Five years ago, I started designing and making my own laser cut organizers with my Horizon Zero Dawn organizer and it was quite the learning experience. I had never owned a laser cutter before, nor had I ever even operated one. I wasn’t a product designer. I didn’t even know how to use any sort of 3D modelling software. But I felt confident in falling back to what was familiar to me; 2D design, and an overwhelming sense of “I can do that.”

Sure, there were issues to resolve with my initial designs, and certainly new obstacles to overcome when I decided to start selling them. My first design took me about 6 hours to cut on my one laser cutter; it’s not what I would call marketable, or even profitable. What I didn’t realize at the time was that all of the difficulties I was faced with were helping to shape what was to come, something easier; and there just had to be an easier way to go about this.

Fast forward to three years ago. I had beta testers helping me with initial builds to identify issues I wasn’t seeing or having troubles with. I had my manufacturing workflow a lot more refined. I upgraded my shop with a huge dual 130W laser which was able to cut two things at the same time and had 4 times the bed size of my first laser. Then I upgraded again when I got rid of that big guy and traded in for an additional 3 smaller lasers, which, as it turned out, were a lot easier to maintain and were providing better and faster cuts. However, some of the earlier and more problematic issues still haunted me; people were still having a hard time building my organizers, and creating new ones was taking an abysmally long time, which didn’t pair well with having a pretty demanding full time job as well. I needed to make things easier for everyone. 

All these frustrations, setbacks, slowdowns, and difficulties finally coalesced into my “pie-in-the-sky” idea. What if I invented some sort of universal system that, like Legos, could be built piecemeal by hand that could accommodate any game component? It sure would make designing a lot easier, and I would know everything fit the moment I built it. It would make manufacturing easier with replaceable and interchangeable parts, so no more reinventing the wheel every time I started a new project. And it would make for a better customer experience because I would be able to get farther away from my Ikea-esque instructions of “insert Tab A into Slot B,” which, admittedly, was confusing and difficult to improve upon. Rather, I would be able to make things super simple and clear in my instructions by designing parts that could fit together in an intuitive way without the need for sub-millimeter precision on anyone’s part.

But what would it look like? At first I thought about 3D printing, but alas, while I had started to learn some very basic 3D design, I have always struggled with translating what I had in my head into 3D designs in a digital format, as if my brain couldn’t make sense of what was on the screen and was unable to reconcile what it saw and what it wanted. I was a long way off from having the skills I needed to design the types of parts I knew I would need. I thought, “Perhaps I can push the limits of laser cutting design and stop thinking in terms of 2D shapes being cut out.” So, I started to make parts where the edge of the MDF shapes played as big of a roll as the overall shape; I started to think of them as 3D objects rather than just profiles.

From this...

...to this...

The resulting prototype was… interesting. It was also tedious, painful to put together, and extremely time intensive. But, like Lego, I both found something that could be universal, and just as painful to step on when dropped. The one good thing to come out of this was the revelation that storing miniatures in a square grid-like pattern is one of the most inefficient ways to put a bunch of figures in a confined space, however, my first prototype showed me that if I fit miniatures together, like a cartoon shark’s teeth, I could squeeze them really close together without them damaging each other. I just needed to find the right shape to cut out that would solve all the previously mentioned issues.

And I feel like I tried everything: glue, friction fit, 2-part snap in shapes, twist-lock, 3-part snap in shapes, cross lap connections. I found a lot of things that would work, but none of them were easy, fast, and simple to either manufacture or construct. So, I relented and went back to 3D modelling. I think it was more out of desperation than of necessity, I finally sat down and started to learn how to use some CAD software, and much to my surprise, some of the mental blocks I’ve been struggling with since early college courses started to lift. Things began to click and in about 6 or 7 months… well, I’m confident in saying I was capable, but that was enough.

In late 2024, I got my first 3D printer and started printing some early prototypes of a series of connectors I had designed. They were fantastic. They still hurt to step on, but they held miniatures in place and were easy to install. Hurdle One down.

The next step was to figure out how to make it more modular, customizable, and more accommodating of different types of components. In the end, I wanted it to be able to hold all sorts of sized miniatures, cards, tokens, dice and whatever else I might find in a game box. I also needed to figure out how all these connectors would be held themselves; would I continue with MDF or would I keep running with the 3D printing? I wanted something truly universal; something that a single kit could be opened, cut apart, modified, adjusted and eventually hold any game. One kit, one organizer, any game. That was my new goal. 

