KINK3D & DI LABS: A Manufacturing Partnership Making a Global Impact

Solutionology Stories Episode #31 | 13:30

Description

In the best partnerships, both sides become better by digging into the details, taking risks, and pushing each other. That’s certainly the case with DI Labs and Kink3D.

Our relationship with Dan Berman , Founder and CEO of KINK3D , started when he ordered parts through an online additive manufacturing platform that subcontracted to DI Labs. Dan’s order included specific directions about build orientation, but when Manufacturing Engineer and Solutionologist Sean Douglass evaluated the request, he immediately saw a better way. Sean pushed back and used a different build orientation than requested to achieve a better outcome.

When Dan received the parts, he was extremely frustrated and planned to request replacements. But after reviewing the parts more closely, he saw how much better they were because of the change and decided to seek out DI Labs directly for more support.

That project in 2018 was the beginning of a long-term working relationship and partnership with Kink3D. Since then, we’ve pushed each other to be better and have created a ripple effect of ground-breaking quality and industry-leading performance across the world.

“There are things you do just for us. Processes that don’t exist for anyone else. That’s part of what makes this work—it’s not off the shelf. It’s something we built together.” — Dan Berman, Kink3D

Why Additive Was the Only Manufacturing Path for Kink3D

Kink3D operates in a niche product category with intense manufacturing requirements. Dan designs and develops wearable male chastity devices, an application that requires direct skin contact and continuous, long-term use by customers with a wide range of anatomies. The product demands extremely high surface quality, durability, skin safety, and absolute precision.

It’s also deeply personal. Customers wear these products in active, demanding environments. Some are nurses, pilots or even members of the military. The products must perform under stress while remaining comfortable and discreet.

“It’s an example of a real torture test for additive… people are using it in a continuous way on the body, with skin contact, and often in pretty demanding environments.” — Dan Berman, Kink3D

For Kink3D, using additive manufacturing hasn’t just been about proving out design concepts and launching initial products. It has been essential to scaling and iterating through every stage of production growth. Kink3D now offers over 900 distinct size combinations, something that would have been impossible with injection molding or traditional tooling.

The Growth of Our Collaborative Partnership

Over the past seven years, Kink3D has grown from a direct-to-consumer e-commerce startup to a global brand with retail partners around the world—from San Francisco to Berlin to Melbourne. While additive manufacturing made that scale possible, it was the push and pull of our collaborative partnership that drove the quality and consistency needed for retail distribution.

As Kink3D’s expectations have risen, so have ours. Dan has pushed us to be more precise, more consistent, and more flexible. And DI Labs has delivered by developing custom finishing processes and exclusive production methods that simply didn’t exist before Kink3D.

“This partnership shaped our approach to critical manufacturing challenges. The processes we developed for you now drive how we solve complex problems in other industries.” — Brian Douglass, DI Labs

It’s a collaboration that has taken both a product line and manufacturing process to new levels of quality. Through this unique partnership, Kink3D has become an industry-leading global brand, and DI Labs has become an expert at successfully scaling additive manufacturing for volume production of complex parts in all types of high-performance applications like medical device, defense, and aerospace.

Chapters

00:00 — Intro

01:22 — The first order: when DI Labs made a part better than requested

04:25 — How the partnership began and what it revealed

06:42 — Why additive was the only way to support 900+ size combinations

09:30 — Taking Kink3D from hobbyist market to global retail

12:15 — The unique demands of a skin-contact, long-wear product

14:48 — Trust, iteration, and the value of process

18:32 — Custom manufacturing processes developed exclusively for Kink3D

21:40 — Mutual curiosity: how Kink3D pushed DI Labs to improve

25:10 — Closing thoughts: what happens when you build better—together

Speaker 1 (00:00):

DI wasn’t the first company that I had had prototypes made with. I had worked with probably about four or five companies before you getting individual prototypes made from a variety of providers. I had found a really hard time finding the quality that I wanted and that I felt like I needed for this product. Something that’s worn on the body in a very intimate way to find that quality that was going to be successful and meet those expectations.

Speaker 2 (00:30):

We’re here with a very special guest, Dan Berman, who is the sole founder and CEO of a company called Kink 3D. They are the leader in their product space of making male chastity products, and he’s done it in so many of the right ways that there are lessons here to be learned regardless of what role you play in the world of managing products, developing products, or even launching and developing a brand, Dan has developed a magical way of building and succeeding with his business. Thanks again for joining us.

