When the Product Range Outgrows the Equipment
Away's UV printing personalization ran on equipment built around luggage, which made printing anything smaller slow and expensive. I led the evaluation that brought small-format printing in-house — 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.
Printing was already in-house, on large-format equipment configured for the flagship suitcase. Sensible, when luggage is what you're printing. But as the range broadened, personalization demand grew fastest on the smaller items — limited editions, and corporate orders where placing a logo was the whole requirement — and those sat awkwardly on equipment sized for a suitcase.
We proved the demand with outside vendors first. That confirmed the volume was real. The open question was whether small-format, high-mix printing belonged inside the building too.
What We Had to Decide
Bed size is a bet on your order profile.
Rather than argue it in the abstract, we went to order history — printed-part demand broken down by average order volume and product size. That distribution made everything else answerable.
A larger bed prints more per cycle and spreads setup across more units, but costs more, eats floor space, and is slow to change over on a small order. A smaller bed is cheaper and quicker to turn, but caps what you can absorb when a big corporate order lands.
Time studies mattered as much as capacity — the realistic cycle time including load, alignment, cure and unload, run by the people who'd actually operate the machine. And materials weren't negotiable: whatever we chose had to print on leather and polycarbonate.
Qualifying the Equipment
Lab testing is repeatable. Wear testing is real.
We evaluated vendors on capability, cost, service, consumables, maintenance and footprint — then sent our own products out to be printed on their machines. Trial prints on real parts showed how each performed on our materials and gave us samples for testing: adhesion, abrasion, chemical resistance, colorfastness and flex.
Testing has limits worth naming. Leather swatches are easy to fixture. Textured polycarbonate with grooves is not — standard abrasion methods assume a flat surface, so we arranged less conventional ways to test that geometry.
Lab testing earns its place because it's measurable and defensible. But wear testing is the north star: it's the only thing that shows how someone actually handles a product — what they set it down on, what they clean it with, what rubs against it in a bag.
Running It
The machine wasn't the failure mode. Maintenance was.
Defect rates came in low. The useful finding was where they came from — not print execution or operator skill, but maintenance cadence. The risk in bringing a capability in-house usually isn't that the equipment can't do the work; it's that nobody owns the upkeep. The maintenance plan stopped being paperwork and became part of how the line ran.
The Impact
Lower cost per part, and meaningful lead time removed by eliminating the round trip to an outside vendor. But the bigger shift: once the team understood the new economics and turnaround, they started designing into the capability — proposing products that assumed printing was 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 answered more than any spec sheet.
Lab testing proves repeatability. Wear testing proves reality.
Expect the awkward substrate to need a method that doesn't exist yet.
The equipment is rarely the risk. The upkeep is.
Write the maintenance plan into the operating routine before the first production run, and give it an owner.
New capability changes what people design.
Plan for the demand you're about to create.