Whew! What a whirlwind that was! Shapeways was at MakerFaire San Mateo last weekend, and as always, we had an amazing time meeting makers and sharing the excitement of 3D printing. The weather was great, and there was lots to see. Pictures are worth a thousand words so here's a few...
We can't lie, R2D2 was our favorite booth visitor
Jessica of Nervous System has been busy experimenting with full color 3D printing. It's a bold new move for the design duo, who usually design in nylon and metals. Each print is 4 to 6 inches, the meshes are generated by Processing and 3D-printed by Shapeways. She must have been inspired by her coral-filled fish tank because these gorgeous "Colony" prints remind me of diving in the Caribbean. More eye candy on her Flickr set!


We're back with the seventh in our series of Shop Owner tips to help you get your shop ready for the holiday season.
2012 has been remarkable year here at Shapeways. Our community grew dramatically, hundreds of thousands of your designs emerged from 3D Printers, and the world has officially woken up to the possibilities of 3D Printing -- not as a SciFi dream but as an accessible tool to make ideas real.
Perhaps most excitingly, we're starting to see a world in which you can get exactly what you want, and not have to settle for what is available.
Your innovation and creativity inspires us on a daily basis, empowering us to go from one rickety shelf to a fully operational factory in Long Island City in a matter of months, joining our ever expanding facility in Eindhoven. As we make major investments in localizing production, our team continues to grow on both continents in order to make the impossible a reality.
So thank you all for inspiring us, and without further ado, here's a snapshot of the 2012 in numbers:
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
We're back with the seventh in our series of Shop Owner tips to help you get your shop ready for the holiday season.
Once your shop is set up for holiday sales, you're well on your way to being optimized for selling into the new year. These last few tips are going to help you set up a longer term strategy for maintaining a good shop.
Wouldn't it be nice to know if all the things you were doing to improve your shop were actually working? Data to the rescue! While scary at first (to me at least!) data really can be your friend by letting you:
1. Keep track of sales
2. See where traffic is coming from
3. Use it to your advantage
1. Keep track of Sales
As a Shapeways shop owner, you have a great tool at your disposal: The Sales Overview Download located on your My Shop page. The Sales Overview Download (XLS) allows you to see exactly what models you're selling in which material, when they have shipped, and which country they were shipped to. With this data you will be able to create your own shop analytics which can help you improve the performance of your shop. This great blog post dives into the details.
How is this helpful? If you see that you make most of your sales in silver, you can tailor your designs to sell even more. If you see most of your sales coming from Japan, you could think about what items might appeal to that specific market. You don't know what you don't know until you experiment and measure!
2. See where traffic is coming from
Ever wanted to know exactly how many hits you get in your shop on any given day? Where they come from? What keywords they used to find you? How long they stayed on your page?
Google Analytics can tell you all those things! Check out this handy tutorial for setting up Google Analytics in your shop. It's as easy as pasting a quick code and unleashes a lot of data you can use to improve your marketing efforts.
3. Use it to your advantage!
Using the data, you discover how to tailor your shop to your customers. For example, if you see a lot of traffic coming from Twitter, (like we do!) you might consider tweeting more often about your products. If you tag @shapeways with it, we'll often re-tweet it or favorite it, exposing your product to all of Shapeways followers (10,000 and counting!). Read more about it in this handy Shapeways guide to Twitter.
Alternatively, you might find that a lot of the traffic to your page is coming from search, in which case you would want to consider AdWords or optimizing your descriptions for search even further.
So dive into data, you might be surprised by what you find. Next week we'll take a look at advertising, and using those AdWords that Google may send your way just for signing up for Analytics!
We're back with the seventh in our series of Shop Owner tips to help you get your shop ready for the holiday season.
While advertising and promotion is important to get your products known out there, having a conversation with your customers is often more powerful than just broadcasting a message. Customers feel like they get input into a product they are buying, just the same way you feel when you design something for 3D printing! Best of all, they get to tell a cool story, like this one from Pete, our CEO:
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!
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!
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?
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!
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.
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?
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 Printing Material impact tests. The new improved Elasto Plastic wins. http://t.co/D1ztGAKCcg
Once a month we hold our live video chat with the Shapeways community.
That moment is happening now.
Join us at shapeways.com/community/live