Historical record. The information on this page documents publicly reported facts about Mellow Boards as of the periods cited. Current product availability, warranty support, corporate operations, and official communications from Mellow Boards GmbH, TQ-Group, or TQ-Systems could not be independently verified at the time this archive was published. This site is not affiliated with those entities.
- 2015 — Company founded. Johannes Schewe and Kilian Green establish Mellow Boards in Hamburg, Germany. Prototype Mellow Drive development begins.
- May 2015 — Kickstarter launch. Crowdfunding campaign opens seeking €100,000 for production tooling and certification.
- June 2015 — Kickstarter close. Campaign finishes with €309,978 from 364 backers. Details
- 2016 — Pre-production. Engineering refinement, supplier contracts, and backer communication on delivery schedules.
- 2017 — March launch. Mellow Drive ships; complete-board variants Cruiser and Surfer documented with Buddybuddy decks.
- 2018 — November acquisition. TQ Systems (TQ-Group) acquires Mellow Boards.
For narrative context beyond dates, see company history.
Reading the timeline
Hardware startups compress years of work into headline dates, but the meaningful story lives between milestones: motor controller tuning, IP testing for IP65 claims, remote firmware pairing, and the community education required for a modular mount. Kickstarter update archives — referenced on our sources page — fill gaps that press releases omit.
After the 2018 acquisition, continuous public timelines from Mellow as a standalone consumer brand are difficult to reconstruct from open web sources alone. We mark that boundary explicitly rather than inventing post-acquisition product roadmaps.