Today we’d like to introduce you to Bridget Ayres.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
My husband Tim and I have always been makers and consider ourselves to be a part of the wider Maker Movement. In 2014, after patents on 3Dprinting processes had been expiring for a while, there was an explosion in the variety and accessibility of 3dprinters and 3D scanners and my husband and I hopped right on the 3dprinting hobbyist train. Our first machine was a kit we put together ourselves made of laser-cut MDF board and sold by a company that sadly no longer exists.
As a mechanical engineer, his interest in 3dprinting was more obvious than mine at first. But my mother was a stockbroker (who kept up with companies and modern technology as it was crucial to her work) and I still remember her telling me about 3dprinting in the ’80s when I was young. So, I’d been enthralled with the idea for decades, although I didn’t know anything about 3dscanning. Yet.
Downloading models to print on our new machine, I ran across a 3dmodel of a celebrity and was fascinated by the accuracy, and Tim told me nonchalantly that he must have been scanned. He was calm. For me, it was like our roof went flying off the house, the sky opened up, and I knew what I wanted to do immediately. My enthusiasm has not flickered and I still look forward to working every single day. Luckily, I was not working outside our home at the time and dove in. It’s the kind of discipline that with time and widely available, free materials online, one can learn to do what I now do.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road continues to get smoother all the time.
For the first year and a half, we ran the company out of our home, but it gradually took over our kitchen, dining area, a bedroom, and a living room-type area. To get business, I had to convince someone to let me come set up and scan them in their own homes, which didn’t pan out for the kind of volume I was looking for in a business. It was also difficult to have proper lighting in random places. The other option was to pay to go to set up a mini-store in booths at shows like ComicCon and fill orders before the next show, but our booths were not large enough for me to scan someone in full length. But paying for our booth & electricity took a huge chunk of our proceeds. We also had to fill orders that were full color at larger printing companies, which took another huge bite out of any profit.
Once we were able to get a commercial location, however, we had room to acquire our own full-color printers and really get organized. Now, I can scan people in full length, capture well behaved pets and babies. We’ve been at this location since late 2016 and chose Arlington because it’s so centrally located in the DFW metroplex.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about 3DLirious 3D Printing & Scanning – what should we know?
By now we take all sorts of jobs, but at first, we were exclusively focused on portrait scanning and printing.
I’m particularly proud of a finishing process I developed for binder jet 3dprinting that adds a real metal coating to prints and then they can be finished like any metal object with polishing, a patina, & sealant. I can do bronze, copper, brass, pewter, etc. I spoke to several people at a major 3dprinting conference last year and I appear to be the only one in the world who offers this finishing process. It’s not good for mechanical parts, but it’s fantastic for artistic pursuits, which is what I developed it for.
We’ve also contributed over 130 statue scans (which is on par with museums’ contributions) from 4 countries so far to an archive that collects scans of statues that are in the public domain from around the world (that are truly the world’s shared cultural heritage), called Scan The World. It’s like a huge digital museum with nearly 16,000 objects by now.
But even from the very beginning, we were different because we offered several products made from portrait scans rather than other companies who sold full-length figures or a bust and that was it. We debuted offering bobbleheads, magnets, jewelry, charms, and beads made of people’s heads, personalized chess kings and queens, and we put people on famous statues like David or the Venus de Milo, etc. or whatever else someone wanted to be on.
When full-color prints come out of the printer, they are weak and need to be made stronger with super glue or epoxy. Even in the early days when we filled orders from large companies, they used super glue to strengthen and we would coat those portraits in epoxy to make them stronger and the colors more vivid. Now, large 3dprinting places offer the coating, but we have for years before that. With our own full-color printers, we use food-safe epoxy in a vacuum chamber to finish them, which makes them watertight and far stronger than the prints other places offer.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
I think our empathy, which translates into determination to provide customers with high-quality products is perhaps most important. If something doesn’t turn outright, we will keep at it until we have the kind of result that I would personally want.
Contact Info:
- Address: 611 N Center St
Arlington, TX 76011 - Website: http://3dlirious.com/
- Phone: 682-472-6170
- Email: 3DLirious@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/3dlirious/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/3dlirious/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/3DLirious
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