Business · Live
HiddenAboard
My small business: numbered, collectible 3D-printed ducks made for cruise ships. I design and print every duck and run the store and the tooling behind it.
Entrepreneurship3D printingE-commercePythonBlender
The business
Hiding rubber ducks for other passengers to find is a popular tradition on cruise ships. HiddenAboard makes numbered, collectible 3D-printed ducks made to be hidden and found. The tagline is "Made to be found."
What I built
- Product design: I model the ducks in Blender and engrave text into them with Shrinkwrap-based modeling, then print them in PETG on my Creality Hi Combo.
- Store: I launched the online store on Big Cartel at royalhiddenducks.com with all five policy pages written, and set up the brand's Instagram.
- Pricing engine (Python): a quoting tool built on a "Duck Unit," meaning the printer time for one base-size duck. Every product and custom order is priced by the same formula, using real geometry measured from the duck's STL file, so prices track what each order actually costs to print.
- Licensed asset toolkit (Python CLI): a tool that finds and downloads open-source web design libraries from GitHub, checks each license, and refuses anything that isn't safe for commercial use. It also outputs paste-ready code for the Big Cartel theme editor.
- Site build script: inlines web fonts into the storefront page so it works within content-security restrictions.
What it shows: running a real business end to end, from product design and manufacturing to pricing, the storefront, policies, and marketing, while keeping licensing and compliance in mind.
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