Read time: 15 mins.
Key highlights:
- A printing pioneer: How Shapeways' business model disrupted the manufacturing market.
- What goes up...: What went wrong for the 3D printing marketplace.
- A lasting legacy: Assessing the company's impact on the additive manufacturing space.
This article was first published via the Additive Insight newsletter on September 26th, 2024.
It is October 20, 2021. Greg Kress, the CEO of Shapeways, is stood on a balcony flanked by fellow executives and guests, with the company’s branding in the background and a large, brass bell front and centre.
When he rings that bell in a few seconds, it will open the stock exchange on which Shapeways has been trading now for three weeks. There will be hollers and cheers, photos to remember the occasion, but its listing on the New York Stock Exchange won’t be the roaring success the company hopes.
Within two years, it will be forced to list with the NASDAQ stock exchange instead. And after three, a brand that is so familiar to those in the world of design and manufacturing potentially won’t exist at all.
It would be a dramatic fall after a momentous rise. A sad day for the additive manufacturing (AM) market. Some might say a wake-up call. The sheer scale of its impact on the AM space doesn’t come into question, but what legacy does Shapeways leave behind?
The birth of a disruptor
The Shapeways concept was born inside a start-up incubator programme within Royal Phillips Electronics in 2005, with Robert Schouwenburg, Marleen Vogelaar and Peter Weijmarshausen named as co-founders when the company first started conducting business in 2007.
