Manufacturing
Traditional manufacturing has a dirty secret: it only works if you want thousands of the same thing. Injection moulding, casting and tooling-based production carry setup costs that can run to tens of thousands of pounds before a single unit exists, which prices out anyone who needs fifty units, or five hundred, or exactly one. Low volume manufacturing is the answer to that gap, and it's one of the core services we run at Nexform.
Low volume manufacturing is production in small batches, typically anywhere from a single unit to around a thousand, using processes that don't require dedicated tooling. At Nexform that means industrial-grade 3D printing at production scale: FDM for strong, functional parts, resin for fine detail and smooth finishes, backed by a full post-processing line that takes parts to a professional standard.
Because the "tool" is a digital file, the economics change completely. There's no mould to amortise, so making 50 units doesn't demand you order 5,000. Batches are repeatable to the same specification every time, and updating the design between runs costs nothing but the file revision.
Bridging prototype and mass production. You've validated the design and orders are coming in, but you're not ready to commit to tooling. Low volume runs let you sell real product, learn from real customers and fund the scale-up.
Products that will never need thousands. Specialist equipment, industry-specific accessories, niche tools. Plenty of profitable products serve markets of hundreds, and batch manufacturing at that scale is exactly what we're set up for. Some of our longest-standing clients order custom and off-the-shelf parts from us on repeat, batch after batch.
Pilots, special editions and campaigns. Limited runs for product launches, branded pieces for events, promotional items produced in the hundreds. We've manufactured campaign runs for national brands where every unit had to be identical and camera-ready.
Replacement and legacy parts. Combined with our reverse engineering service, low volume manufacturing keeps older equipment alive, reproducing discontinued components in exactly the quantity needed.
Production parts have to survive the real world, so material choice matters. We manufacture in everything from standard and plant-based plastics through to carbon fibre-filled nylons, engineering-grade resins and flexible elastomers, and we'll guide you to the right one for impact resistance, UV exposure, food-adjacent use or visual clarity.
Finishing is done in-house: sanding, vapour smoothing, wet spray painting, media tumbling and full assembly. Parts leave us production-ready, not printer-fresh.
Our whole approach to manufacturing scales with you. There's no minimum order quantity, just a £50 minimum order value, and most batches ship within 3 to 5 working days depending on size. Start with one, order fifty when you're ready, come back for the next batch when they sell. We're an Essex manufacturing company serving clients across the whole of the UK, and repeat production is where we quietly do our best work.
Need parts made in the quantity you actually need? Talk to us about your first batch.
Written by
Founder and owner of Nexform, leading every project from first enquiry to finished piece.
