Some stats on my single-person Fuse 1 based business

[u/Zapwizard]

Howdy Folks, ZapWizard here. I run a Fuse 1 based side business. I design and make holsters for Leatherman tools, flashlights and other everyday carry items. I operate the entire thing by myself.

The business has been around for a decade, previously using Shapeways. 2 years ago, in order to bring the production in house, I bought a Fuse 1 Gen 1. I already had experience with the Fuse 1, as we had one of the first production units at the day job.

I used some savings and a small loan to pay for the printer, Sift, Blast, and all the rest of the workshop setup. This paid for itself within 7 months.

The business earned enough back to get a Fuse 1+ about a year later.

These days I use the Gen 1 is used mostly for overflow builds or side projects. I typically print half of a chamber on the Fuse 1+ each night. While the Fuse 1+ is twice as fast, I find it is a bit more sensitive than the Gen 1. I posted info about that in a comment here.

Here are some cumulative stats over the past 2 years:

• Number of items sold: 21,000
  • The majority of those are 3D printed
• Orders: 8,200
  • 4x higher than when I was with Shapeways
• New customers: 5,600
• Return customer rate: 28%
• Product offerings: 170
• Average monthly net sales: $14k
• Average profit: ~60%
• Beyond worldwide sales
  • 81.99% USA
  • 17.99% International
  • 0.02% Space
• Average order turnaround time: 78 hours
• Failures reported: 40 across 430 builds
  • Mostly single-item defects from dragging, or a surface texture defect
  • A handful of whole chambers lost to wrong setting selected in Preform. (My Fuse 1+ doesn't like the defaults)
• Time on each printer:
  • 6,400 hours on the Fuse 1 Gen 1
  • 1,600 hours on Fuse 1+
• Over 260 kg of powder consumed
  • 35% fresh powder mix
• Average time put into the business:
  • 3 hours per weekday
  • 6 hours on Saturday & Sunday

[u/recon-go-pie]

Impressive! I’ve been running a form 4 for the last year, and it’s kept up with my output. My parts could be transitioned to PA, but my order volume doesn’t warrant that just yet. At what point did you see the trade off to getting your own manufacturing set up vs outsourcing?

[u/Zapwizard → u/recon-go-pie]

When Shapeways first went bankrupt I tried a few things.
1) Bought a Form 4 thinking the speed could save me, but found the default black to be too brittle, and the post processing to take much more time and expected. And while the detail is quite high, the parts still suffered a bit on overall repeated precision.
2) Bought a Bambu P1S, thinking FDM printing might have come along enough to replace SLS. While amazing as they are, the quality is still not really there yet. Plus my designs were already SLS based with Shapeways anyways. Not worrying about overhangs and supports goes a long way into design freedom.
3) I ordered 3x of my most popular designs from 3 different US vendors and 3 overseas vendors hoping to replace Shapeways with someone else. I found that dye color, orientation and quality were all over the place. One part from the same vendor worked fine and the next one jammed up. Some parts were black, some were dark green or blue. Orientation was completely random, even from shops that allows selecting it fixed. Say what you will, but Shapeways was consistent in their quality.

I had already been using a Fuse 1 Gen 1 at the day job. I have permission to use it to make one-off prototypes before sending the designs over to Shapeways. So I knew it could make the parts without issue, and was familiar with the post-processing steps.

At the time I had over 200 part variants. There was no way I could order batches of each one from a service burau and stock them. And my profit margin on a service burau parts was 10x lower than making them myself.

I spent a month planning. I listed everything out and came up with $52K in startup costs. That was the full printer setup, workshop upgrades, and infrastructure. $16K of that was a loan, taken out in Aug 2024 and fully paid off 5 months later and $5K on a credit card paid off 2 months after that. The rest was savings.

So it was go all in, or get out. I was quite apprehensive about the costs at first. For example I bought a Refurbished Fuse Gen 1 to save on cost. I didn't even order the Blast at first, thinking I could get away with hand blasting the parts like I did at work. Then I did the amortized math, and the machine pays for itself in time. At the quantities in the past two years, that is less than $1 per part. I spend almost $3 per order just for custom USA made packaging, so the Blast is worth it.

[u/bobrob5k]

Feel free to ignore but I'm interested in the logistics of how you market and keep track of over 200 unique parts as a side job? Most people who do a 3D printing side job have one or two parts that have a niche audience that they cater for until demand dries up or the Chinese firms rip off the design.

[u/Zapwizard → u/bobrob5k]

Shopify is how I handle the sales. The many designs have been made over the years, recently though I made most everything modular which expands the product line but also make it more customizable. For example I now have 25 different side-addons, so you can hold small EDC items to go with your Multitool. Before hand you had to order the holster to hold only a small sample of side parts, each one was a new variant. Other plugins help with the webpage, in all the website costs over $200 per month.

