What do you get when you combine a 3D printer farm, 16 tonnes of Haribo Bears, and the ethos of the Rep Rap project? To find the answer, you need look no further than Prusa Research’s factory in Prague and its stack of 130,000 plus machines sold.
Like most start-ups, Prusa Research’s origins can be traced back to a basement, a two-person band, and little more than a passion project. Founded by Josef Prusa back in 2012 after he and his brother Michal began tinkering with 3D printing to make parts for DJ equipment, Prusa Research has steadily established itself as a leading force in the 3D printing community, finding a strong fan base in both the maker space and professional market.
Unlike other start-ups, however, Prusa Research didn’t go via the Kickstarter route or in search of an investor like the many 3D printing companies that have come and gone before them. Though that led to a somewhat slower start, the privately held company has more than caught up, and last year was named the fastest-growing tech company in Central Europe by Deloitte with a turnover that rose from 149,000 EUR in 2014 to 45.83 million EUR in 2018. With 59,776 3D printers sold last year alone, Prusa Research says it has amassed over 10% of the desktop market share, according to estimations by Wohlers Associates.
To what does Prusa Research attribute its success? Passion and no nonsense.
“I think for a good business, to start is to be passionate about the thing and to be really into it. If you just want to start a company and then you start searching for something you would make or the company would make, [that] is the wrong way around,” Josef tells TCT. “That’s why I don’t much like the start-up scene right now because everybody wants to be the entrepreneur and they want to be a part of the “bros” and then after that, they start thinking about what to do.”
Original Prusa i3 MK3
Prusa likes to do things their own way. Go to any 3D printing trade show, you will spot Prusa’s team a mile off, a young crowd in black t shirts which read “Everyone is a maker only I am a printer” and usually the last ones on the dance floor. But has that cool maker identity ever hindered Prusa as the desktop industry fights to be seen as a serious contender on the manufacturing scene?
“I don’t think it’s good or bad. It’s the way it is, and I quite enjoy that,” Josef said. “We don’t have to wear suits at these shows and try to be overly nice, you know. We can just show up in T-shirts and chat with everybody the way we want. That is very freeing in this industry.”
Josef himself is a key part of the company’s identity – his name appears twice in the company’s full moniker after all. He is a dominant figure in the Rep Rap community with the tattoo to prove it, was named one of Forbes’ 30 under 30, and doesn’t look or sound like your typical CEO running a nine-storey manufacturing facility with 300 employees. When Prusa first came to be, it wasn’t uncommon to see eccentric CEOs and figureheads leading the desktop 3D printing revolution that never quite happened. With the maker community such an integral part of Prusa’s success, it makes sense to put a face to a company name - so much so Prusa placed an inflatable version of himself atop of the first Prague Maker Faire last year - but Josef says in the early days the company chose to remain low-key and stay clear of overpromising.
“We weren’t trying to tell everyone “alright, we are coming to the industry”,” Josef comments. “We didn’t ride that hype wave [and] we also sold the printers ourselves. That means that if somebody came to us, we asked him what he was going to print ... because at that stage, it was super easy to sell a printer to anyone, right? If it wasn’t for them, we just told them which technology they should use.”
It is this attitude that has earned Prusa a community of impassioned users who regularly share prints and hacks on the new Prusa Printers online hub and are eager to support the company in the comments section on YouTube in the face of any, and arguably very few, negative reviews. Popular channel Maker’s Muse commented during a review of the Prusa i3 MK3 that, “it can be tempting to buy into a company at almost a religious level” and you certainly get a sense of that with Prusa’s fandom. According to Josef, having that open dialogue with the community is what encourages Prusa to innovate, arguing that the maker community can often be harder to please than big industrial users.
A full set of 3D printed parts for an MK3 can be produced in 27 hours
“It is very important for us that we have this community because it is pushing us very hard,” Josef explains. “Also, they can tweak the printer, modify them, and if they find something which is an improvement, it is always good inspiration.”
On first glance, Prusa’s current model, the i3 MK3S, doesn’t look like anything special - it is a standard desktop-sized, plastic extrusion-based technology with open source design files readily available online. Place one next to a current generation Ultimaker or MakerBot and its simplistic orange and black frame is unlikely to win any prizes for aesthetics but that has never hampered Prusa’s success. “We just never bothered with making it look pretty for the designers but we always worked on the functionality,” Josef says, reeling o the many accolades the machine has received including scoring first place in MAKE: Magazine’s 3D printer shootout two years in a row. Priced at 699 GBP for the kit, recent features include a new filament sensor, rebuilt extruder, improved silent mode, and a new magnetic heat bed with replaceable spring steel sheet. This year, the company also introduced its first MSLA printer, the Original Prusa SL1, which Josef says has been received positively by professional users, particularly in the dental industry.
The hardware has come a long way from the first Prusa Mendel, a chunky piece of DIY kit referred to as the Ford Model T of 3D printers, and so too have the company’s sales. An excited tweet from Josef back in 2010, now pinned to the company’s blog, celebrated the success of five Mendel kits sold in three days. Now, it’s more like 6,000 a month.
This is all made possible by Prusa’s 500-strong printer farm which churns out parts for Prusa machines day in day out. A whole set of plastic components for one MK3 printer can be produced in 27 hours and 80% of those machines are sold as kits, which Josef believes is a strong indicator of the strength of the DIY movement.
“It is very nice from the point that if you build a printer, you know how to repair it,” Josef offers. “FDM printers, even the ones which cost hundreds of thousands of Euros, they can still have a jam or something like that, so people think it’s an advantage that they know how to assemble it. For us, if something like that happens, it means that we can just ship a new part.”
Prusa manufactures its own filament across 13 lines at its Prague factory.
Everything is and has always been done in-house. Machines are shipped to customers directly from Prague where 24-hour support is available in seven different languages. Each machine is rigorously tested and comes shipped with a testing protocol sheet to prove it. Last year, Prusa also began manufacturing its own Prusament filament across 13 lines, and with the help of robotics, aims to achieve non-stop production to keep up with demand. With the user community never too far away from Prusa’s plans, there is also a fully equipped maker space which hosts regular 3D printing classes.
“We never had resellers so we were always in direct contact with the customers in the community and this proved very important for us because you have instant feedback from the people,” Josef adds. “If you are just a manufacturer and somebody else is doing the selling for you, you don’t always get all the information back. At the beginning, it was much tougher for us to do it this way because we not only needed to learn how to make the printers at scale but we also needed to learn how to ship all the printers, how to run a such a big web shop, and how to do the customer support for all these people. It was more difficult but now it’s paying off that we have this direct contact.”
With the i3 MK3S now firmly in the hands of users – not to mention a new world record achieved just last month for most 3D printers operating simultaneously (1,096 to be exact) – looking ahead, what can we expect to see next?
“There is always a new printer on the horizon” Josef adds with a sense of excitement in his voice, “we are kind of restless in that regard.”
