Brydge Collapses

May 5, 2023 2:59 PM

The downfall of Brydge: iPad keyboard company folds, leaving staff unpaid and customer orders unfulfilled Chance Miller over at 9to5Mac with a well reported and sourced account of the extremely sudden demise of popular iPad (and more recently, Surface) accessory maker Brydge.

Miller:

Brydge, a once thriving startup making popular keyboard accessories for iPad, Mac, and Microsoft Surface products, is ceasing operations. According to nearly a dozen former Brydge employees who spoke to 9to5Mac, Brydge has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs within the past year after at least two failed acquisitions.

Oops:

One red flag that multiple former employees cited was a notable period during which Brydge did not have a chief financial officer. As confirmed by public information on LinkedIn, Brydge had a CFO from January 2020 to October 2021, though that person had no chief financial officer experience. Instead, Brydge internally promoted someone from their head of finance role to act as CFO.
When this person departed the company in October 2021, Brydge did not fill the position, despite significantly expanding the C-suite level during this period. Instead of hiring a new CFO, Mander-Jones and Smith leaned heavily on the company’s accounting controller to fulfill the duties usually handled by a CFO.

Oops:

Former Brydge employees also said that Smith and Mander-Jones would orchestrate a huge push to increase revenue right before an acquisition was finalized, hoping to drive up the acquisition price. When those deals ultimately were not made, Brydge had burned significant amounts of cash and found themselves in a worse position than they were before the acquisition talks.

Oops:

In December, Brydge held its annual Christmas party at a local restaurant. Mander-Jones and Smith had set a budget for the party, the people said, and they stuck to that budget. At the end of the night, one of the CEOs put his card down for the bill. His card was declined, and a Brydge employee paid the bill instead, the people said.

Extreme cringe face:

After this round of layoffs, Mander-Jones and Smith treated the team to tacos in a bid to increase morale, the former employees said. They also attempted to salvage the workplace environment by rearranging the desk layout, with Smith and Mander-Jones themselves setting up desks in the middle of the office and watching employees as they worked throughout the day.

posted by General Malaise (15 comments total)

I'm just a little bit sad because I have a Brydge keyboard case for my iPad, which is a really great piece of kit imho.
posted by General Malaise at 3:00 PM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

There are lots of red flags but the Christmas party tab thing is just perfect.
posted by fedward at 3:38 PM on May 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

The fucking flappers did it.
posted by Freecola at 3:41 PM on May 5, 2023 [29 favorites]

CFOs just don't want to work.
posted by rhizome at 4:28 PM on May 5, 2023 [9 favorites]

"Matthew Vroom" ...?
posted by slater at 4:46 PM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

As a veteran of the "space," let me say this. A hardware startup is NEVER thriving. It cannot be done. Surviving perhaps, but never thriving. That's why they were trying to get acquired. Software startups can have explosive growth because after it's made, the per-unit cost of more is effectively zero. But hardware companies face the brutal, unavoidable calculus that every new unit requires an input of money. Make too few and you're leaving money on the table. Make too many and the cost of carrying excess inventory will sink you.

There's a reason that (long-term) successful hardware companies are massive multinationals. You have to be able to exploit economies of scale, survive on razor thin margins, and weather financial and supply chain shocks. By the time you're doing that, you are by definition not a startup.
posted by tom_r at 5:23 PM on May 5, 2023 [31 favorites]

"Making stuff isn't a viable business model" is not a future I could have predicted.
posted by rhizome at 5:27 PM on May 5, 2023 [26 favorites]

That's a shame because (a) running your company straight into the ground like a founderbro buffoon screws over a bunch of people who work for you, and (b) the Magic Keyboard is hot garbage and nobody wants to make anything that's better, only cheaper and even crappier.
posted by majick at 5:34 PM on May 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

"Making stuff isn't a viable business model" is not a future I could have predicted.

It can be, but when one of your main products has a 50% return rate, you have a major problem with either design or quality control. "Making stuff where half get sent back" is definitely not a viable business model, and can only last so long when it's papered over by a different, much more mechanically simpler product with a low return rate.

A 50% return rate probably means 75%+ dissatisfied customers, as quite a few will just emotionally write off the product but not bother going to the trouble of a return or RMA.
posted by tclark at 6:06 PM on May 5, 2023 [10 favorites]

Hah, that's quite a failure rate for, well...a widget company with more than 5 employees.
posted by rhizome at 6:10 PM on May 5, 2023

oh, that Christmas story. reminds me of the time our CEO took some of us to E3. after our plane touched down, he gathered us all up and was like, "hey, let's go to lunch!!!" and we're all "yeah!!! we just had a five hour flight, we're in Los Freaking Angeles!! let's gooooo!" and he's all "yeah! Let's go to BUCA DI BEPPO!"

Red flag number one!

But you know no big deal, boss is paying, right? So we get there, we sit down, water shows up, server passes out the menus, and we crack them open and he pokes his head up over his like a fuckin' prairie dog and goes, "Oh by the way we're not paying for any of your meals for the rest of the week. Let's do family style!!!!"

Aaaaaah, the games industry, ya'all!
posted by offalark at 7:00 PM on May 5, 2023 [9 favorites]

The add-on keyboards to the iPad never made much sense to me, it always felt like Apple trying to justify the existence of $1k "serious business" iPads when most people at that point would buy a laptop that doesn't require an additional $200 for a keyboard. And if you're going to buy an overpriced, wacky keyboard case, you might as well buy the first-party solution, even if Brydge was cheaper and better.

I also bought a Henge dock (which Brydge acquired in 2019) and it seemed completely unnecessary, even way back when power, video, and USB were separate cables.
posted by meowzilla at 8:03 PM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

The add-on keyboards to the iPad never made much sense to me

I didn't think they were all that useful until Apple disabled split keyboard mode for all the "shaped vaguely like an iPad Pro" models, at which point the hardware keyboard became mandatory. Typing on an iPad is basically impossible for me without split mode.
posted by majick at 9:06 PM on May 5, 2023

They also attempted to salvage the workplace environment by rearranging the desk layout, with Smith and Mander-Jones themselves setting up desks in the middle of the office and watching employees as they worked throughout the day.

Taking the Titanic deck chairs metaphor a tad literally, aren't we?
posted by brundlefly at 11:29 PM on May 5, 2023

Think about how much money they could have saved had they embraced remote work. I’m assuming they were locked into a multi year lease but I seem to remember numerous corps renegotiating leases during the height of the pandemic. The decision by the co-CEO’s to not hire a competent CFO seems to me to have exacerbated the end of the company.
posted by photoslob at 9:07 AM on May 6, 2023