How 3D Printing Mannequins at Scale Led to the Birth of a Digital Factory Platform

3D printing’s path to industrial scale has run through aerospace tolerances, medical implants, and automotive lightweighting. It has also, less famously, run through mannequins.

The demand for faster collections, smaller batches, and more sustainable production in the display and visual merchandising sector forced one company to push FDM beyond its typical limits. In doing so, the company built a production infrastructure that would eventually become something much larger, serving clients such as adidas, The North Face, and Atomic.

Vertex Group began by using FDM for 3D printing mannequins and props.

That company is Vertex Group, and the platform it led to the creation of is L3AD: a digital factory service launched in 2025 that gives industrial users access to a network of over 800 printers across China and Europe, without a single capital investment in machinery. But to understand L3AD, you have to go back to 2020, when Vertex set a new manufacturing standard through the mass production of mannequins and props using 3D printing.