How Harlequin Is Meeting Tight Deadlines for Hermès, Dior and Louis Vuitton With SLA Printing

Harlequin’s schemes are meant to create a flawless illusion of an exciting world pedestrians can’t resist visiting. For this unified look, fittings and fixtures play a critical role. 

The big problem? “We don't live in a world with a lot of options on fittings and fixtures anymore. There used to be a lot more available, but even big companies like Häfele don't really hold stock anymore in the same way. They have certain fittings and that's it,” Garside describes. But those one-size-fit-all-solutions rarely matched Harlequin’s high standards and unique designs.

That’s why Garside is happy to be able to print the parts he needs, whenever he needs them. 

But this doesn’t mean Harlequin has abandoned mass-produced parts. On the contrary, the flexibility of 3D printing lets them leverage the full potential of cheap stock items and easily upcycle them, saving production costs. “What I love about the 3D printing process is that you've got the option to style something that you wouldn’t be able to use otherwise. Sometimes you want to just utilize the off-the-shelf hardware and now we can dress it up, creating a beautiful skin for it, so we can use it in our windows,” Garside says.

The flexibility of 3D printing is also saving Harlequin valuable time they would otherwise spend searching for parts which might not even exist. “Whatever it is you want to source, you’ve got to find it first. With 3D printing we can either skip that process entirely or cut it down to a minimum, as we can take a part that’s close to what we want and adapt it,“ Garside explains. This enables Harlequin to execute designs no matter what parts are available, increasing their credibility with high-value clients.

SLA 3D printing is known for its great freedom of design and high level of detail, which Harlequin leverages for geometrically complex and highly customized transition pieces. With 3D printing, Harlequin can create extraordinary displays that were once unthinkable, too cumbersome, or too expensive to execute. “3D printing is very useful for creating smooth transitions between objects. We can easily print pieces that are quite complex, and would request way too much manual sculpting otherwise,” Garside explains. 

For a long time, the designers of Harlequin had to find a perfect balance when it came to the thickness of those transitional pieces or fixtures. On one hand, every added inch would increase the stability needed to hold pieces in place. On the other, it makes purely structural parts observable. The mechanical properties of Tough 2000 Resin make it possible to decrease the thickness of supporting structures, making them less visible without compromising on strength.

Garside’s colleagues receive urgent requests daily due to the ever-changing trends in retail and fashion. Ever since building their in-house printer fleet, they can meet these demands, easily printing overnight. “Everything comes and goes quickly and I never know what will happen tomorrow. But with 3D printing, we have got the flexibility to respond as quickly.” 

Before 3D printing, Harlequin would have had to wait for external poly sculpting or printing services, which would take up to weeks to deliver results. Today they are fully independent and printing critical parts within a day, securing the success of high-value projects. “I've had situations where mistakes happened and we've needed to create, for example, fittings on the day of delivery. We didn’t have time to shop those parts or source them, but we managed to print them,” Garside says. 

The availability of a large printer fleet has already saved projects. Garside vividly remembers one project for Louis Vuitton, for which he needed to prepare a crucial part within 24 hours. “It would've been a week at least to get this part sent by an external sculptor. We would've missed the deadline. It's an example of something where it wouldn't have been possible to deliver this before. But the fact that we used the fast Draft Resin and we've got the number of printers we've got, I was able to hit the ground running and get [Louis Vuitton] something printed out for the next day.”

If you want to catch the customers' eye, you sometimes simply need to be big, bold, and colorful. That's why Harlequin designed a pixelated horse, which would never have jumped into the real world without the help of 3D printing. Garside remembers the challenge: “The horse was almost life-size, and we didn’t have a lot of time.” Their typical approach of sculpting would have been way too expensive and time-consuming.

For big projects like this 2.5 meters long horse Garside loves the extended build size of the Form 3L, which makes it possible to print pieces up to 33.5 × 20 × 30 cm. While industrial printers capable of printing at this scale can be very expensive, it’s possible to purchase a fleet of Form 3Ls for the same price. “The ability to simply print different bits simultaneously meant that we could do something far, far, far quicker than anybody else we would be sending it to,” Garside says. “Those bits get glued or fixed together, sanded, finished, painted, done. It’s incredibly quick and easy.”

In the end, Harlequin saved more than two weeks of lead time by leveraging the printing capacity of their in-house fleet and assembling the parts. 

Harlequin is not only leveraging the compound build volume of their printer fleet to quickly create large pieces, but also large amounts of small pieces. To promote their recently opened workshop in New York they printed hundreds of hotdogs with their name on them. Just before the planned start of the campaign, they realized that the dots of the letter I were missing. Thanks to their Form 3L fleet it took Garside less than an hour to print all the missing pieces.

In addition to printing models and fixtures, Harlequin uses its printer fleet to print tooling and jigs.  The great flexibility of 3D printing and Formlabs’ material library lets Harlequin leverage the advantages of additive manufacturing to optimize the tools in their workshop.  

For their decorations, Harlequin often needs a larger series of individual pieces in a short amount of time. One of the processes they use to create such parts is vacuum forming, which uses a tool to quickly and cost-effectively produce large quantities of thin-walled thermoplastic parts. 

Preparing forming tools with machining  has not only been very expensive but also a time-consuming process, impossible to use in cases with very tight deadlines. “If I’d have vacuum forming tools made in aluminum or machined by a toolmaker, the cost would be insane. We would sometimes wait two weeks each time a tool needed a small adaptation,” Garside says. 

Today Garside and his colleagues use the heat-resistant Rigid 10K Resin to quickly iterate tools for vacuum forming. “Rigid 10K [Resin] is perfect, when you need really fine details and absolutely accurate stuff.” With this, they reduce waiting times, saving production costs and making the best use of every task's best-fitting machine.

Garside is happy about the great independence Harlequin gained from 3D printing, letting them flexibly solve problems in almost no time. Whenever his team needs pieces, he is now convinced that they will quickly find a way to prepare those, whether it’s a jig, tool, model, or anything else.