Optimist has come a long way since I first started tinkering with computers in 2018. It began as a small Etsy store, something to do during the pandemic more than a plan for a company. I opened it in 2020, and I can be honest about the fact that a fair amount of what happened next came down to timing and a bit of luck alongside the work. Over its life that little store held a 4.95-star average and sold more than three hundred systems, and somewhere in there it stopped being a way to pass the time and became the thing I did. We eventually moved to a preliminary Shopify site, and we closed the Etsy store for good in January 2025 once everything had shifted to our own home online.
What we owe most of the progress to is the team, and to a handful of builds that taught us who we were. Sakura and Nocturne, in particular, shaped Optimist into what it is now. They were the ones that proved the idea worked and gave us the footing to attempt more ambitious systems, and nearly everything we build today traces back through them in one way or another.
Through all of it, the root of what we do hasn't moved. We build for individuals rather than a broad consumer base, because we've believed from the start that a person, and the workspace that person spends their life in, is genuinely unique. The one-size-fits-all of mass-market computing is useful, and it is also shallow in a way we never wanted to make peace with. A machine can carry some of the character of the person who owns it, and once you've seen that done properly, the gray box under the desk starts to feel like a missed opportunity.
That belief is also why, over time, we pulled everything back to one place. We spent stretches on eBay, Newegg, and Jawa, and for a while on Etsy we had a real hold on the high-end corner of this market. But selling across a half-dozen storefronts meant giving up control of the two things we care about most: the hardware that goes into our systems, and the way we release and cycle our designs. Bringing it all onto our own site is how we keep both in our hands.
So this is a thank-you, really. To the team, to the early buyers who took a chance on a small Etsy shop, and to everyone still here as we keep going. We build for the midnight-oil burners, the travellers, and the creatives, the people who ask their machine to be theirs and not just anyone's. That's the whole purpose of Optimist, and we intend to keep delivering exactly that, nothing short of it.
