(Watch Cary Sherburne’s full interview with Marleen Vogelaar here.)

Marleen Vogelaar is not new to launching groundbreaking technologies into the marketplace. In 2008, she co-Founded Shapeways, a leading online 3D printing marketplace and community. In six years, Shapeways went from the simple ideal of making 3D printing more accessible to all to a thriving 150+-employee company delivering thousands of 3D creations to its customers all over the globe on a daily basis. It provides a platform where more than 20,000 entrepreneurs sell their products on their marketplace.

Now she has turned her attention to the textiles and apparel industry, an industry that admittedly is ripe for innovation and has only recently witnessed a greater appetite for change, especially as a result of the pandemic’s negative impact on supply chains and changing consumer demands. As an industrial engineer by trade who started her career in paper manufacturing and M&A, Vogelaar founded Ziel in mid-2015 with the goal of delivering a transformative and innovative platform, one that rethinks the traditional apparel and retail model altogether. Her Shapeways experience clearly demonstrated the business value and sustainability benefits of on-demand manufacturing, which she describes as “making exactly what the customer wants and only making what is really needed, which means you don’t have the waste in capital or the physical waste of making too much.”