Nine years after setting out to tackle unsheltered homelessness with rapidly deployable, hard-panel micro-shelters, Everett, Wash.-based social purpose corporation Pallet is closing its business.

In a post on its website, Pallet said the landscape surrounding the homelessness response has evolved significantly since the company was founded in 2017.

“Communities understand the challenge differently,” Pallet’s statement says. “Customer needs have become more complex. Funding environments and political priorities have shifted. And through nine years of working alongside communities across North America, we have learned an extraordinary amount about what works, what doesn’t, and what is needed next.”

Since launching, the company deployed over 100 transitional villages across North America, providing more than 6,000 temporary beds and serving an estimated 30,000 individuals. To support that scale, Pallet raised more than $18 million in venture and impact funding — including a $15 million Series A round in 2022.

Pallet was founded by husband-and-wife team Amy and Brady King, who grew the social purpose company out of their work in general contracting and a desire to build fast, dignified, individual emergency shelter alternatives.

The pair designed modular, panelized shelter units that could be assembled on-site in under an hour without specialized tools — incorporating climate control, lockable doors, and cleanable hard surfaces to serve both natural disaster relief and city homelessness responses.

Pallet was the Hardware/Gadget/Robotics of the Year winner at the 2022 GeekWire Awards.

“We exist because communities cannot quickly build enough affordable, permanent housing to meet the needs of their residents,” Amy King, Pallet’s CEO, said in 2022.

GeekWire reached out to Pallet for comment on Tuesday and we’ll update this story when we hear back.

In a report on the closure, Seattle news outlet PubliCola noted that Pallet’s plastic and fiberglass panel units ran roughly $20,000 each — nearly five times the cost of a traditional wooden tiny home built by the Low-Income Housing Institute.

In Seattle, where the city recently partnered with Pallet on a 75-unit shelter in Interbay, the contract budget with the city’s Human Services Department roughly tripled from $1.3 million to nearly $4 million as the scope expanded, PubliCola reported.

With Pallet shutting down, operators of existing sites will now be left to perform their own ongoing maintenance and source replacement parts independently.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who pledged to open 1,000 new units of shelter and emergency housing during her first year in office, called Pallet’s closure unfortunate.

“My understanding is that Pallet shutting down is really due to shifts in the availability of public funding,” Wilson told PubliCola. “They just don’t have the demand, in terms of purchasing their shelters, that they need to keep them in business.”

Pallet noted that its team members plan to carry their operational experience into new initiatives within the homelessness space, while pointing to lasting systemic changes — such as updated building codes and policy shifts — that helped legitimize rapid-deployment shelter alternatives.

“Our goal was never to defend one solution. Our goal is to solve the problem,” the company wrote on its website, framing the closure not as a retreat, but as a necessary evolution.

Wenxin Fang was 14 years old when he realized he was fed up with fighting with a flimsy piece of plastic in math class.

As an eighth grader at Evergreen Middle School in Redmond, Wash., Fang kept bumping into the limits of standard classroom protractors — the cheap, clear tools generations of students have used to measure and plot angles. Frustrated by how often he had to realign the plastic arc just to mark a single line, he started sketching an alternative in his notebook.

Two and a half years and seven design iterations later, the incoming Tesla STEM High School junior is launching the ZeroPivot Protractor, a sleek, precision-machined aluminum hardware project aiming to drag an overlooked classroom staple into the modern era.

“I shouldn’t be fighting with a piece of plastic to draw an angle,” said Fang, now 17, during a call from China this week where he was meeting with suppliers ahead of production of his tool.

Fang launched a Kickstarter campaign on July 26 to fund the initial production run of the ZeroPivot. The campaign hit its initial target within 48 hours and has raised more than $2,200 from dozens of early backers.

Priced at $19, the ZeroPivot is positioned as a durable, high-precision upgrade over standard $3 plastic models. The funding will cover tooling costs and help manufacture the custom-machined aluminum components through HKAA Industrial, a supplier Fang vetted and partnered with during a visit to Shenzhen.

To make the tool work, Fang abandoned the traditional semi-circular design in favor of a guide-rail system made from anodized aluminum — a material choice he insisted on despite the higher production costs.

Unlike a standard protractor, which requires users to mark an angle’s vertex and rays in separate steps, the ZeroPivot features an adjustable sliding mechanism that allows users to plot and draw precise angles in a single fluid sweep.

“I went down this path of product design, trying to come up with something that’s small, that’s almost simplistic … that is able to improve the lives of people in tiny ways through good design,” Fang said.

Fang didn’t just keep his ideas trapped in his notebook. After coming up with the initial sketches, he brought them to his middle school engineering teacher, who encouraged him to build an actual prototype rather than treat it as a fleeting thought.

When he transitioned to high school, that mentorship expanded into a full support structure. A trio of teachers helped him turn his hobby into a legitimate consumer hardware launch:

• Steven Bonomo, an engineering and product design teacher with a background working on Microsoft’s Surface Laptop line, guided Fang through user testing, ergonomics, and physical product design.
• Andrew Christensen, who has a background in law, walked him through the corporate, operational, and legal logistics of starting his company, Bonae Artis LLC.
• Karen Schaeffer, a graphic design teacher, helped him refine the brand identity and the final visual aesthetics of the product and its packaging.

That guidance proved essential as Fang spent the past year user-testing prototypes in class on himself and his classmates, refining the tool’s feel and mechanics in real classroom conditions.

Balancing the demands of a hardware startup with high school homework requires an intense level of discipline — and plenty of late nights.

“It’s a ton of work, that’s just the reality of it,” Fang said. “If you’re pushing a project by yourself, there’s not an external deadline there. What you have to do is set deadlines for yourself and say, ‘Hey, this iteration needs to get out by Sunday.’ I do late nights pretty often just to get something in on time.”

For Fang, the ZeroPivot is just the starting point for a career he has been prepping for since childhood. His earliest memory of designing anything was at age 9 during Chinese Lunar New Year, when he used Lego bricks and superglue to create a custom ceiling hook to help his grandparents hang decorative lanterns.

Now aiming for a college degree and future career in product design and mechanical engineering, Fang sees the protractor project as proof of what simple, physical problem-solving can accomplish.

“That was kind of when I first realized, hey, I could make something so simple, and I could have somebody else use it, and it could be really nice for them,” Fang said.

With the Kickstarter campaign already funded, Fang is focused on executing the manufacturing run smoothly in China and delivering the finished ZeroPivot protractors to backers by his estimated February fulfillment target.

While he isn’t yet ready to reinvent the ruler or big pink eraser, Fang does envision creating more consumer hardware tools down the road. But his immediate motivation remains remarkably simple.

“I’m definitely focused on getting this through to fulfillment and getting this in people’s hands,” Fang said. “I think that is the most satisfying part of doing products — getting to see people using them.”