Over the next few months I played around and experimented with all sorts of geometry to make sturdy, yet cuttable 3D printed parts to act as the sides of each box within an organizer. I created connector after connector, each serving a unique function. I had a connector to hold walls at the corners, one to hold them at 90 degrees mid wall, one for a tall corner, one for short corners, and one that a wall could slip in and out of easily on one side. I had connectors for miniatures on the end of rows, connectors for miniatures in the middle of rows, and two versions of those for rows along the side of the game box. Then duplicate those again for three different sizes of miniatures. I had something for any imaginable design need one might come across when using my “kit” to build their own custom organizer. Awesome. I had come up with a system that could easily make anything. Now I had to figure out how to make it easily.

It was around this time, the middle of last summer, that I took a trip with my wife to visit my parents in Northern Michigan. Typically, we usually take a couple of days to travel a few hours farther north to Marquette where I went to college. I’ve always loved that city and my wife had fallen in love with it from her first visit. It was on this visit that she raised a surprising question, “Why don’t we move to Marquette?” She worked from home, I had a promising side hustle, and after looking at our finances, we decided we could afford the move. We started looking around at places and it wasn’t long before we found our absolute dream home, after only two weeks of looking. We put an offer in and within three days we were under contract. So began the rush to get our own home sold, everything packed, and a cross-country move’s worth of other logistics figured out. Due to timing constraints, we ended up having to live with my parents for about a month, with all of our belongings in limbo somewhere along the route.

With October finally done, we were living in our house, awaiting our belongings for another two weeks. We had just barely been able to move in and get everything sorted by Thanksgiving. Throughout December, I focused on getting my laser shop set up again, which meant redoing the electrical, adding ventilation, plumbing lines for coolant, and installing an ethernet intranet. Then there was the matter of sourcing a supply of MDF. Up here in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, building materials are quite as readily available as they are in Salt Lake City. But after a few weeks of asking around, exploring possible alternatives, I did find a reliable local retailer that could order in HDF (High density fiberboard) twice weekly for a reasonable price. 

So now I had my shop set up, I had my designs finished, and I had my supply lines figured out. Now I needed to figure out mass production. 

To get an estimate of what each kit would likely need, I put it to the test of building an organizer for a few of the games I’d already designed for. I made an organizer for Batman: Shadow of the Bat, and calculated that I had used about 5 square feet of my “flat wall” sheets, and over 400 various connectors spread across 23 different shapes. It was a bit more than I was anticipating needing, but it still worked. So, I put together some calculations to figure out how long it would take to 3D print those parts and how much filament would be needed. 

That’s where my plan fell apart. To make this one organizer, I would need to have my printer running for about 3 days with only a few hours in the middle of the night for downtime. Clearly, 3D printing wasn’t feasible if it could only make 2 organizers worth of parts each week. I mean, can you justify buying an organizer kit for $800? I can’t justify selling it for that price, but that’s what it would have needed to be.

Luckily, there are two other ways to mass produce the sorts of parts that I needed: Injection molding and casting. I knew injection molding would be expensive, so I put that on the back burner for now and focused on casting. Because of the design of my parts, I knew my mold would need to be flexible to aid in demolding, so I opted for silicone. That was the easy part, the harder question that needed solving was what sort of material would I make the parts out of. Because silicone casting is a gravity-powered method instead of being pressure-powered like injection molding is, I needed some sort of two-part urethane that could be mixed and poured into the molds. I identified several other needs that this urethane would have to be able to meet. I needed it to cure fast, without needing to undergo a degassing process, it needed to have a decent work time, with water-like viscosity, somewhat flexible but not bendy, needed to cure to a pleasant color, and be easy to source and affordable. In the end I found one single suitable urethane, but in my initial tests, it looked, felt, and worked great. On to making the molds. 

Remember how I had 23 different shapes of connectors? I needed a mold for each of them, and many of them required a two part mold. The problem with this is that unless you are very precise in your mold making, you will end up with some flashing at worst, or ridges along the separation lines at best. It’s a good thing I had gotten pretty good at AutoCAD, I was able to make molds for the molds that were as accurate as my 3D printer could get. On my first test of each mold, everything went mostly smoothly, until I demolded my parts. 

My parts ended up not being parts as much as blobs. I had a ton of bubbles, a ton of defects, and a lot of flashing. So redesigning the mold was the next step; I just needed to get the orientation just right to allow the urethane to flow down and air to flow up and out of vents. Test two, not much better. Test three, four, …and then test ten, and each one not getting any better. 

Maybe I needed to use a different urethane. I tried several other types, brands, and adjusted my list of “needs” to see if I could get anything to work. After three months of daily tests, redesigning, casting molds, cleaning the molds, prepping the molds for casting, pouring test casts, curing, demolding, and examining the results, I conceded that my parts may not be able to be cast using this type of urethane in silicone method. Injection molding it is.

After a few days of searching for as many companies as I could find that might be able to produce the parts I had, I finally bit the bullet and reached out to about 15 different companies asking for a quote for services, not quite half of the companies I initially looked at. Most of these companies did not return phone calls or emails. Of the few that did, I had a few responses along the lines of, “We appreciate your interest, but your products are not inline with the type that we typically make.” The shortest response I got was simply, “We’re sorry, we don’t typically touch any project that has an anticipated net price of under $2,000,000. Good luck.”

I did manage to get three companies to give me an actual quote. I had done some calculations to figure out that given my ideal price point for my organizers, what my per-piece price would need to be for each connector. Unfortunately, none of the companies would be able to get there without a significant order size. Some more maths revealed that in order to get my per-piece price into my range, I would need to order around 2 million parts for each of 23 parts. Unfortunately, even at two cents per piece, that would still require an investment of over $900,000, and would take about 6 months. Yeah, nope.

What if I do the injection molding myself? I knew there are some desktop units on the market. Again, unfortunately, the math just didn’t work out. I would have been about as fast as a 3D printer, but I would have been losing the production time by doing all the work myself. 

Then it hit me, what if I combined some of the parts and reduced the number of unique parts? A few thousand each of five or six parts is still expensive, but it might fall within the reasonable range of a small business loan, maybe just enough to get me by. 

In the end, I managed to eliminate and combine a total of 19 of my shapes leaving me with a total of four distinct shapes, two of which are fairly common geometries that I had tried to improve upon until I found that they worked perfectly fine as they were. Of the remaining two shapes, any given organizer would likely only need one of them. They were my miniature holders; one was for miniatures with bases that had flat sides, and the other for beveled bases, and I’ve yet to find a game that has both base styles.

The master shapes:      

I went back to the injection molded numbers and found that, while I was doing better on cost than my earlier quotes, it was still wildly unaffordable, even with a business loan. But wait, these shapes have changed so much in the past five months, what about 3D printing?

I threw my parts into my slicer and found that I could make these parts a lot faster and with a few more printers, I could make enough each week to be within a reasonable startup production and manufacturing output. Success!

A few months later, I finally have updated designs to work with the new lineup of four connectors, redesigned my production process to mostly eliminate laser cutting, improved my margin of error for production, and made construction easier by improving my packaging.

All in all, I feel I've put together a product that accomplishes the goals I had set out to solve three years ago while maintaining the design priorities I’ve had since the very beginning:

1. Be easy to build. 

Directions should be clear and easy to understand. The organizer should not be overly laborious to build.

2. Design with gameplay and setup steps in mind.

Stuff you need first or use most frequent should be at the top of the box.

3. Minimal impact on miniatures.

For those who paint their miniatures, and as someone who paints their own, a good organizer should be designed to touch the paint job as little as possible to avoid scraping paint and ruining hours of effort painting.

4. Be flexible in design.

Being flexible will allow the end user to adjust how their organizer is used based on how they play their game.

5. Be modular. 

Future updates should be able to be implemented easily. The organizer should be able to be recycled for use with other games.

6. Minimize shelf storage space without sacrificing component integrity.

Many of you have a lot of games. Many of you have limited storage space. Many of you have both. I hate seeing people having to be super picky over what games to buy because they don't know where they're going to put them. Lid lift is a huge issue with many people, but if I had to pick between a little bit of lift and using even more space to swap out for an additional box, I choose a bit of lid lift.

7. Maximize shelf storage utilization

Many of you have a lot of games. Many of you have limited storage space. Many of you have both. I hate seeing people having to be super picky over what games to buy because they don't know where they're going to put them. Lid lift is an issue with many people, but if I had to pick between a little bit of lift or using even more space to have an additional box, I choose a bit of lid lift. 

 

Does all of this mean I think I’ve created the absolute best organizer ever and nothing else is even close? No, not at all. My organizers are tools that serve a purpose and do some things differently than other organizers. This may or may not align with how anyone else wants an organizer to look or function, and that’s fine. People drive different cars for different reasons, wear different clothes, eat different foods, use different software, and all to fit different needs. Do I think I’ve made a system for organizers that solves the biggest issues I’m concerned with? Absolutely, yes, and I think it’s pretty awesome. So, if you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading, thanks for your support and enthusiasm, and I hope you enjoy these organizers as much as I do!