While everyone is talking about the 3-D printing industrial revolution, Protomold is helping tinkerers become tycoons by making mass-production injection molding technology accessible for easily customized short-run batches — and their recent expansion of materials lets designers produce almost anything they need.
3-D printing something like a cellphone case can take hours — unacceptable when makers need mass quantities. In order to cost-effectively produce products in big batches, traditional manufacturing processes like injection molding are still the best option. Unfortunately, companies that specialize in these processes want to work on huge-volume projects, leaving the little guy, or even a moderately successful Kickstarter project, with few options.
Protomold has stepped in to provide servicing to those makers who need small orders by being able to produce 50-5,000 injection-molded parts in one business day with prices starting at $1,495 for a production tool, and each produced part costing a couple dollars or less. The experience isn't much different than ordering business cards online. A designer uploads their CAD file, chooses from a few preset options, and shelf-worthy injection-molded parts arrive on their doorstep.
The company has been successful, operating since May 1999, while continuing to grow their service. They've just added new materials to their list, including injection molded steel, stainless steel, magnesium, copper. Their newest is the option to mold parts in high temperature, medical grade resins, giving garage entrepreneurs the ability to produce parts for medical devices and high performance applications. Protomold is focused on helping turn big ideas into big companies.
Protomold is able to move so quickly because they optimize their offering for small businesses. While some companies treat moldmaking as an artform, with each production tool cherished like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, Protomold is more like a Thomas Kincaid canvas used to cover a hole in the wall. This means mold cycle times are a few seconds slower, tools are made out of aluminum instead of steel, and need to be simple enough to be produced on a CNC milling machine. "We can't make everything," says CEO Brad Cleveland. "But the things we can make, we make faster than anyone."
What started as a single engineer looking to solve his own problem has turned into a publicly traded company with a billion dollar market cap and 511 workers filling 160,000 square feet of office space producing parts 24 hours a day.
The company got started while its founder and CTO, Larry Lukis, was sourcing plastic parts for a project, but was frustrated by the idea of having to pay $20,000-40,000 for a mold and then wait 8 weeks to have it delivered. After researching the industry, he found that a lot of the cost and time came from repeating grunt work — quoting prices for projects and design for manufacturing exercises to make part molding more efficient.
His belief was that if a part wasn't too complex it should be easy to write software that could interpret a CAD file, create a price estimate, and make adjustments to improve the moldability of the design. He developed the software and offered people the ability to get basic injection molded parts in 15 days (and under a week for a premium). Year after year, the time to get parts was lowered to the point where it's now faster to get production parts than 3-D prints from most service bureaus.
"The only industries we serve are those who use plastic parts or metal parts," deadpans Cleveland. This year we'll do business with 7,000 customers. Everyone from innovators working in their basement on a toy, to engineers at Fortune 1000 companies, up to the VP of purchasing at GM." He adds that no one customer is worth more than 1% of their revenue.
While their prices are approachable, moderately complex projects can still cost more than a car. To help offset this burden, Protomold also extends help to those just starting out through their "Cool Idea! award program where innovators with promising ideas are able to win grants from a $250,000 pool of free services.
One successful project to come out of the program is the 6dot Braille Labeler, a hand-held label maker that helps the blind better organize their lives. It started out as a prototype invented at a MIT lab, went on to become a successful Kickstarter project, and was ultimately acquired by a company that focuses on assistive technology.
"An engineer in a hurry with a credit card is a great customer, but engineers are usually really good planners, so that doesn't come along often," says Cleveland. "Our biggest challenge is marketing, how do we get people to become aware of us? Product developers have relationships with molders and CNC shops. As long as they can meet their needs, they're fine with them."
It's a difficult problem, but instead of bothering with banner ads, their solution has been to focus on the next generation of designers by providing a steady stream of educational content, white papers, blog posts, and freebies that would make Seth Godin proud. They also commissioned the book Injection Molding for Dummies and developed a series of desk toys: the Cube, Torus, Protogami, resin puzzle, and even a toy mold that showcases their capabilities and materials. These tchotchkes demonstrate surface finishes, tolerances, and the right and wrong ways to design features in ways that printed materials never could. The team at Protomold is keenly aware that attention is a scarce commodity and looks at these products as "Something of interest for product developers so that we can remind them we exist," according to Cleveland.
Protolabs isn't out to replace 3-D printers or the services that provide access to them. "Our services our complimentary and synergistic to 3-D printers," says Cleveland. "When you want to get something in your hand to see how it feels, you can 3-D print a part in a matter of hours and if your need for surface finish and accuracy aren't aggressive you can use those printers for form and fit testing as well. Once the basic design is locked and if you care about accuracy or surface finish you want a molded or machine part."
"I think there is going to be a 3-D printer on every desk," says Cleveland. The excitement about 3-D printers is great, but expectations are going exceed reality for a while. The best thing about 3-D printing is that it's raising the expectations on how quickly a part can be produced, which is great since were only the place in the world that can work this quickly."
The team at Protomold evolves their offering by looking at their own pain. In order to get good at providing injection molding services, they also needed to get good at machining metal molds. Realizing there was a huge demand for a quick serve machine shop, they started offering those services to customers, through their Firstcut division. The company just launched a new offering that allows customers to have parts molded in magnesium, stainless steel, and copper.
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