The DIY 'Maker Movement' Meets the VCs

In a light-filled loft in lower Manhattan, a dozen young workers stuff tiny circuit boards and empty Altoids cans into plastic bags. These will be packed into kits and shipped to do-it-yourselfers worldwide, who use the components to create homemade smartphone chargers. The loft, a former Wall Street trading floor, is the headquarters of Adafruit Industries, an electronics distributor that last year sold $5 million worth of Altoids kits, TV-B-Gones (remotes guaranteed to silence any television), and hundreds of other oddball products. Coming soon: a wired video jacket that plays movies and jewelry embedded with pulsating LED lights. “Over the last year, we’ve doubled in revenue; in number of products, we’ve quadrupled,” says Phillip Torrone, creative director of the seven-year-old company.

Adafruit is one of hundreds of growing ventures in the U.S. that belong to the so-called maker movement. These companies sell kits and support online communities of DIY types who make everything from toys to robots to 3D printers, and their moment seems to have arrived: Maker Faire, the movement’s Woodstock, attracted perhaps 20,000 hard-core devotees five years ago. At last year’s events in Detroit and New York, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to presentations sponsored by the likes of PepsiCo, Ford, and Microsoft. And electronics giants Microchip Technology and Texas Instruments, hoping to profit from the maker zeitgeist, last year began offering their own kits. The maker movement is “as significant as the shift from agriculture to the early industrial era,” says Jeremy Rifkin, a Wharton economist.