MELISSA ZUCKER
MELISSA ZUCKER
Mechanical Engineer + Product Designer

3D PRINTED CANDLE HOLDER

A STUDY ON DESIGN AND MARKETABILITY

For a final project in an Additive Manufacturing course, I worked in a team of three to create this lightweight holder to house a tea light candle to be sold on a 3D printing website. In addition to completing market and cost analysis, we modeled and printed several prototypes before arriving at this elegant solution. 

 

DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS

The design we were pursuing had a powerful aesthetic in part because of its complex geometry. While nice looking, the angles of the triangular sections on each face presented a fabrication challenge since standard commercial 3D printers like MakerBot and CubePro machines can't print tight angles easily. While we modeled several designs that included support structures and larger (more printable) angles, we found that changing the angles severely changed the aesthetic of the product, and support structures would overcomplicate the build when considering how a consumer might receive the product. With these challenges in mind, we decided to pursue the original, complex design using Fused Deposition Modeling as our method of fabrication. Although this added a little cost to the build, the result is a functioning, buyer-ready candle holder with a stunning aesthetic. 

MARKET ANALYSIS

Based on our market research, unique 3-D printed home accessories are popular and marketable on crowdsourced 3D printing sites like Thingiverse and Shapeways so we took the responses to products on these sites into careful account. After uploading preliminary designs onto these sites and taking a weeks worth of market data, it was clear that the geometric design (bottom) was more popular than the bowl design (top), encouraging us to pursue this design instead of the other.

In addition to taking into account the market analysis, we repeatedly ran into complications when printing the round candleholder on the Cube Pro machines. It is because of the complexity of this print, in addition to the market analysis and the strong visual appeal, that we decided to pursue the rectangular design as our primary design for the final product.