← Work AKER Kits
2014 – 2017
AKER Kits
Twenty-plus snap-fit products: beehives, coops, raised beds, wall planters and worm composters, each cut from a single sheet of FSC birch plywood and released open source. Five thousand people built them.
Backing
Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship (opens in a new tab)
Funded fellowship for open technology in the public interest.
The Situation
Cities were full of people who wanted to grow food and keep bees and had no products designed for them at an honest price. Garden hardware was either disposable big-box kit or artisanal one-offs.
AKER's answer was a product family: flat-pack kits a person assembles in minutes, cut from a single sheet of plywood, with the cut files released open source so anyone with access to a CNC router could make their own.
The whole range as it shipped is in the AKER kit catalog (opens in a new tab), 24 pages of beehives, coops, raised beds, planters and composters.
The Assumption
Make the product good enough and the business follows. Shipping is a solved problem.
What Was Actually True
The constraint that kills you is rarely the one you are designing against. Plywood is heavy; flat-pack local manufacturing only works with enough demand in one place to keep a shop busy, and there was not. A competitor who owned their material and their channel won without a better product.
Decision 01
One Sheet, One Product
Every kit nests its parts into a single standard sheet of FSC birch plywood. One sheet means one price, no waste stream to manage, and a cut file any shop can run. The constraint also gave the range its visual language: everything looks like it belongs to the same family because it is made the same way.
Decision 02
The Joint Is the Product
Assembly without screws or glue. Snap-fit joinery is what makes a kit a product rather than a woodworking project: minutes to build, no tools, and nothing to lose in a drawer. Getting a joint that holds through seasons outdoors, in a material as variable as plywood, was most of the design work.
Decision 03
Ship the File, Not the Crate
The cut files were released open source, and kits were cut on CNC routers near wherever the customer lived instead of freighting plywood across the country. Five thousand people built them, and installs went up from Barcelona to Denver.
Built and Used
The Range
Twenty-plus kits in one visual language, every one cut from a single sheet and assembled without a fastener. The joint is the product.
What Shipped
20+
Products in one visual language
the catalog
5,000+
People built the kits
sales and build records
$300K
Budget, end to end
company records
What I’d Do Differently
It died of arithmetic. Flat-pack was meant to solve shipping: send the file, cut it near the customer, never put a crate on a truck. But that needs enough demand in one place to keep a local shop busy, and there was not. Meanwhile a company in another state made its own sheet stock from recycled milk bottles and sold into distributors by the pallet; they owned the material and the channel, and we owned neither. I spent three years making the product better, and the product was never the problem.