CW&T, or Charlie Whiskey and Tango, is a two-person design practice with a mission statement that might sound familiar to Formlabs customers: “CW&T exists to create the things we want to see in the world.”
Co-founder Che-Wei Wang spoke to us about how using the Form Series to prototype has led them to Form Now for end-use manufacturing of one of their viral products, the Solid State Watch.
“It changes the way I think about what we can make. If we wanted to make thousands of this product, it’s such a straight line to get there.” -Che Wei Wang, Co-Founder CW&T
Striking While the Inspiration Is Hot
CW&T is a small design studio that develops a wide range of everyday products they’d want to use in their daily lives. From wall-mounted tape dispensers that double as modern art to lightstands and utility knives, their products are both functional and beautiful. Their unique designs have helped them develop a core set of customers that follow along as new products drop or are restocked.
Inspiration can strike at any time — Wang says, “We have a mentality of never knowing exactly what people will connect to, so we have to try things as inspiration hits and get them out there fast.”
Getting those new ideas out to be tested on the market means having a full fabrication shop in-house. “We have a full machine shop, and all the tools you need for prototyping, but we are also really interested in having as much control as possible over manufacturing,” says Wang. 3D printing has been a huge part of their workflow, both fused deposition modeling (FDM) and stereolithography (SLA), and Formlabs SLA printers have been in the shop for years. “We’ve been working with Formlabs since the Form 1 — we know exactly what we can get out of the printer,” says Wang.
The Solid State Watch: A Sleeper Hit
Like the Form 1, CW&T launched the Solid State Watch on Kickstarter. It was early 2020, and CW&T offered them in small batches of 16 at a time. The watch encapsulates a Casio F-91W watch base, a favorite among the watch community, inside a transparent resin case. The Casio F-91W has a cult following in the watch world — Wang explains, “It’s a beautiful feat of engineering. You seriously can't find another piece of technology that's so ubiquitous and does what it is supposed to for as long as it does without any intervention.”
Enclosing it in resin — and precluding users from being able to alter or access it — was a polarizing design feature. Some watch lovers immediately ordered, some hated it, but both reactions contributed to a growing interest in the design and in CW&T as a whole. Two years after release, the product has gone semi-viral in the watch world, and the team manages a constant backlog of orders. At this point, they have shipped over 2000 Solid State Watches.
To make the watch, Wang 3D prints an enclosure in Clear Resin, then fills it with a silicone oil batch and floats the Casio watch base in that bath before enclosing it in the Clear Resin case. “3D printing allowed us to test and iterate the enclosure methods and find new solutions to float the delicate internal components on, without spending money on tooling or too much time on manual solutions,” says Wang.
The team still makes small changes, and because they’ve always been 3D printing, there’s no danger of spending money on outsourcing — everything can happen right in-house without any interruption in delivery timeline for the customer. “We looked at injection molding or machining, but they were going to be so expensive, the breaking point would probably be in the tens of thousands,” says Wang.
A Familiar Process, But Now Hands-Off With Form Now
Even though 3D printing and manual assembly in-house are more affordable and practical than injection molding or machining, for a product so popular, it was still taking up a good portion of the team's day. He needed to find a manufacturing solution that maintained the same standard of quality, the same materials, and an understanding of the design itself — traditional service bureaus wouldn’t cut it. “I didn’t trust the process of sending out to contract manufacturers; we had a workflow that was specific to Formlabs materials that we had already tested,” says Wang.
Form Now combined the best of both worlds — an approved, well-tested process and material with the high-throughput capacity of a manufacturing facility.
“When you do the quick-math, it’s kind of a no-brainer. The labor costs, not having to deal with post-processing parts, the quality of life improvement, the replacements, and the QC process.” -Che Wei Wang, Co-Founder CW&T
Speed, Control, Transparency at Form Now
Manufacturing end-use products with Form Now has opened up throughput options for CW&T and also brought peace of mind. “The overall interface is great, perfect. Being able to see the price per part right there in the ordering form is really nice,” says Wang.
Ordering through Form Now lets Wang set standards for quality and finishing, without having to invest the valuable hours of employees’ time in exacting post-processing steps. “The surface finish matches the quality we set ourselves, and not having to actually do the post-processing is a huge benefit.”
Working with Form Now as a 3D print-on-demand service has also enabled them to scale up their volume. When printing them in-house, CW&T was shipping less than 10 products a week. With Form Now, they can ship over 40 watches each week. The viral nature of the watch means that the more products out there, the faster the demand grows. Form Now has been a huge part of that expanded (and ever-expanding) customer base.
“The advantages of working with Form Now are the control — we know exactly what we’re going to get back, which is a dream in manufacturing. It’s changing the way I think about the products we make.” - Che Wei, Co-Founder CW&T
3D printing’s value has always been easiest to see on the prototyping side. Product designers can move fast and try new things. Manufacturing end-use products is harder, especially with a technology like SLA, where post-processing, quality-control, and higher-volume throughput require training and labor. Form Now offers the opportunity to take all the advantages of 3D printing and remove the hard parts, making end-to-end product development workflows possible.
To get a cost breakdown of your products with Form Now, visit our page.