10 Years of Exploding Shed: From an Attic to a Synth DIY Shop, Plus a Giveaway Worth Over 5,600 Euros!
History, Stories, and 15 Giveaway Bundles for the Anniversary
10 Years of Exploding Shed: From an Attic to a Synth DIY Shop, Plus a Giveaway Worth Over 5,600 Euros! · Source: Exploding Shed
In October 2026, Exploding Shed turns ten, and we’re celebrating right along with them! This Leipzig-in-Germany-based synth DIY shop now ships almost everywhere in the EU, but it all started with Tupperware, a homemade circuit-etching rig, and a lot of DIY workshops. In this article, we’re tracing how that idea grew into a real company. And no birthday is complete without presents: 15 giveaway bundles worth more than 5,600 Euros are up for grabs, you can enter from October 1 to 7, 2026. You’ll find every detail of this raffle at the bottom of this article.
10 Years of Exploding Shed: History, Milestones, and a Look at the Next Ten Years
10 Years of Exploding Shed: An Anniversary With Heart and Soul
I’ve run into Manu from Exploding Shed several times at Superbooth over the years, and we’ve caught up plenty of times over the phone in between too. This is a guy who lives and breathes his company, you can tell in every conversation. He’s full of vision, thinks from the community outward first (which matters a lot in this genre), and clearly pours heart and dedication into what he’s built. He never seems to run out of new ideas either.
It’s honestly always a pleasure catching up with him. That’s exactly why I didn’t want to mark this birthday with just a few lines, I want to tell you the story behind it.
Exploding Shed was founded in 2016 by Manu and Hagen. Startup capital came in at a lean 1,000 Euros, and the first headquarters was a 12-square-meter attic in Leipzig-Connewitz. Today, the shop carries dozens of brands and close to 1,000 products. How did that happen? Let’s start at the very beginning.
Tupperware and Etching Rigs: The LeafAudio Workshop Years
Some of the instruments built during this early era eventually made it onto real stages, even Berghain, apparently. But it all started pretty modestly, around 2010 with LeafAudio. Manu was crisscrossing Germany at the time, running synth DIY workshops for total beginners in clubs, at festivals, and at cultural events. Partners along the way included CTM Festival, De:Bug, Electronic Beats, and the Time Warp Lab. Over the years, roughly 100 workshops added up.
These were aimed at beginners, musicians, and artists, not electronics pros. The barrier to entry stayed deliberately low: sign up, show up, and all the materials and tools were already there. By the end, everyone walked out with a working, self-built instrument.
The engineering behind it all was gloriously improvised. Circuit boards got etched by hand, using a homemade rig built from a gray drainage pipe from the hardware store, an aquarium heater, and some cobbled-together ventilation. Enclosures were drilled by hand, and more than a few were literally Tupperware containers. Genuinely charming stuff. The instruments looked bizarre but were completely reproducible and actually musically useful.
For plenty of participants, something else stuck besides the instrument itself, soldering turned out to be surprisingly meditative.
Worth clarifying: LeafAudio was never really about circuit bending. The focus was always on circuits you could reliably reproduce and then actually put to musical use afterward.
Can’t You Just Sell These Kits? The Path to a Real Shop
It turns out as a “yes”. That’s exactly what more and more people kept asking. As attention grew, especially thanks to the collaboration with Electronic Beats, the same question kept popping up: can’t we just buy these kits?
Manu and Hagen started planning their own shop in 2015, kicking it off with that same 1,000 Euro in capital. The idea was to build something more professional than what existed at the time, with EU-wide shipping, offering not just their own kits but parts and products from other manufacturers too. Exploding Shed went live in 2016.
Twelve Square Meters Under the Roof: The First Headquarters
Warehouse, shop, packing station, and shipping department, all crammed into one single room. That was the original headquarters: a privately rented attic in Leipzig-Connewitz, unheated and just 12 square meters. As the product range grew, space kept shrinking. Packed boxes piled up in the hallway, shelves filled up completely, and eventually, the founders started screwing hooks into the ceiling just to hang up more inventory somewhere.
Picture that cramped little room, then compare it to today’s location, and you get a real sense of how far this journey has actually gone.
From Connewitz to Plagwitz: A Side Project Becomes a Company
The move to Leipzig-Plagwitz in 2018 brought Exploding Shed to its current location. It started with just one room, followed shortly after by a second, and the team’s first part-time employee joined around then too. A year later, in 2019, came the first full-time hire, and this happened before Hagen and Manu were even paying themselves a regular salary. Respect.
Employee number two arrived in 2020, followed by another large room in 2021 to expand shipping operations. Looking back, 2018 marks the real turning point. From then on, there was no denying this side project had turned into an actual business.
LeafAudio Grows From Workshop Project Into a Manufacturer
Starting around 2017, workshop activity slowed down while LeafAudio steadily transformed into an actual manufacturer. In 2018, the Microphonic Soundbox launched, and it’s still in production today, now in its Mk2 version. A specialized product line grew up around it: contact microphones, impedance-optimized preamps for contact mics, geophones, body-sound sound generation tools, accessories, and specialty cables.
