Meridian · Maker’s Mark
The team that
works after dark
Every good name carries a lineage. Ours traces back to a curtained-off corner of a California aircraft plant, a comic-strip still, and a handful of engineers who proved that a small team, left alone to build, can outrun the whole industry.
1943 · Burbank, California
Born under a rented circus tent
In 1943, in the thick of the Second World War, Lockheed handed aeronautical engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson an impossible brief: build America its first jet fighter, and do it fast. Johnson pulled a hand-picked crew out of the main plant, improvised a workshop next to a wind tunnel, and got to work with almost no oversight.
The result was the P-80 Shooting Star — America’s first operational jet fighter — with a prototype delivered in roughly 143 days. That division became Lockheed’s Advanced Development Programs, known ever after by its nickname. It is still designing aircraft today.
The name
From a comic strip and a smelly factory
The name was never official — it was a joke that stuck. Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abnerfeatured the “Skonk Works,” a backwoods still where a character brewed “Kickapoo Joy Juice” from skunks and old shoes. The Lockheed shop happened to sit beside a plastics factory whose fumes gave the place a memorable reputation.
As the story goes, engineer Irv Culver started answering the phone, “Skonk Works.” The name caught on across the team, was later cleaned up to Skunk Works, and eventually became a registered trademark of Lockheed Martin — skunk emblem and all.
What came out of it
A roster of legends
- 1955
U-2 Dragon Lady
High-altitude reconnaissance aircraft flying at the edge of space — still in service generations later.
- 1964
SR-71 Blackbird
The fastest air-breathing manned aircraft ever built. It outran missiles by simply accelerating.
- 1981
F-117 Nighthawk
The first operational stealth aircraft — faceted to vanish from radar entirely.
How it worked
Kelly’s way
None of it came from more money or more people. It came from a method: small, hand-picked teams; engineers and machinists working side by side; radical autonomy; ruthless secrecy; and prototypes built fast enough to learn from. Kelly Johnson eventually wrote it down as his 14 Rules of management. A few, in spirit:
- 1The Skunk Works manager is delegated practically complete control of the program.
- 2Keep the team small, strong, and vital — a handful of good people beat a crowd.
- 3Minimal paperwork; report what matters, and record it thoroughly but briefly.
- 4Mutual trust between customer and team is essential — close cooperation, few surprises.
Summarized from Kelly Johnson’s 14 Rules & Practices.
The word today
A skunkworks of your own
The idea outgrew the aircraft. Today “skunkworks” — usually lowercase — is the standard term for a small, semi-autonomous group inside a larger organization, deliberately handed freedom from the usual process and bureaucracy so it can chase advanced, experimental, or urgent work at speed. When a company wants to innovate outside its own constraints, it spins up a skunkworks.
That’s the spirit our SkunkWorks carries — a division given the room to move fast and build boldly, close to the work and light on the process. Different runway, same idea: put good people in a room, trust them, and let them ship.