Ethan Nyholm was the IT manager. Adina Jacobs was the accessories buyer. Neither of them came from the technology industry, and that turned out to matter enormously.
Nyholm had spotted the gap from a practical angle. He needed a bag for his laptop that wasn’t a stiff black briefcase. When he couldn’t find one, he slid the machine into a postal envelope and dropped it into his backpack. Jacobs, meanwhile, had spent years reading consumers for a living. Her job was to understand what people actually wanted from the objects they carried every day.
When the two put those instincts together, they weren’t building a tech company. They were filling a silence the market hadn’t yet noticed. Their first products were laptop bags with dedicated protective compartments, built to survive real use rather than just commutes. The office was Nyholm’s garage in Bondi Beach. The brief was simple: make something that works, and make it look good doing it.
“Our goal has always been to make technology easier to use by protecting devices and reducing the disruption that comes when they fail,” Nyholm said.
From Garage to Classrooms Across the World
Growth came steadily rather than suddenly. STM Goods moved from laptop bags into tablet cases as the iPad reshaped how people carried technology. Schools proved to be the most demanding customers the company had ever encountered.
Students dropped devices constantly. Repair queues stretched down hallways. Some districts in the United States reported double-digit annual breakage rates among student-issued iPads, with replacement costs swelling budgets that were already tight. STM responded with the Dux case: reinforced corners, transparent backs for asset tagging, keyboard-compatible builds, and construction that could take the kind of punishment a school bag delivers every day.
The Dux line became the standard. Competitors studied it, copied it, and built products that orbited it. Jacobs, who led product development throughout, treated the imitation as confirmation rather than threat.
“Each new case or accessory is shaped by feedback from classrooms and workplaces that rely on these devices every day,” she said.
STM has since deployed millions of Dux cases across education programs, enterprise fleets, and consumer markets worldwide. The company now operates across Sydney, San Diego, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom, serving customers across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, China, and beyond.
What Fashion Taught a Tech Company
The fashion background that Jacobs brought into the business was never incidental. It trained her to think about objects from the outside in: how something feels in a hand, how it wears over time, whether a person will reach for it again tomorrow.
That sensibility separated STM from the protective cases that came before it. Earlier products treated durability and aesthetics as opposites. STM treated them as requirements that had to coexist. A case that protected a device but looked institutional or felt clumsy would sit in a drawer. One that worked and felt right would travel everywhere the device did.
Twenty-six years on, the company remains founder-led, privately owned, and free of external debt. The garage in Bondi is long gone. The problem the two founders set out to solve, however, hasn’t changed at all. Devices still break. People still need something better to carry them in. STM Goods is still building it.
