"We had a goal, that we want to democratise home manufacturing. Put 3D printers in every household."
Stop me if you've heard this one before.
A desktop 3D printer is the talk of the town at a trade fair, the resulting prints are colourful - multi-colourful, even, the hardware price is low, and a CEO is relaying a dream of putting a 3D printer in every home.
But it's 2025, not 2015. This player didn't even exist during 3D printing's hype heyday. In fact, back then, this particular CEO was just as mesmerised by the technology as the rest of us mere mortals.
"For engineers, it's kind of a dream machine," Dr Ye Tao, Bambu Lab CEO tells TCT in a conversation at Formnext. "I wanted a 3D printer so much, like a kid on Christmas day."
Within a year, Dr Tao, who now leads one of the industry’s biggest desktop 3D printing brands, got his wish. But like similarly 'high-tech' toys of Christmas past, he was left feeling pretty uninspired. Dr Tao won't disclose which desktop machine it was, but remembers spending too much time tweaking, levelling print beds and fixing nozzles to get it to work.
Luckily, it wasn't the end.
A few years later, Dr Tao, along with a team of engineers from Chinese technology giant DJI, where he'd been leading its consumer drone department, was planning a new start-up. At the time, 3D printing was just one product on a list of several candidates. A list, admittedly, the technology was pretty far down on.
"We gave it five minutes of thinking and threw it out," Dr Tao says of the team's view of 3D printing in 2020. "It's already so cheap and so many vendors rush to the bottom - why should we join such a game?"
So, '3D printer' was crossed off the list. That was until they needed one to prototype.