In 2024, the production team grew larger. Since then, between 2024 and 2026, more shops and distribution channels steadily got added, all helping LeafAudio products reach buyers. Production, warehousing, distribution, and export still all run through Exploding Shed’s Leipzig headquarters.
The 2023 Shop Relaunch: A Huge Effort Behind the Scenes
The shop itself started creaking under its own success. The original setup on the Jimdo platform hit its limits once the product catalog got big enough, and among other problems, there was no decent search function at all. The solution was a complete rebuild from scratch: a new shop system, a new ERP setup, and reorganized internal workflows. The new infrastructure went live in 2023, and we covered that relaunch on Gearnews.de at the time.
From the outside, that was a big step toward a professional operation. Behind the scenes, though, this phase ranks among the hardest stretches in the company’s history, since growth and technology both demanded a lot at once, and it took a real personal toll too.
Synth DIY 2010 vs. Today: What’s Actually Changed
If you were into DIY back in 2010, you were operating in a pretty loose scene. Small manufacturers dominated, documentation got put together on the fly, regulations barely factored in, and the Eurorack DIY scene itself was still finding its footing. LeafAudio gradually drifted during this period from Tupperware-based circuits toward Eurorack modules, including the NoiseFoc Euro, VCO-1, and EXP-1.
Today looks pretty different. Front panels and graphics look far more polished, build guides are more thorough, the selection is broader and more specialized, and digital modules play a bigger role than ever. Customers also expect more when it comes to build quality and support.
One thing really stands out: more and more kits now ship partially pre-assembled, while pure through-hole build-it-all-yourself kits are becoming rarer. Quick technical note here: THT means components with wire leads get pushed through holes drilled in the board and soldered in place. SMD components, by contrast, are tiny and sit directly on the board’s surface. The trickier SMD sections often come pre-assembled straight from the manufacturer these days, leaving you to solder in jacks, pots, and controls yourself.
Some older DIY manufacturers have dropped kits entirely at this point, offering only fully assembled units instead, or ones you can simply and cleanly click together.
The Flip Side: Rules, Regulations, and Responsibility
Alongside all this technical maturity, the pile of regulatory requirements has grown just as much. Anyone manufacturing electronics or selling online in the EU now has to deal with WEEE compliance, product safety rules, GPSR, data protection, documentation obligations, and importer responsibilities. For small manufacturers, that’s made it noticeably harder to sell products legally within the EU.
Exploding Shed sees a real responsibility here: not just professionalizing its own operation, but helping other manufacturers navigate this path too. The underlying goal is that synth DIY should still be legal, economically viable, and practically possible within the EU five or ten years from now. It’s a topic that rarely makes headlines, but it genuinely shapes where this scene goes next.
Exploding Shed Today: Team, Lineup, and Strong Partners
So how big is Exploding Shed these days? Four people work directly in the shop side of things, three more handle LeafAudio production, and one additional role focuses on assembling and packaging DIY kits for other manufacturers. Several rooms in Leipzig-Plagwitz now support the operation, covering warehousing, shipping, production, office work, and electronics development. Packages go out to nearly the entire EU, plus Switzerland, Norway, and the UK.
The catalog spans dozens of manufacturers, with longtime partners including Befaco, Shakmat, 4ms, ADDAC System, Erica Synths, Music Thing Modular, Patching Panda, Zlob Modular, and RYK Modular. Alongside kits, there’s a small, carefully curated selection of fully built boutique gear too, like the Plinky series. The rest of the lineup goes way beyond modules as well: Eurorack rails, screws and other mechanical hardware, pots, knobs, electronic components, tools, cables, and specialty accessories.
If you know the UK shop Thonk, think of Exploding Shed as a smaller continental counterpart. There’s barely any real rivalry between them though, both shops carry each other’s products, and they share the same goal of keeping synth DIY accessible for everyone.
Something else matters a lot to the company: you won’t get stuck dealing with faceless contact forms here. Customers can just call, get recommendations, and talk through problems with actual people. Over ten years, nearly every customer issue that’s come up has gotten solved somehow, and when time and circumstances allow, custom solutions and small favors are part of the deal too. Really nice touch. The goal is explicitly to never become some faceless shipping machine, and that matches exactly the picture I’ve built up of the company over the years.
Two Founders, Two Roles: Who Handles What?
The two split responsibilities pretty clearly. Manu handles organization, vision, the shop, and sales, essentially representing the company to the outside world. Hagen runs development and the backend, meaning numbers, spreadsheets, logic, and the technical structure behind the scenes.
Originally, neither of them set out to build some massive retail empire. They just wanted to carve out their own space inside a small, music-meets-technology niche and build something they could genuinely shape themselves. What’s grown out of that is now a mid-sized company that supports both its founders and its staff. It’s still meant to stay a place they can shape on their own terms though, somewhere ideas, creativity, technology, and music all coexist on equal footing.
