I Tried Starting a Sidewalk 3D Printing Business

these days it seems like a new trend Rises and Falls every week but I think there is one Trend that is here to stay cute little succulents in cute little plant pots I mean come on who doesn't love these little guys and you know it got me thinking I have a 3D printer I can probably design a cute little plant pot in like 15 minutes I want to see if I can make a profitable sidewalk business out of 3D printed plant pots here on the Venice boardwalk in Los Angeles California probably the street vendor capital of America but first things first we got to design some plant plts plant plant pots let's do it I wanted to include a succulent with each planter so I stopped at Home Depot and got 27 plants for $144 that's about $530 cents per plant I got mostly small and medium ones because it seemed like those would sell the easiest but I also splurged on two large plants to see if those would generate a larger profit margin all right let's design our first plant pot timer starting now so we're in Fusion 360 and I'm going to create a form specifically a cylinder and we want the diamer to be similar to what we have for our existing plant pot which is about 3 in so we'll go 3 in there we want a fair amount of diameter faces so that we have a lot of resolution to create our spirals at this point I should probably tell you that I have a detailed video on how to design plant pots in this style for the purposes of this video we're just going to Breeze through the design but if you want a step-by-step break down on how to design these you should check out that video all right back to the design so first things first we want to select all of these height faces and since we have circular symmetry if I double click one we select all of them and we're going to crease those edges we want to select an entire column of faces and I'm going to edit form going into a top view I'm going to click and drag this Square while holding option or shift if you're on a a Windows PC and and that allows us to extrude this outwards we're just adding a little bit of three-dimensionality so that we get access into these interior faces these are the ones we want I'm going to zoom in and select an entire column of faces and we're at a minute and 45 seconds of design time going back into edit form we're just pulling this around so that we create a peak doesn't have to be exact no use wasting time on this part then we're going to select the next set of faces that was previously the inside of that crease but now kind of looks all wonky trust me though it's the right face edit form top view pulling this around to the other side all right so now we have this Cactus looking thing and we can begin to create our profiles so I'm going to go into this side view I'm going to select this Center Line since I'm selecting through I'm actually selecting the whole perimeter and I'll go into edit form now we want to scale this up because this is going to be like the fat part of our profile um I'll select the next face going up back into edit form expand this a little bit to sort of match the profile next one up edit form here I kind of want a little bit of a neck near the top so make the next one up just a little bigger so that we kind of have a flare there's no real like formula here it's just a matter of you know experimenting figuring out what you think looks good and you know following that instinct I think these plant pots look really cool that's why I think they're going to sell and every time I've designed these I've just sort of had a vision in mind right now I'm thinking of this kind of like modern Venetian pot um with a Twist in it hopefully you see what I mean we're at 4 minutes and 30 seconds of [Music] design I think that I think that might be it that's kind of the shape I'm going for so now we're going to start twisting I'm going to select everything except for this bottom section you can see that that's all selected edit form and we're going to add a Twist so I'll grab this wheel and Pull It Around by yeah let's say 35° so as you can see it acted on that lower section cuz it's not the one we selected it propagated a little up into the next one but now we're going to select everything except for the bottom two we'll do the same thing edit form except this time I'm going to twist it by 5° less the one on the bottom so last one we did was 35 this one we're only going to Twist by 30 now I'll select this we're going to pull it around by 25 I think you get the pattern at this point there we go there's our curve I love this shape it reminds me of like a flowing piece of fabric sort of combined with Pottery nice we're pretty much done in the create form workspace we are at 8 minutes and 55 seconds we can finish form boom converted successfully now we need to turn this empty cavity as you can see it's fully empty into a closed body so we'll create boundary fill which does exactly what it says select cells hit the chck mark and we have our body nice so I'll turn off that empty cell and now we need to create the inside of the plant pot so little trick here we can't just use the cavity tool it's too much complex geometry it will fail so I'm going to create a sketch on top I'm going to project that top shape double click to select this sketch and we're going to offset it inwards so then we can just click inside of there and extrude this slightly down so that we have a nice upper lip if you want more details about why exactly I'm creating the inside in this way you should just go watch the uh the detailed video but just trust me that we can't simply use the cavity