MakerBot made a bold bet that 3D printers would become as common as microwaves. Just one problem: no one else shared that dream.

It was October 2009 when Bre Pettis — his unmistakable sideburns and dark-rimmed rectangular glasses framing his face — took the stage at Ignite NYC, threw his hand in the air, and shouted “Hooray!” two times. A PowerPoint slide lit up behind him, revealing a photo of a hollow wood box crisscrossed with wiring. Bouncing up and down, his profuse mop of graying hair flopping about, Pettis began: “I’m going to talk about MakerBot and the future and an industrial revolution that we’re beginning — that’s begun.” A former art teacher, Pettis had emerged as a key character in the growing maker movement of the late 2000s, a worldwide community of tinkerers who holed away in makeshift workshops and hackerspaces, equally at home with tools like old-school lathes and contemporary laser cutters. Pettis had begun his ascent in 2006, producing weekly videos for MAKE magazine—the maker movement’s Bible—that featured him navigating goofy tasks such as powering a light bulb with a modified hamster wheel. In 2008, he cofounded the NYC Resistor hackerspace in Brooklyn. By then, Pettis was a star. A year later, he launched a Brooklyn-based startup with friends Adam Mayer and Zach Smith (also a NYC Resistor cofounder) called MakerBot.

“We have a machine that makes 3D objects and it’s freaking awesome,” Pettis said giddily from the Ignite NYC stage. By shrinking the technology inside hulking, $100,000-plus machines into affordable desktop boxes, MakerBot had kicked off a revolution in 3D printing. With a 3D printer, objects designed in computer software are physically formed, in three dimensions, as layers of molten plastic are stacked one upon the other. Now anyone with a MakerBot device could design and print their own objects.

To Pettis, the implications were explosive. People printing objects at home would mean we travel to the store less often and make anything we want. He shared a quick story about “printable happiness”: Someone who planned to propose needed an engagement ring, so he printed one out. For five and a half minutes, Pettis extolled what he dubbed the “Industrial Revolution 2,” with MakerBot leading the way.

“You get to be the tycoon by making things yourself,” he said. As he wrapped up his talk, he implored his listeners to literally “make the future.”

The year before MakerBot was founded, analysts predicted that a global 3D printing market worth about $1.2 billion would double in size by 2015. By the end of 2012, it basically had. MakerBot seemed to be right on time: That year it released the company’s best known, and arguably best-performing, 3D printer — the Replicator 2. MakerBot predicted it would find its way into thousands of homes. Wired declared the Replicator 2 the company’s “Macintosh moment” in its October 2012 issue, with a cover featuring a confident-looking Pettis cradling his new baby and the words, “This machine will change the world.”

MakerBot’s Replicator 2 3D Printer, as photographed at the architectural offices of Perkins and Will in Chicago in October 2013. Getty Images

“MakerBot is, or was at least, the Kleenex of 3D printing. MakerBot became synonymous for a 3D printer,” says Matt Stultz, a former MakerBot employee for five months and now MAKE’s digital fabrication editor.

Pettis himself had morphed into a cult figure. Even before launching a company, says Stultz, “we were already following everything that he was doing, watching his videos every week and looking at the projects he was making.” With MakerBot, he had risen to become a kind of hacker king.

But the second Industrial Revolution led by the Everyman Tycoon armed with a well of ideas and a trusty MakerBot never came to pass. By 2015, Pettis, Mayer, and Smith had all moved on. A new CEO and management team has taken the helm since then, and three rounds of layoffs cut the employee head count from a high of around 600 to about half that. This year a Taiwanese competitor nabbed MakerBot’s spot as the most popular desktop 3D printer maker.

How did MakerBot, the darling of the 3D printing industry, fall so hard and seemingly so fast? Pettis did not return multiple requests for comment, while Smith and Mayer declined to be interviewed for this story.

Backchannel pieced together the account from industry observers, current MakerBot leadership, and a dozen former MakerBot employees. Some gave their names, while others asked to be identified only as former employees.

In the span of a few years, MakerBot had to pull off two very different coups. It had to introduce millions of people to the wonders of 3D printing, and then convince them to shell out more than $1,000 for a machine. It also had to develop the technology fast enough to keep its customers happy. Those two tasks were too much for the fledgling company.

“MakerBot built itself up really big to try and satisfy a market demand that just didn’t show up,” says Ben Rockhold, who spent four years at MakerBot in various engineering roles. In pursuit of the Everyman Tycoon dream, MakerBot tried to release printers that were both affordable and appealing to ordinary consumers, yet it repeatedly failed to hit its mark.

At a TEDx event in New York in 2012, Pettis said, “When you have a MakerBot you have a superpower. You can make anything you need.”

It would be years before anyone was willing to say that just wasn’t true.

In the early days, MakerBot thrived off a community that bonded over its highly hackable printers.

The inspiration came from British professor Adrian Bowyer, who in 2005 began work on the RepRap, a desktop 3D printer that used fused deposition modeling to print out objects. Bowyer wanted to create a 3D printer capable of replicating itself: One RepRap would beget the next by printing the parts, and so on. In New York City, three friends following along had an idea. Could they make a machine that would produce the parts needed to assemble their own RepRap printer? The answer was yes. Working out of the NYC Resistor hackerspace, Zach Smith, Adam Mayer, and Bre Pettis created the CupCake CNC, a machine that could start printing RepRap components on demand.

Parts laid out for assembly of a Makerbot. Getty Images

“The idea was to make a small batch of these so people can make their own RepRaps, and that first batch sold so fast,” says Stultz, who worked for MakerBot from December 2011 to April 2012.

In January 2009 the trio founded MakerBot with $75,000 in seed funding, including $25,000 from Bowyer and his wife, Christine, to sell the CupCake as a kit for people to assemble. By the spring, MakerBot was shipping CupCake kits for $750 apiece. “It rode the coattails of MAKE magazine and got attention from the media, who all loved it and all talked about it,” says Rockhold.

The CupCake was also open source. MakerBot released the hardware and software for running the machines for free, and people who bought CupCakes contributed fixes and improvements to them, fixes that MakerBot would incorporate into later versions of its printers. Being open source brought people inside and outside the company together on something that felt like a quest. It was also good marketing, and became elemental to MakerBot’s story and appeal.

“Being open is the future of manufacturing, and we’re just at the beginning of the age of sharing,” Pettis told MAKE magazine in a 2011 interview. “In the future, people will remember businesses that refused to share with their customers and wonder how they could be so backwards.”

MakerBot represented a revolution in how things get made. One CupCake could make near-duplicates of itself (minus screws and other metal parts), as well as duplicates of countless other objects. The maker movement wouldn’t be just some nerdy subculture; it would be a transformative force remaking society literally and figuratively in its image.

Demand for CupCakes was so great that their owners helped MakerBot print off the pieces to package more kits. Active forums popped up across Google Groups and Reddit, and makers shared the designs of objects they were printing to Thingiverse, a website MakerBot started up that hosted files under Creative Commons licenses.

Other makers made fixes to the CupCakes themselves. Christopher Jansen, a user who goes by ScribbleJ on Thingiverse, contributed an upgrade that made the machine less noisy and improved the quality of prints. Another known as Whosawhatsis? designed a more efficient extruder, a component that squeezes out the melted plastic “ink” of 3D printing.

“Because we’re open source, our users know that the code and designs are theirs to hack on,” Pettis said in an interview in early 2010. “They also know that if they improve their machine, they can share their improvement and everyone in the community benefits.”

MakerBot’s company culture was similarly open and fluid. Its first office in Brooklyn was more experimental lab than formal office. Employees arrived late in the morning and left late at night. One day you might be packaging CupCake kits; the next you might be testing extruders. Pettis answered support emails from customers, hopped into a MakerBot Operators Google Group to address questions and concerns — or sometimes helped employees discover the intricacies of MakerBot hardware by encouraging activities that, if tried by somebody at a more buttoned-up company, might get them fired. On one of his first days, Ethan Hartman was wondering if PLA, a type of plastic used to make 3D objects, would burn if it got stuck in the extruder. He recalls that Pettis grabbed a blowtorch and a piece of PLA plastic, and they took turns trying to set it on fire on the floor.

“Nobody was there to put in your hours and then get a big exit and make a lot of money,” says Hartman, a tech support worker and later a manager at MakerBot from April 2010 to August 2012. “People were there because they loved the idea of an open source hardware project really being a viable thing in terms of a business.”

