We established the company in October 2015, and transformed into a Community Interest Company in 2019 (UK Company Number 09849074).
Highlights include:
2015
- The idea was born at a residency at Somerset House called The Small Museum, in March
- We incorporated in October, working out of Hans Sloane’s old house in Bloomsbury
2016
- Our first commission, “Big Stuff from the British Museum”, in April
- Hired Charlie! Yeah!
- Our first branded hardware, the progress bar Printed Circuit Board (PCB)
- Tom’s lovely The Planets prototype pops out over a weekend
- Early design thinking about a Box that can listen as well as speak
2017
- Flirting with the Raspberry Pi Foundation commences; press!
- We connect with educational concepts of 21st Century Skills and object-based learning
- Tom escapes the fracas to join Sketchfab
- Gill Wildman coins the phrase “brainraising” to celebrate our first joint box-making session, which Adrian, Tom, Charlie, George, Gill, Dan, and Fiona all worked on to make five Boxes (!)
- R&D on Make Your Own begins
- First great outreach commission with Camden Council; lots of kids, lots to learn
2018
- Major commission with the Smithsonian Institution, including research trip to DC, to hand-deliver Boxes to Title 1 schools (and meet the kids)
- Moved to Hoxton, in Shoreditch, out the back of the National Circus School (we’ll tell you about that at the pub one day)
- Part of the spring cohort of the Young Foundation Accelerator
- A collaboration between British Museum and National Museum of Iraq results in a Box in Baghdad that speaks Arabic
- Declared V1 of the Box’s “skull” design (that’s the outer shell)
- Successful Crowdfunder raises £20k for the company, our only outside investment
- Made our biggest run yet, 80 Boxes
- Initiated self-funded product R&D phase, to research Make Your Own, with 40 international pilots
- Build the concept of “admin cards”, objects in each Box that can help you configure it, using the same UI as the Collection objects
2019
- Our Make Your Own pilot proceeds, as we send out Boxes in Jan/Feb, and get updates from pilots about their Collections, being made around the world
- The first ever boop made entirely by somebody who doesn’t work here happened in Spain. This was a huge milestone, because it meant that the Make Your Own idea could work
- Incredible Amagugu Ethu / Our Treasures commission with Dr. Laura Gibson takes us to South Africa
- First dementia-oriented Collection is developed with the Monroe County History Center in the USA, for their Living with History program The hardware that drives the whole shebang is looking super sweet, including our annotated PCB
- Opened our online shop in November, selling Make Your Own kits (which people are buying!)
- Completed development of our on-demand small-batch manufacturing process, with a 2,000% productivity increase since we made our first Box
- Abira Hussein joins our Advisory Board
2020
- Strong first quarter, with Make Your Own kit sales all around the world
- COVID-19 hits
- July: Company declares a “state change”, shrinking operations to conserve energy as cultural sector is in disarray; shop stays open