We were lucky to catch up with Daniel Smith-O’Donnell recently and have shared our conversation below.
Daniel , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?
We are very new to the 3D printing business, one of the things that I noticed right away how hard it was to balance the cost of making products and the price of them on our websites. We’ve taken inspiration from some of the bigger online retailers and offer free shipping on most of our products. This helps us a lot because it stands out more to potential customers as well as helps us keep a competitive pricing. It also can be challenging because the most popular 3D printed items that people like to buy are very over saturated especially in the online space. We’ve taken more of an outside the box approach and sell more niche items that you usually wouldn’t find on the front page of Etsy or Shopify.
Daniel , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
EZE3D at its heart is a family business. My dad Nick and I came up with the idea during the 2024 election season originally as an idea to make products here in America so as to stand out amongst heavily taxed foreign goods. We now are making it our goal to become a household name in the 3D printing space. Although the process hasn’t been completely linear, we have gotten through half of 2025 with exponential growth for a new company. We want customers to know that we’re not one of those faceless corporations and that we are here to help with any problem that arises with our products. Eventually we would like to start mass producing parts for things like cars and then selling them in bulk to other companies. For now however we are just a son, daughter a mom and a dad navigating the e-commerce space.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Social media has proven to be one of our biggest challenges. We are now posting everyday on our Tik Tok and Instagram page as well as having a presence on YouTube shorts. Consistency is the name of the game on those sites. We are now working on mass outputting our more popular videos to try and get as much exposure as possible. Usually this entails posting the same video on 10 or 15 different accounts and hoping that will turn into some clicks on Shopify and Etsy. Although our social media presence is still small we will keep being consistent and deliver entertaining ads all across the internet.
Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?
In order to offset the cost of having an in person store, EZE3D is entirely an online company at the moment. Less cost of operations is definitely the biggest pro about selling online. We use the funds that we would use on renting out a space on things like Google Ads and boosted posts on Instagram. A big con of it however is not being able to interact with customers in person, this causes some hiccups on things like product sizes and colors, but we have been able to navigate everything they throw at us so far. Trying to get your name out there on social media and the internet is always tough no matter what you’re selling. If those numbers on the screen aren’t going up you start to panic irrationally about your reputation and the store viability, that has proven to be a big con as well. Like I said earlier the process hasn’t been completely linear and that’s how we know we can improve.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.eze3d.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shopeze3d?igsh=MTJvOHRkZ2V6cmk5cg%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@eze3d-n7f?si=oIuzAIT3YWkCYtZn
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@eze3dus
Image Credits
These are all images of me (Daniel, founder, creative director) doing various activities that I enjoy mainly outdoors based like hiking and fishing and there’s one of me from Panama City on a scuba diving trip.