Carbon CEO Phil DeSimone on How to Sell 3D Printing Applications – 3DPrint.com

For a company that has historically been one of the most iconic brands in the additive manufacturing (AM) industry, Carbon manages to fly somewhat below the radar these days. The company’s CEO, Phil DeSimone, doesn’t mind that a bit:

“I embrace it,” DeSimone told me in an interview on the sidelines of the 2025 Additive Manufacturing Strategies (AMS) conference in New York City, “because at the end of the day, I think we’ve got the winning strategy. I’ve seen enough at this point to know that. And the bet I’m making is that five years from now, everyone else will look back, too, and be able to see that it was the right strategy.

“I don’t go to the shows as much anymore — this is my first time going to an AM conference in eight months or so. Instead, I’m at fashion week. I’m meeting with the engineers and the design innovation teams at the brands we’re targeting.

“You know, I always tell people to avoid the 3D printing labs at the big companies you’re trying to reach. That’s where 3D printers go to die. You need to focus on the design engineers. Go to them and ask, what problems do you have that we can solve? It’s not about the printer. I’m not selling you a machine. I’m selling you a differentiated product line that, once you’ve committed to it, it’ll lead to machine sales on the back end.”

That last point is the crux of Carbon’s playbook, and if AMS 2025 was any indicator, it may not take five years for people to see that Carbon has made the right call. While it has been a running theme for quite some time, that AM companies should be selling manufacturing applications rather than selling companies on AM as a technology, that theme has rarely been emphasized as starkly as it was at this year’s AMS.

As AM industry marketing advisor Aaron Pearson astutely put it in his write-up on the conference, “Perhaps the industry is finally getting past a tendency to focuses on 3D printer specs and instead is getting serious about building complete tailored solutions for specific use cases.”

If any company exemplifies that idea of “building complete tailored solutions for specific use cases”, it’s Carbon:

“Our three big application areas are aligner/orthodontics, dental, and foam replacement,” DeSimone explained. “From the macro view, the lattice isn’t so much about footwear, or football helmets, etc. — it’s about replacing foam. And where that broader idea will start to become clearer is when we branch out into applications like children’s car seats, protective padding systems, military helmets, bedding, and everywhere in between.

“The way I look at it is we’re waging a war on foam. If you look at a pair of running sneakers, historically, there’s on average something like 13 different components just in the midsole of a shoe. You would need to have different types of foam to get different properties in those different areas.

“What’s great about 3D printing, and for us in particular, is that we can deliver all of those different types of compression properties in a single part simply by changing the design. It opens up way more complexity in the final component, but with an inversely simplified production technology.”

In the foam replacement category, another application that Carbon has seen considerable success with is in bike saddles:

“Our technology can produce over two dozen compression zones within a half-an-inch area out of a single printed part,” DeSimone told me. “When you look at customer ratings for bike saddles online, ours are routinely the highest rated ones in a given store. Certain areas of the saddle you want stiffness, other areas you want comfort and cushioning, etc., and the ability to control and tune that design in that fashion is, I think, our biggest differentiator.

“Once we’ve made that partnership, and it succeeds like it has with bike saddles, the belief in the product is no longer just from Carbon — it’s from the customer, too, and in this instance, Specialized. It wouldn’t shock me if, eventually, we can get 10 percent of the global bike saddle market, with almost 200 million bike saddles sold every year around the world. If we get 10 percent of that, that’s a hundred million dollar a year business.

“That’s how we attack a market: we go after each one methodically, create believers within the market, and provide the services that show them how to differentiate their product lines. We look at markets where we know we can create differentiation, and we go really deep, really quickly.”

While DeSimone may be unconcerned with whether or not Carbon is getting the credit that the company deserves, I do think that there’s something to be said for the AM industry paying attention to which brands it is that are succeeding, especially at a time when the industry as a whole is mired in pessimism. Even for a company like Carbon that’s not publicly traded, the industry’s collapse in terms of stock valuations has reverberations for everyone involved:

“It hurts everyone from a valuation perspective, and from a funds availability perspective,” said DeSimone. “It’s going to be most painful on companies that are small and young that are trying to make an impact, that are simply not going to get the money sent their way that they might have otherwise, because there’s a bad taste in the mouths of investors.

“But I’m excited to be in 2025, because I think we can leave a lot of that stuff behind us. And frankly, for us, the last year was great, because while everyone else was focused on M&A’s and all that, we had our head down focusing on business. It still hurt the overall view of the market on Wall Street, so I think the industry needs to focus now on recovering and rebuilding its relationship with the more purely financial side of the market.

“From the point of view of, not just the Cantor Fitzgeralds of the world that really understand the industry, but even more so, from the point of view of institutions like JP Morgan and Goldman, it looks like a circus over here. It’s not something that they’re too keen on getting more involved in, at the moment. I think we’ve gotta start building that trust back.”

If the rest of the industry can follow the lead of companies like Carbon, I think that would be a solid first step towards rebuilding that trust. More or less everyone in the industry seems to now be internalizing that you can only build AM up one application at a time. Carbon is one of the brands that is already truly executing that playbook.