Businesses are increasingly looking at 3D printing and customization for real business benefits. But, one piece of the puzzle is missing: the design.

Plektor!, the guitar pick configurator, is a personal dream realized, but also demonstrates how paramate will help your business tackle the design challenge and get ahead in the age of additive manufacturing.

Small, unnoticed, but undeniably important, guitar and bass picks can make or break a sound. A lot rides on those tiny triangular objects. Music scene outsiders may not know, but musicians certainly do. Never fully satisfied with the typical picks they could buy, the musicians in our development team decided to build a pick configurator to create customized picks.

The project is the brain child of paramate Product Manager, Erik Entrich. Not his first foray into customization, Erik regularly turns his talents to tackling the problems of standardized products. “Plektor! started as just a fun side project, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s part of the next age of manufacturing and business. All anyone needs to disrupt an industry is a website, a software like paramate, and a good idea.” Therein lies the essence of what paramate makes possible for businesses. A cloud-based platform, paramate comprises 3 major parts: CAD functionality, advanced rendering capability, and web-based applications. Together they enable anyone to offer intuitive online product configuration and create the custom designs that individualized products demand. But, how do you go from idea to full-blown product configurator?

3 steps from idea to product
As with any custom product on the paramate platform, Erik and his collaborators had to start with their customization concept. Using standard pick forms as a point of departure, they then determined what elements they wanted to make individualizable and within which limits. Every musician wants to play a bit differently and their pick has to be shaped to allow that. And of course who wants a pick that looks exactly like someone else’s. Taking all of this into account, the team came up with a range of customization options: the tip shape, pick length and width, and the design. Within each of these elements they set parameter ranges, which are value limits that define the outer limits of a customizable feature.

Once the configurator had been built production could start. Members of the design team created picks for their style, got them printed, and started playing. After a bit of trial and error, the team landed on the ideal material for the custom picks.

Of course an idea this cool doesn’t belong locked away, and to spread the word about customizable picks the team set up an e-Commerce website. Integrating a product configurator is very simple using the paramate API, and the interface can be fully adapted to the corporate design of any business. In the case of Plektor! our team was left to follow their creative spirit, we think the result is pretty awesome, you can check it out for yourself here.

“Plektor! is a fun idea and we think people will enjoy it, but more importantly we hope businesses from all sectors will be inspired by it. Offering customizable products sometimes seems like this huge undertaking, Plektor! shows how simple it can be with software like paramate.”

Want to learn more about how paramate will help your business to simply and efficiently design and create custom products? Get in touch today: www.trinckle.com/paramate