Brian Deignan, Senior Director, Injection Molding

Get to Know Brian

I'm the senior director of injection molding here at Xometry. I'm responsible for all the post-sales activity related to injection molding, urethane casting, die casting, metal extrusion, plastic extrusion, and metal stamping.

I have a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. While I was at RPI, I did a co-op internship with Schick, the razor company. That was my first real hands-on experience working in a product development environment. I was doing a lot of CAD design, as well as 3D-printed and machine prototypes, utilizing the resources of the central tooling room at the Schick facility in Connecticut. I also worked for Leviton Manufacturing Company, a big electrical device manufacturer. I was designing injection molded parts for electrical devices as well as metal stamp components. A lot of that experience directly fed into what I'm doing here at Xometry. 

At Leviton, I was in the shoes of a Xometry customer. We were doing prototype and production runs all the time, utilizing both in-house and supplier resources.

Being in the shoes of the customer helps me understand where they're coming from. Customers are likely working with a number of different vendors, so how can we position ourselves to be better? How can we give the best service that we can give? By giving quotes quickly, making sure that we're going to hit the lead time that's on the purchase order, and setting up customer expectations. 

Work That Matters

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had a startup with a PPE product come to us that was looking for a manufacturing company to help them launch their product quickly to sell into the market. That was the ClearMask. The ClearMask product was launched in the summer of 2020 via the Xometry platform. In about 12 months, we were able to produce millions of masks for the ClearMask team. Being able to see that product go from initial launch to mass production was really satisfying. We brought the customer's idea to life at a time when their product was in extremely high demand. Being able to meet the customer's needs at that scale was something that I will never forget. 

Leveraging a Global Network

At Xometry, an oil and gas customer started out using us an alternate supplier when their current supplier could not keep up with their demand. Now we've been producing diecast product for them in both India and China through our partner network. We keep costs down for them while producing products in a timeline that suits their needs. Xometry is now one of their No. 1 suppliers. 

We're also able to offer varying transportation options to this customer via both ocean freight and air freight through our shipping providers. Our shipping rates are typically very competitive because of the amount of volume that we ship globally. On top of the large production runs that we're doing both here in the U.S. and overseas in China and India, we're also delivering very fast prototype runs for our customers here in the U.S. 

The Entire Product Development Cycle

A lot of the projects we are running are larger projects for customers who are looking for real production-quality injection-molded parts. We're also doing urethane cast, diecast, plastic extrusion, and metal extrusion, all technologies requiring production or prototype tooling. We're running projects for customers that are ordering part quantities upwards of 100,000 parts, while we're also still running prototyping and bridge-tooling projects at smaller quantities. 

I love helping customers succeed. It's what keeps me going every day. Whether it's delivering small 3D-printed prototypes for somebody who's starting a business out of their garage, delivering a spaceflight part for NASA, or delivering a production run of injection-molded and diecast product for a customer building electric motorcycles, it's very satisfying.