Prometheus Lights

Prometheus Lights is a premium EDC (Everyday Carry) brand that designs and manufactures a variety of best-in-class products such as flashlights, pens, keychains, and the world's highest precision spinning tops. The company is constantly looking for ways to optimize manufacturing operations and reduce lead times to keep pace with sales while creating time for new product development. Kappa Keychains are Prometheus Lights’ top product by volume, but are a relatively low-revenue item. As demand for this product increased, the tedious assembly operations failed to scale, becoming problematic and expensive. The team realized that they needed to automate some of the labor-intensive parts of the process.

The first improvement they made was building a custom pneumatic tool to automatically insert canted coil springs. The Markforged Mark Two was perfect for this job, printing the tooling perfectly on the first try. They were able to go from CAD design to completed production tool in two days instead of weeks without interrupting production. As Jason Hui, owner of prometheus lights said: “The real strength of the Markforged 3D printer is getting the prints you want on the first try, which is the major failing of other printers we've tried.” The finished tool turned a 15-second process requiring semi-skilled labor to a 3-second unskilled task that everyone wants to do.