Getting the Picture Perfect

Were he alive today, Leonardo Da Vinci, medi­eval inventor – if only on paper – of the helicopter and the airplane and a master painter, may well have looked at Liette Tousignant’s creation, the Hang & Level, and thought: “Now why didn’t I think of that?” History records that Da Vinci, inventive as he was, usually failed – unlike Tousignant and her husband, Kelly Krake – to get his inventions off the drawing board.

by Anthony A. Davis

But if Tousignant and her husband had foreseen the gruelling, nearly 10-year struggle they’d endure to recently get their simple, plastic $19.95 product into stores such as Home Outfitters, they might have joined Leonardo on the quitter’s bench.

One thing history does not record about Da Vinci was whether, brilliant as he was, he struggled to hang his and his students’ paintings on the walls of his pads in Florence or Milan. Most people – five centuries later and in an age of space shuttles and computers – still tussle with this seemingly simple task, leaving constellations of holes all over walls as they try to bang nails into the proper spot for the hanging wire, D-ring or keyhole at the back of a photograph or painting. Still, that velvet Elvis just doesn’t quite look like it’s in the right spot.

If neccesity is the mother of invention, frustration, as Tousignant discovered from her days as a Calgary interior decorator hanging other people’s artwork, can be its father. In 1996 Tousignant started Under the Roof Decorating, a small interior design business specializing in economically overhauling a home’s look with, more or less, what furniture, art and home accessories were already on hand.

Calgarians eagerly adopted Tousignant’s premise and she happily set about redecorating hundreds of homes, helping owners find each room’s true focus. But “one of my biggest frustrations was hanging the art,” recalls the 44-year-old, who especially loved going at the walls of homes, creating groupings of art or family portraits. “We would say to owners, ‘Come back in four or five hours, and we will have the room completely rearranged for you.’” But sometimes they came home and Tousignant was still nudging pictures a little left, a little right, a bit more up…. “It’s very time consuming,” she says. “I remember coming back home one day and saying to Kelly there must be some sort of tool out there to help me hang pictures. I’m using up so much of my time doing that.” That was in 1998.

After an exhaustive search of major retail outlets like Wal-Mart, Zellers, Canadian Tire and home decorating stores such as Michael’s and Walls Alive, the couple discovered that, no, there was no tool on the market to ease and improve picture hanging. Says Krake, “Even back then we searched the Web but there was nothing out there. So we both went to the garage and came up with our own tool.”

That first tool was a simple, flat, rectangular piece of wood about 35 centimetres long with a white knob on one end and two screws on the other. “This was primitive,” says Krake, pulling the first protoype from a vase full of about a dozen protoypes Tousignant keeps as an homage to the couple’s tough journey as inventors. “You hang the picture on the screws, take it to the wall where you want to put it, press on it and it makes two marks where the screws or nails should go. But the screws could scratch the walls,” says Krake.

Neanderthal as that first tool was, Tou­signant’s Under the Roof clients often marvelled at it and asked her where they could buy the yet unnamed device. In 1999 that got the couple, married 24 years, thinking they could improve the design and start manufacturing and selling it. First, they talked to the National Research Council and got a small amount of design assistance and funding, and, spending $1,000 of their own money, had computer-aided design drawings done and a “rapid protoype” made in California. Tousignant reaches into a vase and pulls out an opaque plastic prototype with a slender plastic gripping handle and three buttons that can be depressed to mark a nail-point on a wall once a tool and painting have been properly positioned on a wall.

More protoypes would follow, each one pointing to weaknesses in its predecessors. Each one costing the couple more money and more sleepless nights, says Krake, who was a business consulting partner with Deloitte & Touche for 20 years until he quit his job in October 2004 to work on Hang & Level full-time. After that first rapid prototype, Tousignant and Krake realized that if they were serious about mass-marketing their product, they were at the point where they needed to have an injection mould made to produce some samples or “offs,” as they are called. That would cost the couple, who still had two teenaged daughters to raise, $30,000. “So that was a big step,” says Krake, sitting in the kitchen of their Calgary home that also serves as Under the Roof headquarters. “So we bit the bullet and cobbled our savings together, so to speak, and had the mould made.”

The offs from that mould only served to highlight improvements still needed with the design. For instance, the plastic points used to indent the wall and mark where nails or hooks should go would wear quickly. Tousignant and Krake decided to go with better metal pins, but that would entail a more expensive two-step manufacturing process.

In 2001, Under the Roof came close to signing a manufacturing and distribution deal with a company in the United States. But the deal fell through when that company was bought out. “There were tears,” recalls Tousignant. Burnt out from developing their tool while working 60- to 80-hour work weeks at their regular jobs and raising two children, the couple shelved their invention for three years. But Tousignant could not let it rest. “We couldn’t bear the idea of seeing someone else come to the market with a similar product,” she explains. “When we shelved our tool for a few years – while we were mourning our loss – I kept using it.” And people kept asking where they could get one. “We just couldn’t bury the idea altogether. We didn’t want to live through our life and say, ‘What would have happened if we would have gone all the way?’”

Late in 2003 Tousignant and Krake pulled their invention back off the shelf and devoted themselves to it full-time. As one prototype in Tousignant’s vase shows, Hang & Level was originally called Spot On, a name a marketing agency came up with. Now reinvigorated, the couple decided that, before they sank more tens of thousands of dollars into a new production moulds, a market survey would be wise. Krake developed a web questionnaire asking about 80 quality-related questions, and the most recent prototype was given to about 100 friends and acquaintances to try out. The test group was instructed to be brutally honest.

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