Quirky's recent deals with GE Lighting and Harman aren't one-offs. The crowd-inventing startup is officially a business-to-business company.
Best known as the place for amateur inventors to propose new products and have them developed and distributed quickly, Quirky Inc. is reinventing itself as a platform for other companies hoping to copy the model for their own products. As part of the shift, it's acquired Undercurrent, a Manhattan design firm and business consultancy, the companies announced today.
"Quirky knows how to bring ideas to life with unprecedented speed, how to build community, brands, platforms, and new businesses," said Undercurrent CEO Aaron Dingnan in a blog post. "We know, better than anyone, how large organizations can harness that energy, and how to serve and change a client at the same time."
Quirky founder and CEO Ben Kaufman said he resisted the idea of selling an inventing platform service for years. "To us, it was always a non-starter," he wrote today. But that changed in 2012 when Undercurrent introduced them to General Electric.
The GE introduction led to the first of two partnerships Quirky has already announced, a smart-home technology line called Wink developed with GE Lighting. Just last week, Quirky announced a deal with audio equipment maker Harman to develop better headphones. In both cases, Quirky's bottom-up approach to research and development is integrated into the larger corporation.
Kaufman said the experiments proved Quirky could work with large partners without undermining its original purpose. "Our partnership with GE was (and continues to be) deeply transformative for Quirky. Not only did we learn a lot about technology and engineering from them, we learned a lot about ourselves," he said.
Both Kaufman and Dingnan said more industry partnerships will be announced in the coming weeks.
Financial terms were not disclosed. Under Quirky ownership, Undercurrent will continue to handle its existing business workload, while further developing Quirky's "Powered by Quirky" concept.
Kaufman told Inc magazine that Quirky saw the potential in becoming a platform for companies to change their own approach to research and development, but they lacked a service component.
"We really weren't set up to service companies," Kaufman said. "We were meant to work as a consumer products brand, and what Aaron and his team do is run an organization that really powers and enables a much more service-oriented approach."
Traditionally, Quirky collects ideas for consumer products from an online community of about 1.3 million people, chooses the best and manufactures them, sharing profits and credit with the individual inventors. Some of its biggest hits include a flexible surge protector and a bendable USB port.
In its partnerships, the resulting product will carry the Harman name, for instance, but include the words "Powered by Quirky," and credit the original inventor, Inc reported.
The deal is Quirky's first acquisition.