On November 18-19, 2015, Webit’s DIGIT.EMEA took place in Sisil, Istanbul, where digital and technology company executives and founders from 110 countries gathered. The gathering acknowledged an emerging startup with a promising future in technology sector, and this year’s award went to the Hungarian company Leopoly. Leopoly started with the idea to help everyday people use the emerging online scanning and 3D printing technologies by making a user-friendly platform offering “evolutionary modeling,” a new way of virtual sculpting. Leopoly has built its customer base and expanded its technological developments by recruiting the uninitiated through easy access customization apps and tools.
Leopoly’s customer base is non-technical users who still want to easily create what they envision without the hassle of learning more technical design skills. With apps and tools like color, geometric, and parametric designs, Leopoly continues to get better at what it set out to do, which is to allow more people to become the makers they were meant to be. If you take a look at the platform, it is incredibly straightforward and easy to follow. Under Tools, you can see a demo or try the following: sculpt, formshifter, paint, text, image, and cube. For Apps, you are given a very easy entry point into your first 3D design, and you are told you can choose a template, customize it, and order it in minutes.
For the holidays, these simple to use apps include candle holders, holiday rings, ornaments and keepsake boxes. You can engrave these items with people’s names, a date or the year, and any other message you’d like, resulting in accessible products that can be customized without the user being overwhelmed by designing something from scratch. (This kind of makes me think about how some companies have made it so much easier for us to design our own websites without knowing a drop of HTML coding.)
It appears that Leopoly has struck a nerve in the 3D printed design/consumer goods niche, and the DIGIT.EMEA Award for Startups acknowledges the relevance of the company’s ideas and its contributions so far. DIGIT.EMEA is not the only tech gathering that has awarded Leopoly with new startup distinction. Leopoly has also received a startup award at Slush 2015 in Helsinki, which had 1,700 different startup companies attend it. Slush has grown from a 300 person non-profit technology themed event into a much larger gathering. Last year, 15,000 people from 100 countries were in attendance. Leopoly was honored there as a finalist for the IBM Cloud Start Up Award.
As 3D printing technology evolves, we will see more people try to launch platforms that make it as easy as possible to customize items quickly and painlessly, and Leopoly has been ahead of the game as far as this is concerned. Marketing itself as the “3D Content Factory,” the company strives to be the go-to place for people just getting started with 3D design and printing. Less technical, more fun, and high-quality results are all things Leopoly appears to be delivering. Now the key is to convince the public it’s that easy to design and print something yourself!
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