THE INVENTABLES WORKSHOP

When Bart was considering working at Inventables we met at Starbucks and he told me he was going to retire after Inventables in about 5 years.  I remember thinking “Yea that’s fine that’s a long time from now”.  I feel like I blinked and the day arrived.  Today is that day, and is with extremely warm wishes that I announce the retirement of Bart Dring.



A living legend in the Maker Movement, Bart played a pivotal role in growing Inventables from a “Hardware Store for Designers” where we were distributing other companies materials into a manufacturer where we made our own products.

It all started when Bart invented the MakerSlide. He had the idea that a low cost open source linear bearing for CNC equipment and extremely easy to integrate into your design could be helpful in a lot of applications. After running a successful Kickstarter campaign for Makerslide, Bart was selling MakerSlide out of his garage.



Bart and I first met up at Maker Faire Detroit and he showed me the MakerSlide.  We c…

We’re so excited to finally share our new brand identity with you! As you can see, this is a big change for us. We want to share some insights into what lead us to pursue an overhaul of our look.


Inventables was a much different company when our CEO, Zach Kaplan, founded it in 2002. Our first venture was in selling kits filled with inspirational and quirky materials to R&D departments. These kits roused people to create in new ways and build new products. While most of the items from these kits are no longer available, products like our Light Diffuser Films still live on as mementos of this phase of our company.


Seeing the cool products and ideas generated by our materials kits inspired our next chapter. We transitioned into selling 3D carving machines, like X-Carve and Carvey, and built our brand around the maker community. We developed Easel to make designing and carving intuitive and accessible to everyone. Expanding our vision allowed us to bring our machines, materials, and r…