Minarium Founder Rob Walczak has always loved miniatures. Not just printing them or painting them, but the hunt for that perfect sculpt, the one that fits exactly what you’re imagining. That passion for collecting is what eventually led him to start his own 3D model studio, DKP Miniatures, in 2024. And it’s also what led him to blow the whole thing up and start over.
When Rob launched DKP Miniatures, he did what most new creators do. He set up shop on MyMiniFactory, uploaded his models, and waited. Three weeks went by. He searched for his own models and couldn’t find them. Not buried on page five, just… gone. It didn’t take long to figure out why. The platform was quietly pushing smaller studios down in search results to make room for bigger, more established names. For a new creator trying to build something, it was a dead end.
So he moved to Etsy. And honestly, it worked better. People found his minis, sales started coming in, and things felt promising. But then came the fees. Listing fees. Transaction fees. Processing fees. Etsy was even taking a cut of shipping labels. Every time Rob looked at his margins, there was another line item chipping away at them. It felt less like a marketplace and more like a toll road that kept adding new booths.
Being an engineer, Rob didn’t just complain about it. He started solving it. He built technology that could handle long tail search for 3D models, the kind of search that helps a collector find a specific obscure miniature instead of just whatever the algorithm wants to show them. He brought it to the major marketplaces, hoping to fix the discovery problem from the inside. He genuinely wanted to work with them, not against them.
They all passed.
That rejection was the beginning of Minarium. If the existing platforms weren’t going to change, he’d build something better from scratch. The idea was straightforward: low fees, real discoverability, and a level playing field for creators of every size. No suppressing smaller studios. No nickel-and-diming sellers on every transaction. Just a clean, honest marketplace where the quality of your work is what gets you noticed.
Minarium went live in October 2025. It was built out of frustration, yes, but also out of genuine love for the hobby and respect for the people who create for it. Rob knew what it felt like to be a collector searching for something specific and coming up empty. He also knew what it felt like to be a creator putting real work into something, only to have it buried. Minarium exists because both of those problems deserved a real answer.
And that answer has a simple foundation: no hidden fees, no favoritism, and no more great creators going unnoticed. This is a marketplace built on the belief that quality should speak for itself. Where the world’s great creators rise to the top.