Forbes Shines Spotlight on 3Doodler’s $20 Million Business
Last spring, Forbes named WobbleWorks one of the 10 most successful companies built on Kickstarter. At the time, it had raised $3.9 million on the crowdfunding platform in two campaigns for the 3Doodler, a 3D printing pen that had launched there in 2013. Today WobbleWorks has yearly sales for around $20 million from three different lines of pens and recently signed licensing deals with the Cartoon Network and CBS for kits featuring, respectively, the Powerpuff Girls and Star Trek.
Like 3D printers, 3D printing pens allow users to easily create three-dimensional objects. Users simply draw what they want, generally with plastic rather than ink.
“Within a couple of months, we’ll be at our millionth pen, which for three-and-a-half years is an awesome achievement.” Daniel Cowen, 3Doodler cofounder.
Forbes reports that 3Doodler is a fast-growing company, which has 34 employees and offices in New York and Hong Kong. It is cash-flow positive, and has avoided taking on either investors or debt. As the technology for 3D printers has advanced, numerous companies have sprung up to take advantage of it. For 3Doodler’s inventors, Max Bogue and Peter Dilworth, the idea of having a 3D printing pen was a simpler, more intuitive idea. As toy inventors, they conceived of the idea as something fun, but it is also beginning to have more serious applications.
The home 3D printing market is expected to reach $2.35 billion by 2022 and today 3D pens, sold by the likes of Kuman, Mynt3d and 7Tech, as well as 3Doodler, are a booming business. WobbleWorks cofounder Daniel Cowen joined the company in 2013 to help launch its first Kickstarter campaign for its 3Doodler 3D printing pens.
“Within a couple of months,” he says, “we’ll be at our millionth pen.”
Read the full Forbes article here (recommended read)
As far back as 2014, we reported that 3Doodler was making into the mainstream as the company reached its 1oo,000th pen sold. In the beginning, the enthusiasm around the rapid diffusion of 3D printing might have helped sales of this low cost plastic extrusion system to make physical 3D designs without using CAD software.
The reality proved to be even more positive, with the 3Doodler becoming the first 3D printing associated product to truly break into the consumer market, recording mass product sales numbers. The company had revealed that it has sold more than 100,000 units of the 3Doodler and has thus certainly provided an entry point into the world of physical 3D creativity.
The 3D printing pen allows its users to literally “draw in the air” by extruding plastic sticks of ABS and PLA. The colour palette for doing so includes more than 50 different colours, following the latest addition of twelve new colours (including exotic tints such as Radioactive Yellow, Cotton Candy Pink, Cafè au Lait and the new “clearly range”).
This – along with its accessible price – proved to be a key feature in attracting a wide demographic of users, ranging from artists and makers to schools and educational programs. Now the time has come for a 3D printing related product to truly record mass market sales numbers, hitting, for the first time, sales above the one million mark.
