Netlooks partners with Sculpteo to create customizable eyewear!

Posted By Lucie Gaget on Apr 29, 2019 | 0 comments

A pair of glasses adapted exactly to your morphology, does it sound impossible to you? Well, prepare yourself to be surprised because Netlooks and Sculpteo have partnered to give life to customizable handcrafted eyewear.

What are the advantages of implementing 3D printing inside their manufacturing process? Why did they choose to work with Sculpteo? Let’s discover it right now. Get inspired!

Netlooks, rethinking eyewear manufacturing

“We are at a moment in the eyewear industry when we have to do something unexpected. We are at a crossroads of technology and craftsmanship”, explains Pierre Andrieu, founder of Netlooks.  

Netlooks was created with one main goal: to manufacture handcrafted, bespoke frames that are entirely customizable. It means that you can engrave, choose your colors, choose the shapes for the branch and face, everything!

In the beginning, Netlooks was handling everything in-house: customers just had to choose the eyewear, get a face scan, and try a test model, before getting the final handmade desired product. But Netlooks quickly became a victim of its own success! Indeed, per store, more than 200 testing models were required, involving more than 1000 hours of work and a dozen craftsmen dedicated to creating them. That is precisely where 3D printing appeared to be the best solution for Netlooks, to create their test eyewear models and scale their business growth.

Using both 3D printing and handcrafting to deliver the best products!

Going further, to try out new technologies and improve business models… Companies now have to be at the forefront of innovation. Netlooks obviously needed help to improve its process and become more efficient to produce these custom made test glasses.

Indeed, if you are looking for a great manufacturing technique for mass customization, additive manufacturing might be the perfect good solution for you. 3D printing allows for making several iterations quite easily, which makes it really helpful for prototyping processes or test processes like this one!

According to Clément Moreau, CEO and co-founder of Sculpteo, “People that wear eyeglasses often struggle to get the right fit! 3D printing allows customers to try frames, adjust the product and change their mind, just as luxury jewelry makers make you test a ring in wax before manufacturing it. The technology is cheap, fast, and accurate. It demonstrates that not only high-end technology can help artisans but in addition, it makes possible better products for end users.”

Even if the final product is still handcrafted, additive manufacturing can be used to simplify the production process. These 3D printed models enable customers with the help of the optician to test the frame, adapt it to their morphology, and choose between millions of possible combinations.

Using Sculpteo’s online 3D printing service

Pierre Andrieu, the founder of Netlooks, affirms that “Sculpteo’s 3D printing technology enabled us to achieve the degree of accuracy needed to rapidly create any type of frames, at a low price, with perfect fit – while maintaining the green approach we care so much about. Together, we’re pushing the eyewear to reality until now only opened to the luxury industry.”

How does it work, concretely? Using 3D models, Sculpteo can 3D print test eyewear that customers can try on in order to check the morphological measure and their comfort of each part of the frame. Netlooks is saving time and money, using this test 100% made in France.

The 3D printed models are then 3D printed with Nylon PA12, using the Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) technique. This material is perfect for this project: It is skin-friendly, quite flexible, and this material also offers great possibilities when it comes to finishes, which are essential for the quality of the models. Polishing and dyeing post-processing give a great finished aspect to the 3D printed parts.

Sculpteo is really happy to partner with Netlooks, and help them develop scale their business growth. If your business needs help scaling its growth, consider how additive manufacturing can help by talking to one of our 3D printing experts.  If you want to know more about new 3D printing applications, don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter!