The first device many people see break is not their own. It is a school tablet or an office laptop, a shared machine that is essential to daily work and learning but rarely treated as a priority until it fails. When a screen shatters, the impact often appears in a budget line: a teacher shelving a planned purchase, or a family facing an extra bill for “optional” device insurance that is not really optional.
In Sydney in the late 1990s, before one‑to‑one iPad programs and blended learning, a young IT manager named Ethan Nyholm was trying to solve a smaller version of that problem. He stuffed his new laptop into a padded postal envelope so he could carry it in a hiking pack, then realised that the market had very little to say to someone who wanted protection without the briefcase aesthetic. That gesture—makeshift, unremarkable—would eventually give rise to STM Goods, a founder‑led accessories company that has spent more than 26 years operating in the margins of an industry that barely acknowledges margins exist.
The Economics Nobody Sees
The consumer electronics market is projected to be worth more than 1.2 trillion dollars in 2024, with global revenues expected to grow steadily, if more slowly, through 2030. Analysts argue about basis points of growth in smartphones and wearables while a different calculus plays out on classroom desks and office benches. Devices are now treated as infrastructure, not perks, and when they break, the costs are immediate and specific: repair bills, replacement units, lost lessons, lost work.
In that context, the business case for device protection is not romantic. School districts and universities run spreadsheets that show exactly how many cracked screens it takes to derail a technology budget. Enterprise IT departments calculate downtime in hourly wage losses. The demand for rugged cases and accessories is rising not because they are fashionable, but because they reduce the friction between policy and reality, between the promise of a “digital classroom” and the fact that children drop things.
STM Goods sells into this space as a small player. Publicly accessible data suggests it has a few dozen employees and low–single‑digit millions in revenue, far smaller than rivals like Belkin or Logitech. Yet the company reports that it has deployed millions of its Dux cases for iPad into education programmes around the world, stitching together a presence in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, Asia‑Pacific, Europe, the United Kingdom and China. In the quiet economics of device protection, that is real power: not in market share headlines, but in the number of school carts and teacher bags that carry its designs.
A Company Built on Breakage
There is a certain moral clarity in designing for failure. Nyholm has described STM’s evolution in simple, almost blunt terms: “We didn’t guess our way into rugged cases; the devices broke and told us what to fix.” The company’s flagship Dux line—the Dux Plus and Dux Ultra for iPad, the Dux USB‑C keyboard, the ChargeTree wireless charger—grew out of observing where and how devices were failing: in backpack drops, in crowded lockers, in institutional deployment where one cracked case might mean three weeks without a tablet.
Co‑founder Adina Jacobs, who came to technology through fashion and accessories, frames the work less as stylistic flair than as a responsibility to reduce everyday friction. “We design products so people can interact with technology more easily and with greater peace of mind,” she has said. It is a plain statement, but there is an ethic inside it. The job is not to make devices precious; it is to make them survivable, so that a dropped iPad does not become a lesson in scarcity.
This is where the story of a small accessories company brushes against larger questions. When a school district chooses rugged cases, it is not just buying plastic and rubber. It is making a bet that children in poorer postcodes will get the same uninterrupted access to digital lessons as those whose parents can afford replacements. When a university protects its laptop fleet, it is treating student access as infrastructure rather than privilege. STM is one of several companies selling into that demand, but its founder‑led structure—privately owned, debt‑free, without venture capital—means it has built its business not on blitz‑scaling, but on the unglamorous work of testing hinges, corners and latches.
What Gets Protected, and Who
Analysts predict that as smartphone penetration plateaus in richer countries and competition intensifies in emerging markets, overall electronics growth will cool, even as segments like education and enterprise mobility continue to expand their device fleets. That shift raises a blunt question: who bears the cost when devices fail? For families, it can be another bill they cannot pay. For public schools, it can mean choosing between repairs and additional staff. For small companies, it can mean lost contracts and lost jobs.
A company like STM Goods does not solve these structural problems. It sells cases and bags. Yet the logic of its work reveals something about how societies choose to allocate risk. When protection is built into the system—when a district budgets for rugged cases, when a workplace treats devices as shared infrastructure rather than disposable perks—the burden of breakage is spread more evenly. When it is not, the cracks in a tablet screen are often a mirror of the cracks outside it.
Device protection is less about heroics than about routine decisions. Schools, workplaces, and families weigh the cost of rugged cases against the cost of repair and downtime, often with little public attention. STM Goods operates in this space as a relatively small accessories company focused on reducing breakage and extending device life, rather than on high-profile launches or branding campaigns. As new tablets and laptops reach classrooms and offices, whether they remain usable will largely depend on practical choices about protection, budgets, and which users are prioritised when those choices are made.