The Next Ten Years: More Products, More Support, More LeafAudio
What’s coming next? Exploding Shed wants to broaden its product range further, stay a reliable partner for customers, and become the leading synth DIY player across the EU. That lines up with plans to expand its role as an importer and offer a bigger selection of electronic components and small parts. Going forward, manufacturers should be able to count on Exploding Shed not just for parts and infrastructure, but also for help navigating professionalization and EU regulations.
LeafAudio is meant to keep growing internationally, with solutions built around contact microphones, body sound, experimental instruments, amplifiers, specialty electronics, and accessories for field recording and sound design.
On the bigger question of whether DIY survives, the founders leave zero doubt: it’s here to stay. Building techniques will keep changing, but the urge to design and build things yourself isn’t going anywhere. Boutique gear, specialty components, partially pre-assembled DIY systems, field recording accessories, sound design tools, and specialty cables all look set to keep growing alongside it.
Here’s how the founders put it themselves, looking back: “If I’d known back in 2016 everything that was coming our way, I probably would have gulped for a second. But that’s really the whole point. You just start, solve one problem after another, and see where you end up ten years later.”
Ten Years of Dedication: My Take on the Anniversary
Building a company out of an attic into a real European fixture over ten years deserves respect. What impresses me most about Exploding Shed’s story is that it’s not some polished success fairy tale. A homemade etching rig, hooks screwed into the ceiling, a genuinely painful relaunch, and founders who went without a paycheck all belong to this story just as much as the solid growth of recent years. That’s exactly what makes it believable.
The fact that the founders don’t treat their own success as a given, and instead want to give plenty back to the DIY community and the small manufacturers they work with, matches the picture I’ve had of Manu and his colleagues for years. That’s why they’re not just celebrating this anniversary with candles, they’re doing it with something for you and the community too.
Alongside the giveaway, the Birthday Weeks run from October 1 to 31, 2026, directly in the Exploding Shed shop, so it’s worth swinging by. All of October, you’ll get 10% off the entire catalog. Just enter the coupon code “10-Years-DIY” at checkout.
10 Years of Exploding Shed: The Big Anniversary Giveaway
To enter this giveaway worth more than 5,600 Euros, please read and accept the terms of entry first. After that, we’d love to see your comment with your email address and your bundle pick (please choose just one bundle from the 15 listed below and post it as a comment):
Bundle 1
- Black Noise Modular, Cosmos
- CHAIR, Ilse
Bundle 2
- Joranalogue, Test 3
- Vostok/DivKid, Path
- Making Sound Machines/DivKid, DivSkip
Bundle 3
- Erica Synths, EDU DIY Kick Drum
- Erica Synths, EDU DIY Snare Drum
- Erica Synths, EDU DIY FM Drum
- Erica Synths, EDU DIY HiHats
Bundle 4
- Neutral Labs, Elmyra 2 (Desktop DIY)
Bundle 5
- Neutral Labs, Scrooge (Desktop DIY)
Bundle 6
- Neutral Labs, Luna (Desktop DIY)
Bundle 7
- Making Sound Machines/DivKid, DivSkip
- 333modules, Rooter
- Modulove, MVMNT
- Modulove, SCOPE
Bundle 8
- 333modules, AntiLogic
- 333modules, Dual LFO & S/H
- Modulove, A-RYTH-MATIK
- Modulove, Multvert
Bundle 9
- Zlob Modular, Foldiplier
- Zlob Modular, Tote Bag
Bundle 10
- Wirehead Instruments, Basilisk DIY
Bundle 11
- Wirehead Instruments, FeaqFM
Bundle 12
- LeafAudio, Geophon S
Bundle 13
- LeafAudio, Contact Mic
- LeafAudio, Field Amp
Bundle 14
- Timo Rozendal, Dyn
- Transistorkreis, Random
- ADDAC System, VC T-Network
Bundle 15
- Music Thing Modular, Workshop System
Terms of Entry
Entering the Exploding Shed Giveaway 2026 is completely free, as always. The minimum age to participate is 14. Entry is limited to one entry per person, attempted multiple entries automatically result in disqualification.
To enter, comment on this Gearnews article. Your comment must name the bundle you’d like to win. All valid comments go into the drawing. A random draw picks one entry per bundle, and the lucky winner gets contacted afterward by us or by Exploding Shed (shipping address will be requested separately by email). So please make sure to include a working email address.
Your data is stored only for the purposes of this giveaway and is never shared with third parties. Legal recourse and cash payout of the prize are both excluded. The giveaway runs through Wednesday, October 7, 2026, at 11:59:59 PM CEST. Any comments submitted after that point will not be counted.
Heads up: since our editorial team has to manually review and approve every comment, your entry won’t appear right away, but it has absolutely been received. Please be patient.
By entering and submitting your comment along with your email address, you confirm that you accept these terms.
Employees of GEARNEWS.com, all participating companies, and their family members are excluded from entering this giveaway.
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