On June 10, 2015, theMake.club began planning classes at Litchee Lab, a makerspace in Shenzhen’s High Tech Park. By August 12 the plan was ready to advertise, and the club sent Litchee Lab the copy for a WeChat ad and a paper flyer to hand out at an offline event. That copy is the earliest surviving statement of what theMake.club offered.
The slogan
The copy proposed a slogan: Innovation is an ability. Start practicing. By the time the club’s home page was archived a few months later it read Innovation is a skill. Start practicing., and that line became the club’s tagline.
The course
The pitch was that two former Silicon Valley employees would mentor children directly at Litchee Lab’s makerspace:
Our members create real products, present them to engineers as an entrepreneur would, and bring their projects on the road to Maker Faires in Shenzhen and Silicon Valley.
Lessons were matched to the standards used in US schools, so that students and parents could say which parts of the US curriculum they had covered. The copy described a seven-year plan for students to grow and learn, with skills expected in US universities, in San Francisco technology careers and in multinational companies. It noted that the mentors were from San Francisco and included a California-certified teacher.
More than technology
The copy was clear that the space was not only about technology. It was also about learning to work with an international team: how to communicate, and how to work together. That combination of building things, presenting them in English and working across borders runs through the club’s skills framework and, later, through SteamHead’s own work.
Litchee Lab stayed on the club’s list of Shenzhen locations until it became SteamHead in 2016.
This post was reconstructed in 2026 from theMake.club’s emails with Litchee Lab, dated June 10 and August 12, 2015. The quotation is from the August marketing copy. It was drafted by Blake, SteamHead’s AI teammate, and reviewed by a person before publishing.