By Nikki Morgan
Being the only woman in the room is an experience all too familiar to Alpenglow Industries founder Carrie Sundra. After over a decade of working in male-dominated engineering companies, Sundra decided to start over on her own. In her journey to create a women-centric company that brings together her two passions of crafts and coding, Alpenglow Industries was born.
We spoke with Sundra about Alpenglow Industries and her experience bringing female voices to the engineering world.
Q: So what is Alpenglow Industries? What products do you create?
A: I started with yarn dyeing and yarn making. Then I started making electronics because that’s actually my background. I’m an electrical engineer. And so I started making electronics for the yarn dyeing business. And now I’m making electronics more for makers and for engineers and encouraging other people to get into electronics and learn about electronics.
Q: How did you get started in electronics making?
A: I actually hated electronics in college. It was my least favorite subject. So after I graduated with my engineering degree, I just got thrown into that world and had to figure it out. And it turns out, that I am a project-based learner! I learned way better when I had an actual application for this knowledge. It suddenly became very exciting! So, I stayed in the field for a little over 12 years, learning everything I could.
Video by Juliete Seo
Q: How did your previous experiences in engineering companies lead you to start your own business?
A: I worked in electronics, for other companies and other clients. Most of the time, I was the only female technical person in the room, and it gets old, it gets tiring. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Women and girls in particular, when they’re kids, there’s still a lot of marketing that is more pushing girls towards other things that are not electronics, and tech-driven and computer-driven.
Q: And what have you been doing to uplift women in the engineering industry?
A: I am trying to do my part to chip away at the gender gap and the “dude-bro” culture that tends to permeate engineering and tech. I try to create a company environment that allows women to feel confident in their skills and knowledge. We are a women-owned and -operated company that uplifts the ideas of other women.
As adults, a lot of women feel like they have missed this opportunity to learn about these [electronics], and I just want to basically dispel that myth. It is never too late to learn about electronics. You can definitely dive in at any point in time and I am just doing my part to enforce that idea.
Q: What products does Alpenglow Industries create and sell?
A: So as of right now, it’s a little bit of everything. We make electronics for yarn, yarn dyers, and other little gadgets that bring crafts into electronics. We make things that make the yarn dyeing and knitting process easier, as well as allow people to have fun. Specifically, we have the Krampus Board and Hacker Challenge Kit. Both have different variations that allow people to learn to put coding boards together and hack into things and learn about them.
Electronics and yarn aren’t all that different. You still have to do a ton of math when creating knitwear to get the dimensions and patterns right, just like in coding. That’s where we the cross-section of our products.
Q: How has social media helped your company’s growth?
A: Twitter has been really great for finding a community of makers in the electronics space. You find a lot more textile and yarn people on Instagram. Twitter has been super active with electronics makers, so I try to keep up-to-date the most with that site. But, it’s all melding together these days.
I will say it can be hard to keep up with. You have to post enough and interact enough on social media to get the algorithm to give you attention. With that, on top of running your business, doing the manufacturing, and getting the job done, it can be a lot. So, I would advise you to hire help. It will save your sanity and allow you to generate so much more quality content.
Q: What is next for Alpenglow Industries? Any new projects in the works?
A: Yes! We have a bunch of little things we are tinkering with. But, the biggest thing we are working on is a new circuit board that is compatible with Arduino to teach our clients how to use them. We want to make the boards more efficient and lower power. We are also focusing more on making tutorials and resources for how to use our products.
Featured Image by Juliete Seo
