I believe 3-D printing will remain a novelty attraction for the coming years. There’s no question that 3-D printing is brilliant technology and new applications for its use are discovered every day, however until there are more meaningful use cases for this in the retail context, its impact will be modest.

As a former manufacturing engineer, I absolutely believe that retail-oriented 3-D printing is indeed a novelty.

While there may be some viable small use cases, like customized ornaments, most of the “stuff” printed by 3-D systems amounts to trinkets. I’ll skip all the metallurgy and strength of materials engineering-type arguments and simply state that there is a cavernous gap between the 3-D hype and reality. There are industrial printers that have far more replacement part printing type of capabilities, but they are unlikely to be in-store.

Anyway, the process of scanning and printing is slow and usually requires mechanical knowledge to produce something of value. After one or two toyish printing experiences, the shininess of the experience will wear away, so I do not see shoppers continuing to invest their time. And just look at how much home sales of the machines have plummeted despite pundits stating every home would have a machine.

Lastly, let’s see the survey questions and understand the participants.

If there was a place where I could go to get a specific custom widget 3-D printed I wouldn’t even finish this post. The last time I talked to folks who could do this sort of thing for me it was going to cost thousands. And it’s not even complicated.

At some point, hopefully, this will be as common and inexpensive as where you go to get your keys made. Only by then you probably won’t be using keys.

All you have to do is use a 3-D printer once and you will see right away that the technology is a long way away from either an application on a store floor at scale, or an application in the consumer’s home capable of producing retail-quality products. My son has two 3-D printers and a table full of bad print jobs. The issues that hang him up are not related to the printer function itself. There is simply a lot of configuration and testing to get the right combination of speed of printing, heat of the extruder, scaffolding to support whatever you’re trying to build and internal structure and composition of your design. And once you think you have that figured out, you then have to compensate for weather — the temperature in the room, but also the humidity has a big impact. And for all I know, high pollen days or ozone alert days where particulate matter in the air is overly high. The point is, these things are still super finicky. And it’s… Read more »

I actually own a 3-D printer — my daughter loves her homemade fidget spinners. There are a few things that need to change to make it more associate-friendly and less of an engineering effort. Specifically; 1.) the management of filament, which is the plastic that is melted in to form, needs to be as easy as changing batteries; 2.) the preparation and print of an item needs to be as easy as printing an MS Word document and 3.) the print time needs to be halved. Though individual prints are very inexpensive, given the cost of filament, until the aforementioned changes happen 3-D printing will remain a niche offering. I do believe that ultimately 3-D printing will have a tremendous impact on retail supply chain management, giving retailers the ability to avoid holding various parts and finished goods in inventory, the ability to further delay building finished goods and the ability to digitally deliver physical goods to consumers. As for the latter point, I am currently looking to do a couple of 3-D prints of… Read more »

Mattel’s ThingMaker reminds me a lot of those wildly coveted plastic dinosaur souvenirs that came out of an injection-molding machine at the 1964-65 Worlds Fair as the Sinclair Oil exhibit.

I’m holding out for the day when we can use a 3-D printer to print a 3-D printer….

Eventually, yes, 3D printing will have a great impact in retail, but it will depend on the product type and retail segment. Who doesn’t see the Lego store adopting 3D printing to make any piece of your choice in the store to cover those situations where you’ve lost the one special piece you need to complete a build project. For apparel? It might be longer. While the tech is available today, it doesn’t feel like something that could handle the load in a busy store environment — just ask anyone who has a 3D printer at home.