Quirky
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Quirky was a crowdsourced invention platform founded in 2009 by Ben Kaufman. Community members submitted product ideas online; Quirky then patented, manufactured, marketed and sold the chosen inventions through retailers like Walmart and Amazon, sharing royalties with inventors. The company later expanded into smart-home devices with its Wink platform and a partnership with GE.
02 / Quirky FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Quirky collapsed under its own cost structure. Taking ideas from drawing board to store shelves — engineering, manufacturing, marketing and retailing — proved far more expensive than the thin margins on its products could support; growing revenues were swallowed by spiralling costs, and some inventions that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop sold only a handful of units. An expensive expansion into the Wink smart-home platform and a GE partnership deepened the burn, while a Wink hub recall and failed fundraising attempts in 2015 left the company with no way out.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Ben Kaufman founded Quirky as a crowdsourced invention platform where the community submitted ideas and the company built and sold the best ones.
- Expansion and cash burn
Quirky launched the Wink smart-home platform and partnered with GE, but burned through cash at about $5.8 million a month, forcing layoffs and cost cuts.
- CEO departs
Founder Ben Kaufman stepped down as CEO in August 2015 after the company failed to raise new funding.
- Bankruptcy
Quirky filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2015 and agreed to sell its Wink subsidiary to Flextronics for $15 million.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Quirky raised a total of $185.3 million in funding between 2009 and 2015.
- 02
The company burned through more than $150 million before collapsing.
- 03
In September 2015 it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
- 04
Its smart-home subsidiary Wink was sold to Flextronics for $15 million during the bankruptcy.