STORES Magazine - July 2015 - 48

TECHNOLOGY

Endless Possibilities
The UPS Store embraces three-dimensional printing
by FRED MINNICK

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

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

http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/22/technology/innovationnation/ups-3d-printing/ http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/22/technology/innovationnation/ups-3d-printing/ http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/22/technology/innovationnation/ups-3d-printing/ http://www.NRF.COM/STORES

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - July 2015