Quirky

» see quirky.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i heard about quirky was a wired piece around 2012, then the wink hub gadgets in a youtube unboxing a couple years after. i was a working engineer in ankara by then. crowdsourced consumer invention was the kind of new-york-startup story i could read about and had no usage entry point into.

ben kaufman founded quirky in 2009 in new york. the model was deliberately public, even theatrical. anyone could submit an idea for evaluation by the community and the staff. a thursday-evening show selected the winners. the in-house team built each chosen product and shipped it to retail partners like bed bath and beyond, while the contributors who had touched the design split a fractional royalty.

between 2010 and 2013 the company raised about $185 million across four rounds. the series d in november 2013 included $30 million from general electric, who paired with quirky on a smart-home product line called wink. inventions started flowing into stores. the pivot power power strip and the egg minder became visible in the home-goods aisle. wired and fast company wrote about the model like a new way of doing consumer products.

the unit economics never worked. quirky was spending a lot of money to invent each product and the products were not selling at a unit volume that paid the development back. by mid-2015 the cash was running out. kaufman stepped down as ceo on july 31 and 111 employees were laid off. the company filed chapter 11 on september 22, 2015. q holdings bought the surviving assets for $4.7 million over ge's objections, and ge sold its share of wink to flextronics two months later for $15 million.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the pitch in 2010 was that you could crowdsource the consumer product cycle. instead of one design team you had an open submission pipeline, instead of a single launch you had a weekly cadence of new products. contributors who had touched a design got paid through a royalty system. it was the perfect web-2.0 narrative for the early venture climate.

~ how it actually ended ~

the public narrative was 'too many products, not enough hits.' the actual problem was that even the hits did not sell well enough to repay what each product had cost to build. a power strip with usb ports is a $40 sku, and a quirky-grade invention pipeline is not. the gap was not closeable at the scale they were running. the ge partnership was meant to close it via the wink smart-home line, but wink had its own problems and quirky never reached the volume side of the business in time.

~ what came after ~

quirky is what a lot of crowdsourced product platforms tried to be in the 2010s. it had the best version of the model and the highest-profile retail partnerships any crowd-platform got. it still died. that result probably read for the people who came after as a signal that the model itself is hard to make work, not that quirky executed it badly. the wink hub kept shipping under flextronics for a few more years and then quietly stopped. the q holdings remnant tried a couple of relaunches and then went dark.

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