tool it just straight up warm out work nice so that gives us our top Edge and for the rest of it we're going to create a smooth surface this so I'm going to create a uh section analysis I love these this is like one of my favorite parts of fusion it is so handy to be able to see a cut through of your object then we're going to create a sketch on this plane I'm going to draw a spline and we're kind of try and match this thickness down the shape so basically I'm creating the inner wall of our plant pot and the major thing is making sure that it's not too thin anywhere again we don't want to poke out of the side there we go we got a close shape revolve that around the center axis all right oh that actually looks really good okay you can see that let's turn off the analysis we sort of cut into our nice upper Edge there so I don't want that I'm going to go back into my sketch where are we at TimeWise we are at 13 minutes and 53 seconds back into our sketch we want to pull this point out a little bit so that we're not cutting into there let's pull both of these out okay that's way better turn the section analysis back on like you can play around with that spline and try to make it as thin as feasible but if you don't really if you're not being too stingy about filament which I tend not to be I mean that looks pretty good to me don't waste time on details that don't matter final thing is creating our drainage hole on the bottom um I think like 3/4 of an inch is usually pretty good diameter for a drainage hole right click extrude pull it through and time finished the design 14 minutes and 50 seconds pretty good if I do say so myself I thought it would be a good idea to have a few styles of Planters available so I spent another 15 minutes designing this one that has a bit more of a blll shape and then I went back into my archives and chose one of my favorite ones that I designed in the past now obviously I had already put in the work to design this planter but for the purposes of calculating how much I'm making per hour on this project I added another 15 minutes of work to my running total now if you've watched my videos in the past you'll know that I normally use relatively expensive 3D printers but every planter in this video was printed on the elu Neptune 4 which at the time of this recording only cost $229 now eligo is the sponsor of this video but I am genuinely so impressed with the quality of this printer for the price first off it arrives in like five chunks which are super quick to assemble I think I had the first test print going 45 minutes after opening the box this Beni printed in only 22 minutes and look at that quality this printer is fast and full of features the Neptune 4 can print up to 500 mm/ second it has 121 Point automatic bed leveling it comes with a removable bed a 300° c high temperature nozzle so you can print in all sorts of materials pretty much everything you would want on an entrylevel 3D printer click the link in the description to Kickstart your 3D printing Journey with Neptune 4 from elu I spent the last 5 days feverishly printing plant pots I had the printer going pretty much 24/7 averaging about three plates per day and at least for these smaller ones I was able to fit three pots on the plate but for these big guys this was a single plate print physically setting up each print you know arranging everything on the build platform starting the print taking the pots off of the build platform that probably took an average of 5 minutes per plate so let's call that an hour for physical work with the 3D printer and repotting the plants into my 3D printed pots took another hour and I printed everything in a variety of colors White marble this sandstone and sage green honestly I love this color selection it matches the succulent so well I'll put links to all of this filament that I used in the description oh I also also printed like four extras just in case someone wants to buy plant pots on their own with no plants I'm thinking of pricing these at $15 for the small ones $20 for the medium ones and let's say $25 for the big guys there's only two big ones I think most people are going to want to buy the small ones I mean if you're shopping for your desk in a small apartment I mean come on these are so cute look at that man I don't know I have my own biases and favorites but I'm very curious how the public is actually going to receive this and what is going to sell let's go to Venice [Music] Beach all right we are all set up at Venice Beach it is a beautiful day a little cold by Los Angeles standards because it is the end of February but there's a ton of foot traffic we got our plant set up we have the 3D printer going which I I hope we'll draw some people in and we stopped at Staples to get some postero to make a sign I also 3D printed some two-toned little signs here so far we're getting a lot of curious looks but we've only been here for like 15 minutes so I'm feeling optimistic it's already a great day this is so fun so we're set up from this Sidewalk Cafe right now and I think all these people sitting here are just like watching us set up and watching the 3D printer and we must have had like 10 people so far come over who were just so curious by sitting there having a meal for 30 minutes and wanting to know what was going on so not just the foot traffic but like this captive audience is really really helping us to tdch it yeah go for it thank you yeah it's a pretty amazing technology how you one so one takes about 3 hours but this big one takes about 9 hours tou yeah wow it's great wow it's crazy how long does it take uh so one of this