My wife Alice quit her job a year ago to found Makies with some friends in London and Helsinki. Makies is a 3D printing startup. The company's mission is to create toys and dolls from "playful" digital environments (games, social systems, stuff like that). Essentially, the idea is that you create digital people, along with their clothes and accessories, and play with them online, and at the press of a button, you can order these things as physical objects that get custom produced by a local supplier and shipped straight to you. The idea is to build a business that inspires makers, hackers and crafters — for example, the dolls' heads are designed to take an Arduino Lilypad, should you have such a notion.
After a lot of experimentation and design iteration, they've gotten to the point where they can reliably produce and ship 10-inch custom action dolls using suppliers here in London, and they want to alpha test it against the real world, so they're selling 100 of these dolls to see how the whole thing works. There are just a few left now — Alice didn't want me to blog this until all the people who'd signed up for the mailing list and all the friends and family had had a crack at the inventory. You can also play with the doll creator without buying the actual doll. They've learned a ton in a just a few days, and they're looking for more of your feedback.
