For an industry predicated on the concept of a digital warehouse, additive manufacturing (AM) still loves having stuff around. Within the context of trade shows and event exhibitions, that stuff translates to swag.
Giveaways, trinkets, functional parts, and other demo parts are all made from various materials on 3D printers for your booth visitors to take back home with them as both a reminder of your brand and a hands-on proof-of-concept.
Given the popularity and ubiquity of swag, companies spend a good amount of time and resources on ideating and producing those takeaways. Balancing speed, cost, and the impact of additively manufactured promotional items is an interesting challenge.
3D Printed Swag
Swag – promotional goods or items – takes on a number of forms in the AM world. As trade shows bring together the businesses offering supplies and services to potential customers and partners, the ability to go hands-on is vital. There’s nothing quite like actually holding a 3D-printed part and seeing for yourself whether it holds up to marketing images or videos. 3D-printed swag allows visitors to check the surface finish as well as the feel of the 3D-printed material.
It also helps if those hands-on items fall into another category: it helps if they’re cool.
There’s a fine balance between a cool-looking part that demonstrates the complexity and benefits of 3D printing with the differentiators of a given material/process/application – while still being something attendees want to take home with them.
One of the most popular choices for 3D-printed swag these days is a bottle opener.
Bottle openers are small (most fit within a 3D printer build volumes), familiar (no confusion about what a part is), useful (has a known and common application), and functional (must perform a repetitive task). A side benefit is that the more frequently these parts appear at different booths, the more different designs can be compared, offering a direct opportunity for especially fantastic models to stand out in the crowd.
Other popular designs for 3D-printed swag include:
- Lattice structures, often cubes, which frequently demonstrate tensile strength and flexibility
- 3D-printed business cards, which offer the immediate impact of offering contact information with a tactile reminder
- Whistles, which can be tiny or huge, and may include internal features, such as balls, to showcase part reduction and complexity
- Fidget parts, highlighting manipulability and design complexity; fidget spinners and cubes are especially popular
- Rings, pins, earrings, and other wearables, which double as valuable and mobile advertising
- Miniature versions of showcase parts (e.g., prototype shoes, phone cases, threaded screws)
- Fun pop culture references (you’ll see many an Iron Throne at any event, either full-sized for photo ops or handheld to showcase detail
- Chess pieces, especially rooks, and especially with internal features
- Multiples of the same design – often a functional tool, company mascot, or cultural icon – in different material choices offered as a set
- Collectibles of a similar design updated for each event
Because additive manufacturing is about manufacturing first and foremost, and manufacturing is nothing if not tied to tradition, other more ‘typical’ swag items are also often on display. Pens, bags, branded (or just delightful) candies: all of these are based on the Field of Dreams idea: “If you build it, they will come.”
Speed, Cost, & Impact of 3D-Printed Swag
When considering what swag to 3D print, you need to strike a balance between speed, cost and overall impact.
It takes time and money to design, iterate, and 3D print your swag – whether in advance or potentially live at the event – and these are going to be given away for free by dozens, hundreds, or even thousands. Those parts come straight from your marketing team’s budget, and that tends to impose limitations in terms of size and complexity.
Still, higher-value designs and materials that showcase key points of differentiation – say, a bottle opener made of Inconel over one made of PLA, and one with intricate internal lattices rather than a clunky shape with unseen infill – can offer a potential customer’s first real hands-on impression of your company’s capabilities.
That bottle opener could also be an opener to a major new customer!
What can an engineer design that can fit in a trade show attendee’s bag or briefcase, make it through airport security in a carry-on, and arrive intact to its final destination? Once it arrives back at the office, it can be a point of conversation and hopefully conversion for new customers.
Some simple guidelines to designing swag are pretty basic:
- Fit as many as possible on a given build plate
- Use as little material as possible
- Be identifiable (to the customer and to TSA)
- Be portable
- Be appropriately durable
- Be branded
The number to print depends, of course, on a great many factors and how those are weighed against each other will differ from company to company. A well-funded 3D printer OEM showcasing its capabilities at Formnext, for example, will want higher-value, higher-impact swag than a recycled filament startup displaying at MRRF.
Further, companies with the capability to do so often find additional value in 3D printing on-site during events. Trade show giveaway items actually made over the course of the event offer an immediate proof of concept for your technology. Showing in-situ that a system produces what it promises is a powerful statement.
Given the limitations of speed multiplied by demand, it obviously makes sense to have pre-made swag ready to hand out, but media, technology partners, and potential “big fish” customers generate additional value in the experience of watching the swag being made – seeing, after all, is believing.
When offering cool trade show swag, the intent is to entice, intrigue and create new business opportunities. When an attendee walks away with a physical reminder of your company, they are more likely to remember their experience at your booth.
The best trade show swag should be a testament to the designers’ capabilities and the seamless integration of 3D printer, material, and software – branded, of course, to engage and remind.
If you can get the formula right, balancing speed, cost and impact, you could be handing out swag that will sit on someone’s desk for years to come. In the best case scenario, that little trinket will be the reason your company is the one new customers think of when they’re finally ready to buy.
*Image disclosure: swag items pictured all obtained through work in either a media (3DPrint.com and Fabbaloo) or client (Additive Integrity) capacity