Custom Plywood Product Display (Part 1)
Around this time last year, I begun work on a custom tea light box website called TeaLightBox.com which allows which designs and cuts out custom tea light boxes that are then shipped right to your door which you assemble and paint yourself.
I’m very proud of this site and the amount of customization it offers the general public in a very cost-effective manner but one of my goals for 2019, being almost exclusively online only for the past 4 years with CNCROi.com, is to start going on the road and offering my services offline to people and businesses I actually get to meet in person!
Part of that is to get a bit smarter as to how to display things at trade shows and markets across North America, I think the whole concept behind TeaLightBox.com alone is fantastic, it just hasn’t been exposed to people in the right way in person for it to really catch-on and the start of that will be this plywood product display.
About 6 months into the development of TeaLightBox.com, I got lots of feedback from customers that essentially went along the lines of “we got it, but haven’t had time to put it together yet”, and hence, why I came-out with an upgraded glue free design.
It’s incredible what I can produce at CNCROi.com, it’s been more than 4 years since I started this business and I feel I haven’t even started to scratch the potential of this business, from 3D modeling and prototyping to full-on production as I’m doing with this plywood product display.
I have lots of ideas in the back of my mind, they stay there until I have enough passion and see enough of a market to develop them further but regardless of what I launch, I’m in it for the long term, these sites start small but slowly build-up momentum over time.
Part of being a bit smarter at shows is to bring things in that are both unique and require little to no set-up on my part, basically, walk-in with something, move a few things and done, and as part of that, I designed this very straight forward display to showcase just some of what TeaLightBox.com and CNCROi.com is capable of doing.
The interlocking aspect of this design will give it incredible strength using only thin 1/4″ or 6 mm thick plywood.
I had so many ideas of how to go about doing this but I decided to design a tea light box side holder as straight forward and dummy proof as possible and based on feedback and experience, tweak the design to further.
You might thing this is a very simple design, but sometimes going this route makes the most sense as you get your foot in the door and then, based on feedback and experience, go nuts and develop something better down the line but the important part is to START SOMEWHERE.
As this is for shows where space is very limited, I went with a table top display that sits on the table, it has a 15 degree “fall” towards the back once fully assembled which uses gravity to hold everything inside the slot holes when at the show and it doubles as storage when transporting the TeaLightBox.com sides to the show.
It has been a while since I build a model using plywood, it’s a very strong material and works wonderfully for this application, I was considering MDF but it doesn’t have the rigidity that plywood has and it weighs practically nothing.
All the components you see in the plywood product display below all fit into one another when in transport and all come apart when ready at the show, I was considering a lot of other items like cantilevers and the like but at some of these shows, there will be kids and I need to make sure this doesn’t fall down easily, hence wickedly overbuilding the entire display and the supports keeping it together on the table.
I’ve begun cutting out this plywood product display using our Austrian wide-format CNC laser already after designing it earlier in the day, the reason being the laser introduces a contrasting edge while the router doesn’t.
After gluing this together later in the day, I plan on varnishing it extensively and doing a few more tweaks to make it not look so dark as I don’t want this plywood product display to appear dark but really light and inviting.
If you are curious to see what TeaLightBox.com is all about, check the site out!
These make for a fantastic gift for birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, weddings and just about anything else needing something unique and personalized just for you!
Here’s the follow-up to this blog post.