There was a permissiveness about the place. Curious passersby on the street were allowed to drop in without notice to see what was going on. “In the earliest days there was no clear operational structure at all. This was never something we thought could be sustained when scaling up, but there really wasn’t the notion that this would be a huge company someday,” says Matt Griffin, MakerBot community manager from December 2009 to August 2012.

Employees described it as their dream job, a chance to will an alternative future into being—a world where anyone could be their own private manufacturer. Hartman says the fact that MakerBot was an open source company was “100 percent central” to how much employees loved clocking into work. They even took pay cuts to work there; one person remembers his MakerBot salary being about $22,000 less than his previous job. But MakerBot was exhilarating. They would upend a market, and do it according to their own rules.

In September 2010, MakerBot started selling the Thing-O-Matic, its second 3D printer, as a kit for $1,225 (or $2,500 for the pre-assembled version). By then people had already been using their CupCakes to make a variety of items, such as owl-shaped headphone wraps and block puzzles. The Thing-O-Matic upped the ante. A school in Texas used it to make chess sets, with the printed pieces resembling San Antonio landmarks, and then sold each set for $150. Pettis appeared on The Colbert Report with the Thing-O-Matic and used it to print out a bust of Stephen Colbert’s head, a design still available for download on Thingiverse. MAKE magazine likened Pettis’ appearance to a “five-minute infomercial” for MakerBot and exuberantly crowed, “Who would watch this and NOT want one?”

In later years, trinkets gave rise to more serious endeavors, such as a 3D-printed prosthetic hand. It seemed that the dream Pettis envisioned in 2009 was becoming a reality. People really were printing objects they wanted and needed. “The tenor of the early days was, ‘We want to change the world’…Democratize manufacturing — that was a phrase we threw around internally and externally,” says a former member of MakerBot’s web team who started working there in September 2010.

The company nurtured that spirit. MakerBot was a place where everyone attended meetings and employees had “Bot” tacked onto the end of their formal job titles. Andrew Pelkey was hired the second week of March 2012 to compose blog posts, copyedit press materials, and look over what the company was posting on social media. But he wasn’t a writer, he says: He was WriterBot.

Then-Editor in Chief of Wired Chris Anderson and Bre Pettis in 2010 in New York City. Getty Images

Classic startup ethos governed: fail fast, figure out solutions, iterate, build quickly, and get the product out there. Pettis called this the “Cult of Done,” and enumerated its principles on his blog. Among them: “Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.”

Pettis was well practiced at building a following online. He was beloved by makers, an affable, gee-whiz kind of person who loved creating and seeing the creations of fellow makers. In his Ignite NYC talk, he showed a photo of a working whistle that had been designed by someone in Germany and printed out in New York. “We figured out teleportation. You show me a way to get a whistle from Germany to New York without a missile,” he cheerily exclaimed. The audience laughed along with him.

As time went on it was Pettis, more than Mayer or Smith, who became the public face of the company. In the 2014 MakerBot documentary Print the Legend, Pettis remembers a conversation with his cofounders where they likened him to another technology wunderkind: “You have to be the Steve Jobs,” Pettis recounts for the camera, just before saying he wanted to be the MakerBot equivalent of Steve Wozniak instead.

Still, Pettis excelled as MakerBot’s Jobs, and buyers were snapping up the Thing-O-Matic and the CupCake, which MakerBot offered at a special low price of $455 for Father’s Day in 2011. “The archetypal MakerBot customer was somebody who had just found out that 3D printing was a thing. When they found out they could get their hands on one for $1,000 or less, their minds were literally blown,” says Hartman.

Now it wasn’t just tech journalists covering MakerBot. Rolling Stone wrote about the Thing-O-Matic. The CBS Evening News wondered if MakerBots everywhere would soon give us the ability to create anything. The New York Times diagrammed the insides of the Thing-O-Matic.

By August 2011 MakerBot had sold 5,200 printers. That month it snared $10 million in venture capital funding — from the Foundry Group, Bezos Expeditions, and others — and began to grow, eventually adding another office in Brooklyn. Come autumn, MakerBot employed around 70 people.

The excitement grew, but for early employees it was a sign of irreversible changes to come. “Taking in the investment was something that put people on alert. The attitude became, ‘Well, now we’re trying to show hockey stick growth and we’re going to grow this company at a tremendous pace,’” says Hartman.

