Gantri creates contemporary lighting with 3D printing

Founded in San Francisco, Gantri is the digital manufacturer of designer lighting. These modern lights are created by its team of designers and made on-demand using 3D printing technologies. Additionally, the company is dedicated to producing lighting that is made from sustainable products such as corn starch. For this reason, it has developed its own 3D printer that can work with the materials it wants. Called Dancer, Gantri explains that developing their own machine was the only way it could produce on-demand products that achieved industrial quality and efficiency – whilst of course retaining the flexibility of 3D printing such as design freedom. In order to learn more about Gantri we spoke to its founder, Ian Yang!

3DN: Can you present yourself and your link with 3D printing?

I joined the San Francisco TechShop back around 2014/15. I was just very curious about different manufacturing processes. When I learned 3D printing, I was obsessed over it. I bought a Printrbot Simple Metal, put it together and started printing like there’s no tomorrow! Also, fun fact, that machine was all that I used during the first year of Gantri to make prototypes. We still have it.

Ian Yang, Founder of Gantri

3DN: How did the idea of founding Gantri come about?

I remember the first time I learnt 3D printing. It was a class I took at the TechShop. And the entire time all I could think about was why no one was using it to manufacture products. “Too slow”, “Too low quality”, “Too expensive” were some of the feedback that I got. But I thought to myself that these are all solvable problems. And I know as a design consumer, that there’s a lot of people who just yearn for fresh new designs that are just too expensive to produce industrially. So I started researching ways to make 3D printing work for manufacturing design, and that’s how I embarked on this journey to building Gantri.