Make:

A quarterly magazine, a global festival, and a stubborn idea.

On a Saturday morning in Santa Rosa, the Make: office is quieter than it used to be. The staff is smaller. The footprint is smaller. The orange-and-black robot stickers on the laptops, however, are exactly where they were. A printer hums in a corner. Somewhere in the back, a 3D printer is doing what 3D printers do, which is take longer than anyone expected.

Make: is a media company that prints a magazine four times a year, runs a worldwide network of Maker Faire festivals, and sells kits and books through the Maker Shed. That sentence sounds modest. It is also wildly insufficient. Make: is the company that, in 2005, decided "maker" should be a noun applied to ordinary people who solder things at their kitchen tables. The word stuck. So did the company - even when, for a moment in 2019, it didn't.

The hobbyists had no clubhouse.

In the early 2000s, the people who built robots in their garages had Slashdot threads, a few mailing lists, and a quiet feeling that mainstream technology magazines had stopped caring about them. PCs had gone beige. Tech publishing had gone corporate. The hands-on stuff - circuits, motors, weird sculptures wired to Arduinos that did not yet exist - was scattered across forums that did not talk to each other.

Dale Dougherty, then a longtime editor at O'Reilly Media, noticed something else. The kids he met at tech conferences were no longer asking how to use a tool. They were asking how to build one. The shift was small but real. He proposed a magazine modeled, gently and without irony, on the old Popular Mechanics - except instead of "How To Build A Boat", it would be "How To Build A Robot That Throws Snowballs." His boss, Tim O'Reilly, said yes. The first issue shipped in February 2005.

What if the audience showed up in person?

A magazine is a one-way medium. A magazine for makers, Dougherty figured, was missing the point. Makers wanted to show their work. So in 2006, he rented the San Mateo Event Center and threw what the press described, charitably, as "a science fair for adults." Around 22,000 people came. There were fire-breathing sculptures. There were homemade electric vehicles. There was a man with a Tesla coil and a bad idea.

The first Maker Faire turned out to be the real product. The magazine sold subscriptions. The Faire built the community - the thing that subscriptions can't buy. Within a decade the format had been licensed to nearly 200 cities across 40 countries, drawing roughly 1.5 million attendees a year. Berlin, Shenzhen, Rome, Cairo, Tokyo. The colon traveled.

One brand, a half-dozen front doors.

Make: is not one product. It is a stack of them, each pointing at a different way to be a maker. There is the print magazine, still arriving in mailboxes four times a year, the last quarterly that does not feel embarrassed about being a quarterly. There is makezine.com, an archive of more than a decade of project tutorials. There is the Maker Shed, where you can buy a soldering kit at 11pm and have it on your kitchen table by Wednesday.

Then there is the festival circuit. Maker Faires range from "flagship" multi-day events in the Bay Area and New York to "Mini" community editions in libraries and high school gymnasiums. The company doesn't operate most of them directly - they're licensed to local organizers, who keep most of the revenue and most of the headaches. It's a franchise model for civic enthusiasm, and remarkably, it works.

Maker Camp, originally co-developed with Google, takes the same idea and points it at younger audiences. Make: Books publishes a steady drip of titles - Getting Started With Arduino, The Big Book of Maker Skills, the kind of thing libraries quietly buy a lot of. And quietly underneath everything, there is an editorial point of view: that the line between "professional" and "hobbyist" is mostly marketing.

The receipts.

The maker movement is a vibe, which makes it hard to measure. Make: has tried anyway. Here's a sketch of what the company reaches at its current scale, drawn from public reporting and the company's own disclosures.

Make more makers.

The company's stated mission, when it is willing to be stated, is simple: create and empower more makers. The mechanics behind it - publishing, events, learning programs, advocacy - are unfussy. The ambition behind it is not. Dougherty has spent twenty years arguing that the maker mindset is, in fact, a civic project. People who build things tend to fix things. People who fix things tend to organize.

That argument has occasionally caught the attention of policymakers. The Obama-era Maker Faire at the White House was, in retrospect, the apex of governmental enthusiasm for hands-on creativity. The follow-through varied. But the educational programs Make: helped catalyze - school makerspaces, library 3D printers, community fab labs - kept going, often without the company's direct involvement. The movement outgrew the magazine, which is exactly what the magazine was supposed to want.

An antidote to the screen.

In the year of the conversational AI, an unfashionable suggestion: that some problems are best solved with one's hands, and that the person doing the solving might as well be you. Make: has been making this case quietly since 2005. It is now making it loudly, because the case is harder. The default twelve-year-old in 2026 has access to a chatbot that will draft their book report, an image generator that will draw their unicorn, and a streaming algorithm that will pick their afternoon. The maker movement's pitch - that you should, instead, take the back off the toaster - sounds quaint until you watch a kid solder their first LED and discover that the world is held together by things that can be unscrewed.

The company is no longer trying to be a unicorn. After the 2019 collapse, Dougherty rebuilt Make: as a smaller, more focused community business - one that licenses its brand carefully, runs its events leanly, and treats its subscribers like an asset rather than a metric. The company even ran a community funding round in 2024, opening ownership to its readers. That, too, is unfashionable. That, also, is the point.

The 3D printer is finally done.

Back in Santa Rosa, the print finishes. Someone walks over, peels the part off the bed, holds it up, turns it in the light. It is a bracket. It will go into a project that will go into the magazine that will go into a mailbox that will reach a kid who has not yet decided whether to take the back off the toaster.

Make: is, in the end, a small media company in a small California town that has - somehow, against unflattering odds, through a bankruptcy and a restart and a steady-state of about 190 people - convinced a few million strangers a year to bring their projects out of their garages. The colon still works. The magazine still ships. The Faires still happen. The world still needs people who know what's inside a toaster.

Make: would like that to be more people. They are, as always, taking applications.