The collaboration between INITIAL, a Prodways Group company, and L’Oréal has paved the way to manufacturing final material parts using 3D-printed moulds. INITIAL accelerates the development of injection-moulded parts using plastic additive manufacturing and its new solution: 3D Molding®.

The fast marketing of new products is a constant challenge to meet consumers’ specific and wide-ranging demands. This is a major issue in the cosmetics industry.
INITIAL and L’Oréal have combined their expertise to accelerate the development of injection-moulded parts. INITIAL and L’Oréal chose to collaborate to enable them to produce “final material” parts, in a record time of two weeks and at a limited cost, paving the way for accelerated approval and iteration processes for the development of new packaging.

Injection-moulded final material parts with 3D printing

As Yvon Gallet, Initial’s Chairman, explains: “We produce the 3D Printing mould and the final material parts are then directly injection-moulded. With our 3D printing and injection expertise, we were best placed to develop this unique solution. It is aimed at designers in the development phase and complements our traditional machining and injection solutions. It is an innovative alternative that meets the needs of manufacturers, like L’Oréal, that could benefit from this technological advance to reduce their time to market.”

The synergy of these skills enabled to develop this new solution quickly: 14 resin test molds were needed, plus 20 injection-moulding test runs and several hundred moulded parts. This marriage of machine and material comes from combining Prodways Technologies’ patented MOVINGLight® technology and Prodways Materials’ PLASTCure Rigid 10500 resin. This resin guarantees extreme accuracy and excellent resistance to injection-moulding constraints.
INITIAL, the leading French producer of additive-manufactured parts, a Prodways Group subsidiary since 2015, was able to offer this innovation to the leading beauty product manufacturer thanks to Prodways Group integrated offer:

  • 3D printing and injection-moulding expertise with INITIAL
  • Custom and innovative materials with Prodways Technologies and Prodways Materials
  • Assistance from start to finish of the solution development process from Prodways Conseil