The kid behind the printer
It started with a very bad dragon.
I'm a Year 8 student in New Zealand, and I design toys. Every one of them starts as a pencil sketch, becomes a 3D model on my tablet, and comes off my printer as something you can actually hold. This is the whole story, including the parts that went wrong.
The first sketch (and the first mess)
I've always drawn things in the back of my school books. Not landscapes or portraits — little creatures with too many legs, boats with fins, robots holding snacks. For years they just stayed there, flat on the page, and I'd forget about most of them by the next term.
Then we got a second-hand 3D printer. It arrived in a box with a couple of screws missing and a manual written for somebody who already knew what they were doing. It took a whole weekend to put together. My first ever print was supposed to be a dragon, and it came out as a lumpy grey blob with both back legs fused into one — it fell over every single time I stood it up.
I printed that dragon eleven more times before it stood on its own. Wrong temperature, wobbly table, a horn that drooped over into a comma. That's honestly the part I like best now: a design isn't finished when I think it looks good on screen, it's finished when the printer stops arguing with me.
From notebook to shelf
No dates, because I genuinely lost track. But this is roughly the order it all happened in.
01
Where it started
A notebook full of sketches nobody had asked for, drawn mostly in the last ten minutes of class. Some of those pages are still my best ideas.
02
The first printer
A second-hand machine on a desk that wobbled, and a long stretch of failed prints while I worked out what every setting actually did.
03
The first real toy
A pocket-sized dragon that finally came out clean, stood up by itself, and survived a whole week of being carried around in a school bag.
04
Letting other kids in
Friends started handing me their own drawings to model, and their ideas were better than mine. That's where the Dream Lab came from.
05
Opening the shop
Six designs I'm genuinely happy with, a promise of NZ$1 to UNICEF Aotearoa from every order, and this website.
Where the toys get made
The workshop is a desk in the corner of my room. The printer sits on a paving slab with a foam mat underneath, because otherwise you can hear it through the whole house at eleven at night. Around it: filament in a sealed tub with a bag of silica gel, a set of calipers, sandpaper in three grades, a jar of colour test cubes, and the notebook. There's a lamp aimed straight at the print bed so I can check the first layer without lying on the floor.
A print day usually starts the night before, when I slice the model and set it going. The first layer decides everything — if that goes down wrong, the next eight hours are wasted. Small pieces like the tug boat take a couple of hours; the triceratops takes most of a day, so that one gets started in the morning and I try not to think about it until after school. When it's done the real work begins: snapping off supports, sanding the seams, running a thumb over every edge to check nothing is sharp, and holding it up to the window to look for gaps. Anything that doesn't pass goes in the reject box on the shelf. That box is fuller than I'd like, and it's the reason the ones I post out are good.
What I try to stick to
Made by hand, by a kid
Every design here is drawn, modelled and printed by me — nothing is bought in and re-labelled.
A parent handles the boring adult parts: the money, the postage and the emails.
Honest about the limits
These are 3D printed toys. Up close you can see the print lines, and no two come out perfectly identical.
If a print takes longer than I said or a design isn't ready, I'll tell you instead of pretending.
Give a bit back
NZ$1 from every order goes to UNICEF Aotearoa, and every donation gets published on the Give Back page.
A small number honestly reported beats a big number I can't show you a receipt for.
Come see what's on the shelf
Have a look at the toys I've made so far — or send me one of your own drawings and I'll try to make it real.