Wired profiles Athey Moravetz, a game developer who quit the business to raise her kids, who built WarpZone, a massively successful Etsy store selling 3D printed, nerdy cookie-cutters:
While many homemakers have a secret cookie recipe, Moravetz has a small fleet of MakerBots. Her four MakerBot Replicators run simultaneously to keep up with the demand for her products. She says “I turn the bots on when I get up in the morning to get my daughter ready for school. So they turn on about 8 am, and they’re running all day long from that point until an automated timer I’ve got them plugged into, turns them off at 3am. That way I can get in one last print started as I’m going to bed.”
…Designing cookie cutters requires design skill — not every game character makes for a good cookie. Moravetz says “I had a lot of people requesting Dr. Who stuff — Tardis and Dalek specifically. A Dalek just doesn’t read unless you include the inner detail — the silhouette is only readable to a certain degree. It needs the inner detail. But it needs a lot of small inner detail, and I try to avoid cutters going over three and a half inches in any direction. I made a four inch Dalek, but it took nearly two and a half hours to print, and when you’re getting as many orders as I am right now, any cutter that takes that long to print is hardly worth it.” Like Dr. Who, she outwitted the Dalek and now offers it for sale alongside the Tardis.
Maker Mom Builds Cookie-Cutter Empire With 3-D Printers [Joseph Flaherty/Wired]