Michael Goldberg was in pain. After working for months at a high-tech Silicon Valley corporation, he began to develop back pain from sitting hunched over at his computer all day. He realized that a standing desk might solve his problem. He asked his employer if he would purchase one for him. The employer declined, however, saying that he would have to get one for all of his employees, a standing desk would take up too much space, and it would cost too much money.
Michael did his own research and discovered that even an inexpensive standing desk costs around $300. He felt that this was too much money, and he also realized that there were probably many office workers like him that had the same problem. He decided to come up with his own version of a mobile standing desk that would be portable and relatively inexpensive. He had the idea to attach a desktop to the top of an office chair so that a mobile standing desk could be created with the chair that people already owned. After doing his own concept sketches, he contacted Ken Tarlow at Tarlow Design to help him refine the concept.
Tarlow Design got to work in our fully equipped prototype shop and came up with a number of concept models to demonstrate how the mobile standing desk might look and work. After this process was completed, CAD engineering drawings were created for all components and a final “looks-like, works-like” prototype was built. Tarlow Design sourced all components for manufacture in the United States and obtained tooling and piece-part costs. Mr. Goldberg was able to use the prototype in a Kickstarter video to obtain $50,000 in crowd source financing so that he could get the Stork Stand into production. The Kickstarter campaign was successful, and the Stork Stand is now available online at http://www.storkstand.com.