Interview with Philippe Guglielmetti, CEO of Zeepro (USA)

I’ve been talking back and forth with Philippe, CEO of Zeepro, for a while now – he’s the founder of a host of companies including his most recently launched ZIM dual-head 3D printer which has a kickstarter campaign going on right now at:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1410146982/zim-the-first-dual-head-personal-3d-printer-fully

I had some questions about his upcoming ZIM 3D printer and asked if I could interview him, he thankfully agreed. Thanks Philippe!

Can you give me a little background about yourself and how that lead you to see an opportunity in the 3D printing world?

I have been a serial entrepreneur since the age of 19. I co-founded and have been director of the board of several successful tech companies including iBase (pioneer of Direct Marketing on the Internet in Europe, acquired by Publicis) and Witbe (performance measures on the Internet). In 1995, I co-founded (along with Zeepro’s COO, Pierre Gerard) Integra, the leading pan-European company for managed web hosting and ecommerce web site operation. Integra was one of the first internet companies to be listed in Europe, and the sole company to be dual listed on the German and French stock markets. At 35 years of age, I became the youngest CEO of the SBF120 Euronext index. Integra had operations in 10 countries in Europe. And the company, with more than 1,200 employees, was sold to a subsidiary of Verizon in 2001. Prior to co-founding Zeepro, I worked in the manufacturing industry as the CEO of Arcoa, a yacht builder.

I purchased a 3D printer for my son. Watching his enthusiasm for this new technology sparked my interest in building a team of professionals to design and manufacture the best personal 3D printer on the market.

What made you want to invest your time and treasure into starting your very own 3D printing hardware company when the market seems dominated by two massive companies already with vast resources such as Stratasys and 3D Systems? The payoffs even with success seem minor (you are building a commodity machine) and you cut your nose off from the start by allowing customers the option of getting their material from other sources (where the real money will be).

To answer the first part of your question, the companies you mention, Stratasys and 3D Systems, make 3D printers for manufacturing and prototyping; their offers are not intended for the home or small office. Even Makerbot, recently acquired by Stratasys, is more for design offices. With Zeepro, we wanted to create the best personal 3D printers for the home or small office. The key word here is Personal.

When we started designing Zim, we decided that we wanted an easy and safe way to load the filament. We also wanted a beautiful design hiding the “classic” filament spool. The only solution was to design our own specific cartridge. In addition to automatic loading, our smart cartridges also protect the filament, particularly the PVA, from moisture, and are convenient to store.

Now why offer a refillable cartridge to those who want to use their own filament? It is just because people who use 3D printer do it intensively at this early stage of the market. They use an important amount of filament and logically want to save cash!

Zeepro will also offer his own filament cartridges. Because they will be offered at market price, with a large range of colors, because they will be easy to load and to remove (so it will be easy to often change color), because people will be happy to store them easily, because our filament will be “pure” and perfectly adapted to our nozzles and to Zim drive gear, we are confident that many users will choose to purchase our own cartridges, allowing us our share of what you call the “real money”.

Why did you decide to go with extrusion over stereolithography (SLA) technology?

SLA technology produces very precise results that are excellent for labs and other sectors demanding low tolerances. We believe that for home and office use, Filament extrusion provides quality results at an affordable price. I remind you that Zim can print from 50 microns layer.

Looking at your direct comparison chart – I’m astonished you’ve managed to beat the two major manufacturers in the areas of layer resolution and speed yet are able to offer your 3D printer with more features at a cheaper cost per unit. How did you accomplish this especially with your dual-head… it’s a steal by comparison!

We just wanted to make the best 3d personal printer in the world. Each feature has been very well thought out. Our team has many years of experience in design, product development and manufacturing, and our experience combined with our research over the past year has resulted in Zim. And we will continue to work hard to improve continuously the performances of our products.

There are A LOT of 3D printers coming onto the market these days, it seems like a new one is released every week – each promising incredible things only to vaporise a few weeks later. What aspects of your 3D printer make it unique enough to have staying power?

It’s not about what makes our 3D printer unique, but more about how our company was set up from the start to adapt quickly to a changing market. Creating the product is only the very first step in building a successful company. Financing, Manufacturing, Marketing, Distribution, Logistics, After-sales support are all in their own way essential to the success of Zeepro and we have built an incredible team of professionals, dedicated to this project and that have experience in all these areas.

One aspect that I really love about your Zim 3D extrusion printer is the camera… what a wonderful idea as the print times are atrocious for 3D extrusion printers. Being able to monitor a 3D printer wirelessly on your phone or desktop seems like such a smart idea… where did this idea come from?

Looking back, this was one of those “why has nobody else done this yet”? To us, an on-board camera seemed like such an obvious selling point! Our whole team has been using 3D printers for quite some time, and we are all aware of how long it takes to print. Instead of sitting in front of your printer for hours to make sure everything is going ok, we stuck to our goal of making the best product and installed a camera. In fact this was such a collaborative team effort that just this morning we were trying to figure out who had been the first to suggest it, and we couldn’t even narrow it down to one person!

Unlike the other 3D printers in the consumer marketplace, you are offering over 20 different print modes… can you expand on this a little more? Why so many and are they only simple tweeks or can they actually radically modify the print quality and speed of the output model? Can you give an example?

We have designed Zim like a high-end camera with several modes which allow the neophyte to print by clicking on a single button (AUTO mode), and the expert to make use of all of Zim technical capabilities (EXPERT mode). If you choose the expert mode, you will be able to set several dozen printing parameters such as various printing speeds, layer thickness, filling of the hollow parts and many others. In the standard mode, default parameters are already set-up to allow the user to balance between high speed and high quality.

You have decided to try your hand at Kickstarter to crowdsource Zim to both generate some funds to see this project through and to generate market interest in your machine. Are you happy with the results from this marketing model thus far?

Yes, we are very happy with our Kickstarter campaign! Traditionally, a new technology in its early stages does not reach the general public. But because of the increasing popularity of crowdfunding and the media’s crush on 3D printing, Zim is now reaching both early adopters and the general public simultaneously.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1410146982/zim-the-first-dual-head-personal-3d-printer-fully

It’s really great to have simultaneously a strong interest of both the technology community, such as kickstarter’s, and well known resellers for consumers. We are really very proud of that!

Anything else you’d like to add?

We have not publicized it much, but our entire team came from across Europe and the U.S. to work out of a house in Sunnyvale,CA for the duration of our Kickstarter campaign. It is an incredible experience that has not only solidified our team, but also allowed for spontaneous collaboration on how we can make our product even better!