Some months ago Trinckle announced a deal with Conrad to provide 3D print services. Now it seems to have gone live.
Conrad is a massive European-based electronics retailer with revenues exceeding USD$1B. They have 36 physical locations, but the majority of their revenue is from online operations.
Trinckle is a Berlin-based company that provides several interesting 3D print-related services. So many, in fact, that we wondered what their growth strategy might actually be.
One of their many ventures is this deal with Conrad. The idea is that they can leverage Conrad’s gigantic online following to capture revenue through 3D printing requests.
And now it’s online so I thought I’d give it a try.
The system does work and works very easily. It should, as it seems to be simply re-using the standard Trinckle interface.
It’s easy to upload an STL file, although there seems to be a limit of 32Mb, which may be a problem for more complex 3D models.
Once uploaded, you can choose among several printing parameters and choose the material to be used. There are several materials available, and you will likely find something appropriate.
Pricing is calculated in real time after the 3D model is uploaded and you are presented with specific pricing for your upload.
The system does perform an analysis of the uploaded 3D model before you can send it off for 3D printing. Here we can see the types of analysis performed, including: wall thickness, detail level, gaps and they also ask you to confirm the size of the print.
You can see my example here, an artistic Beluga Whale, courtesy of artist Kal Barteski. Fortunately, this 3D model passed the test and appears entirely green in the analyzer.
There’s one issue I see with this system: it’s challenging to find on Conrad’s site. I could not find the service within a few minutes searching, likely all the time a user would bother before giving up. Instead I had to resort to the direct link provided in their press release.
This is not a good thing as the point of the deal is for Conrad to drive traffic to the service. Perhaps they should consider placing the service in a more prominent location on their web page.
