Distributor Spotlight Series @Digikey

Hello! We are doing a spotlight series where every week where we highlight a different Adafruit distributor on the Adafruit blog. Adafruit is based in New York City and so the first stop on our regional tour of Adafruit Distributors is the U.S.!

This month we gladly present one of our top distributors in the U.S. Digi-Key.

We have had some excellent collaborations with Digi-Key in the past couple of years, The Buy- One-Give-One Circuit Playground with Girls Who Code, All the IoT Videos, and LadyAda interviewing Dave Doherty being just a few!

A little background on our friends over at Digi-Key:

Digi-Key was founded in 1972 by Dr. Ron Stordahl who built a Digital Keyer to transmit Morse code.
When building this device, he ended up with extra components and decided to sell these to other
hobbyists. This is when all the fun began for Digi-Key.

Digi-Key is an authorized distributor of more than 6.8 million electronic components from over 675
industry-leading suppliers. All the company’s 1.4 million in-stock components along with over 10,000
boards, modules, and kits are located in one central location in small-town Thief River Falls, MN. The
warehouse measures 800,000 square feet, houses over 3500 employees, and ships around 20,000
packages per day. Once an order is placed, it is out the door in less than 20 minutes on average and if
you place your order before 8:00pm CST it will be shipped the same day.

On December 8th , 2015 Digi-Key reached its 50,000,000th package shipped milestone.

In 2016 Digi-Key launched a new website called Maker.io aimed to help Makers along the journey to
become Maker Professionals. This website is full of great Maker products, projects, blogs, and much
more to inspire ideas. We also have a great 10 part interactive dashboard that will help you bring your
idea of a product to production with the help of some very valuable partners such as Adafruit.

In 2017 Digi-Key made two momentous announcements. First, the company recorded a record $2
billion+ in sales worldwide, and more impressively, announced a very large warehouse expansion of a
mind-blowing 2.2 million square feet in size! The new building will create 1000 new jobs over the next
10 years. Construction of the new warehouse will begin to take shape as soon as the ground thaws this
spring.

 

Check out Adafruit products at Digi-Key HERE!