After a great night in St. Michaels, we got up the early and prepared to cruise back to our home marina. We had a lot do, so we wanted to get an early start. Before we left, I showed the Marina Manager a prototype of the SeaClutch and showed him our website. I then confirmed his email address and promised to get him pricing information as soon as we were home. We then loaded up the dogs, cast off and started a pleasant cruise home. After arriving home, I updated our corporate

We are proud to announce our membership in the QAC Chamber of Commerce! #boat #RV #yacht #pictureframe

This has been an awful summer for boating! It seems like the pattern has been beautiful weather Monday – Thursday, clouds on Friday and gale warnings on Saturday. This has really cut into our trips! We have planned to take the boat to St. Michaels and spend the entire weekend there, but there were Small Craft Advisories and Gale Warnings all afternoon. I don’t mind taking the boat out when there is a Small Craft Advisory, but Gale Warnings are something completely different.

The last post contained the original version of the packaging with the product. You can see how the red lettering against the clear background makes it very difficult to see the description of what is being sold! That’s no good! The picture above contains a different version of the packaging. You can see that the top of the package now has a white background, and the SeaClutch name really jumps out at you. Because of these issues, we decided to make the following changes. On

We are getting close to production! Very exciting. We received an actual production version of the SeaClutch in the proposed packaging. As you can see from the picture, the clean design we envisioned became rather cluttered when the SeaClutch was inserted into it. The problem was that the “clear” sections that had writing were difficult to read. We also need to make sure that people can tell what the product is. This is a product that most people don’t realize they need until

With the GS1 prefix, I was now able to generate a bar code for the SeaClutch itself. The GS1 site has so much information on it that it is very confusing to navigate. It was made even more difficult because I had never done anything like this before, and virtually every step was a journey of discovery! After several fits and starts, I found that the UPC code generator was part of the US Data Hub. This is important because the Data Hub is what a merchant queries when they want

I took an extended lunch break to attend a meeting at Maryland Plastics. I met with our local contact to discuss some tooling issues with the current version of the SeaClutch. On certain picture frames, the SeaClutch binds in the middle allowing the picture frame to wobble a bit laterally. It is a very minor issue and has virtually no effect on the functionality of the product, but I felt that the wobble decreased the quality “feel” of the product. Furthermore, I felt that it

With the online store up and running, I turned my attention back to manufacturing. There were two variables that I needed to consider: 1) The initial cost of the molds in the short term and 2) per unit costs in the long term. We had two basic manufacturing “paths” we could go down. The first path was to take advantage of the 3D printing technology that we were using for our prototypes. While this technology was incredibly important and useful for prototyping it had a very hi

After much work, we own the SeaClutch logo! Many thanks to the many people who helped! #pictureframe #Boat #RV

We are so excited about this! This is the official USPTO notification of the award of the SeaClutch name to us. The logo was also approved, so I will share that when we receive it. Thanks everyone for the support! #Boat #RV #pictureframeholder

Hasn’t everyone purchased something on the internet? But have you ever thought about what goes on “behind the scenes”? I had the foresight to realize that I would need an online retail store and chose that option when I subscribed with the Wix web hosting service. Now that I needed a store, I went to the Wix website dashboard and followed their instructions. First, I needed pictures of the product. I had Lisa and Alyssa wear the standard and v-neck versions of the shirts in b