By using Kickstarter they are raising funds for injection molding tooling to manufacture the case and a base mount; however, the team could not afford to build tooling for all the additional mounts that they wanted to produce. Each new mount would cost around ten thousand dollars in tooling, and the engineers were constantly coming up with new and creative mounts. The value of iconic.am increases with every mounting option so the team wanted their users to have more options than the company’s startup funds would allow.

The team had an “aha!” moment: they were using 3D printed components for their prototypes and found them to be so durable that everyone treated them like production parts. The case had to be injection molded so that it would be waterproof, but the rest of the parts could be produced via 3D printing. Iconic.am quickly redesigned their mounts to be optimized for 3D printing. No longer limited by the strict requirements of the injection molding process, they could design creatively to make their parts lighter and more robust.

Iconic.am wants their Kickstarter backers to get involved with the design action, and challenge them to come up with new mounts. By asking backers to provide a sketch, iconic.am will turn their users’ ideas into 3D printed parts made available via their Shapeways store.