Business View Magazine | February 2020

53 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2020 Where new products are born I t’s a tale of life lessons, faith, and three engineers blessed with the skills and drive to forge a path in advanced manufacturing. Based in Hoagland, Indiana, Peridot Inc. is a visionary family business established in 1997 by David E. Hockemeyer and his sons, Brian and David J. (Dave), at a time when the emerging technology of rapid prototyping (3D printing) was starting to gain practical application. The brothers were engineers with experience in the polymer and metal casting industries, and their dad had 37 years of diverse engineering experience under his belt with a large truck OEM. Together, these three engineers saw the myriad of possibilities for 3D printing technology in the product and tooling fields. So, they wrote a business plan, managed to acquire some financial backing from the local bank to accompany their own investments, and dove right in. An impactful event earlier that same year, the unexpected and sad passing of a third son, Jonathan, had made the family realize just how short and fragile life can be. Time was not to be wasted. In his honor, the company was named Peridot (pair-uh-doe) – a semi-precious mineral and birthstone for the month of August, the month Jonathan was born. Peridot’s company president, Dave Hockemeyer, recalls, “We started with one LOM and one FDM machine and 1,500 sq. ft. of office space. Our business plan was to use this new technology to print models that engineers could design on the screen but rarely were able to evaluate it until it got to production. We saw an opening in northeast Indiana and the Great Lakes region for such a technology that was only around in Chicago and Detroit. For a couple years, we printed only 3D models, which ultimately led to customers saying, ‘Thanks for the model, now can we have ten more, but a little bit tougher?’” That’s how Peridot migrated into the process of using low-pressure polyurethanes to produce cost-effective functional components. PERIDOT, INC.