Luke Leafgren earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard in 2012. Since then, he’s been serving as the resident dean for Mather House at the university, dishing out life and career advice to 400 or so undergrads. Add all this up, and you might guess that Leafgren has some free time on his hands. And you’d be right.
But let’s not beat up too much on the comparative lit whiz. Leafgren has been productive during his downtime. Earlier this year, he built something called the Stand Stand. It’s a portable standing desk that costs $50. The product naturally has its own Kickstarter campaign, and Leafgren and his partners have raised more than $30,000 to date.
I typically try to avoid writing about Kickstarter products based on the premise that Brookstone wannabes should have to fund their own crummy prototypes. In this case, though, I’ve made an exception, because in exchange for $50, Leafgren was able to send me an actual Stand Stand. And it worked.
The typical standing desk ranges in price from about $900 to more than $2,000. Do-it-yourself types can build one for less by ordering a table top and some legs from Ikea (IKEA:AV), although the results often end up wobbly and unsatisfactory.
Stand Stand is an end run around on all these ideas. It assumes you have a desk of some sort. The stand is made out of three pieces of interconnecting wood/bamboo that support a laptop. The product looks a bit like a large book that has been opened with a tray on top of it. It takes all of two seconds to assemble or disassemble Stand Stand, which weighs just under two pounds.
Leafgren came up with the idea for Stand Stand while performing his resident dean gig. He had read a lot of the scientific literature that established sitting for long periods of time as a major health risk. Yet Leafgren found it tough to avoid sitting. “I’m supposed to be out seeing people and available,” he says. “That means working in the library, the dining hall, and other spots around campus. But I was reluctant to do that [as] I had to be sitting in all of those places.” Time and again, Leafgren found himself retreating to a treadmill desk at his house.
Then, earlier this year, the idea for Stand Stand took hold. “There was always a table or desk wherever I went,” Leafgren says. “So I wanted to make something that was as easy to carry as a laptop that I could bring with me.”
Leafgren had taken shop class in middle school and worked at a cabinetry shop for a couple of summers. This gave him enough confidence with power tools to take a crack at making a prototype from scratch. It took a few tries and some advice from a couple of engineer friends, but Leafgren came up with a working model after a couple months of work.
I’ve been using Stand Stand for about a week, and my takeaway has been that the product is quite clever and useful. The stand has been sturdy enough to support a beefy MacBook Pro without any wobbling. It’s simple to put together, and it looks nice. The top wood panel even makes a smiling face out of its grooves, and Leafgren has turned this into his budding company’s logo.
The big question will be exactly who the audience for this product is. It’s becoming more common for office workers to get the more-expensive, real-deal standing desks from their employers. And it seems like a big request for road warriors to bring along two more pounds of gear just so they can stand now and again.
The product, however, does seem well suited to office workers who might want to hop up to the standing position every now and then at their desk without all the hassle of bringing in a lot of new gear. It’s also ideal for home-office types and those who end up doing a lot of work at coffee shops and the like.
Leafgren has a couple of people, including his wife, teaming up on the Stand Stand project, and they plan to use the Kickstarter funds to buy an automated machine for cutting out the wood panels.
