17. MakieLab: Custom-Made, Born-Digital Toys

One afternoon in 2010, at the Digital Kids Conference in New York, Alice Taylor sat at a crowded lunch table full of conference attendants, so close to each other that she could not help but eavesdrop the pitch of an entrepreneur’s idea to an executive in the toy industry. She then realized how difficult it was to enter the toy industry. As Digital Kids was co-located with Toy Fair, Alice also came across the huge divide between digital and physical regarding education and entertainment for children. That was when she came up with the idea for MakieLab, inspired by the freedom to create embedded in maker culture and in do-it-yourself communities. What if children could use their fertile imagination to design their own dolls, just like gamers do with avatars? With MakieLab, Alice Taylor wondered whether she could create “an infinite loop of play” by experimenting with blurring the boundaries between the digital and physical world.

“It’s incredibly risky to put a product on a toy shelf. To make a doll of this size you would generally spend 4 years in R&D and in production, in secret. You’d mold each piece at a cost of a couple of tens of thousands of dollars per mold, and then you’d run off a minimum order quantity. Usually you then have to get those products into a warehouse in America before they will necessarily be accepted on the shelf. Then, in some cases, with retail you have to pay for the shelf space, in the sense that you have to be able to bid up against Disney or whoever. So, if you want your doll next to those guys you have to be able to afford it. Again, this is why you don’t see start-ups, why you don’t see artisanal anymore in those spaces.”

—Alice Taylor, speaking at Bay Area Maker Faire 2014

MakieLab is a U.K.-based toys and games company that created Makies, the first safety-certificated 3D-printed doll for children. Makies are action dolls created and customized by the customer in a web application and turned into real dolls by MakieLab which has them manufactured on demand using 3D printing. At the same time, being born digital, Makies are also avatars that play roles in games. Contrary to traditionally mass-produced toys, Makies are designed according to the preferences of their owners, who modify a doll’s facial features, expression, and clothes to their own creative taste. By making unique 3D-printed toys using game technology, MakieLab bridges the digital and the physical worlds in a way that had not been seen yet in mass-manufactured toys.

Founded in London, U.K., MakieLab is the first service in the global mass market to offer full personalization of toys. This is possible, thanks to the additive manufacturing technology but also, to a large extent, to the democratization of access to technology and to the maker culture. MakieLab positions itself in the digital-physical interface of the industries of toys and games. The digital strategy supports the manufacturing platform by providing a source of alternative revenue, as well as other routes to customers, expanding the distribution possibilities of the dolls and being a creative tool to design the physical product.

When the idea for MakieLab started to take shape, Alice Taylor searched in Shapeways for someone who could help her model a sketched doll and have it 3D printed. Producing the dolls at Shapeways was fairly cheap, so they iterated the doll model as necessary, in order to build a prototype to pitch the idea to potential funders. Joining Alice Taylor to set off the company were Jo Roach, also formerly from Channel 4, and Sulka Haro, previously from Sulake, a Finnish company that created Habbo Hotel, a social networking website for teenagers.

Borrowing the idea from games where players create an avatar, the web application enables children to create unique characters from playful imagination. Makies are generated by tweaking pre-set options with a slider to modify sizes, color, and shapes of eyes, ears, noses, and other facial features of dolls. Makie avatars can display multiple variations of each feature. If the child wishes to have a physical doll, it can get one exactly like the computer-generated design provided the child has parental assistance to complete an order using a credit card. After that, dolls are manufactured on demand using industrial grade 3D printing. Doll accessories are also 3D printed and clothes are handmade at MakieLab’s headquarters. Finally, Makies are delivered to the customer within 2 weeks after production order.

The first MakieLab product was an online doll building application, launched at demo level in 2012. Alpha versions of software correspond to the testing phase, thus being unstable and prone to crashing or offering limited design options; open means that an unlimited number of people can use the application. MakieLab had decided to use the seed funding to go live early and iterate on the fly using users’ feedback as they customized and ordered dolls. Initially, the company received funding from a public innovation agency in the U.K., and privately from friends and family. In the alpha demo version, Makies were offered in the bone-white skin option only and priced at £99, well above the $20 average market price for similar-sized dolls. Although the interface couldn’t prove mass-market appeal and could show problems unresolved, going live early gave MakieLab the chance to get an “alpha geek” community of enthusiasts to create avatars and order dolls.

People started to experiment with Makies, alongside the Makies team, for instance using different dying techniques at home to change the skin coloring, adding make-up, and making clothes. Then they posted their accomplishments on the discussion forum. The company followed closely what these early customers made to understand how they used the toy and figure out what they were looking for in such a toy. As the company was prototyping also doll accessories, using a cheap desktop 3D printer, and trying out techniques to obtain different skin tones, it posted on the customers’ forum its own development breakthroughs.

