STORES Magazine - July 2015 - 48
n TECHNOLOGY Endless Possibilities The UPS Store embraces three-dimensional printing by FRED MINNICK W hen Debbie Adams was one of the 100 UPS franchisees selected to offer three-dimensional printing, the Louisville, Ky., UPS Store owner was a little nervous. Adams went ahead and leased a costly printer, not knowing what to expect. She merely hoped the new machine would become an added service to new and existing customers. "I wanted to make sure that it could at least break even," Adams says. Little did she know that the device would transform her business and help her attract unique printing jobs. Across the country, 3-D printing is allowing small businesses, retailers, medical and automotive companies - really anybody - to personalize their offerings, creating unique 3-D items to help promote and sell products. "3-D printing is opposite of the way that objects have been manufactured since the beginning of time, which 48 STORES July 2015 is subtractively - where you took a block of something and you cut away at it," says Daniel Remba, who oversees the implementation of 3-D printing services in UPS stores. "This is additive, so we take a raw material and we create an object one layer at a time, stacking these layers up until the object is built. In the case of the 3-D printers in our stores, it's a spool of plastic which is melted and then it's pushed through a print head like a glue gun, and that plastic is squeezed out in a series of two-dimensional layers stacked on top of each other until the object is built up." The UPS Store was the first national chain to pursue 3-D printing and expects to add more 3-D printers in the near future. AN ACCESSIBLE TREND Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute is credited with printing the first solid material in 1982. Two years later, 3D Systems Corp. created the first 3-D printer. The materials were expensive and the machines were not cost-efficient. These days, things have changed: The machines, which once cost upwards of $10,000, can now be purchased for less than $500. Remba says the 3-D printer trend is directly connected to the printers being more accessible: Many retailers sell home versions, and it's also becoming a service. Remba says a number of UPS clients are small businesses that perform product development. "They are essentially prototyping new products or making innovations on existing products and they want a local place to come and do their 3-D printing so they don't have to ship it out of state," he says. "It's better to do it locally. You can do it faster and you can have a relationship with the storeowner who's doing the printing for you. "We see 3-D printing as just sort NRF.COM/STORES
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