MakerBot lays off 20 percent of its staff for the second time this year

MakerBot is laying off 20 percent of its staff for the second time in the last six months, citing “market dynamics” and a failure to meet “ambitious goals.” The company is also leaving one of the two buildings it occupies in Industry City, a large-scale manufacturing complex in Brooklyn.

The 3D-printing company will also be making changes to its leadership team to better “focus on [its] people and the MakerBot 3D Ecosystem.” The news was announced in a blog post by CEO Jonathan Jaglom.

“We are facing tremendous challenges at MakerBot,” Jaglom tells The Verge. “Across the board throughout the industry we are seeing a very slow growth pace in the 3D printing space, and of course MakerBot is impacted by that as well.”

This is the second round of layoffs under Jaglom since he took over as CEO earlier this year. Jaglom previously worked for Stratasys, a massive 3D-printing company that purchased MakerBot for more than $400 million in 2013.

The acquisition reportedly strained the rapidly-growing MakerBot, as parent company Stratasys set lofty financial and production goals. Bre Pettis — one of the original founders and MakerBot’s CEO at the time — left the company little more than a year later. His successor, Jenny Lawton, took over for just a few short months before leaving for an executive position within Stratasys. That’s when Jaglom came in.

“They were targets that we believed we could reach when we set them,” Jaglom says. But he also admits that the growth of the consumer 3D printing industry is slowing. “What we had predicted and planned for and hoped for is becoming very challenging,” he says.

The reorganization will not only affect MakerBot’s staff on paper, as the number of employees is now below 400, but also its physical presence. MakerBot leased spaces in Industry City not long after the acquisition, but now the company will leave one of the two buildings it occupies there — building number 1, specifically, which is the home for the company’s customer support, software, and research and development teams. Those departments will relocate to the company’s main offices in Downtown Brooklyn. However, MakerBot’s brand-new factory will remain in operations in Industry City.

Jaglom said the growth of the company and the pace of the industry at the time demanded the expansion. But as the consumer 3D-printing market’s rise has slowed, he says splitting the staff into multiple locations was affecting MakerBot’s ability to work efficiently.

“The fact that we were splintered across the organization,” Jaglom says, “caused for misalignment, miscommunication, [and a] more challenging environment for our staff to work in.” MakerBot’s global structure, where MakerBot employees answer up the chain to the respective regional sections of Stratasys, won’t see any changes.

The 3D printing industry is still very much an emerging one, at least on the consumer level, and the inherent turbulence has made MakerBot’s rapid rise a rather bumpy one. On top of that, MakerBot is currently dealing with a lawsuit that alleges the company (and Stratasys) knowingly sold faulty printing heads.

Correction: Jaglom mistakenly stated that MakerBot will be leaving “building 19” in Industry City. The company’s R&D, software, and customer service departments actually occupied “building 1.” The story has been changed to reflect this.