GE Appliances, a subsidiary of China's Haier, is spinning out Giddy, its Quirky-like crowdsourced hardware product development platform for businesses
Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
The lineage here runs straight through Quirky: the original crowdsourced hardware maker sold the promise of faster product development in its crowdsourcing model, then collapsed after pushing money-losing inventions through its own factory, cutting a third of staff before filing for bankruptcy in 2015. Its 2017 relaunch kept the crowd but dropped manufacturing entirely, licensing designs instead — an admission that the platform survives only when it doesn't own production.
Giddy applies that lesson as a pure service: GE Appliances, itself a subsidiary of Haier since Haier's acquisition of GE's appliance business, is spinning the platform out to sell crowdsourced development to other businesses rather than feeding only its own pipeline. The move sits alongside GE's broader retreat from experimental ventures — sources reported GE Ventures has been shopping itself for months — even as GE separately doubled down on applied machine learning via its acquisition of analytics firm Wise.io.
First-order effects
- Business clients gain a turnkey crowdsourced product-development channel without staffing an internal invention team, while Giddy exits GE Appliances' cost structure as a standalone unit under Haier's ultimate ownership.
Second-order effects
- Gddy's closest competitor is Quirky's own relaunch, which also abandoned manufacturing for licensing — two descendants of the same failed model now fighting over the same corporate design-sourcing budgets.
- The spinout extends the divestiture pattern at GE: ventures that don't map to core industrial operations are being shed or shopped, narrowing what remains inside the parent to analytics-adjacent software like Wise.io.
Third-order effects
- If both surviving heirs of Quirky are service-and-licensing businesses, crowdsourced hardware development is structurally settling into a B2B consulting layer above contract manufacturers rather than a vertically integrated product company — the exact structure whose absence drove the original bankruptcy.
The trend: Crowdsourced hardware platforms are completing a decade-long pivot from manufacturing their own inventions to selling the development process itself as a service to corporate clients.