Before any grand narrative about global markets or education technology, there was a man in Sydney sliding his new laptop into a padded postal envelope. It was not a moment destined for museum display, nor the sort of origin story tech founders boast about. It was simply what happened when Ethan Nyholm wanted to keep his device intact while heading out on a hike.
That improvised hack became the seed of STM Goods. It suggested something obvious but often ignored: people depend on their devices far more than device designers tend to admit. And so Nyholm and co-founder Adina Jacobs began building products that responded not to the idealised ways people say they use technology, but to the messy ways they actually do.
The company’s long-term bet – that durability is a design language of its own – would take decades to fully reveal its reach.
When Broken Screens Become Budget Line Items
Schools were among the first to feel the consequences of the tablet era. Students dropped iPads. Backpacks doubled as impact labs. Repair queues stretched down hallways. Several districts reported double-digit annual breakage rates, and replacement budgets ballooned accordingly.
Tablet protection was no longer about style; it was fast becoming infrastructure.
STM Goods slipped into this space quietly, testing its cases in real classrooms instead of polished boardrooms. The Dux line didn’t come from glossy design briefs, it came from teachers pointing out what kept breaking, students showing how they actually used their iPads, and long lists of last term’s casualties.
Nyholm has been clear about how the work began: “We didn’t guess our way into rugged cases; the devices broke and told us what to fix.” It reflects a simple idea: STM treated breakage as information that guided each new design.
Over time, educators, IT administrators, and procurement teams began recognising the patterns embedded in the Dux design: reinforced corners, transparent backs for tagging, and compatibility with classroom tools. The case became a regular guest in drop tests around the world.
Imitation: The Unofficial Industry Applause
Once the Dux reached a certain level of visibility, copies followed – sometimes flattering, sometimes nearly forensic in their similarity. None of this surprised Jacobs. “When a design solves a real problem, people tend to repeat it,” she said.
What did surprise some observers was how a privately owned Australian company with no venture capital managed to influence an entire product category. STM did not scale through splashy campaigns or rapid hiring. Instead, its reach expanded through institutional programmes in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, China, and Australia – places where thousands of iPads needed protection and procurement teams compared cases with the attention normally reserved for textbooks.
In that context, STM’s size mattered less than the consistency of its engineering.
The Case That Became Part of the Furniture
Today, millions of Dux cases sit in classrooms, lecture halls, and offices – often unnoticed, which is precisely the point. They are objects designed to disappear into routine. Yet the rise of protective cases reveals something about modern life: when devices become central to learning and work, protection becomes part of the cost of participation.
Tablet adoption continues to increase globally, and districts now treat durable cases as mandatory rather than optional. The padded envelope that started it all has been retired, but the idea behind it remains: make protection simple, make it functional, and make it last long enough that people forget it’s there.
What began as a small Australian bet on practicality has become a quiet influence on how the digital classroom works. And in a market obsessed with the next breakthrough, there is something refreshingly grounded about a story built on the everyday act of trying not to break things.
