Another suggestion

It occurred to me that there are services that Shapeways could offer that would benefit them and us. Some of us design jewelry. Earrings and pendants really require additional assembly to be useful. As it is now, either the customer has to supply the parts and assembly or we have to order the part, assemble it and send it to the customer.

I propose that Shapeways offer finishing services.
They could easily install ear loops in earrings and chains for pendants. This would make the jewelry products more salable, benefiting us both.

Also, if there were a way to upload one model of an earring and have it order-able as a finished pair, sales would improve, I think.

it's a nice suggestion.
Though, i think shapeways wants to be as fair to everyone as possible. Offering a service that only jewellers would use might be focussing on one part of the userbase.

If they do this then they'll soon have to make stands for sculptures and paint them for the customers.
Assemble R/C helicopters from the printed parts.
Etc.

I'd love shapeways to sand, prime, paint and mass produce my models, but there are other companies for that that are set up for that specific thing.

I work at a place where the employees are supposed to assemble certain things and package certain things, and you'd be surprised what they can do that is nothing like the instructions. I'm not saying Shapeways employees are idiots, (I may be saying some of the employees here are though ) but to have individual instructions for everything. And they wouldn't be doing 5000 at a time, It would be one order at a time. I can only imagine the head ache, and the cost for all that.

I confess that I would love being able to change the mention "Marble not included" into "Marbles included" in my Marble Pendants...

If/When my shop blows up, and I can afford to have an inventory, I'll make my own site, with Finished models. Maybe by then we'll be able to do a co-op site with Shapeways so that people can order the unfinished or the finished.

Well they said that 3D printing for consumers was hard too... :laughing:

Actually it is a very interesting concept. The challenge is to get those addon / assembly parts. If we would procure those at our expense and keep on the shelves it can get very costly. An option would be that the designer would provide us with the parts at his or her expense.

Getting people to do this is feasible, but how should we charge for this?

- Robert

Let's take the case of the marbles.
Some semi-precious marbles are up to $8 a piece. But I found some internet site that can sell ordinary marbles at 2,90¤/kg (1 kg = 250 marbles of 16 mm of diameter). To make it short, it is less than 1 cent per marble, so I can neglect the cost of the material (well, not really because I will have to pay the delivery at my place and then the delivery to Shapeways, but it is still some cents, say 10 cents per marble).
The most expensive of the pendant (including my markup) is now $10. The less expensive is $6.50. Say, I will stay in this range.
So, the question is how much are the customers ready to pay to get 2 marbles, for objects in this price range...
I would say a couple of dollars.
So in my very special case I would find fair to pay (well, more exactly, I would find fair for the customer to pay ) $1.80 for the service.
The marbles do not have to be inserted into the pendant: this can be done by the final costomer.
The minimum salary in France is less than 10¤/hour, say $30 with the taxes to be conservative.
So if someone paid $30/hr can add 2 marbles in a package in less than 3 minutes and 36 seconds, it can be convenient.

I am reminded of an amusing story told by a famous puzzle designer Stewart Coffin. The following tale appeared in his publication: AP-ART:

Well, if Shapeways could avoid employing children under 12 to do the assembly, I would be more comfortable (don't misunderstand me: I just want to avoid they take some marbles for their personal usage!)
:laughing: