The winding way to a straight Christmas tree.

The crooked tree

One Christmas we spent more than half an hour trying to get our tree into its stand. One of us was holding the trunk while the other tightened screws. We’d step back, see that it was leaning, and try again.

Eventually we gave up. It was still crooked. It stayed that way. There had to be a better way.

I went looking at the stands already on the market. I couldn’t find one that did everything I wanted at a remotely reasonable price, so I started working on my own.

Making it work

I wanted one person to be able to put up a real tree without having somebody hold it upright or crawl around underneath tightening screws, really a one step set-up process. It also had to hold the tree securely, be easy to fill with water, and be affordable to manufacture.

I worked on concepts and prototypes for roughly two years. I’d find something that worked, run into a new problem, change the design, and try again. The version that eventually worked used self-adjusting, sliding jaws to hold up the tree.

The prototype was one thing. I still had to figure out how to make thousands of them.

The molds

The original base design took too many pieces and too much assembly. I redesigned it with injection molding in mind and began the much more expensive job of getting production tooling made.

That part of the project became a series of delays and disputes with manufacturers. Tooling wasn’t delivered as promised, parts needed changes, and Christmas seasons kept passing. More than once I thought production was close, only to end up starting another round of work.

I have photographs of the early prototypes and even the Eazy Treezy logo in the mold tooling. They’re useful reminders of how many versions of the product there were before it reached a store.

Dragons’ Den

I applied to pitch the stand on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den and was invited to Manchester. When I went in, I still didn’t have production-quality parts to show it the way I wanted.

I didn’t get a deal.

But when the episode aired, I heard from a European company the very next day that was interested in licensing it. We eventually signed an agreement.

Eazy Treezy in stores

The product was called Eazy Treezy then. I had licensing arrangements in the U.S. and Europe, and at one point the stand was sold through Home Depot stores nationwide.

The product sold out that season. The longer-term business was harder to keep going. The licensing arrangements eventually ended and the rights returned to me.

Turbo Tree Stand

I later relaunched it as Turbo Tree Stand and began working with a manufacturer in Iowa. These days I’m still talking with tree farms and retailers and getting stands into people’s hands.

A demonstration is usually the easiest way to explain it. Someone sets a tree into the stand, the jaws take hold, and they can see how it works for themselves.