Co-founding Stockholm Makerspace
Co-founding a member-run workshop in Stockholm in 2012 and serving on its board ever since, through two moves, a lost lease and growth to more than 1,100 members.
Stockholm Makerspace started as an online discussion in autumn 2011, among people who thought Stockholm needed a place to build, learn and work on projects together. Eventually a few of them said what everyone was thinking: we can’t just complain that it doesn’t exist, we have to start it ourselves.
The first meetup was in February 2012. Seven people sat around a table at the Bishops Arms on Vasagatan, talking all evening over a single glass. The plan was modest, perhaps a 30 m² room shared by 30 members, but interest grew so fast that we had outgrown it long before any lease was signed. I co-founded the association that spring, and I have been on its board ever since.
Finding a home
A crowdfunding campaign at the end of 2012 raised around SEK 120,000 from well over 100 people. It felt like a fortune, and it barely covered the bank guarantee on our first lease. Finding that lease was hard in itself: few landlords wanted a brand-new non-profit with no financial history, planning to have hundreds of members coming and going at all hours with loud machines.
In April 2013 we moved into a 300 m² basement on Wallingatan that had once housed a toy museum. The walls were bare bedrock, the wiring couldn’t be upgraded and the tiled floors made it echo, but members built workshops there anyway. Money was tight. We brought in sponsorship, charged organisations for tours and held open houses, and the treasurer’s forecast was sometimes simply that if the last few days’ trend continued, we would make rent on the due date.
Building it ourselves
In autumn 2014, the team behind THINGS Stockholm, a new coworking space for hardware startups, offered us the basement of the building it had leased from Akademiska Hus. It was less central, but better for the workshops and far better for the finances, and the members voted to move. On 14 April 2015, exactly two years after moving into Wallingatan, we moved everything in a single day. A table of 3D printers was running that same night.
For more than a year, members met for build nights, often more than once a week, to make benches, run power and set up machines. A crowdfunded laser cutter became one of the most-used tools in the space. Lower rent and a growing membership finally gave the association some room in its budget, and with it the chance to fund projects members cared about. Over the following years almost every workshop was rebuilt once, twice or three times. We built up a financial buffer for a future move, and gradually bought or replaced the machines members had lent us, a job finished in 2024.
Losing the lease, and keeping the space
In 2020, the space became a print farm for the face shield I had designed at 3DVerkstan. A volunteer team organised by another member gathered printers from companies, schools and individuals, and at its peak more than 60 of them ran around the clock. They printed over 2,800 frames in a single day and more than 25,000 in two weeks, and the space also acted as a national distribution hub for visors printed by volunteers around Sweden.
At the turn of 2021, we were given notice on our lease when THINGS wound down. A move to a much larger space in Kista fell through after the developer changed the terms several times, so we turned to staying where we were instead. In 2022 we signed a lease directly with Akademiska Hus. The demolition that had been planned since before our first lease was cancelled, and the building was to be renovated instead.
That security made the latest round of growth possible. Since 2023, the electronics and textile labs have moved into two ground-floor rooms with daylight, woodworking has a sound-insulated room of its own with dust extraction, and in 2025 the metal workshop doubled in size and silversmithing finally got an enclosed space. The space now covers more than 400 m², the most it has ever had.
Why I’m still involved
Today the association has more than 1,100 members, and more than 6,000 people have been members at some point. My part now is board work: strategic planning, governance and purchasing. Every part of the space has been built, and often rebuilt, by its members. The machines are only part of the point. It is somewhere to ask someone a question, share an experiment or pick up a new skill, and that is a big part of why I’m still involved.