3D Market Day: Student Business

 

We have detailed during the past year and a half on this blog about a student who has been working on unique designs for a small business that she runs as part of her after school and weekend activities.

Wanting to give her an experience to use the technology in the school to operate a realistic business experience she recently attended a local market where she featured four different 3D Printed designs that had also been spray painted and packaged.

She spent the day selling the items and interacting with some of the members of the public.  An important consideration to remember is this student has developed the CAD software to design this items from scratch has linked them herself via Tinkercad and printed them using the school printers.

To make it a realistic business model we have charged the student for a roll of filament (NZ $31.00) for 1kg roll.  She used this to produce the items for sale.    The cost for each of the prints to be manufactured on this basis (there were the four in total, the Kiwi, The Counting Caterpillar, the Dolphin and the Butterfly all at which have featured at times as posts on this blog - was between 0.50c and 0.85 cents to produce.    We did not include a 'hardware' charge in the pricing.  She was able to manufacture twenty four items for sale - and was able to sell nine of them during the course of the market.  The finished product price that she charged was up to $8.00 per print.

This meant that she has paid back the use of the filament, the spray paint which she used to decorate the design, the bags and packaging and make a modest profit.  Crucially moving forward the remaining items which have not been sold (which is nearly half) will be sold in upcoming markets and with the costs already covered the remaining items represent a hundred percent profit.

The most favoured item that was sold was the 'Counting Caterpillar' which went extremely quickly.   The student intends restocking with this item for the next time she is selling items - this is being used in our junior school at present to determine its viability to help teaching and counting of numbers. 

Senior Student: Practical Craft Market Experience

 

One of our most popular series of prints in recent years from both the students perspective and feedback from visitors at our school has been the set of flexi-animals created by a senior student.

This students saw similar examples online and was able to deconstruct the process by identifying the flexi-linking, by using Tinkercad (following some tutorials from Youtube) 

The student has talked in the past about the potential to run a stall at the local market.  Our school has made this possible by making the 3D Printers available and allowed the student to use the machines at the cost of the PLA to produce the prints.   The student is then going to sell these prints (which it should be pointed out she has designed from scratch including making a set of originals) to the general public to see if she can run a small niche business.

The student concerned had a significant number of potential prints available.  However for the market process which she is going through she has settled on four designs for the first market print run.

She choose the Kiwi the symbol of New Zealand as it is a unique and iconic symbol and one of the designs that has received significant feedback.  Details of this print can be located here.

Another practical print with a clear use was the counting caterpillars.   These were commissioned by the junior part of our school who wanted unique counters to assist the students in counting by producing flexible number lines.   The design was initially created here using a slug as the basis before evolving in the caterpillar design.  You can click on the hyperlinks to find out more details about the prints described.

For the final two designs she has opted for the butterfly and dolphin.   Both of these designs have been remodelled since their initial appearances here on this blog.   The butterfly was one of the first complicated prints that the student linked and worked on.  It was this design that was discovered to also work as a floating toy in the school swimming pool.

This project eventually morphed into an excellent series of lessons culminating in a series of creations from the junior school now producing their own versions of these prints.  We intend to update the progress of this process (ie the market selling of these items) once it is complete.  We have previously held a market day at our school where one of the businesses was based on flexi-animals (although these were by and large not produced by the students instead coming from sites like Thingiverse.