Speaker 1 (01:05):

Thank you for that very kind introduction. Carl.

Speaker 2 (01:08):

So much ground has been covered since late 2018.

Speaker 1 (01:13):

Absolutely, yeah. We’ve come a long way together as a partnership of our two companies and really kind of grown together. I think

Speaker 2 (01:19):

As I think back about the tension of getting that first request in, and there was a specific way to produce that first series of parts and we violated that intentionally and said, no, we’re going to do it, see what you’re doing, but we’re going to do it differently than this. And then it was pretty obvious when you got the parts back like this isn’t what I asked for.

Speaker 1 (01:41):

Yeah. I had put in that request to you guys and without even knowing that it was you at the time, it was through a platform that unbeknownst to us, connected us with you and one of these cloud-based additive platforms. I thought I knew what I wanted. I thought I knew what the color I wanted the material, I wanted the build orientation and got that part in from you where all of those things were different when I looked at it and I was like, oh, what’s going on here? Better get better, get a replacement and put in that request. And then while y’all were processing it, and even before I got the updated one, started thinking about it and reviewing the part a little bit and realized, hey, well it’s true that this isn’t what I asked for, but this is actually way better than what I asked for. And fortunately I was able to track you guys down and find out who made it. And it’s the start of a beautiful partnership.

Speaker 3 (02:34):

It’s often the start of any good journey is the winding path that we follow. The path is never straight, seems like it has to start that way one way or another for it to be successful,

Speaker 2 (02:45):

That trigger. And we’ve, we’ve experienced both sides of that coin of getting a request, having specific requirements in that request and then deviating from those with intentionality. And we’ve experienced both sides of that where there are times where it doesn’t matter if it was the right thing or not, it was a deviation and it’s unacceptable. And in a case like ours where it became acceptable after going through that process, I think it says a lot about, from my standpoint, how our relationship has evolved because we’ve done that for each other, where we’ve done things where we believe that they were right, and then you’ve really pushed us to say, look, this isn’t good enough. You’ve got to do better than this and forced us or challenged us to develop some processes to get to the point that you wanted to be. And that to me was a strong reflection of who you are and the standards that you held for this venture that you were starting at that point. Even then it was like, look, this is really important to me to get it right and to have high quality and in a lot of ways we’ve made each other better. You’ve made us better. There’s no doubt about it. By having that push, by

Speaker 1 (03:57):

Pushing us partly my natural personality is to want to perfect things. That’s just for better or worse, who I am and have always been that way. And so that’s come through in the course of running this company and developing these products and always wanting to go back and think, does this need to be changed by a millimeter or does that dimension need to be changed by a 10th of a millimeter until there’s finally nothing left to chip away? Nothing that seems like it can be optimized. But the other part of it is as a real first time business owner and one who started a company in an area that I was genuinely extremely passionate about, I mean it was a passion project at the beginning. My customers at the beginning were people who I found online who were similarly passionate about the products and who were really taking a chance on our business. At the beginning they were finding us through social media, they would have a social media conversation with us. They really took a chance sending their money and wanting to try out the product as an early adopter. And so that put me in the mindset of feeling like, I don’t want to let them down. I want to provide the best thing that I can because I just appreciated so much that they were taking a chance in this really unknown way to give the product a go.

Speaker 3 (05:11):

I think those early phases of the journey, it’s really raw because the learning curve is so steep. How did you manage all those aspects of serving the client, understanding what they really liked, what they didn’t like, and then bringing that back together to have a positive outcome with change, because change management’s really challenging for most

Speaker 1 (05:33):

At the beginning. I think a lot of that came from really that one-on-one connection with early adopters and with people who, whether they liked it or not, became kind of the testers of the product. And because our initial sales essentially were done not through a traditional e-commerce shopping cart and not through a retail channel but rather direct connection with customers, we were able to get that really intimate feedback about what was working, what wasn’t working. And I think because the product was sold in that way and the connection was done in that way, people had the attitude that the feedback they were giving would be constructive criticism. They felt like they knew a little bit about me, I knew a little bit about them. They knew that I was coming from a good place of genuinely caring about what I was doing and wanting to make a good product. People felt like they could be open and honest with the feedback that they gave and that it would be taken seriously by me, which it definitely was.

Speaker 2 (06:36):

When did you start the business and at what point did you start transacting with these test customers?