In a blog post announcing the funding, Pettis characterized the investment and hiring spree as the move needed “to democratize manufacturing and make 3D printing more accessible to everyone!”

But to draw in people who weren’t hackers, MakerBot knew it needed a much cheaper, plug-and-play printer. “Kits were hard to build. People wanted prebuilt things that would just work,” says Hartman.

So MakerBot threw its weight behind the idea of debuting the MMM, or Mass Market MakerBot, at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The MMM’s price point would be about the cost of a video game console, with no assembly required. It would appeal to the types of people who bought their electronics at places like Walmart and office supply stores.

The company embarked on a stealth undertaking to develop the MMM using contract manufacturing in China, a “crazy top-secret” project, according to one former employee. It fell to cofounder Zach Smith, the one with the engineering chops, to head up MMM’s development. He pulled key engineers from Brooklyn to China.

But by late September 2011, Pettis decided to change course. He called together a seven-member R&D team to, in just three months, design, build, and test a different 3D printer — the Replicator. “The Replicator happened because Bre came into a meeting, grabbed all of R&D Brooklyn and said we need a printer for CES, and didn’t tell us why,” says Rockhold. Boxes containing an MMM arrived every so often in Brooklyn, “but the rate at which they were improving was really low,” Rockhold says.

As the date of CES approached, Pettis asked to see test prints of specific objects: one the size of a bread loaf, and another that was the DeLorean from Back to the Future. The Replicator passed the tests and became the company’s focus for CES.

Retail price? $1,749.

It didn’t meet MakerBot’s internal goal of an affordable printer, but the Replicator still won the “Best Emerging Tech” award at CES. The charm of its earlier printers was still there — the printer was made from a balsa-wood frame. And it was entirely pre-built, not a kit. The hardware and software were still open source, which meant a community of makers remained invested financially and emotionally. It also meant those same makers, given the chops, could fix any problems, a trait that made the Replicator a workhorse in the eyes of the maker movement.

A few months later, in April 2012, MakerBot shut down its operations in China. Zach Smith left the company. “At no point was MakerBot China ever mentioned again,” says one former employee.

People were buying the Replicator “in droves,” says Rockhold. Yet he says it shipped with notable problems: The heated build platforms would burn out because a cable couldn’t support the amps needed, and the device was sensitive to static electricity. If a customer was statically charged and inserted an SD card (what holds the printable file) into the Replicator, the machine would make a loud pop, the sound of a destroyed 3D printer — or at best an expensive repair.

By this time MakerBot was no longer alone — and its failure to build cheaper printers was becoming imperiling. One month before CES 2012, web developer Brook Drumm raised almost $831,000 on Kickstarter for Printrbot, a desktop 3D printer that came as a kit and cost only $549. The Cube, a slick, plastic desktop 3D printer built by 3D Systems, a heavyweight of the industrial 3D printing industry, also debuted at CES 2012 for $1,299. Several months later Solidoodle, founded by former MakerBot COO Sam Cervantes, released a new, pre-built printer that cost just $499.

That same year, analysts at Gartner made a pivotal assessment. On the firm’s “Hype Cycle” graph — which tracks emerging technologies from overenthusiasm, through disillusionment, to sobering realism — 3D printing now sat precariously atop the portion of the graph labeled “Peak of Inflated Expectations.” In a corresponding report, Gartner clarified 3D printing to mean “3D Print It at Home.” The notion of a consumer market for 3D printing technology, made up of Everyman Tycoons, had reached Peak Hype.

In May 2012, MakerBot announced it would move to the 21st floor of Brooklyn’s MetroTech Center that fall. It now employed 125 people and counting, and was preparing to unveil its next printer, the Replicator 2, to the world. “There’s no sign that demand is slowing down anytime soon,” Pettis said at the time. “It won’t be long before having a MakerBot in your home is as common as having a microwave!”

And then, in August, came the TangiBot.

On Kickstarter, a mechanical engineer named Matt Strong was raising $500,000 to mass-produce an exact replica of MakerBot’s Replicator. “I want to bring a low-cost machine to market that people can trust,” Strong told Wired. “The Replicator is the best and completely open-source.”

