About Minted Prints

Minted Prints is a small operation making STL files for cookie cutters. The catalogue exists because of a single moment in 2022. A plastic cookie cutter snapped in half mid-bake, three weeks before Christmas. An hour of frustration that night turned into a 3D-printed replacement. The replacement worked. Three years later, this is what it became.

How it started

The founder is a home baker, not a 3D-printing professional. The first replacement cutter was designed in Tinkercad, badly, and took four attempts to print correctly. By the third one we had a working cutter; by the tenth we had a small set; by the fiftieth we'd posted a few on Etsy on a whim. They sold faster than we expected.

Two years later we have a catalogue of 300+ STL files, a small but steady customer base in the home-3D-printing community, and an alarmingly large collection of test cookies that get eaten by neighbours and colleagues. The work of designing cookie cutters turns out to involve a lot of cookies.

Why STL files, not finished cutters

We don't sell printed cutters. Three reasons:

• Shipping cookie cutters is expensive. Bulky packaging, no economy of scale at our volume. The buyer would pay more for shipping than the cutter cost.
• The 3D-printing community already has the printer. Our customers all already own an FDM printer. Selling them a finished print is selling them something they could print themselves; selling them a tested design is selling them time.
• Custom sizing. A buyer can scale our STL files to fit their specific cookie size, baking sheet, or design constraint. A pre-printed cutter has one size.

The design process

Every design goes through the same pipeline:

1. Sketch — usually pen and paper, then digitised. We design at the silhouette level first, before worrying about cutting-edge geometry.
2. CAD model — Fusion 360 for the precise geometry. We use a standard cutter template (3mm cutting depth, 0.4mm cutting edge, 4mm handle wall, internal cavity for dough release) and parametrically adjust per design.
3. Test print — every new design is printed on at least three different printers (Bambu A1, Prusa MK4, Ender 3 V2) before listing.
4. Bake test — actual cookies, actual rolled dough. If the cutter doesn't cut cleanly through 3mm dough or if the cookie doesn't release easily, the design goes back to step 2.
5. Print profile notes — recorded for the product page. Filament, layer height, supports needed (if any), known printer quirks.
6. Final STL listing — file uploaded, photos taken, listing written.

The pipeline takes about 4–8 hours per design from sketch to listed product. Custom commission designs are faster because we skip the speculative-design step and go straight to a buyer's specification.

Who buys

Roughly three groups:

• Home bakers with 3D printers — the largest segment. People who got a printer for general home use and bake regularly enough to want better cutters than the £3 plastic ones at the supermarket. Often buy seasonal sets.
• Small cookie businesses — under our $5,000-per-design commercial threshold. Etsy sellers, weekend market bakers, hobby-businesses that sell decorated cookies for parties or events. The custom commissions are mostly this segment.
• Schools and community groups — bulk-buying alphabet sets for school baking projects, library programmes, after-school clubs. These are usually our largest single orders.

What we don't do

• We don't sell printed cutters. STL files only (with a few exceptions for custom-commission clients who can't print themselves).
• We don't sell other STL files. Cookie cutters only. There are great makers for other categories — we'd rather do one thing well.
• We don't list our designs on Thingiverse / Printables. Those are great free file repositories, but we maintain the catalogue ourselves — both for quality control and for the small income that keeps the design pipeline going.
• We don't take cryptocurrency. Standard payment processors (Stripe, PayPal) only.

Get in touch

Email [email protected] for custom commissions, licensing questions, technical support on a file, or general feedback. We answer within a couple of working days; most things faster.

If you're new to 3D printing and want to know whether our designs will work on your specific printer, just say which printer you have when you email — we keep a working knowledge of how most consumer printers handle our cutter designs.