The infrastructure of DIY electronic music is a handful of small shops that stock the things nobody else will — a specific Thonk-sized bag of resistors, a panel, a Bourns potentiometer with the right shaft, a kit from a maker in Lithuania who makes forty a year. They are not glamorous businesses and the scene does not work without them.
Exploding Shed, in Leipzig, is ten years old this month.
The story
Founded in 2016 by Manu and Hagen with €1,000, in a 12-square-metre unheated attic in Leipzig-Connewitz.
The prehistory is better. Their roots go back to LeafAudio workshops around 2010, teaching DIY synth building using improvised equipment — including, per gearnews’ account, a homemade rig built from a grey drainage pipe, an aquarium heater and some ventilation, with Tupperware enclosures.
They moved to Leipzig-Plagwitz in 2018. Today they stock nearly 1,000 products from dozens of manufacturers — kits, components, tools, boutique gear — employ eight people across multiple rooms, and ship across the EU and beyond. LeafAudio continues as their own manufacturing brand, focused on contact microphones and experimental instruments.
The giveaway — closes 7 October
- 15 bundles, worth over €5,600 in total
- Products from Erica Synths, Music Thing Modular, LeafAudio and others
- Free to enter. Minimum age 14, one entry per person
- Enter by commenting on the gearnews article with your chosen bundle number (1–15) and your email address
- Deadline: 7 October 2026, 23:59:59 CEST
Four days. If you build, that is a few minutes well spent.
Why a shop like this is worth paying attention to
A DIY synth shop is a curation layer, and curation is the scarce resource. Anyone can buy components from Mouser. What a shop like Exploding Shed provides is the specific subset that works for this kind of building — the right pots with the right shafts, panel hardware that fits, kits that have been checked, and the knowledge of which of two near-identical parts is the one people actually want. That is editorial work, and it is the difference between a BOM you can fill in one order and an evening of cross-referencing.
And LeafAudio’s focus is the tell. Contact microphones and experimental instruments is not a commercially obvious product line. Contact mics are the entry point to a whole practice — amplifying objects, listening to surfaces, the whole field that runs from Cage through to the Fluxophone we covered last week. Building and selling them cheaply is an act of scene maintenance, not a market opportunity.
The workshop origin matters for the same reason. A shop founded by people who spent years teaching DIY building, with drainage pipe and Tupperware, is a shop that understands what a beginner’s first build fails at.
The pattern worth naming
Ten years, €1,000 to eight employees, with no outside money that the story mentions — in a sector where the comparable path for a hardware company is a Kickstarter, a scaling problem and a quiet collapse.
The difference is that a shop’s growth is bounded by demand rather than by a funding round. They did not have to promise anyone a 10x return, which means they were allowed to grow at the rate the community grew. That is a genuinely different business shape from the instrument startups we cover most weeks, and it is why the shops outlive many of the brands they stock.
Leipzig is also not an accident. Connewitz and Plagwitz are the districts that made Leipzig the affordable-rent counterpart to Berlin for a decade — cheap industrial space, a dense experimental music scene, and enough people within walking distance to run a workshop. A 12m² attic in 2016 Leipzig was a viable business premises in a way that the same square footage in Berlin already was not.