About NearMade
Why does a custom 3D print take two weeks to arrive from overseas — when someone three streets away has a printer sitting idle most of the day?
We couldn't find a good answer. So we built NearMade.
The 3D printing industry has an odd shape. On one end: giant overseas factories turning out thousands of identical items. On the other: passionate hobbyists printing whatever they want, for themselves.
Somewhere in the middle is the person who just wants a custom plant pot, or a toy for their kid, or a replacement part for a drawer that no longer exists on the market. They don't fit neatly into either world.
NearMade is built for that person — and for the maker around the corner who'd love to help them.
Local isn't just a marketing word for us. It's the whole mechanism. It's why your order can be ready tomorrow instead of in two weeks. It's why the person who made it might walk the same streets as you. It's why, if something isn't right, a fix is never far away.
We started in Dublin because it's where we are — and because Dublin's maker community is quietly brilliant. Small workshops, enthusiastic hobbyists, people who stay up late dialling in their first-layer calibration. We're proud to work with them.
Long term, we want every city to have its own version of NearMade. But we're in no rush to get there before we've got Dublin right.
It started with a frustrating experience: wanting a simple custom print and finding the only options were a two-week overseas delivery or hunting down a local maker on obscure forums. There had to be a better way.
We spent time talking to makers across Dublin — people with Bambulabs and Prusas running in spare bedrooms and garages. Almost all of them said the same thing: 'I'd love to take orders, I just don't want to deal with the admin.'
We launched quietly with a small catalogue and a handful of makers. The first orders taught us more than any planning session could. Customers wanted to know who made their item. Makers wanted flexibility, not quotas. We listened.
We're just getting started — expanding the catalogue and welcoming new makers, but deliberately. We'd rather be excellent in Dublin than mediocre everywhere. Quality and community come before growth.
We're not a marketplace with global ambitions. We're building something deliberately small — tight neighbourhoods, short distances, real faces. Every order stays within a few kilometres of the person who placed it.
Nothing is printed until someone wants it. No warehouse, no overproduction, no items destined for landfill. It's a more honest way to make things, and it matters to us.
Our makers aren't gig workers or fulfilment centres. They're hobbyists, tinkerers, and craftspeople who happen to have great printers. We want them to thrive — not just to process orders.
24–48 hours isn't a marketing promise — it's only possible because our makers are local. When the person printing your order lives nearby, tomorrow is actually achievable.
NearMade is a small team. We don't have a PR department or a ping-pong table. What we do have is a genuine belief that the way things get made locally is worth fixing — and a stubborn determination to do it properly.
We answer our own emails. We talk to our makers directly. When something goes wrong with an order, we find out why. It's not scalable in the traditional sense, but it's the only way we know how to build something worth using.
If you've got a question, a complaint, or just want to say hello — we're at hello@nearmade.site. We'll write back.