As a thank you to the employees, we bought a 3D printer for the office for Christmas 2018, designed for printing parts for drones and other toys, such as special tracks for Lego. It was great fun! But aside from gaming, we found that our printer - like the vast majority of other FFF printers - does not have a network connection, so we have to go around with an SD card to access it. And this is where our aversion to unnecessary work and the programmer's belief that it has to be done more simply came into play.

Right in January 2019, we discovered OctoPrint and set everything up to reduce the number of steps around the offices. Unfortunately, not everything is solved perfectly in OctoPrint, so we thought we'd help improve it. We had ideas for useful features and at the same time realized that many businesses and organizations would like to be able to manage their printers in one place. OctoPrint cannot do this, it is always tied to one printer. We thus got an idea for an interesting product, precisely at the time when we wanted to invest in development after a while. We did not stop at market or competition analysis, cost and revenue calculations or product specification, but we started from what would suit us and what would be easily scalable to multiple printers. We named the product Karmen because it is an easy-to-pronounce name and at the same time it is a strawberry variety. The strawberry — technically fragaria — gave our company its name earlier.