Big ideas.
Made real.

204 3D printers help this family-owned Billings business corner an expanding market

There’s a world of product possibilities just waiting to be created at Head Concepts, the 3D, UV printing and custom design shop at 302 N. 29th St. in downtown Billings. All one needs is a little imagination and owners Chris and Tammy Head will take care of the rest, or at least, their 3D printers will.

Walk into Head Concepts and the first thing you notice is motion: a printer laying down a flute layer by layer, a much larger printer creating a planter from the bottom up, shelves of kid-painted figurines and a table full of trinkets and wearables. Even a ukulele.

The business does “a little bit of everything,” Tammy said.

The downtown storefront is open to the public from 1 to 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, where the owners take custom orders and sell 3D printing supplies such as filament — the spools of plastic tubing used for printing. There is also a computer workstation set up for customers who’d like to use the equipment to print themselves. They even host events and workshops like kid-friendly birthday parties, 3D printing pens and hosting other print and paint activities. The four active, on-display printers inside the downtown workshop is only a glimpse of Head Concepts’ printing power.

Out on Moore Lane is their “print farm,” a warehouse housing 200 printers. It’s where the company’s 11 employees assemble products, fulfill Amazon orders and run bulk production contracts for business clients. Through Amazon, the business sells thousands of Milwaukee toolbox organizers, cigar holders and Air Pod cases styled like Milwaukee tools. Yes, they’ve hit it big, it seems. Not so long ago though, it all started with one printer in the garage as a hobby.

First there was one

Chris began tinkering with 3D printing in 2019 on an early machine he had to level by hand with a sheet of paper before each print. Friends started asking him to make things, and pretty soon, he realized he might just have a business on his hands.

The business really took off in 2023, when they made a big purchase for the business — a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon 3D printer — a roughly $2,000 purchase at a time when the couple was living paycheck to paycheck. That printer is still running in the store today, with more than 10,000 hours on it.

When Chris’s print income started to equal his income for his work-from-home customer service job with Farmers Insurance, the couple decided to take the leap to full-time business owners.

One printer became three. It was when they had 50 printers crammed into their garage that they decided they needed to move the business outside the home. The couple moved into the downtown building. Then when that filled up at about 120 printers, they moved their bulk operations to a warehouse on Moore Lane and converted the downtown space into retail.

And then there were many

The family’s values shape the materials, too. Most of what Head Concepts prints is PLA, a corn-based biodegradable plastic, and the shop deliberately avoids resin printing because of its toxicity. “We have kids that are also growing up on this Earth,” Tammy said.

They also mass-produce tubes used for at-home blood tests for California-based health company Rhythm. This business partnership came along by chance, after ordering an at-home blood test themselves and found out the company 3D-printed their tubes.

Chris said he’d thought to himself, “I could do that better.” So, he called them up and proposed a partnership, and said, “Hey, I think I can do this better, cheaper, faster for you.”

The tubes are black, so it’s a color they go through a lot — and when they run out of the color black it can be a disruption to their supply chain. Hence, their next business development.

Soon, they will be making their own plastic. They are in the process of assembling their filament line. It will be a 40-foot filament production line being assembled at their Moore Lane warehouse. Clear corn-based pellets and colorant go into a large hopper, are melted and extruded through a long-heated tube, cooled through warm and then cool water baths, checked for diameter and wound onto spools ready to print. They will have full control and customizability of their products going forward and won’t have to worry about running out of product, either.

“It’s always been like a dream to own my own business,” Chris said, “and now it’s like a dream come true because I get to, you know, do what I love.”

Reproduced from the uploaded PDF for private reading. Reporting by Lillian Palmer. Photography by Amy Lynn Nelson, Billings Gazette.