Design Your Own 3D Printed Lampshade: Meet the Lampshade Designer

For years, the most common email we've gotten started the same way: "I love the LOLA, but could you make one that's a little taller / wider at the bottom / less curvy / in a hexagon?" The answer was always yes — but it meant back-and-forth messages, sketches, and a custom quote. As of this month, you can skip all of that. Our new Lampshade Designer lets you shape, texture, size, and price a completely custom 3D printed pendant shade right in your browser — and watch it take form in live 3D while you work.

What the Lampshade Designer actually does

This isn't a "pick from five presets" configurator. It's the same design engine we use in the studio, opened up to you:

• Silhouette: Start from a drum, tapered, dome, bulb, or faceted profile — or switch to Custom and drag control points to sculpt necks, bellies, and flares exactly where you want them.
• Cross-section: Shades don't have to be round. Choose oval, polygon (3–8 sides), or draw your own outline for a shade that reads completely different from every angle.
• Texture: Smooth, ribbed, woven, ripple, or spiral — with depth and density sliders, plus an optional twist that wraps the whole texture around the shade.
• Size: From a cozy 12 cm bedside pendant to a 40 cm statement piece over a dining table.
• Real-time price: Every slider updates the price instantly. No quote requests, no waiting.

It only lets you design things we can actually print

Here's the part we're most proud of. Every design is checked against the physics of vase-mode 3D printing while you edit — wall angles, socket clearance, build volume, texture resolution. If a shape would sag, fold, or fail on the printer, the designer tells you before you order, in plain English, with a suggestion for fixing it. If it says "✓ vase-mode printable," we can make it. Your shade isn't a rendering of something we'll approximate later — it's the exact geometry our printers will follow.

Same materials, colors, and quality as our shop pieces

Your custom design prints in the same PLA we use for our bestselling pendants (PETG available too), in 30+ colors and specialty finishes — silk, matte, marble, wood-fill, even glow. Choose a Standard finish for everyday value or Premium for our finest 0.4 mm layers. Add an E26 or E12 socket fitting, an optional vented top cap (it looks great and saves weight), and a plug-in or hardwire cord kit if you need one. Then it's printed to order in our Connecticut studio, hand-inspected, and shipped tracked — exactly like everything else we make.

Yours alone

Every design gets a unique design code attached to your order, which means we can reprint your shade perfectly if you ever want a second one — but nobody else gets it. We don't add customer designs to our catalog. If you design something beautiful, it's yours.

Try it in 60 seconds

Open the Lampshade Designer, grab the height slider, and pick a texture. That's genuinely all it takes to see something you designed spinning in 3D with a real price under it. If you'd rather start from something proven, browse our pendant collection first — and if you already have a 3D model file of your own, our instant quote tool is still the fastest way to price it.

Questions about a design you're working on? Send it over — a real maker (hi, it's Rich) reads every message.