one is printing about this size and it'll take around 3 hours this this very interesting social phenomenon there'll be like 10 minutes when no one comes by and then all of a sudden two people come in and then two more people come in and this little just group forms because everyone wants to see what everyone's looking at I'm super impressed with how good the printer is doing outside we're having no bed adhesion issues we're probably like 2/3 of the way through the print and it's looking fantastic I like the vase but then I like the plant I mean I could try to repop them but it's a little uh a little finicky I also have a couple more um the white yeah you like the white I'll take that one this one all right thank you my pleasure enjoy making [Music] money [Music] so morly we've been at Venice for 4 hours how many pots have you sold uh I think two we sold two of the small ones and made $30 does that cover our parking almost I'm not going to claim to be an expert but Street vending is hard work we spent 7 hours and $178 on this project to make 30 bucks and that doesn't even include the fact that I had another person helping me at the boardwalk so imagine you had to pay that person's wage now you could say we should have spent more time there it was only my first time we'd make more money the more we went so that initial investment would pay off over time but I think one of the most surprising explanations came from a street magician that I met while selling on the boardwalk he makes his money by gathering large groups of people and then performing tricks asking for tips and he was saying that he actually avoids doing it on the Venice boardwalk because there is so much going on there's so much for people to see that it's really difficult to get people focused on one thing he tries to do it in less crazy areas like the Santa Monica pier where he can be the most interesting person person on the Block it's kind of like if you've ever been to a really good Art Market you see all these really interesting amazing wild things but you leave without buying anything even though the quality of everything was so good we had probably a hundred people come by Marvel at the 3D printer think that the plant pots were really cool but then they got you know distracted by something else and they went on their way the sociology and marketing psychology of this experience was so interesting how you draw people in how a small crowd forms a bigger crowd having the 3D printer there was huge that was probably the main thing that actually brought people to the table but man I have so much respect for these Street vendors I was watching a lot of the others during the day and they also only made a few sales for the most part I am very curious about the economics of being a street vendor obviously I'm a rookie but if you're a street vendor or if you know someone who is I would love to hear about your experience in the comments I think one of the most difficult Parts about selling in art or handmade Goods on the street is that it's a very specific product you know someone's walking on Venice boardwalk they're probably not thinking about buying an artistic planter then they see one they might think it's cool but it's a big leap to then go and purchase that whereas if you're selling at somewhere like a maker Market where people are going specifically to you know buy handmade Goods or buy art I think you would have a much better chance of success I really don't even care about the money those 4 hours on the boardwalk were so fun we had tons of people come over just mind blown seeing a 3D printer in action I find it amazing how a lot of us assume that 3D printers are ubiquitous now you know they're so much more popular than they were 10 years ago but so many people have still never seen one in operation and they're stoked to see one actually working a common theme was people saying they never understood how they worked until they saw it in person but the moment they saw it printing they immediately got it in the end we ended up giving away the 25 plants that didn't sell to passers by in the Boardwalk to the ladies next to us who were selling tacos and I'm pretty sure they turned around and sold them with their tacos they were straight hustling and I gave them to friends and family as housewarming gifts all of those people were so excited to get them it kind of solidified For Me Maybe selling stuff on the street isn't for me maybe I'll stick to making YouTube videos but if you want to print these plant pots if you want to sell them or if you just want them for yourself I'm putting them all available for free download on printables doccom there'll be a link down in the description so go for it do whatever you want with them and if you want to directly support this channel you can do so on patreon you'll gain exclusive access to my behind the scenes Instagram account my private Discord Community you'll see what's coming up what projects I have in the works I would like to give a special thank you to my top supporters on patreon Paige AR and my mom Kathy Kurt thanks Mom I love you also if you're curious we are in seoa National Forest not many SE around now H in Death Valley [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] today

Channel: Morley Kert

Views: 384,898

Keywords: Morley, morely, kurt, money, business, profit, street, vendor, venice, beach, california, los, Angeles, challenge, 3D, printer, printing, Digital, fabrication, succulent, build, make, cactus, plant, planter, design, fusion, 360, boardwalk

Id: uAVcLp_yXe4

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2024