In other words, Strong made his own Replicator and just rebranded it. He then proposed to sell these TangiBots at a fraction of the cost of a MakerBot machine by outsourcing the manufacturing to a contractor in China. By doing this, Strong claimed, he could sell a TangiBot for just $1,199, or $550 less than a Replicator. Technically, he could — open source hardware isn’t protected by copyright law. So now Strong was on Kickstarter trying to get the money he needed to find a contract manufacturer and begin production.

The open source community rallied around MakerBot, calling out the TangiBot campaign for the rip-off it was. Although the Kickstarter campaign failed, the experience caused Pettis to rethink his commitment to being open source. “Replicator 2 was ready to be released and Bre saw the TangiBot and said, ‘Nope, we’re done with this business strategy,’” says Rockhold.

When the Replicator 2 came out in September, parts of the machine were closed off. The black metal frame was proprietary, as was the graphical user interface that sits on top of the 3D printing software on a user’s computer. These changes may seem like minor pivots, but MakerBot caught flak from the open source community. One former employee said some people were “outraged.” The fixes and improvements they had contributed over the years — for free — were now locked inside MakerBot.

The community was flummoxed by the move, and an outpouring of analysis hit the MakerBot Operators Google Group. Some were cautiously sympathetic: “I want to hear that he’s struggling as much as anyone else with the decision and I hope he finds a solution. Because if he’s just made this about-face without remorse I’m going to lose a lot of respect for Bre and MakerBot. I doubt that’s the case. I hope that’s not the case, but we’ll see,” read one posting. Others were less ambivalent: “There’s exactly zero reason going closed source will protect the design from being stolen or reverse-engineered and sold elsewhere. Going closed source only hurts the community,” read another.

“I think they felt really hurt by us doing that, they felt really abandoned,” says Pelkey. “Internally MakerBot was a club, and I think externally people felt like they were part of that club.”

Employees were also confused, since it seemed like going closed source was a decisive move away from the makers, that early community of people that reliably purchased MakerBot printers. “They thought that they had built a big enough of a name that they didn’t necessarily need community. But 3D printing right now is still something that can’t survive without community,” says Stultz. “When you take the early adopters and piss them off, and they’re the people who own a 3D printer, they’re not going to be saying, ‘Buy a MakerBot.’”

MakerBot was turning its back on the early idealism that founded the company. The “age of sharing” Pettis referenced the year before was officially over.

Reflecting two years later, Pettis seemed to suggest he always knew MakerBot couldn’t afford to be open source. “We could have been hard core, but it very likely would have destroyed the business,” he told Politico in August 2014 on the decision to go closed source. “So it was kind of: which is our mission? Is our mission this somewhat absurd, unrealistic utopian vision? Or is it 3D printers for everyone? And I chose 3D printers for everyone.”

By releasing a closed source machine, MakerBot had raised the stakes for itself. So far, the company had advanced in tandem with a devoted community tolerant of its technical hiccups. With its printer now incapable of modification but newly fit for the everyday consumer, it had to work flawlessly.

In June 2013, MakerBot was acquired by Stratasys, one of the largest 3D printing companies in the world, for $403 million, plus an additional $201 million in performance-based earn-outs. MakerBot went on a hiring spree and unveiled three new desktop printers at CES 2014. The printers were loaded with new features like wifi capability, LCD displays, and a new Smart Extruder.

Rabbits made with a MakerBot 3D printer on display at the 2014 International CES in 2014 in Las Vegas.

Yet their prices were still too high; the cheapest, the Mini, cost $1,375. XYZprinting, an upstart at CES 2014, debuted a desktop machine that cost $499 — the same price MakerBot had wanted for its Mini, according to a planning document from 2012 obtained by Backchannel.

“Bre wanted that so bad and nobody could ever get him that price,” says Jeff Osborn, MakerBot’s vice president of sales and business development from March 2012 to early 2013. “He did know he needed a cheaper machine on the market.”

According to one former employee, some of the machines MakerBot showed off at CES 2014 weren’t even working. Yet once again, all three machines won awards at the show. “If there was ever a moment to call bullshit, the hype cycle was so high that CES was willing to give an award to a machine that could not be demo’ed,” he says.

