Manufacturing at Arrow
Since Arrow doesn't have in-person facilities, we can't manufacture our designs like a traditional company. Instead of operating factories ourselves, we focus on design and coordination online, partnering with people and companies in our community to manufacture our designs.
So far, our manufacturing has been limited to various prototypes and the Quiver devkit. However, we envision a future where our designs are produced at scale globally. In this future, we'd like some of the value we create to flow back to the DAO so we can continue improving our designs and developing new products. We recognize the challenges of capturing value from open source designs when we don't directly control manufacturing, but we believe the future of hardware is open and that there's a practical way to manufacture our designs while sustaining the organization.
In pursuit of this goal, we've conceptualized a manufacturing protocol that lets the DAO coordinate a network of community manufacturers, guaranteeing quality and support for customers. In exchange for providing designs, order flow, and support, manufacturers would post a quality-guarantee bond in our $ARROW token and pay a commission from sales to our treasury.
The current specification envisions an Arrow-operated web store and protocol that routes customer orders to the best manufacturer, but initial versions will likely be more manual. It may be more practical for manufacturers to handle sales directly and pay commissions back to the treasury separately.
As we evolve the concept, details will change from the original specification, but the core idea of an open network of manufacturers remains central to Arrow's model. By allowing anyone to build our designs, we can bring products to market quickly, with global availability and affordable costs for customers.
If you're interested in joining Arrow as a manufacturer, or in helping build our manufacturing protocol, please introduce yourself on our Discord or governance forum and we'd be happy to discuss more.