“We said, screw it, we want to put it live anyway, we want to get it out to the alpha geek community; we want to talk to people; we want to see what people want; we want to start figuring out what it is about a customizable doll people love the most. Alpha geeks are the canaries in the coal-mine. They’re the ones who will pick something up that most folks maybe wouldn’t understand; they’ll examine it and say, what is this? How does it work? They’ll play with it; iron out the kinks, and in that process the manufacturer or the provider will also learn a lot. And then, when everyone’s ready, it will just bleed into the mainstream.”

—Alice Taylor in 2013 for Make magazine (15/03/2013)

The creative exchange between MakieLab and the early owners of dolls became a conversation that fueled user-driven tinkering and engagement of customers, which fed the iteration process. Iterating on-the-fly using early users’ experiences and feedback would not have been possible in a traditional model for mass-manufacturing of toys or without additive manufacturing techniques.

“We just got an app out, we got skin colors in January, toy safety in February, the CE certification, put an app out in March (2013). The app just sells dolls but the next step is to turn it into a game, which is where this big loop finally closes, where your digital character can be turned into a physical object, but we will be able to create and sell, and maybe people can sell to each other, both digital and physical goods. Using laser printing, for instance, we can have users create patterns for the clothes and then print it on to real cloth and turn it into clothes for your real doll that you’ve designed in an app.”

—Alice Taylor speaking at NEXT13, April 2013

Makies FabLab was the first actual game developed by MakieLab and launched in 2014 on AppStore for iOS devices. It is a resource management game in which a Makie character grows resources to produce materials that will be turned into clothes and accessories. The game is free, but has purchasable in-app functionalities (priced at €0.89 to €6.99). It features a digital fashion studio and workshop where players design and craft clothes and accessories using a variety of machines, including virtual 3D printers that produce shoes, but also grow the raw materials used in textiles, for instance breeding sheep to produce wool or growing cotton plants. Players can style the dolls, photograph them, and organize lookbooks that can be shared with other players. They can also order a real version of their avatar in the game. MakieLab keeps developing the game and its manufacturing services so that players can order also the clothes that they created in the game.

Finally, the latest game released was Makies Fashion, launched for iOS and Android devices and priced at €2.69. This app allows the player to create fashion for the Makie dolls. It features a fabric customizer, photoshooting of fashion looks and catwalk shows with the virtual Makies. MakieLab’s plan is to expand the game’s functions to offer more options for creative use.

MakieLab transformed the earlier digital manufacturing platform from an alpha geek app into a series of entertainment games for children. These games are a core part of the digital-physical business strategy, providing a purpose for making real dolls and supporting the interaction between avatars and dolls through stories, characters, and role playing.

Blythe is a doll, first created in Japan and now owned by Hasbro, which is mass-produced but comes in a large number of variations. When a photographer produced a book in which the dolls posed in different fashion styles, Blythe became a cult doll for collectors. It is priced at around €100, but custom dolls are often sold on eBay for three to four times its original prices. On Etsy there are several shops that sell handmade clothes for Blythe. Doll enthusiasts also created a do-it-yourself community around MakieLab. Moreover, on Etsy there are several shops selling handmade clothes and accessories, such as knitted sweaters, and body painting services, such as make-up and manicure, for Makie dolls.

MakieLab’s founder Alice Taylor said that, compared to Makies, “American Girl is the thing that gets the closest, probably, or Lego where you have this combinatorial thing.” Yet, she considered American Girl as “bruteforcing customization” while Makies opened up customization possibilities by leveraging the potential of 3D printing and the flexibility of games and digital tools. Furthermore, Makie dolls have hollow backs and heads so that there is enough space to fit batteries or a Lilypad Arduino, a small open-source microcontroller, popular in DIY electronics, which can be programmed to interact with other objects, such as Bluetooth- and wireless-enabled gadgets.

Incumbents in the toy industry are getting their feet wet by experimenting with moving closer to users. In 2012, Disney launched a one-off initiative at its theme parks to make Disney Princess figurines with the facial features of their owners, using 3D modeling from pictures and 3D printing technology. More recently, early in 2014, Hasbro announced a partnership with 3DSystems to “co-develop, co-venture, and deliver new immersive, creative play experiences powered by 3D printing for children and their families.” In 2015, Mattel announced it will collaborate with Quirky to create new products that reinvent a few of its brands, including Fisher-Price, Hot Wheels, and Barbie. The mainstream toy industry has not been oblivious to the possibilities brought about by customization, 3D printing, and crowd-collaboration to their business.