Sales of MakerBot printers in 2014 were strong. The annual reports of Stratasys indicate that MakerBot sold 39,356 printers in 2014, or 1,194 fewer printers than it had sold cumulatively from 2009 through the end of 2013. A note signed by Pettis shipped with each new MakerBot Replicator, telling each customer that the machine “will give you the superpower to make the things you imagine.” By the fall, both Staples and Home Depot stores were carrying MakerBot’s newest printers.

The printers again had technical problems — but now, their buyers couldn’t help fix them. Savvier customers wrote in the MakerBot Operators Google Group describing software issues. One particularly salty reviewer said, “After 1 year of war, I just lost my patience.” A Change.org petition was started to ask MakerBot to recall its printers.

One big source of frustration for customers was the Smart Extruder, designed to notify you if the printer ran out of plastic filament. Eventually, a class action lawsuit against MakerBot and Stratasys alleged the company knowingly released a faulty extruder. (In July 2016, with no solid evidence to prove knowledgeable wrongdoing, the case was dismissed.)

Writing on Brokelyn.com, former employee Isaac Anderson placed the blame for those three machines’ problems squarely on MakerBot’s decision to go closed source. They could no longer rely on their old customer base of “capable hobbyists who provided tech-savvy feedback and suggestions for improvement.” The new class of buyers, he wrote, “were largely incapable non-hobbyists with no useful feedback, only unrealistic expectations.”

Bill Buel was MakerBot’s director of engineering on the three machines released at CES 2014. Developing several different machines at once with a hard deadline was stressful for the engineering teams, he says. But he also says each printer was extensively tested, and met MakerBot’s specifications for a shippable product. (And the printers at CES? “Non-functional appearance models,” he says, none of which were available for purchase.)

“I understand why Bre wanted all three of the machines. He wanted to come out and really just sort of explode at CES, which is something we made a habit of doing,” says Buel. “From an engineering standpoint, it makes it a higher risk.”

The printers’ weaknesses started to catch up to MakerBot. During an earnings call in the first quarter of 2015, Stratasys executives talked about a “slowdown” in the 3D printing market, and mentioned “lower than expected MakerBot unit sales.” In April 2015, Jonathan Jaglom, a Stratasys executive, took over as MakerBot’s CEO, but the fate of some employees was already decided. That month the company laid off one fifth of its workforce.

In October of that same year, MakerBot laid off another fifth of its remaining workforce. “[W]e’re not hitting our numbers. Not hitting our numbers equates to financial difficulties and burdens,” CEO Jaglom told me at the time. According to Stratasys annual reports, MakerBot sold just 18,673 printers in 2015 — less than half of what it sold in 2014.

Just last April, Jaglom announced that MakerBot would close the company’s 170,000 square-foot manufacturing facility in Brooklyn, lay off even more workers, and move all manufacturing to a contractor in China, even as the company celebrated the sale of its 100,000th 3D printer. Analysis of those same annual reports published by Stratasys shows that MakerBot sold a paltry 1,421 printers through the first three months of 2016.

“In 2014, MakerBot was convinced there was a consumer market ripe and ready. In 2015, we realized the consumer market is not where we thought it was,” Jaglom told me the day MakerBot announced it was closing its Brooklyn factory.

Here’s the thing about 3D printing: It’s not as revolutionary as it was made out to be, at least not yet. Big companies, like General Electric and Ford, experiment with 3D printing and even use it to produce some parts. GE this year even spent $1.4 billion to acquire two 3D printing companies. But 3D printing technology still isn’t reliable enough, fast enough, or cheap enough to supplant injection molding or traditional, subtractive manufacturing processes.

It’s also not a simple process. If you want to print out original pieces, you need to know how to do 3D design, which admittedly has become much simpler thanks to online software like TinkerCAD. But an extruder head might become jammed during printing. The print bed might warp. The finished print might be crooked, which means you have to re-orient the part for printing. “There’s a ton of work involved. It’s not a thing where you can push a button and get what you were imagining,” says Rockhold.

During the heady days of 3D printing, these weren’t questions that were ignored so much as problems to be solved at a later date. What’s happening now is what Jaglom calls the “de-hyping” of the industry, as the public perception of 3D printing finally catches up to reality. Stratasys’ stock price took a tumble, from an all-time high of $136 in January 2014 to $25 in October 2015, when MakerBot announced its second round of layoffs.

