News

Poppy Adams wanted to start a business designing glass jewellery. She had the skills: The 36-year-old, who lives in Langley, British Columbia, was trained in glassmaking and metalsmithing. But she didn’t have the means: She needed a kiln to fire her own glass, and some way to reach customers. Kilns cost thousands of dollars—a lot of money if her business didn’t take off—and where exactly was she going to sell her jewellery? The local Langley market just isn’t that big.

Two years ago, technology solved both of these problems. Fuelled by engineering breakthroughs and a surge in DIY home crafters, kiln- makers began producing “tabletop” models, microwave-sized and suitable for an apartment; Adams found one online for $800. Now she was able to fire glass in any size, shape or colour that a customer could desire.

Then she heard about Etsy, a Brooklyn, New York-based e-commerce website where craftspeople set up virtual stores. Founded in 2005, Etsy now has more than 50 employees and 200,000 users running “shops” that sell about $90 million worth of products a year to 2.3 million members. Using the screen name Groovyglassgirl, Adams began selling her custom-fired glass in January, 2007. She ships 75 orders a month, most of them to international clients.

“What I’m doing now basically wasn’t possible five years ago,” she says. “The technology has come a long way.”

Welcome to the Industrial Revolution 2.0. The last wave of North American manufacturing died off in the ’80s and ’90s, when manual-labour work decamped for the rock-bottom wages of developing countries like China. Between 2004 and 2008, one in seven Canadian manufacturing jobs disappeared. Over the past decade, the United States lost close to one-quarter of its jobs in the manufacturing sector. And the old paradigm isn’t coming back. We are increasingly becoming a society that consumes but does not make. Companies like Etsy, however, herald an interesting shift: Call it micromanufacturing. Advances in technology mean that small firms—literally mom-and-pop shops—can design products and take them to the global market, sometimes in a matter of hours.

The trend has been driven by the plunging cost of industrial-quality manufacturing tools. Several Web-based firms—like eMachineshop and Ponoko—offer kitchen-table entrepreneurs access to elite industrial design and production tools, such as laser cutters and injection-moulding machines (the latter can cost $10,000 or more to purchase). It’s reminiscent of how Kinko’s brought high-end printing to the masses in the ’80s, enabling a boom in self-publishing: If you couldn’t afford high-end design software and laser printing, you could simply rent it by the hour.

Ponoko, a New Zealand-based service, works in a similar way. Anyone can design a product—using tools as simple as CorelDraw or even paper and pencil—and upload the plans to its Ponoko website. Clients choose their materials (from cloth to brass to wood), and Ponoko’s laser cutters produce it, to 1,000th-of-an-inch precision. The creator can then set up a store and sell the product, with Ponoko (which currently has a staff of five) taking care of credit-card billing and shipping. Because the site produces each product on the fly as customers place their orders, creators don’t need to stock an inventory of gewgaws. More than 15,000 customers have uploaded products; some have sold so well they’ve generated six-figure incomes for their designers. One product—a drink coaster made from the letters of the alphabet—was designed by a teenager during his summer break. He landed his first sale within three weeks and, a few months later, the global design warehouse Veer started selling the product.

Producing small quantities of things is the next generation in manufacturing, says Derek Elley, the co-founder of Ponoko. “Generation one was mass manufacturing,” he says, with large companies like RCA creating televisions. “Generation two was mass customization, which was Dell, where you have a bunch of parts the customer puts together. And now you have mass individualization, where people create lots of things from scratch.”

What has put micromanufacturing into overdrive is the fact that it doesn’t require much upfront capital. With online stores like Etsy, creators can try out a few designs and quickly see whether they sell—then discard the products that aren’t moving and make more of the ones that are. And sometimes all you need is an idea. Firms like CafePress make it possible for entrepreneurs to customize pre-existing products such as mugs, T-shirts and calendars; the creator need only think up a graphical concept, e-mail it to CafePress, and wait to see if anyone orders it. The size of this market is enormous: T-shirt printing is an $18-billion market in North America, and CafePress paid $20 million in cheques to its creators last year.

“We allow people to go into business essentially for free,” says Fred Durham, CafePress’s co-founder. “So the risk goes to zero. With the first dollar of sales, you’re profitable. I don’t think that idea has ever existed before in history.”

So what’s the future for micromanufacturing? In the next few years, observers say, more and more fabrication tools will come online—things like 3-D printers that can quickly pop out the body for a custom-designed MP3 player or a die for an auto part—allowing entrepreneurs to create increasingly complex objects. Meanwhile, the “open source” movement that revolutionized software development is beginning to emerge in hardware: Inventors have uploaded to Ponoko a large number of designs for product parts that are licence-free, meaning that anyone can use and incorporate them into new products. It’s as easy as snapping Lego bricks together.

In a recent speech to the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, President Barack Obama implored Americans to “create, build and invent—to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.” Economists have argued for years that manufacturing was never coming back to North America. But maybe they’ve been looking in the wrong place. The next industrial revolution isn’t happening on the shop floor—it’s happening at the kitchen table.

How Ponoko works
Sites like emachineshop.com and ponoko.com give kitchen-table entrepreneurs the tools they need to build their own prototypes and even sell finished products. Here’s how Ponoko does it

1. Tell Ponoko what it is you want to make. You can sketch it out using Ponoko’s free software, draw it on a piece of paper or even post a description online. Designers will send you solutions.

2. Once your request is uploaded, Ponoko either provides an instant quote for the work or designers submit their bids to you.

3. Confirm your order and Ponoko will laser-cut your design from the material of your choice—everything from cardboard or felt to bamboo or medium-density fibreboard. Your design is shipped flat, and you assemble it yourself.