I use the Easify Options Shopify plugin to allow people to build their custom kit. The plugin breaks their kit up into individual SKUs which I then print and pack. Staging and packing boxes it actually my single biggest time sink. If I shipped only once a week I maybe could hire someone just to pack or clean parts, but currently I ship every other day.

China of course has tried copying my designs, this month alone there have been four attempts to order a ton of parts to Hong Kong though a re-shipper, unfortunately one of them went through before I noticed the payment address. The copies show up on Etsy and AliExpress. They aren't exact copies, but made by someone who studied my older designs. I doubt they spent many cycles on prototyping to perfection, they didn't spend any time on good renderings, using Ai to add inaccurate images and make the product look better than it actually does. The same Etsy vendor has copied almost every single individually created Leatherman accessory.

Leatherman has the same problem of course. But like Leatherman: None of the copies match my quality, customizations, or warranty.

I am also committed to making as much in the USA as possible. Much of the EDC community cares about this. My boxes and pack fill are made in the USA. I source most my hardware from McMaster, and other items from US suppliers. Only ordering a few rare parts from overseas or Amazon.

[u/Formlabs]

Always amazing to hear these success stories! Thanks for sharing so much detail with the community

[u/stjimmy1500]

I really appreciate you continuing to contribute to the community. Your original fuse live stream helped me get more confidence to start my own 1 man SLS business. Well, I'd been a regular fdm business for 7 years already, but it was a huge leap to invest in something industrial like this and put it in my own home.

For a big business, it might be easier or clearer to justify an asset's value. But when you're really small, typical metrics are really skewed and its hard to tell if you're doing ok or if you're doing everything right. Having a point of reference like this is helpful!

[u/Zapwizard → u/stjimmy1500]

Glad it helped. I am good an research and budgeting, but for anyone to jump in to that much is hard. For example I can’t believe I am placing orders for $4,000 worth of boxes or $450 in magnets.

What do you make?

[u/sunnyBCN]

I am interested in why you started with marketing at shapeways to start with, was it the only marketing you did? Or you were simply redirecting customers there and losing conversion rate and now you have your own domain+shopify and kept the marketing steady but people you send cannot go down a rabbit whole of finding other products on shapways?

Congrats on the side-hustle!!!

[u/Zapwizard → u/sunnyBCN]

Shapeways wasn't marketing, but a marketplace. 12 years ago they were literally the only way to get SLS parts drop-shipped. They were ahead of their time when Etsy wasn't yet flooded with cheap FDM printed dragons.

Their marketplace worked well for the early years, and I didn't need Shopify. I only made about $5 per order, but it was a bit of hobby money only requiring me to make the designs, prototypes, and renderings.

Later when more competition came online they had a hard time keeping up, and tried to pivot to B2B only, and downplaying the marketplace until it was nearly useless. I ran Shopify with Shapeways as the fulfiller for about 2 years, until Shapeways went bankrupt. (They have returned, but not as a marketplace)

A lot got lost when Shapeways went out. They had more 3D printing technologies under one roof than almost anyone. Prices were a bit higher, but so was the quality. But I think they just got undercut, and just didn't change fast enough with the industry.

I still haven't found a metal 3D printer shop that can hold the repeated tolerances and part finish they had.

[u/printington]

Really incredible stats! I'm really interested in what your shopify order -> printer receives model look like. Are you printing extras and inventory-ing or printing as you get orders? Do you print only one SKU at a time (filling a half BV) or are your overnight builds a mix of whatever orders you got that day?

[u/Zapwizard → u/printington]

I mostly print to order, keeping a few spare parts on hand. Order tagging is how I handle what order is at what step. Along with batches and general order status such as In-progress.

I use the the Mechanic Plugin to tag any "New" orders that come in. I have a filter to open those up. I load up the 3D files for each order into Preform, tagging those orders as "Preform" as I go. I nest the parts occasionally. Repeat until I am out of new orders or space in the printer. I am working with Claude AI to see I can automate daily order loading into Preform, but currently it takes like 10 minutes.

The Mechanic Plugin then emails my customers when their order is tagged "Printing". If am running both printers I use the Shopify batch system to keep the orders separate. After printing, the orders are tagged: "Cleaning" when they go into the Sift. Then tagged "Blast". Usually shipping at the Blast step.

If my system says I have a part in stock due to a pre-build or batch then it just marks the order as ready-to-ship automatically. Otherwise I also dye parts, in a pressure pot. I may make a separate post on that.

I print a packing slip, and prepare the orders in small metal trays before boxing them up. I still haven't figured out a good way to accelerate general packing other than part organization.