Twelve years later, SparkFun employees each month build 80,000 to 100,000 circuit boards — in signature red — at their Niwot headquarters. Its online store offers 2,000 different products, and revenues last year were nearly $33 million.
Last weekend, the company opened SparkFun Emporium, its first offline store at its headquarters here.
The boot-strapped SparkFun, which employs about 140 people, caters to the small guy. That’s why it opened the store. After tours of the manufacturing facility, visitors want to buy kits and parts.
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“A big driver of the maker movement is the availability of components,” said Dale Dougherty, the magazine’s founding editor and Maker Media’s CEO. “You and I both might have different projects in mind, but we use the same Arduino board. SparkFun, along with a few others like Adafruit, make this approachable.”
… it’s time to relinquish the reins of SparkFun to someone who adores setting strategy, daydreams about tomorrow without distraction and enjoys herding cats (a.k.a, managing people). It’s time to get back to building cool stuff and doing something silly with it.
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