. Sometimes it can be a little hard to find exactly what you are looking for (unless you design it for yourself). Giving your design a descriptive title will help people find your product in both Shapeways and Google search, adding your model to a category is essential to them appearing in the galleries and adding tags makes it easier for people to discover products around a very specific theme.
To help make it worth your while to head in and tag your products, we are going to feature a new tag every Tuesday, and so, Tag Tuesday is born. This week we are featuring products tagged meme.
Take a look at our Shop Owner tips on getting found in search and tag your designs with relevant terms.
Let us know what tags you think we should feature next week?
Thursday, November 8. 2012
Shop Owner Holiday Tips Series: #3 Getting Found in Search
We're back with the third in our series of Shop Owner tips to help you get your shop ready for the holiday season.
Categories & Tags. How can you help us help you get discovered in search? Categories and tags! On the model edit page, under the material picker, you can choose two categories to put your model into, and then create an infinite number of tags.
Categories are the indisputable "what" that defines a product, and they are mutually exclusive or at least have one primary purpose. Tags will still be used to share other attributes, like the occasion (e.g., holidays, gifts), suggested recipient (e.g., for him, for her, for mom), qualities (e.g., geeky, whimsical), or even potential uses (e.g., driving, photography). The wider the net you can cast, the more potential buyers you can catch!
Two great examples are jewelry and homewares. For a bracelet you would choose the categories Jewelry and Bracelets and then create tags to describe them: the color, the style and who they might appeal to.
Best Practice Examples. Kevin Wei has done a great job with the Cosma Silver Bangle using these tags: art, arabesque, architecture, facet, filigree, floral, lace, lattice, mosaic, romantic, silver, white, Valentine's day. These tags describe his design, and even suggest which occasion it might be appropriate for.
For a coffee cup, the categories For Your Home and Dining are perfect. For the Aero Cup, Kioro Design has used these tags to cover a broad range of searches: art, for your home, dining, ceramics, coffee cup, cup, espresso cup.
The more tags you use, the more likely someone looking for something like your product will find you. It is not redundant to use both the tags coffee cup and espresso cup, it just increases the chances that someone will find it in search, either on the Shapeways site or using a search engine like Google.
Do you have any other tips for getting found in search? Any questions? Feel free to share them here!
Stay tuned for next week's tip: the role of personalization and custom gifts in 3D printing.
3D Printed Relief: Join Us Today in Helping with Hurricane Sandy Relief Efforts
As people rebuild their lives post Hurricane Sandy, the Shapeways team and community feel passionate about doing our part to help with relief efforts. 10% of your purchases on Shapeways.com today will go to the American Red Cross' Sandy relief effort. Additionally, products tagged "Sandy Relief" signify that the designer has pledged to donate all of their profits from today to relief efforts.
We want to thank each of you for participating and have highlighted some of our favorite products below.
36 Pencil Bowl by Michiel Cornelissen.
Stella Marina Pendant by Kiorodesign.
A Bit Cross by Michiel Cornelissen.
We know that there's still a lot of work to be done, but we hope you will join us in doing what we can.
Tuesday, November 6. 2012
3D Printed Relief: Join Us in Helping the Hurricane Sandy Relief Efforts This Thursday
A firefighter in Queens NY, where there was a fire on October 29th. (AP, via Atlantic Wire)
With so many in distress in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, including several members of our team who are recovering from damaged homes, our thoughts go out to everyone affected. We were very lucky to emerge relatively unscathed, but we know there are still many without power, food, and homes.
As people throughout the Northeast rebuild their lives, the Shapeways team and community felt passionate about doing our part to help with relief efforts.
This Thursday, we will donate 10% of our sales revenue to the American Red Cross' Sandy relief effort: $0.10 on every dollar anyone spends on Shapeways.com (excluding markup) will go to Sandy Relief.
Shop Owners, we hope you will join us in our efforts! We've heard that some of you would like to donate your markups to charity for the day (big thanks to Shapeways community member Michiel Cornelissen for starting the conversation). We invite you to join us on Thursday by pledging to donate your markups for the day to Sandy relief.
We will supercharge your efforts: by tagging your products Sandy Relief not only will you be pledging to donate your markups, you will secure a spot on the Shapeways homepage as we'll be featuring those products from Thursday to Sunday.
We know there is still a lot of work to be done, but we hope you will join us in doing what we can.
Take a look at some of the Shapeways shop owners pledging to donate their profits so far.
Friday, November 2. 2012
Shop Owner Holiday Tips Series: #2 Function & Form
We're back with the second in our series of Shop Owner tips to help you get your shop ready for the holiday season.
1. Master the Basics: Making your shop shine
2. Function & Form: Which materials for which products?
3. Discovery: Getting found in search
4. Personalization: Put a name on it!
5. Merchandising: Design for the occasion
6. Promotion: Go where your audience is
7. Fan Engagement: Put down the bullhorn and have a conversation
8. Data is your Friend: Statistics, Tracking and Analytics
9. Pay for Play: An introduction to the advertising world
This week we'll be sharing suggestions on function and form, namely how to choose the right materials for your products. If you are making a product for yourself, it's great to have unlimited choice and to be able to experiment with various materials. But if someone is buying your product, you want to help them choose the best material for your product so they have the best experience possible. For example, your customer probably wouldn't want a ceramic iPhone case or a wedding ring in Frosted Ultra Detail...
To get started, when you upload your model to your shop, all materials are automatically enabled. It is important to check if all the materials are appropriate. Ask yourself:
1. Does my design meet the design rules for this material?
2. Would this product make sense in this material?
3. Do I have all materials selected still? If so, can I help customers decide by limiting the choices?
To select materials for your product, the easiest thing to do is to make a material selection when you are editing your product page for markup, description, or other details.
Overall, there are three things to keep in mind: design with the material in mind, use images that reflect the material options, and less is more.
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