@ MAKE – A Maker Business: Adafruit Industries how it’s made – an open source hardware company in NYC

Mz Makerbusiness-1

Phil has an big article on MAKE about many of the tools we use to run Adafruit – check it out! (video above, m4v here)…

A lot of readers are likely familiar with Adafruit Industries, supplier and maker of many kits found in the Maker Shed. In addition to my role here at MAKE, as senior editor, I also work with Limor (Ladyada), helping her with the open source hardware kit business. I’ll have a few articles about general things we do around here to keep the ship afloat and charting new waters, but I thought I’d start this “Maker Business” article with an overview of how it all works and how we use many many web tools/services. One of the most asked questions I get from makers is “what shopping cart do you use?” The short answer is Zencart, and while I think it doesn’t actually matter what you use when you start out, this is what we’re using at Adafruit. A recent milestone, we just shipped our 50,000th order. We mostly create and sell open source hardware, most of the tools we use are open source — I’ve never seen an article detailing “everything” a business uses online, so here’s one. I think you’ll enjoy it. Let’s take a look


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2 Comments

  1. Cristián Arenas Ulloa

    This is really interesting.
    I’ve been thinking about starting a company like that in my own country (Chile).

    I’d love to hear/see more about how you run adafruit 🙂

  2. OMG! Adabot has a face! So that’s what a Phil looks like! Great that you’re stepping into the spotlight Phil!

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