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Kickin’ Wiccan is no more

I received an email via the Acorn Garden website inquiring about Kickin’ Wiccan, the pagan jewelry shop I set up through Shapeways.

Even though I was no longer marketing my items through Etsy, I still received occasional orders through the Shapeways shop page.

The reason why the prospective buyer contacted me through my Wicca page is that they couldn’t find my Shapeways shop page anymore. I looked; sure enough, it’s not there.

I did some web searching, and found the Shapeways wikipedia entry. The company declared bankruptcy in July, 2024. As a shop-owner, I received no notice.

While Shapeways’ support of individual shop-owners like me grew poorer over the years, there was no other site I know of that allowed me to create a display front-end to their 3D-printing capabilities.

To be honest, I made only a trivial amount of money from Kickin’ Wiccan over the years. That, combined with the ever-increasing manufacturing and shipping costs involved with printing individual items, means that I have little incentive to figure out another solution.

This means that Kickin’ Wiccan is no more.

I’m sorry to see it go. I ran it from about 2013 to 2021, and allowed it sit passively as a web page on Shapeways until now. Jewelry sales shrank to almost nothing, since individual pagan jewelers could easily undercut my prices on Etsy because they didn’t have to pay Shapeways’ overhead. The only items that sold were my 3D Tree of Life sculptures, which (to my surprise) are still unique:

It’s time for someone else to pick up the ball and offer something like this for sale. Perhaps that will be you!

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  1. William Seligman 11-Nov-2024 Reply

    I hunted for an alternative 3D printing service that offered what Shapeways did for individual shop-owners.

    i.materialise offers shops, but it has two big flaws:

    • It won’t allow you to put anything in your shop unless you’ve printed it before. While I understand why they’re doing this (it cuts down on customer complains), it’s devastating for someone like me who has many models they’d like to offer. For me to sell my most popular item (“popular” in the sense of 1-2 sales per year), my Tree-of-Life sculptures, I’d have to pay around $500 in up-front costs.

      I couldn’t offer my rings at all. On Shapeways I offered a dozen sizes per ring with the option to ask for more. On i.materialise that’s ridiculous; I’d have to print each size before I could offer it.

    • Their tech support is non-existent, at least through their forums. I had a problem with the correct procedure for setting up my models with color textures. I posted a question on their forums. I waiting a week with no answer. I then looked throughout their forums, and see that the company has not responded to any questions in months.

    I glanced at another company, Vulkaza, but they only print in single-color PLA.

    Perhaps this is an indication that individual 3D-printing-as-a-service is not a good business model.

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