Fab Lab Saigon

Fab Lab Saigon was built in April 2014 by 5 passionate makers. Hoang – Anh, the founder, had discovered Fab Labs in France, and wanted to strengthen the maker community in Vietnam.

So she decided to set up the lab in her own house, in Saigon. During the first year, the team of passionates works with one computer. The first challenge was for them to participate to the space robotics NASA challenge. They did and were awarded at the international level. With the money from the competition they bought their first 3D printer. Makers in the city started to be aware of the place and to join, mostly to learn by working on their projects.

The main mission of Fab Lab Saigon is to build and spread the maker spirit in Vietnam. They focus a lot on providing workshops to children and adults and help other Fab Labs or makerspaces to set up, sharing their knowledge and sending material. They launched recently the mobile Fab Lab program, and sent their team all over the country to teach school’s teachers about digital fabrication, STEAM and the power of learning by making.

More than 700 makers have crossed the door of the lab since its creation. Today 30 makers are coming every week, to attend workshops or work on their projects. According to Nhan (the lab director), 70% of the members are students (from 14 to 22 years old), 20% are foreigner hobbyists, and 10% are entrepreneurs.

The lab communicates a lot on social networks, and benefits from a strong press cover in Vietnam, making it easier for people to get to know about the lab.

40% of the students are coming on a regular basis, working on school projects, or on competitions such as the famous Young Maker Vietnam, or to the Intel ISEF.

Users are in general coming by curiosity, they want to know more about 3D printing, laser cutting… They start with a small project and get familiar with the lab, the tools and its potential. They are driven by the will to learn how to use the machines, and see the potential to express their creativity.

The lab’s team is really aware of the need to “evangelize” the country about Fab Labs. That is why they dedicated a lot of their resources to start the “mobile Fab Lab Vietnam”, and go in cities to teach people about it. Their main objective is to help schools to start mini Fab Labs in their own buildings.

Fab Lab Saigon defines itself as a social business but is registered as a private company under the Vietnamese law. The lab was initially launched with 20 K$ investment, fully boostraped by the founders. 80% of the initial amount was used to recruit the first employees, and 20% to buy the first machines (3D printer and computer).

In 2017, it generated 32K€ of revenues mainly driven by the IPP grant (70%), the co-working space and the events and workshops. The lab is launching a wide variety of services for 2017, such as the fabstore, prototyping as a service…

Regarding the costs, the annual budget of the lab is 56K€, 70% of salaries, 20% for machines uses and 10% of operational costs.

In the near future, the lab would like to build an offer to bring the workshops outside of its wall, directly into schools, and expand their mobile Fab Lab activities. Also it is looking for mentorship to run the business part of the lab and help them to structure their activities to expand them in an effective way.

Today the team of Fab Lab Saigon counts 7 employees. 1 founder, 1 director, 1 community manager, 1 fabstore manager, 1 engineering expert, 1 student evangelist and 1 marketing manager. At the beginning, the staff changed a lot as the lab was in its infancy, but it’s stable for the past 2 years.

The team focuses a lot on building educational content and workshops. They take place every month in the lab. The most frequent are the STEAM workshops, usually attended by students; they also offer technical workshops to learn how to use the machines.

Apart from workshops, the organization of the lab is based on freedom, and project owners can ask for advice to the team, but have no obligations.

In the future, the Fab Lab wants to bring the workshops out of the labs to schools and universities. They also want to provide workshops for hardware startups to help them to build their company.

As part of their evangelist mission, the lab organizes events such as hackathons, and creates partnerships (NAM SON, US consulate, UGCVF) to help its development.

The fabstore, launched in 2016, provides all materials needed by the makers on demand.

The team documents the lab activities (events, workshops, prototyping) mostly using google drive, but all documentation is for internal purpose only. The members are free to decide if they want to document their projects or not.

For their workshops, the team uses a lot of open source content on github, hackaday, and are as well contributors.