This month it is exactly 7 years ago that colorFabb saw the light of day. It looked a little bit like this…
Basically a garage with an office, first production of our spools and our first show: RapidPro
Well, 7 years later…
In February 2013 we launched our first products at the RapidPro trade show here in the Netherlands. We had about 20 colors PLA/PHA and only 2.85mm filament. It was still in the early days when there were only a few of us and we constantly had to explain: “No, we are not selling the printers, we make the filament.” (Disclaimer: these days we do sell printers!)
One of our first tweets when we had 10 followers or so.
A lot happened in the past seven years. We basically started in a garage booth with an idea and a lot of ambition. The idea is still the same: to bring the best possible filament to the market and make sure we meet the need of our customers. The ambition has only grown over the past years. The only thing we left behind was the small garage and the little office above. To give you an idea, the image below was our print lab / logistics:
Scale: almost 1:1
In the meantime we moved twice, went from 20 products to 3200+ SKUs (with more to come in 2020), expanded our staff from 3 to almost 30, we became an independent company, ship to 70+ countries worldwide, have the best customers in the world (yes, that’s you) and have been running, working, printing and producing almost 24/7 to make sure you get the best possible filament to print with.
colorFabb has become a company and brand we are very proud of. The biggest shift is the focus on custom colors with our Color on Demand service. We nearly have all the standard RAL classics available (180+ and counting) and have even matched several hundred more colors. But we don’t stop there: Brand new products like LW-PLA and varioShore TPU have been launched, as well as strategic co-operations with brands like Ninjatek, Lubrizol, igus and Iroprint to ensure our customers have the right filament to suit their needs.
You can find more specific recaps per year by clicking on the links below (2013, when we started is sadly lacking, but believe us when we say it was awesome):
What’s next?
“What’s past is prologue.”
~ William Shakespeare
And that prologue has been amazing and we will work hard to make the next seven years (and beyond) even better. We thank all our users, customers, partners and staff for making colorFabb the brand and the company it is today!
Get ready for a year full of great new material developments!