They left their former jobs, took out all the savings and started their business. This is the beginning of the story about D3Stooges3D, a small printing studio hidden on the ground floor of one of the buildings in Novi Zagreb, where four friends print everything customers ask them, from animal figures and characters from movies and video games to cups, pods, soap holders, earrings. And they are doing great, reports Večernji List on February 13, 2019.
“It started four years ago when our father put together a 3D printer because he wanted to work on aeroplanes models,” said the brothers Daniel and Luke Kirin, remembering how they first got interested in the technology. They were joined by their friends, also brothers Ivan and Filip Ormuž. They bought drawing tablets for one hundred euros and started to improvise. They downloaded models from the internet and printed them as a test, but soon they started making their own.
“We printed everything we could think of. Sometimes we would succeed, sometimes not. For example, a longboard shaft we designed for ourselves got completely stuck to the table,” explained Luka.
After some time, they received an offer for a larger project, 400 casings for TV sets. They went into the “unknown”, as they say, but the job turned out well, and they earned good money. And so, they decided to devote themselves to business more seriously. “We said ‘let’s try it,’ took out all our savings and started the company,” Daniel described.
Now they have five printers, four with the FDM technology and one with the DLP technology, each costing between 1,000 and 2,000 euros. The design process begins with receiving the order, and besides the printing, the guys also design and process the finished items. They work with the resin as well, and they started improvising with ceramics. They are currently creating a 40-part Volkswagen van replica that will serve as a gramophone records shelf.
“We are never bored since clients order different things. The price of a product ranges from 50 kuna for simpler pendants, up to tens of thousands of kuna for more demanding projects. The most expensive one was the decoration for a shop window near Makarska. It took us a month to do it,” they said.
They have also had several international projects, and they plan over time to expand to the overseas market. “The 3D printing is still relatively unknown and underdeveloped, but people abroad recognise its potential much more. For the time being, in Croatia it is mostly used in medicine, for example, for artificial hips, while creative printing like we do is almost non-existent,” said Ivan.
All four believe they had not made a mistake when they decided to launch D3Stooges3D. “We are doing what we love; this is a creative job, and it is always interesting, and if one can live from it than it is a perfect combination,” the team from Zapruđe concluded.
Translated from Večernji List (reported by Jelena Pišonić Babić).
More news on Croatian entrepreneurs can be found in the Made in Croatia section.
