MatterHackers’ three co-founders originally set out to make their own 3-D printing machine in 2012.
Chief Executive Lars Brubaker and Chief Operating Officer Kevin Pope said they saw a software opportunity to improve the 3-D printers at the time.
“I think that there’s always been a strong connection with 3-D printing and software where essentially the promise and the idea of digital manufacturing, and 3-D printing specifically, is the ability to take a digital design and convert it into a physical object,” Pope told the Business Journal.
Brubaker, Pope and Chief Financial Officer Mike Hulse instead found a gap in the delivery of materials and shifted to selling first-party filament for printers.
“We were just trying to be scrappy and find something that could sustain the business,” Brubaker said.
MatterHackers is now a national retailer of 70 different 3-D printing machines alongside its namesake filament and other printing materials and accessories. The company also accepts orders for custom parts that are made in-house.
MatterHackers’ 12-month revenue has grown 58% in the past two years to almost $48 million for the 12 months ended June 30, ranking it No. 8 on the Business Journal’s annual list of Orange County’s fastest growing private companies in the midsize category.
In 2023, it reported $30 million in revenue.
Over the past five years, the company’s consumer-based portfolio has expanded to aerospace giants, medical device makers and retail brands such as SpaceX, Edwards LifeSciences, Boeing and Oakley. In 2021, MatterHackers expanded into the defense industry providing requested hardware, materials and training to the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.
“For us, being either the person that can advise you into getting the right device or hardware, or being able to train you in the ways to use it, is the way that we’re expanding the capability of the market and that’s how the market’s been growing,” Brubaker said.
These industries were also accelerating in the adoption of alternative manufacturing and materials.
“It wasn’t until, I would say 2020, 2021, that you really started to see blue chip enterprises like the Boeings, like the SpaceX, like the Teslas of the world, really starting to get serious about what these machines could do for them internally and that has been a huge accelerating curve just in the last three to four years,” Pope said.
Individual Consumers Revealed as Embedded Engineers
MatterHackers initially sold to individual consumers before jumpstarting a business division.
Back in 2012, the founders said MakerBot was one of the principal sellers of 3-D printers but had a backlog in its delivery of filament to customers. They decided to pick up the slack and launch their own e-commerce store.
“We rapidly tried to start offering hardware, expand our material lines, offer additional hardware, bring in our first hires, and the evolution of it happened from there,” Brubaker said.
As demand grew, MatterHackers made sure to have a sales team that could provide expertise in the products because the machines of the early days were hard to use.
“We found that we were doing more and more at our customer request to be a better and more full-solutions provider,” Pope said.
The Lake Forest-based firm has 86 local employees.
The consumers in the beginning were “hobbyists,” Etsy shop owners, DIY-ers and other entrepreneurs, the founders said. Eventually, these individual customers would lead MatterHackers to larger clients.
“You’d have an engineer at Kawasaki, or an engineer at Tesla, who was using it for themselves, but also would essentially become the advocates,” CFO Hulse explained.
“It turns out that the people we were selling to as consumers that were using it in their garage are actually the engineers that are embedded in these larger companies, and so we essentially had a relationship with them on a personal level, as somebody that was supporting their hobby,” Pope said.
“As the technology improved over time, and it became more viable, we were their connection and their supplier as they were bringing 3-D printing into their business.”
Adoption of 3-D Printing is Accelerating
MatterHackers plans to expand into new markets in the next few years by adding more technicians, warehouses and office branches. And the industry keeps evolving, according to the founders.
“We’re not at the edge of the technology yet,” Brubaker said.
The capabilities of the materials and the machines have increased with new characteristics such as heat and chemical resistance and multi-colored filament now in the mix.
“Each of those step-ups just make 3-D printing more and more viable for everything,” Brubaker said, adding that some of its business partners are now using the process to manufacture pieces for their customers.
3-D printing can use different types of filaments and includes printing with resin, polymer powders and even metals like titanium.
“I think that’s a big part of the story of why adoption of 3-D printing is accelerating so much, and it’s because every incremental improvement really shifts the unit economics to making the cost of production lower and lower,” Pope added. “So, 3-D printing becomes a viable manufacturing method for more and more things.”
Pope also said that the industry currently has strong tailwinds.
“The need for 3-D printing and digital manufacturing has never been greater with supply chain, possible disruptions with tariffs—they’re making investments to make sure that they don’t get disrupted.”
