Hi, {name}

First: Thank you for supporting our mission by subscribing to the Smander Newsletter, joining our discord server and interacting with us on social media. Your activity helps to bring our mission to fruition. The interaction with Makers and Businesses trying to get a product on the market , is what started Smander about 3 years ago as an idea to build a compliant and safe marketplace for Makers.
We have done a pretty big pivot since.
Lectronz.com has beautifully solved the EU-VAT problem and provided the maker-hood with a compliant marketplace. And what we initially found to be a smaller piece of the puzzle , moved into our focus. Product compliance – specifically CE.

It should be just a simple additional step after the creation of a great prototype to turn it into a safe and compliant product.
Our goal is to provide you with a simple cost effective solution no matter in which stage of development you are.
An easy way to evaluate how hard it will be to CE certify your latest brainchild, before the prototype even has been assembled!
A cost effective solution to certify Open source hardware, so it is viable even for very low volume but awesome niche products.
A scalable system to provide all the services a growing business would need, so you can focus on what you really want to do - design great products.

All these are goals are still a bit away , but we are making quite big steps in the right direction.

When will we launch our services?

While we do not have a fixed launch date yet, we do have a rough roadmap:

Q1/Q2 2024 – we are mostlyworking on our backend solutions, to develop the systems needed to streamline antiquated processes turn them from papertrails into modern data processing.
Our Website Smander.com launched.
We also try gather funding and support for infrastructure and facilities.

Q3 2024 – We are connecting with as many interested people as possible, be it as customers, contributors, possible partners and critics. We need as much input as possible from people to find the right product market fit. Therefore we will attend a few events and give talks on our favourite subject- CE for Makers.

Currently scheduled events:
Maker Faire Hanover, Germany 17-18^th August

Kicon europe, Bochum, Germany 19th-20th September

Q4 2024+ – We are starting the renovations and move into a suitable facility to process a large amount of :
CE product assessments
Risk Analysis
Pre-Compliance Testing
Individual Consultations
..and more.

Our major planned services are :

GetSmandered – the group certification Process ( read more here)

Simple Start – if you are unsure about anything CE related. Start here. ( more on this in an upcoming newsletter)

the Compliance Library – A series of short videos in Human understandable language about product compliance.

So who is we?
Actually at the moment we are just one person running it all with the input of our Smander community.

At the moment all the work is done by Clemens Mayer, certified CE- Product Coordinator, Maker, Youtuber, Founder, and Nerd taking the same journey as you probably are right now.

A big part of the whole process is actually software and hardware development, that allows to digitize, streamline and automate processes, bringing down the overhead and therefore cost for all of us.
More on batch processing on our GetSmandered page.

We need partners.

Just bluntly said, we need to team up with the right people to give everyone a cost effective sustainable and dependable way to achieve compliance for their products.
We talked to a few companies who gave us very good feedback so far, but haven´t made any big move yet as we wanted to get to a certain stage of “ripeness”.
But we are looking into talking to marketplaces, crowdfunding sites, fabrication/manufacturing services, and Test-laboratories and legislators.

If you know someone we should get in touch with, please forward them to us or just let us know via email, discord or socials.

We made a few rather unscientific surveys in various places and found one common denominator:

We found people are overwhelmed by the complexity of the CE certification system,

and we found incredible amounts of misleading, outdated or just plain misinformation on the web.
A big confusion and mixing of various unrelated certification systems, of various origins and the unrelenting whish of getting a simple blanket answer, in a field where even the tiniest details can make huge differences, are a recipe for disaster.

We could now do the same thing as some other consultants and just charge for translating cryptic law into human understandable form, for a mystery price only to be obtained after asking for a quotation, but won´t.

Instead we translate difficult cryptic topics for you in short free videos.
The Compliance Library – a video glossar to help you navigate the jungle of regulations and directives.

We also do product reviews with a focus on compliance and manufacturability.
In these reviews we not just look at build quality and design but also dig deep int how the products are made, certified and what edge cases might have been troublesome to them, as well as a critical view on safety aspects and exemplary risk analysis steps.
And if possible we also confront the manufacturer with our findings and discuss measures to improve the product and hear their product development story.

General Information can help with the feeling of being overwhelmed, but it is not directly solving your certification problems.

That is why we have another service cooking:

Simple Start.

But more on that in the next issue of our newsletter.

Meet us at Maker Faire Hanover and Kicon Europe, as well as on our Discord and Socials.

If you want to directly support the project we have a striking deal for you:

Get 10% OFF any item on the MAYER MAKES SHOP on Lectronz.com
with code: “SMANDER”
the profits are directly funneled into the development of Smander.com

thank you very much and please share our mission with whoever might be interested.

greetings

Clemens
Smander.com