About us

Winterbloom is an independent, woman-owned music technology company established in 2020. Our mission is to create instruments that empower people to express themselves through music and technology. Because we value openess, transparency, and education, all our products are open source.

Our story

Thea has been a life-long musician and tinkerer. She started exploring electronics design as a way to apply her engineering skills to the physical world. Synthesizers were the perfect way to combine her engineering and musical lives.

After building her first synthesizer, the Genesynth - a synth containing the sound chip from the Sega Genesis, she began working with Eurorack. After designing a few modules for herself, she decided to start Winterbloom. We sold our first modules in March of 2020.

Who we are

A photograph of Thea Flowers

Thea Flowers creates everything from our hardware all the way up to our manuals.

Before starting Winterbloom, Thea was a professional software engineer and developer advocate for over a decade. She's most notably known for her work in the Python programming language community, and is a Python Software Foundation Fellow.

Thea likes playing guitar, rollerskating, and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Maggie May is the other half of Winterbloom. They're involved with every step of our production process- from packing & shipping orders, assembling circuit boards, to making sure we don’t run out of things. They’re also the one that cooks up our merch.

Maggie is an independent illustrator & comic artist and is currently studying sequential art. They really like coffee and, inexplicably, Garfield.

A photograph of Maggie May
A photograph of Louise the cat

Louise is our head of Human Resources. She is an expert at using humans to get resources for her. She also supervises all work to ensure it’s up to *scratch*. Her favorite thing in the whole world is paper.

Lily is our shipping and receiving manager. She thoroughly inspects every box that passes through here. Lily's favorite thing is fleece blankets.

A photograph of Lily the cat

Open source

Everything that Winterbloom does is open source. Our hardware designs, our firmware, our software, and even our documentation are all published under open source licenses.

Open source is fundamental to our identity and mission. We encourage others to learn and build from our work. We believe that open source is the only way to have true freedom to use, modify, repair, adapt, and repurpose technology.

All of our products are certified open source hardware.

Responsibility

We have a responsibility to ourselves, our planet, our neighbors, and all life on earth. The manufacturing process unfortunately involves a lot of moving parts, complex supply chains, and questionable practices. We strive to minimize the negative impact that we have on the world in a number of ways.

In terms of environmental impact:

  • We manufacture all our electronics in house or in North America with our US-based contract manufacturer (MacroFab).
  • We use industry leading solder wire and solder paste. Both are halogen free, no-clean, and lead-free. more details (wire), more details (paste).
  • We use lead free electroless nickel immersion gold finishing on all our printed circuit boards, including our panels.
  • Our branded mailing boxes are made in North America from majority recycled materials and are recyclable. more details.
  • Our unbranded kraft mailing boxes are made in the USA and are recycleable.
  • Our packing tape is made from 100% recycled FSC using soy-based inks. more details.
  • Our tissue paper is FSC certified and made with 10% to 70% recycled content and are recyclable. more details.
  • The jewelry boxes we use for kits are made in the USA from 100% recycled boxboard, fiber, and paper. more details
  • We do not use any plastics in our normal shipping materials.

In terms of social impact:

There is always room to improve, and we welcome any feedback.

Our friends

Winterbloom wouldn't be here without the support of our friends. These are just some of the excellent folks that we have to thank for helping us flourish.

Get in touch

Got a question? A concern? Something nice to say? The best way to reach us is via email:

email Send us an email

We'll do our best to get back to you as soon as possible, however, if you send us hate mail we'll do our best to never get back to you.

If you'd like to send us some old-fashioned mail (rumor has it that Thea really likes postcards), here's our mailing address:

Winterbloom
2566 Shallowford Rd, Ste 104
PMB 316
Atlanta, GA 30345
United States

Fine print

Please take a moment to read over our terms & conditions and privacy policy.

Our website makes use of open source code: