Creating the Leveling Board

It's Christmas morning. Our family tradition is to go in a circle and each person open one gift at a time. All my gifts had been opened but one. My husband, David, presented me with a large rectangular gift. He seemed very excited about me opening it up.

I leaned over to open the gift and found a strange board with adjustable feet and levels. I had no idea what I was looking at. Whatever it was, it was homemade, and I knew my husband probably designed and built it. David began to explain to me what it was and how it worked.

It was called a "leveling board". David showed me how the wheels spun, spinning two at a time, to adjust the surface of the board until the two levels showed the surface of the board as level. David told me he built it for my resin and paint projects.

Apparently, he had observed my art studio with boxes scattered across the floor and paintings on each box with a level next to one trying to make level surfaces for my work. It was a mess. None of it was level, no matter how hard I tried. I guess you could say, "he felt sorry for me." This was the reason he developed the leveling board, out of love and concern for me, his wife--Rolynda. I had never received such a meaningful gift from him outside of my wedding ring.

I was so excited when I realized what it was! I immediately told him we needed to sell them, entrepreneurs that we are. I asked him for permission to list the board on my Etsy.com account, telling him he could make me another one if it sold. Sure enough it sold very quickly. David then proceeded to make me an even better board, custom to my fold down desk surface.

The last few days of January 2021 rolled around, and we began selling several of the boards. I had placed advertisements on facebook resin groups, and our sales broke loose. By the end of February, we had sold many boards.

We received a phone call from a famous facebook group artist, named Tammy Anderson. She indicated her interest in making a video for our boards. We sent her a large leveling board and she kept her word about making the video. This video demonstrated her excitement about this new concept, saying it was a "game changer" for liquid media artists.

Needless to say, during the first couple weeks of March, we were slammed with orders as a result of her video. We were not expecting to receive this amount of orders. It was exciting and hard work, but we survived and continued on selling these boards.

Since then, we have run into several bumps along the way with the design, problems in shipping, etc. Covid almost single handedly killed our ability to ship through the post office. Luckily, our customer service is amazing and saved our business. We started sending out silicone mats to anyone who had any issue, and it helped a lot.

In March we started seeing a lot of copy cats, which was real frustrating. I shared with them that we had a patent pending, which we had filed immediately after developing the product. No one seemed to care and continued on to sell our product. The saddest part of all this was the customers who were buying from them were not getting the best product that they could get for their art.

The copy cats were only interested in adjusting our design, so they wouldn't get into trouble over our patten pending. What the copy cats and customers did not realize was that their "adjustments" were going to cause the customer trouble. There is a reason we do what we do. David is an engineer and is always studying how the board can be improved. I am an artist want-to-be and am constantly trying new things with the board and have all but demolished my board he made me, all in the name of "testing the product". "lol". In order to protect our patten process, I will not be sharing the details of the problems I see in the copy cats boards.

A few artists shared their concerns about our boards. The board only holds 10 pounds for example. The board's surface is to be covered to avoid damage. One of the concerns was when a customer returned our board and there was metal pieces imbedded into the board. The board was damaged. It turns out the customer was building metal grates directly on the board, not what the board was intended for. His money was refunded in full, due to our policy of always make the customer happy, no exceptions.

Because of a few issues our artists were having with pouring resin directly on the board, or pouring very thin art medium like jello into molds on the leveling board, David developed a pro line of boards.

Apparently, each type of product has a rating of levelness. Glass appeared to have a higher level rating than the boards we were using, so we developed a line of pro boards using glass. This is a new product for us, and we have already received a few people talking to us about these custom boards, with one already shipped.

This has been an exciting and disheartening journey. It has been very wearing on David and I. We were also dealing with getting our daughter graduated from nursing school. She was in her last semester of college and she gave birth to our new grand son. I was his babysitter while she attended college. I rarely left my easy chair during the first couple months after his birth, listening to Echo playing lullabies and rocking my new grandson.

Between the new grandson, my already existing online business, heartofbaking.com, and now a second business selling leveling boards, I became depressed and started to shut down. I still got my work done for the leveling boards. I still babysat my grandson. But emotionally, I was zapped!

Because of all the competition from the copy cats, our business has slowed. I wish I could tell others how badly that affects us. It's very, very disheartening. We continue to work on our patten, and hopefully, someday Etsy will not allow them on their site.

My plead to everyone who reads this story is to "buy from the original artist", and discourage the copy cats. This will help all of us to stay in business. Team work!

Written by Rolynda Sanborn