Maplin Electronic Supplies was founded in 1972 as a small mail order by Roger and Sandra Allen and Doug Simmons. The company originally began in a bedroom at the Allens house in Rayleigh, Essex, after the two electronics enthusiasts were disappointed by the complexity and poor availability of the existing electronic component suppliers.

The trio placed a small ad in an electronic magazine after printing the company's first 28-page catalog, which was offered to the callers free of charge. Despite a slow start-up and waning gain in the first year, the company began to have a reputation for delivering first-class electronic components that are exactly the same as the first-class catalog.

First shop

Maplin Store in Stoke on Trent with the previous logo

The first shop opened in Westcliff-on-Sea; The mail-order department went to the spare rooms above the shop. The sales were a big boost when Maplin was invited to take top-of-the-line advertising space in the IPC Electronics magazines after receiving a large number of complaints against some of their existing advertisers.

A second store opened in Hammersmith by the end of the year. The company's mail-order department had designed the space available across the Westcliff-on-Sea shop, and a large ex-dairy building, a few miles away in Hadleigh, was bought and soon established as Maplin's first warehouse.

Maplin had already started designing electronic kits for hobbyists and musicians, with several first synthesizer and organ projects being released in the first magazine, Electronics & Music Maker, and subsequently provided as kits. Shortly after the second store was opened, the technical team and management electronics - the Maplin magazine, which was originally published every quarter, started later as further projects were drafted, the publication was published monthly.

Maplin Store in Gloucester Road, Bristol

The kits were a perfect vehicle to sell the components of Maplin, and the articles in the electronics published complete wiring diagrams, parts lists and technical articles with complete instructions for setting up and setting up the projects. All this happened in the early 1980s, and the sudden boom in home-computer ownership, created by manufacturers such as Sinclair, Commodore International and Atari, created opportunities for Maplin to build construction kits to these computers such as voice synthesizer, memory expansion cards To add expansion keyboards, cables and connectors.

At the height of the production of the home build kits, Maplins was extensive, with specially developed power amplifiers, radio kits, weather station and a full weather satellite receiver and display system, as well as many others, as well as Heathkit and Velleman kits from the Kits The Maplin catalog with its distinctive futuristic Space ship and planet-themed cover of Lionel Jeans has been crowded with hundreds of application shifts, with each new version being eagerly awaited by the hobby community and hundreds of thousands of copies sold each year.

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Move to South Yorkshire

Maplin Store in Westgate Retail Park, Wakefield

In 1985, Maplin Professional Supplies was developed for the expanding business market with a catalog of products specifically selected for professionals and the business market. A new National Distribution Center was opened in Wombwell, South Yorkshire in 1989, and a Far Eastern headquarters was established in Taiwan four years later.

By 1994 Maplin had a turnover of more than £ 29 million a year