LAB3D did not start as a factory. It started on 1 March 2019 with a single Ender 3. By the end of that first year there were eight printers, and the goal at the time was just to reach ten. Today the same operation, just outside Aabenraa in southern Denmark, runs more than 100 printers around the clock - and it has run on SimplyPrint nearly the whole way up.
That makes LAB3D one of our oldest customers, by choice rather than accident. Andreas Soll found SimplyPrint while it was still in alpha, back in 2020, when LAB3D had only a handful of machines. Almost every printer added since has come online inside the same platform.
We started LAB3D in 2019 with a single Ender 3. Today we run well over 100 printers around the clock - and we've grown the whole farm on the SimplyPrint software since back when we had eight.
What they make#
LAB3D is a contract manufacturer that happens to print, not a hobby that grew. Their line is simple: design should be created digitally and experienced physically. They take a product from idea and technical design all the way to finished, series-produced parts, in runs from 10 to 2,000 pieces. Most of it is FDM, with SLS and SLA in-house too, across PLA, ABS, PETG, nylon and TPU. They can spin up a new production in under 12 hours and ship more than 70% of orders within 24 hours.
Most of that work sits under NDA, so they cannot name every case. The breadth is the point.
Our customers go from billion-dollar companies down to a single designer making vases. We're basically a factory you can hire, and a fast one.
The proof you can hold: their own smart-home switch#
The cleanest example is one LAB3D ships under its own name. The LAB3D smart-home switch is a Zigbee button that fits original LK FUGA frames and keys - the wall fittings already in a great many Danish homes - and pairs with Philips Hue in under two minutes, as well as Shelly and Homey. The housings and rockers are 3D-printed by LAB3D, developed together with KC3D, and the battery is rated for around eight years.
It is not a prototype. The switch sells under the LAB3D brand through Proshop and Danish lighting wholesalers, with more than 100,000 units 3D-printed.
We've printed well over a hundred thousand of the switch housings ourselves. If you live in Denmark, there's a good chance one is already on a wall near you - printed on the same farm that does big orders for industry.
How the farm runs#
A farm of 100+ printers cannot live in your head, or be run by walking the floor all day. The spine is the print queue and one-click print: jobs go out across the whole farm from one screen, instead of being sliced and started one machine at a time. An operator pulls a finished plate and sends out the next job, and the queue keeps every printer and every job in one place - so adding the 80th or the 120th machine is just more of the same, not more to chase.
The fleet is mixed on purpose - Prusa and Bambu Lab side by side - and the same screen runs all of it:
SimplyPrint isn't locked to one brand. We run our Prusa and Bambu machines off the same queue, so the printer mix is our choice, not the software's.
Six years in, still the tool they run on#
There is a particular kind of proof in a customer who has been here since the alpha. LAB3D has been on SimplyPrint for six years, and it has grown right alongside them - from a handful of printers to the farm they run today. For a manufacturer betting its delivery promises on a platform, the reassurance that matters is that it kept up, and only a long-time customer can say it.
The SimplyPrint software has grown with us the whole way. What ran eight printers back in 2020 runs the whole farm now - we never had to switch to anything else.
The scale story is the headline: one Ender 3 became 100+ printers, and the account has logged more than 93,000 completed prints. The steadiness underneath it is the real outcome.
What's next#
LAB3D is about to move from 400 to 2,500 square metres, six minutes from where they are now, with the new space built around display screens everywhere on the floor. The farm in these photos is the current building; the next chapter is a bigger one.
We're moving to a space more than six times the size, set up with screens everywhere. The one thing that won't change is what runs on top of it.
TL;DR#
LAB3D grew from one Ender 3 in 2019 to 100+ Prusa and Bambu Lab printers running around the clock, making parts for industry in runs of 10 to 2,000 pieces and shipping its own smart-home switch into Danish homes. They have run the whole farm on SimplyPrint's print queue and one-click print since the alpha in 2020 - more than 93,000 completed prints and counting.
