Show HN: Lulim Jewelry – Design and 3D print your own custom wedding band | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Lulim Jewelry – Design and 3D print your own custom wedding band

lulimjewelry.com

49 pointsdoctoboggan34 comments

Hi everyone! I built Lulim Jewelry after spending some time figuring out how to design and 3D print my own wedding band.

My day job was in the 3D printing industry and I knew how far the technology had come so I busted out the CAD tools and designed a ring with my wife's fingerprint on it. I thought the processes could be much easier and thus Lulim was born.

The website is built with Vue.js, Canvas.js, and Three.js. Unfortunately those last two can be somewhat resource intensive so I'd love to get feedback from others regarding performance on different devices, OSes, and browsers. I decided to do as much work in the client side as possible so that this website is cheap to keep running. I wanted my costs to scale with sales and to minimize any recurring monthly fees. This is my first real Vue app so I am sure there are things that could be better!

Feedback on the company idea, site layout, tech stack or anything else is appreciated!

If anyone is interested in buying a ring shoot me an email (jack @ <companydomain.com>) and I can give you a decent discount.

Why is the custom design only on the inside? I think I'd be much more interested if it were on the outside.

I personally liked the idea of a simple classic ring on the outside with the personalization only on the inside, but I acknowledge that is just my preference.

I do plan on adding outside customization soon but I wanted to launch ASAP.

If you are interested I can pretty easily make a ring with the design on the outside for you.

You are smart to launch with an MVP that does the one thing so well. Mad props.

Thanks! This still took me longer than I had initially thought to get out.

This is such a great idea and the pieces look fantastic. The price point seems right too, and I'm sure you'll get plenty of customers. Hopefully sometime in the future you can expand to bracelets or pendants, I think this market is overdue for something new.

I browsed through the site on my s9, and scrolling seemed to hang pretty badly, I'm guessing theres a bit too much going on client side.

Thanks for the kind words! I definitely plan on expanding to other pieces of jewelry. It would be pretty easy to use the same techniques I've developed so far to generate pendants or other customized jewelry pieces.

Thanks for the feedback regarding scrolling. I know there is work I can do to make it better (I suspect three.js/webgl is the main culprit). Mobile is even harder, although I have tried to make sure the site is at least browsable on my iPhone.

This is a super neat idea. I have made wedding bands for friends over the years, I usually provided a stainless steel band the right size to wear for a week or two and found that often we would tune the sizes by 1/4-1/2 size or thickness. For expensive bands, it might be neat to offer a trial size for a reasonable fee since wedding rings can have a long life.

When ordering on my site I have an option for "I dont know my size", in which case I send the customer a ring sizing kit. I've heard others say it's important to wear the ring for some time so thats something I should take into account.

One thing I've considered is adding an option to order a brass version of the ring first so the customer can see how the design will come out and test the fit for a few days.

BTW: The name "Lulim" is the Arameic for spiral, in Modern Hebrew there are words like "לולין" ("Lulyan" / acrobat) that take this root)

See: http://www.de-bruyn.it/english/0557_lulim.shtml

I choose lulim as the name after lu-lim, the ancient Sumerian name for Saturn[0] (the planet with rings!)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_planet

Interesting. There's no way they could have seen the rings back then. I wonder if there's a connection.

The name doesn't refer to the rings, e.g. see "Saturn as the 'Sun of Night' in Ancient Near Eastern Tradition" in January 2013 Aula Orientalis 31(2):279-321:

> In addition, a star list identifies En-me-šár-ra with LU.LIM, the “deer-star”, while a mid-7th century Neo-Assyrian lexical text listing the seven traditional planets equates LU.LIM with UDU.IDIM.SAG.UŠ (kayamānu), the planet Saturn.

Other sources translate it simply as 'ram'.

Sumerian is a linguistic isolate: no one has ever been able to demonstrate a relationship with any other language. Which is itself pretty mysterious!

Akkadian, which displaced it, is a Semitic language, which became the lingua franca of the Ancient Near East. Aramaic is somewhere between a relative and a descendant; more the former, Akkadian stands to Aramaic very roughly as Latin stands to English.

