A few days ago, I had a very interesting conversation with someone developing an extremely innovative solution for 3D printing. It wasn’t a 3D printer itself – rather, something used in a 3D printer.
During our talk, the question arose of how this product could be applied in real-world, market conditions. It turns out that this product – forgive me for not naming it, but I’m bound by a trade secret – would actually fit perfectly into several very unconventional industries for additive manufacturing.
One of them could be the funeral industry!
Again, forgive me for not going into detail, but that’s not really the point of what I wanted to discuss here. The topic isn’t the product itself, but rather its adaptation in a client environment.
And funeral industry is a very specific kind of industry for AM implementation. Not so open for such a innovation.
So how do you convince a certain type of customer to adopt a new and better solution when they’re completely devoted to traditional products and simply don’t want to change anything?
Well, my friends - sometimes, you just can’t…
That damned interior finishing industry…
As I’ve mentioned several times in previous articles, I had a rather unusual episode in my professional career - over a year working in the interior finishing industry. That was from early 2023 until mid-2024. I briefly described it here:
We operated in the stretch ceiling sector (I explain what that is in the article above). We worked with a very specific group of people.
I’d call them: clever, but not wise.
I don’t mean to offend anyone. So let me explain:
by clever, I mean people who use all their intelligence to find the best possible short-term solution for themselves, here and now
by wise, I mean people who look at things in a broader context - not only what benefit they can get in this moment, but also what the consequences will be in the future.
For example: a clever person might take advantage of a client’s mistake or oversight and earn an extra €100. A wise person would point out the error, lose the extra €100, but gain the client’s trust - which could pay off later.
I hope you see what I mean?
If so, let me tell you about our struggles with some of these potential - clever - clients…
Competing with “Something That Works”
While working in the interior finishing sector, we continued to use 3D printers. We designed many custom solutions that didn’t yet exist in that market (I described them in the article below):
Installers were buying them, but they always compared our prices with cheaper, lower-quality alternatives. Our products were tailor-made, perfectly fitted, and customized, yet they still had to compete with cheaper, off-the-shelf options that were either too small or too large.
But some installers used them anyway, because they were cheaper. And since they were clever, they just installed them in a way that hid the flaws - at least at first glance…
There was nothing we could do. We simply lost a certain percentage of clients who “weren’t going to overpay for something that works.”
At some point, we came up with another idea - instead of producing lots of cheap products, why not sell 3D printers, filament, and printing files so installers could make their own products - without buying from external suppliers?
Since stretch-ceiling installers are highly skilled craftsmen in construction, they didn’t really have the time to learn 3D printing and software.
So we decided to meet them halfway. Our package included: a 3D printer, filament, and a set of production files preloaded into the printer’s memory.
They literally just had to choose from a list. Click - and done!
Since it was 2023, the market already had super-cheap and super-efficient Bambu Lab P1P printers - perfect tools for this kind of work. They became the foundation of our offer.
On top of that, we added a competitive design service package for those who needed something special - custom projects or specific architectural applications.
We really thought it through. It was a solution perfectly tailored for a builder-installer.
But… nothing came of it. Despite a lot of interest in 3D printing itself, none of them decided to buy the package. Not even the printer alone.
Everyone calculated the total investment cost against the price of finished products they could buy at a construction supply store.
“Why would I spend around €750 to print custom made protective rings on your set if one protective ring costs €0.10?”
Well… I’m sure you can imagine how difficult it was to have a conversation about ROI with clever builders…
Despite numerous attempts and different approaches, we kept hitting a wall. No one was thinking in terms of “the next few months.” What mattered was that right now they’d have to spend a lot of money on something that makes items costing mere cents.
Some conversations were downright surreal. Installers would bring up the cost of a single €0.10 part - even though they could only buy them in packs of 500. And sometimes they needed 10-12 different sizes (meaning they had to buy 500 of each).
Nothing would get through to them.
The closest we got to selling a 3D printer was when one installer was looking for a way to reduce his income tax…
The unbreakable wall
So how does all this relate to the funeral industry I mentioned earlier?
It’s largely made up of similarly minded people (I had a brief episode trying to work with them too). It’s a sector built on decades-old, well-established practices.
It’s a very niche, very closed-off environment. Extremely conservative. They don’t take kindly to outsiders trying to “sell them something new” that they consider unnecessary.
For certain people and communities, breaking through is extremely difficult - almost impossible. Innovation only happens when they come up with something themselves and start implementing it. But when they do, they usually keep it secret so the competition doesn’t find out.
In such environments, innovation progresses slowly and often takes the form of stealing each other’s secrets.
For external companies or individuals, these are unreachable territories - no matter how good the product is, or how attractive the price might be.