Last spring, we named WobbleWorks one of the 10 most successful companies built on Kickstarter. At the time, it had raised $3.9 million on the crowdfunding platform in two campaigns for the 3Doodler, a 3D printing pen that had launched there in 2013. Turns out that was just the beginning for WobbleWorks, which had sales last year around $20 million from three different lines of pens and recently signed licensing deals with the Cartoon Network and CBS for kits featuring, respectively, the Powerpuff Girls and Star Trek.
Like 3D printers, 3D printing pens allow users to easily create three-dimensional objects. Users simply draw what they want, generally with plastic rather than ink.
“Within a couple of months, we’ll be at our millionth pen, which for three-and-a-half years is an awesome achievement,” says Daniel Cowen, 35, a former lawyer who is one of the company’s three cofounders. Perhaps more awesome, the fast-growing company, which has 34 employees and offices in New York and Hong Kong, is cash-flow positive, and has avoided taking on either investors or debt.
As the technology for 3D printers has advanced, numerous companies have sprung up to take advantage of it. For 3Doodler’s inventors, Max Bogue and Peter Dilworth, the idea of having a 3D printing pen was a simpler, more intuitive idea. As toy inventors, they conceived of the idea as something fun, but it is also beginning to have more serious applications. The home 3D printing market is expected to reach $2.35 billion by 2022, according to estimates by research firm Research and Markets, and today 3D pens, sold by the likes of Kuman, Mynt3d and 7Tech, as well as 3Doodler, are a booming business. “You can use the 3Doodler to create what’s in your imagination pretty quickly and by hand,” Bogue says.
WobbleWorks cofounder Daniel Cowen joined the company in 2013 to help launch its first Kickstarter... [+]
Bogue, 35, and Dilworth, 51, had previously worked in research and development for WowWee, a robotics toy company based in Hong Kong, and Dilworth had also worked as a researcher at MIT. In 2010, they teamed up to create WobbleWorks, their own toy-invention company that initially licensed concepts to large toy companies. “We were doing that successfully when we came up with the 3Doodler,” Bogue says.
As with so many inventions, a random accident sparked the idea for the 3Doodler. Dilworth had invented Troody, a walking biped dinosaur, and he and Bogue were working on a new version of it. One day, they were printing a dinosaur leg for Troody on a 3D printer, and the printer made a mistake. “Peter nudged me and said, ‘I wish you could just take the nozzle off the printer and use that.’ Then we slapped our heads and said, ‘Why doesn’t that exist?’” Bogue recalls. They searched to see if anyone had created something like it and couldn’t find anything. So they printed some parts from the 3D printer to create a 3D printing pen and wrote 3Doodler on the side of it. “It worked horribly,” Bogue says, “but we said, ‘That’s cool.’ Then we went to see if any of those toy companies we worked with in the past were interested, and they were like, ‘Eh, no.’”
Undeterred, Bogue and Dilworth turned to Kickstarter, enlisting Cowen to help and ultimately bringing him on as the third cofounder. The 2013 campaign for what it dubbed “The World’s First 3D Printing Pen” raised $2.3 million from more than 26,000 backers, far surpassing its original $30,000 goal. “It was obviously a very big turning point when we went from two people doing a couple hundred thousand a year to a company that did $2 million on the Internet,” Bogue recalls. A second Kickstarter campaign, for the reinvented 3Doodler 2.0, in 2015, raised nearly $1.6 million from more than 10,000 backers. By going direct to consumer, 3Doodlers’ inventors were able to prove there was demand for the concept rather than begging retailers for an audience.
Today, WobbleWorks makes three different 3Doodler product lines. Its flagship pen is the 3Doodler Create, priced at $99. A year ago, it introduced a 3Doodler pen for kids, called the Start, that’s chunkier and made of child-safe plastic and sells for $49. And in September, it launched a Pro version, priced at $249, that’s designed for architects, engineers and designers. The professional offering allows users to set the temperature and speed to give access to a wider range of materials, such as wood and metal, in addition to the regular plastic. “We’re hoping that the Pro pen will be in retailers like Home Depot and Lowe’s because it’s an effective repair tool to fill in cracks. The trade applications are quite staggering,” Bogue says. The pens could be used as a replacement for CAD modeling, for example, or to fix pipes with polycarbonate.
A recreation of Frank Llloyd Wright's Falling Water, created with the 3Doodler printing pen. (Photo... [+]
In February, at the annual Toy Fair in New York, WobbleWorks announced its new license collaborations, which will allow it to sell 3D kits that include instructions and doodle molds so users can create Powerpuff characters, in the one case, or Star Trek ones, in the other. “It goes back to the original audience, who are quite techy and geeky, and gives them something to get excited about,” Cowen says. Additional licensing agreements allow them to sell architectural kits to Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House.
Today, the 3D pens are available for sale at Target, Michaels, Best Buy, Amazon, Brookstone – and at retailers in 60 countries as far afield as Turkey, Spain and Nigeria. With the three product lines and the new licensing deals in place, Bogue hopes that revenue will reach $30 million this year. While other entrepreneurs might have taken on investors or debt in an effort to build quickly, the 3Doodler guys have steered clear of both. “Chasing money is a full-time job, and we didn’t want to get into that,” Bogue says. “We would rather spend time creating product.”