So... probably not? I don't know if any Sumerian loanwords have been identified in Akkadian, but it would surprise me if there were absolutely none, the Akkadians adopted cuneiform to write their language, and their empire was the successor to the Sumerian states.

If anyone can point me at resources on the subject, I'd enjoy that, I've always found that part of history fascinating.

In modern Hebrew Lulim means "chicken coops" :)

Oh no! I hope any of my potential Hebrew speaking customers have positive experiences with chicken coops.

I actually checked the About page to see if this is an Israeli project. Maybe someone started this business in an old chicken coop in their backyard or something :)

There is no luckier sign for a new venture than its name unexpectedly turning out to have a weird connotation in some other language. Congratulations!

Haha thanks! I asked my wife why she didn’t tell me lulim meant chicken coop and she said they didn’t talk about chickens much in Hebrew school.

/offtopic

@fortan77, That's fascinating! How do you know this? Do you speak Arameic? I happen to speak Arameic, but it's so crazy to find someone here on HN who might speak Arameic.

Anyone who has formally studied the Talmud knows it, at least in the context of the Talmud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud#Comparison_of_style_and...

Hey Jack, nice work! I love the idea, this is an area where customization is very valuable and automated customization like this can save a lot of time and headache.

What are you using to generate your geometry? Any plans on doing other jewelry types? One thing I could also imagine people wanting is delivery of SLA-printed prototype rings to get a better idea of the look and feel.

Thanks! To generate the geometry I first generate a bitmap image texture using fabric.js on the client side. I can then import this texture into blender and use it as a displacement map on a ring blank. I apply the displacement to the geometry and export as STL for 3d printing. Blender is scriptable so this can all be automated (although it isn't yet).

I do hope to add other jewelry types. My next idea is necklace pendants with silhouettes (I think new mothers would be the target audience there)

I have considered adding an upsell of a brass print so the customer can see how it looks and feels. I don't want to do plastics as they print using a different process and will have a different look. Brass is cheap enough that I think adding a $29 add-on to the gold or silver ring isn't too hard to swallow.

Yeah fair enough. You can get SLA parts electroplated, although it will still be more matte than glossy unless they are polished, which would increase the price, and it would probably be cheaper to just do the brass casting option at that point.

Also- one of my coworkers recently got a custom wedding band and he went through a similar process to the one you went through of looking at vendors, trying to find the right material, etc. He wanted a pretty customized ring, and one of the things he added was the embossed outline of a lake that had special significance to him. Not sure how many people would have similar requests, but it would be cool to allow something similar. Maybe just have the option to upload a black and white picture and use that to create an embossed feature.

You can upload any image on my site. I convert to black/white and give you sliders to adjust brightness, smoothness, or do edge detection. Currently I only offer engraving rather than embossing but it wouldn't be too hard to emboss instead.

A custom wedding band is a great option. I made one with a design we sketched in the sand, modelled myself, printed via shapeways. Unique, affordable, easy to replace... Much better than spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a shiny stone :) The design can be tricky, so great to see another tool to make this easier!

Cool! I am using both Shapeways and i.materialise right now. They both seem to have the same quality (very high), but i.materialize is a little more expensive. They do however offer white label drop shipping which is nice so eventually I will probably transition to only using them.

The waveform option looks pretty cool. What is the best way to play it back? I could see it being a very sentimental reminder in case something tragic happens.

Unfortunately I don't think there is enough information in there to actually play back. That ring was made from a screenshot of the Apple Voice Memos app.

Ultimately I want to build voice recording into my site and then I would include with the ring delivery a link to play back the recorded audio.

Great project. What kind of machine are you printing these on? I assume an SLA. Is there a specific type of sla that melts out easily for casting?

Site's bust. Looks like Vue isn't loading for me.

Seems to be working for me, can you share a screenshot of the problem with me?

Ah, I've seen this before - it's an SSL problem, unrecognised issuer for jsdelivr.net.

Great idea. How do you deal with resizing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com