Steven said Urban Workshop, which has been open since May, has had an overwhelming response from the community. “We’ve done very little advertising,” he said. “Most of it’s been word-of-mouth. Even before we moved to this building, we had people showing up at our previous location going, ‘Hey, when do we sign up? You open yet?’ The cool thing that came out of that was…we’ve had a ton of great helpers, helping us set this place up.”
While there are probably hundreds of membership-based maker shops throughout the country, Steven said most concentrate on one specific area, such as woodworking or 3-D printing. “If you go to one of those places, you can’t usually see any project you want to make all the way through,” he said. “I’ve been running an engineering company for the last ten years…so most of this stuff, I already had. For somebody to open this up from scratch (is prohibitively expensive).”
His vision for Urban Workshop’s future includes both expanding his maker space–and building a network and community of makers. “That’s what’s going to make this place really cool.,” he said, responding to a visitor who’d asked if he’d have a “connection board” listing members with specific skills. “You’re the electronics guy, you’re the software guy, you’re the fabricator…We can all teach each other, this should be a blast.”