The Beginning
I'd been considering making this business for a few years but it all actually started late at night on the 8th of March, 2023, but let's go a little further back. A few days earlier, I was due to go to year 7 camp, and I printed some little fidgets for my cabinmates. Once I arrived at camp, everyone really loved them, and were playing with them the whole time, it was all great. Back to the 8th - When I was being picked up at the end of the camp, one of my friends that was in my cabin came up to me and my parents to say that I should start a 3D printing business. So that was the final push I needed. I then got home, and got straight onto the computer, and at 8:45 pm I started creating a website on Google Sites. By 1:04 am I had made a website with a few pages, a newsletter, and a form to buy the Gyroid Fidget, the item I printed for my cabinmates, I had designed, printed and laminated a few small paper business cards. After a few really late nights, I had a really nice little website! You can't buy anything through there anymore, but I'll put the link to the finalised design of the google site here.

The Move to Wix
Once I realised I could take this seriously, I moved the website to Wix (Link here). That meant I could finally do payments and customers can shop like they would on a normal site rather than google forms! It was a great time, Wix was a really good platform, but a few issues became apparent later on.

Markets
Website income was slow, because not many people knew of Aiden's 3D Printing. So we decided to try out DownTown Markets! I got myself a Square Reader, and we did really well! So eventually after a few markets I bought a Square Terminal, which made the process even easier! After the December markets, I had saved enough to buy myself a Gaming PC! (If you're interested in my seeing my rig and it's specs just ask :P)

The Move to Square
We had set up the Square POS with all of the products, and it was super easy to use, and we could see analytics of sales (I love data) and it was just making the market process so much easier. The Wix site had been falling behind in updates and it was a hassle to manage two platforms for stock and products. I tried a few code solutions but it just wouldn't work! So we looked into the Square Online concept, and we worked out that it was even cheaper than Wix! So in January 2025 we moved to Square!

The Great Shopify Migration
Is this getting old yet? Yes yes I know, I said Square was the best, but that doesnt matter. Square gave me an unpleasant surprise, customers can't select to pay on pick up! So we took the advice we were given and looked into Shopify a bit more. While a little more expensive, it turned out so much better than Square, but we still faced one problem. POS. We switched to a Square Register for markets, and we weren't going to throw away our Square POS systems, their Point of Sale is so much simpler. To get around this, a little code (with two APIs that actually work) was all that was needed to synchronise all our stock!
So here we are, on Shopify!