Secondly, MakieLab introduced full personalization of action dolls, developing ways for children to create unique toys produced on demand and challenging a conventional divide between designers and users that cuts across many other industries. Finally, it bridged the digital and the physical worlds, which so far have been apart, by integrating gaming technology with creative tools for the design of custom-made action dolls and accessories. Makies are born digital but are also unique objects, which configures a potentially disruptive value proposition. The company foresees its digital-physical strategy to yield a blended margin by balancing the 80 to 90 percent margin in games and applications with around 20 percent margin in physical dolls. The digital strategy supports the growth of MakieLab and the development of the manufacturing strategy.

Nonetheless, MakieLab continued raising funding to support business development. According to CrunchBase and Angel.Co, it was valued in $3 million in 2012 as it received seed funding of $1.4 million provided by Lifeline Ventures, Sunstone Capital, and game industry veterans. In August 2013, the company was valued at $8 million and raised 2.3 million in seed funding from undisclosed sources.

“We’re a small digital/physical manufacturing start-up, operating in an unproven area. Everyone believes in it, and knows it’s going to grow, but there are some really significant questions, like, how long is it going to take for material prices to come down? So we need to stay alive during this alpha geek stage, where the technology stops emerging, and becomes mainstream. And I’m hoping that process takes no longer than 3 or 4 years!”

—Alice Taylor speaking at the TCT Show + Personalize, 2013

A pressing issue for MakieLab is costs: 3D printing costs had not decreased as the company expected, which kept the price of the dolls high. It was assumed that the margins on the physical production of toys would increase with scale, and later even more with advances in 3D printing technology and the expiry of patents.

This is the critical point for MakieLab’s growth on the manufacturing side because the price of each doll is high in relation to mass manufactured dolls averaging at $20. Although Makies are less expensive than in 2011, a simple doll without accessories around €90, which creates a barrier for adoption at a larger scale. Even though the games for iOS and Android were released in 2014, it is early to know whether they will boost sales of Makie dolls.

“We send dolls as far as Singapore and New Zealand. We didn’t need to ask permission for that, we didn’t need to ask permission to go on the App store. You go and upload your app and that’s how that works, and we also didn’t need to ask permission to make physical products. And that’s here to stay. When everybody can take part, surely things become more and more amazing.”

—Alice Taylor speaking at the TCT Show + Personalize, 2013

Assumed as a “big gamer” and the “nerd in the building,” Alice Taylor always wanted to start a games company. Previously, she had created an avatar-builder which became very popular for people on the web to create their virtual character. A serendipitous moment led her to wonder whether one could turn avatars into dolls using 3D printing. Now, MakieLab wonders whether it can be the next LEGO, producing and curating a variety of toy-builders for various age segments. In this quest against dragons plotting “game over” strategies for truly challenging new businesses, MakieLab is the fearless hero making it through every level, gathering props and allies toward creating the next playing field for the toy industry.

Regardless of the challenges that MakieLab faces, Alice Taylor sees a stepchange in the industry, in which innovators will set foot in the market for toys and games. Its ambition is to build upon a basic manufacturing platform that unleashes creativity for design and play. MakieLab aspires to building a distributed manufacturing network that produces customized Makies on demand anywhere in the world where there are professional grade 3D printers. Such a radical change is possible thanks to affordable on-demand manufacturing with 3D printing, and amplified by combining the physical tools with the generativity that a digital platform enables and invites.

The purpose on which MakieLab was founded and is being run today: What is your passion?

The purpose of MakieLab is to hold the child’s future dear, to celebrate creativity and making, to break stereotypes, and to innovate.

Why is MakieLab strategically novel in your view?

MakieLab makes a difference because it’s local, on demand, unique to each owner ... that’s all novel. Living digitally and physically together is also novel. These are areas of continuous exploration!

How have you and your colleagues at MakieLab get here in terms of doing something differently? What rules did you break?

We treat hardware and consumer products like software: release the demo, and iterate as fast as you can. Don’t hold it in secret, and launch with a (marketed) bang 4 years later. We break stereotypes where we can. And we very much rely on word of mouth...!

Both the toy and games industries rely heavily on enormous marketing budgets. This is the toughest hurdle: How to compete with mass-manufactured prices and marketing campaign noise. No one has an answer to this, you can but try.

Future intent: What is the next opportunity and related challenges?

We’re developing more products this year; plus we’re developing for USA manufacturing, and looking to Japan. We want to find partners and licensing opportunities that help the growth (400% YOY for 2 years in a row, and holding) continue to accelerate.

Looking back from the future: Why did what you have done matter more, broadly speaking?

I think what we have done is a significant technical and manufacturing challenge—done by a company that’s 50 percent female in a tech world where that’s not the norm! I’d like to think that Makies will influence other doll body image developments, too.