“People want things to happen a lot faster, and we live in a world of speed, but what goes into a market takes a long time,” says Jenny Lawton, who joined MakerBot in 2011 and served as acting CEO from late 2014 into early 2015. “3D printing’s still in the middle of all that. It’s like an awkward teenager.”

Other 3D printing companies were suffering, as well. Last spring, Solidoodle suspended operations. Electroloom, a startup that created a 3D fabric printer, closed shop in August in part because of “a poorly defined market opportunity.” Stratasys’ main competitor, 3D Systems, announced in fall 2015 that it would shut down a facility in Massachusetts that employed between 80 and 120 workers. At the end of that year, the company said it would stop selling its Cube desktop 3D printers. Like MakerBot, it’s had trouble competing with smaller desktop 3D printing startups with less overhead and cheaper printers. Today, Taiwan-based XYZprinting has overtaken MakerBot as the worldwide leader in the desktop 3D printing market.

This year’s Wohlers Report, an annual, definitive accounting of the worldwide 3D printing market, seems to be saying the opposite: more than 270,000 desktop 3D printers were sold last year. But the two groups buying these machines are businesses and schools, not individuals.

“The plan among MakerBot and 3D systems and others, creating this idea, an illusion, of your average consumer owning one or more of these machines for home use — there’s just not a market for those,” says Terry Wohlers, president of the consulting firm that publishes the report. “That’s perhaps where MakerBot went wrong initially, thinking there’s a consumer market.”

On a sunny Tuesday morning in September, Jonathan Jaglom greeted reporters, Brooklyn business leaders, and MakerBot employees gathered at the MetroTech Center. The company had an exciting announcement. That day, it was releasing its sixth generation of desktop 3D printers, the Replicator+ and the Mini Replicator+.

During an hour-long presentation, employees talked up the printers’ bigger build frames for larger 3D prints, better software, and upgraded hardware. A new MakerBot app makes it so that even a total beginner can walk through their first 3D print. Also, these two new printers were much less noisy than past models. The printers can now, at last, sit on a desktop without disturbing other people. “We’ve totally re-engineered it from the inside-out,” Mark Palmer, MakerBot’s head of experience design, told the crowd.

Jaglom described an “overall repositioning and messaging” at MakerBot. In the past, he said, MakerBot “built products and hopefully found customers.” Now MakerBot was flipping the script: It had asked users what they wanted, and designed products to meet those specs. That move was done with an eye toward the two markets Jaglom thinks MakerBot can better serve: professional engineers and designers, and teachers. Today, more than 5,000 schools across the US have MakerBot printers.

Pettis stepped down as MakerBot CEO in September 2014, going on to head an “innovation workshop” at Stratasys called Bold Machines. The goal was to show that 3D printing could be used for major projects, not just trinkets. In June 2015, Bold Machines was spun off into its own company. Today Pettis runs a Brooklyn-based startup, Bre & Co., to make “heirloom quality gifts,” the first of which is a watch worth $5,800. For the most part, Pettis has stayed away from the public’s eye. Yet many former employees Backchannel spoke with expressed admiration for Pettis’ drive, determination, and vision. “It could not have been the milestone company for 3D printing without Bre,” says one former employee.

In hindsight, it’s easy to criticize MakerBot for misjudging its potential market. Even icons of innovation can’t always invent the future. “MakerBot, it was the first time people knew 3D printing existed,” says Hartman, one of the earliest employees. “To my mind that is the core of the success, and ultimately the same thing that led to the failure. It was promising the future, which is still coming.”

In early October, Pettis popped up at Syracuse University. Under the lights of Hendricks Chapel, still sporting the sideburns and dark-rimmed rectangular-framed glasses, Pettis told his audience that successful people are the ones “who do kick-ass and cool stuff.” He was reciting from his well-honed Pettis playbook. These people are part of their own club, he told attendees, and the only criterion for entry “is to try to do something awesome.”

“If you do something completely stupid, completely absurd, completely weird, almost always you will encounter something completely innovative that actually is relevant in the normal world,” he said from the stage.

The first slide of the PowerPoint behind him? “Getting Started with the Future of Everything.”

Creative Art Direction: Redindhi Studio

Illustrations by: Matthew Hollister