Speaker 1 (06:42):

So Kink 3D started as really a personal passion project in 2018, and when I met you, it was still in that phase. And honestly, meeting DI as a huge part of one of those transition moments that allowed us to move from being a personal project, which it was, and really a hobby when I met you to being a business. And so when I met you, I was still in the initial prototyping of just, Hey, can I make something that I feel good about that excites me, especially in additive. There’s, as we all know, all kinds of questions around surface finish, porosity, quality, smoothness, durability. And DI wasn’t the first company that I had had prototypes made with. I had worked with probably about four or five companies before you getting individual prototypes made from a variety of providers, and I had found a really hard time finding the quality that I wanted and that I felt like I needed for this product, something that’s worn on the body in a very intimate way to find that quality that was going to be successful and meet those expectations. And what you provided was really head and shoulders above at the beginning, even before we moved to our current production technology, which is just mind blowing for additive. But in 2018, we were using a vibratory tumbling for our post-processing and you were able to achieve a smoothness from that that was noticeably higher that I had found from other providers, however you were doing it, that attention to quality has clearly carried through in everything that you’ve done.

Speaker 2 (08:22):

And then you factor in that anatomical or organic shapes that you’re producing are difficult to produce other ways as well.

Speaker 1 (08:29):

The products are basically a two part assembly. So there’s a ring piece which we now have 24 sizes of and a cage piece, which now has, we now have 40 sizes of. So when you multiply those together, that’s 960 distinct size combinations that we can offer. And that also is something that just would not have worked without additive. I mean, starting a company and then building it up to the number of different sizes and skews that we have on a limited budget just would not making all of those as injection molds would’ve been totally impossible. So it’s been really a perfect use case for additive just because of the variety of human anatomy that’s out there. This

Speaker 2 (09:11):

Device, believe it or not, is probably one of the most rigorous devices that we produce because of the geometric constraints. The fact that there’s two components that have to be assembled. If you produce a number one or a number 100,000 of a component, those two pieces have to go together and your customers are buying ’em across time spans. They have to be able to connect. That’s critical. The biocompatibility is critical and the skin sensitivity is critical, and those are things that we continue to work on and optimize. But this is one of the most, if not the most rigorous products that we manufacture because it is so multifaceted. So it’s neat to think about that because it may not seem that way on the surface.

Speaker 1 (09:57):

I like that because I think one of the themes that’s come up a few times in this conversation is how it’s a product category that is, at first, it can be kind of easy to dismiss. People can think of it as superficial or people can think of it as kind of silly. But then when you dig beneath the surface a little bit, you realize that that’s not true along a number of dimensions along the dimension of the role that it plays in people’s lives and the real significance and importance that it can play in people’s lives and the joy that it can bring to people or sense of betterness that it can bring to people, but also on the technical dimension of the requirements that are needed to really create this product in the best possible way. It’s cool to hear you say how demanding it is in that way, because that’s how it feels for me as a designer and for us as a company is we’ve been there on each step of that design and manufacturing journey of seeing just how hard it is to really create the product that I envisioned at the beginning, but that it took so many iterations and so much effort to land on as a tangible item.

Speaker 2 (11:12):

We talked about your attention to detail quality and surface finish, and always wanting to be better has pushed or pulled us in some cases to develop new methods that didn’t exist, or refined methods that didn’t exist to be able to deliver that. So it’s almost as though there’s this heartbeat in our business that’s kink 3D, and it’s the core to the processes that are exclusive for your products, but it’s also like pumped this process development into many other aspects of what we do. So in some cases, we’re doing critical medical device development because you’ve pushed us to be better in develop processes to produce your products. So it’s been neat to think about that journey and how much of an influence you’ve had on where we’ve landed today and continue to drive towards.

Speaker 1 (12:04):

That’s awesome. For me, that’s one of the coolest things to hear in this conversation, and maybe that’s a message that we’ll figure out how to relate to our customers as well, that whether they knew it or not, they were really helping to push the boundaries of this technology, which has led to knock on effects that have improved production. And as you say that the biomedical world or the defense world or other industries that they wouldn’t have dreamed of.

Speaker 2 (12:27):

Well, that’s one thing. If anything, I hope is a takeaway, not just here today, but I hope that we can help you with, is cascading that message to your existing retail partners, to your future retail partners for sure, to the end users that are using this device, and there’s no way for them to have ever known that the pain and the grit and the drive that you had to have in order to develop this product so it can be worn for months and years and be safe. I hope that those folks somehow can get a sense of that and hopefully from some of this conversation. But that’s something that is a message that needs to be shared because of, I’d be surprised if anyone else has taken a 10th of the effort that you have in order to make this right.