When the Product Range Outgrows the Equipment
Away's UV printing personalization program ran on equipment built around luggage, which made printing anything smaller slow and expensive. I led the evaluation that brought printing in-house for the rest of the range — lowering cost per part, shortening lead times, and giving the design team a capability they started building products around.
The Opportunity
A capability built for one product line rarely fits the next one.
Personalization is one of Away's differentiators, and printing was already running in-house — built around luggage, on large-format equipment configured for the flagship product. That was a sensible way to start when luggage is what you're printing.
As the range broadened, demand for personalization grew fastest on the smaller items: limited editions, and corporate orders where placing a logo was the whole requirement. Those products sat awkwardly on equipment sized for a suitcase.
We proved the demand first with outside vendors, which worked and told us the volume was real. The open question was whether this second kind of printing — smaller format, higher mix — belonged inside the building alongside what we already ran.
Making the Case for In-House
The answer was in the order profile, not the ambition.
Two things pointed in-house: cost per part, and the lead time lost shipping product out and back.
Rather than argue it in the abstract, we went to the order history — recent demand for printed parts, broken down by average order volume and by the physical size of the product. That gave us the shape of what we were actually being asked to print, rather than what we imagined we might print someday.
That distribution is what made the rest of the decisions answerable.
What We Had to Decide
Bed size is a bet on your order profile.
The question underneath everything else was how many parts we needed to print per cycle. That sounds like a throughput question. It's really a bed size question, which is really a floor space question — and none of it can be answered without knowing what the orders actually look like.
There was a range of configurations available, and the tradeoffs ran in both directions across it. A larger bed prints more parts per cycle and spreads setup time across more units, but it costs more, takes more floor space, and is slower to change over when the order in front of you is small. A smaller bed is cheaper to buy and run and quicker to turn around, but it caps what you can absorb when a large corporate order lands. Every option between those poles trades one against the other.
Time studies mattered as much as capacity. Not the theoretical cycle time from a spec sheet — the realistic one, including load, alignment, cure and unload, run by the people who would actually be operating the machine.
Materials weren't negotiable. Whatever we chose had to print on leather and polycarbonate, with room for other substrates if the program grew.
Qualifying the Equipment
Lab testing is repeatable. Wear testing is real.
We identified multiple vendors and evaluated them on capability, cost, service terms and availability, consumable management, maintenance requirements, and physical footprint.
Then we sent our own products out to be printed on their equipment. Trial prints on real parts did two jobs at once: they showed us how each machine actually executed on our materials, and they gave us samples to put through quality testing.
The testing program differed by material, use case, and what could realistically be measured. We arranged adhesion, abrasion, chemical resistance, colorfastness to light, and flex testing.
Testing has limits, and it's worth being direct about them. Leather swatches are among the easiest substrates to put through a lab — flat, uniform, easy to fixture. Textured polycarbonate with grooves is not. Standard abrasion methods assume a flat surface, and ours wasn't, so we arranged less conventional ways of testing abrasion on that geometry.
Lab testing earns its place because it's measurable and repeatable — you can compare two vendors on the same axis and defend the result. But wear testing is the north star. It's the only thing that validates how a person will actually handle the product: what they set it down on, what they clean it with, what rubs against it in a bag.
Once the results qualified, we selected the partner and the printer best suited to the business.
Running It
The machine wasn't the failure mode. Maintenance was.
Buying the printer was the halfway point. Once the equipment arrived we arranged training and ran real time studies against the estimates behind the business case.
Defect rates came in low. The more useful finding was where the defects came from — not print execution, and not operator skill, but maintenance cadence.
That reframed how we ran the program. The risk in bringing a capability in-house isn't usually that the equipment can't do the work; it's that nobody owns the upkeep that keeps it doing the work. The maintenance plan stopped being paperwork that shipped with the machine and became part of how the line was run.
The Impact
Adding the smaller-format capability lowered cost per part and removed meaningful lead time by eliminating the round trip to an outside vendor — enough of both to change how the business thought about personalization.
That shift is the part worth paying attention to. Once the broader team understood the new economics, the shorter turnaround and the quality coming off the machine, they started designing into the capability — proposing products and programs that assumed printing was available, fast and affordable. Demand grew because the constraint had moved.
It worked well enough that a second printer followed.
Key Takeaways
Size the equipment to the orders you actually get.
The demand distribution — order volume against product size — answered more questions than any spec sheet. Buy for the work in front of you, not the work you hope for.
Lab testing proves repeatability. Wear testing proves reality.
You need both, and you should expect the awkward substrate to need a method that doesn't exist yet. Textured surfaces don't fit standard abrasion fixtures, and that's not a reason to skip the test.
The equipment is rarely the risk. The upkeep is.
Our most common defect had nothing to do with print execution. Write the maintenance plan into the operating routine before the first production run, and give it an owner.
New capability changes what people design.
A printer that's fast, cheap and reliable doesn't just lower the cost of what you already make — it changes what the team proposes next. Plan for the demand you're about to create.