On TwelveSouth

Darren Murph at Engadget wrote a great feature on TwelveSouth, the maker of many popular accessories for the Mac, iPad and iPhone.

The thing that struck me the most about this article is how careful the guys at TwelveSouth are about becoming too big:

The next question must have felt obvious: “Well, what if you had the opportunity to branch out… to make accessories for companies other than Apple?”

“We’re not interested in that,” [TwelveSouth co-founder Andrew Green] said. In fact, he has been approached by the non-Apple world; designers looking for a design house, companies with earnings in the billions and even one particular CEO of one particularly important consumer electronics company. Green remains humble, but I’m aghast.

The philosophy isn’t that different from Apple’s view that doing too many things usually comes with a drop in quality.

As someone who uses several TwelveSouth products daily, I can say that quality is something the hardware company strives at. Everything I’ve purchased from them is well made, well packaged and looks great.

In a world full of software startups and free services, supporting a small company building actual things is refreshing.