Founded in 2002, Smartphone Experts is a leading online retailer and manufacturer of smartphone accessories, powering a network of e-commerce stores that offer a wide selection of products, rapid fulfillment, and knowledgeable expert support. We stock products for all popular smartphones sold in the US.
In 2007, Smartphone Experts ranked as the fastest growing retailer on the Inc. 500 list of private companies in America, also achieving an impressive 37th overall position on that list.
Our stores are primarily marketed through owned and affiliated smartphone centric online communities. These communities offer everything from great content (news, reviews, guides etc) to discussion forums. Exclusive ads funnel visitors into our online stores, and customer leads are collected through free user registrations. We recognize the importance of separation between media and commerce; accordingly, our community sites have complete independent editorial control from the store operations.
Smartphone Experts own line of bestselling accessory products are developed with direct feedback from end-users through our communities.
 The origins of Smartphone Experts goes back to 1999, when founder Marcus Adolfsson started VisorCentral as a hobby. Visorcentral was a community site dedicated to Handspring's Visor (a variant of the Palm Pilot). The site featured news, reviews, and an active community forum - very similar to the online communities Smartphone Experts operates today.
The start of the business came in 2002, when Marcus launched TreoCentral to accompany Handspring's then recently released Treo smartphone. Modeled after VisorCentral, TreoCentral added a commerce component by selling ringtones to Treo owners.
A smartphone and accessory section was added to the store in 2003, around the same time Handspring introduced the revolutionary Treo 600 smartphone.
The first employee, Diana Kingree, joined early 2004 to assist the growing company. Initially using a third-party fulfillment company to handle order fulfillment, the process was brought in-house by the establishment of a "warehouse" (actually several small sheds) in Diana's backyard.
In late 2004, the company was renamed to Smartphone Experts (keeping TreoCentral as store brand), with the intention of supporting additional smartphones models and stores down the road. We also started contracting with manufactures to produce smartphone accessories under our new brand.
In 2005, we launched our first Private Label stores, Treonauts and Everything Treo, a program that has been hugely successful for both us and our publishing partners. We moved into an actual warehouse later that year, and with the additional shelf space started expanding outside the Treo niche.
 In 2006 we launched BlueShop (Bluetooth headsets), BBerry (Blackberry accessories), and Qdepot (Motorola Q accessories). Also in '06, Smartphone Experts partnered with Mobihand, primarily a software distribution network, enabling us to sell software in our stores and allowing Mobihand to sell accessories (which we fulfill and support) through their partner stores.
In 2007 Smartphone Experts continued to expand its line up of niche stores, adding WMExperts (accessories for all Windows Mobile devices sold in the US) and PhoneDifferent (iPhone accessories). We also acquired CrackBerry to expand our presence in the Blackberry niche.
In 2008 we launched AndroidCentral, and rebranded PhoneDifferent to TiPB. In 2009 we launched PreCentral, catering to users of Palm's WebOS phones. In 2010 we rebranded WMExperts to WPCentral. In 2011, Smartphone Experts launched Mobile Nations, a new network brand to better unify all of SPE's communities and media efforts. |  |
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