The first version was a disaster.
I had the idea before our daughter was born. Her handprint on a basketball, on my desk. Simple enough. So one weekend I bought a ball, some ink, and I tried to make it myself.
The ink smeared the second she pulled her hand back. The ink also took 3 months to set on the surface. The ball itself was small and slick and not what I had imagined.
I couldn't stop thinking about how close it had been. A clean print on the right ball, sealed so it actually lasted, would have been perfect. Nobody was making that. So Quentin and I decided to make it ourselves, and we figured it would take a few weeks.
It took over a year.
Most of that year was unglamorous. We had never setup a business from scratch before. We had to find suppliers, test out inks, leathers, and sealers design a logo, create a brand, design the display base, build a website, When we weren't designing a logo or picking fonts. We were sitting at a kitchen table pressing handprint after handprint onto ball after ball, writing down what failed. (The process that finally worked)
The balls came first. A regulation ball is too big for a desk and too heavy for a base, and the cheap ones look cheap the moment you hold them. We landed on a display-quality 5-inch ball, big enough for a handprint, small enough to sit on a shelf without taking it over.
The ink was its own problem. Half of what we tried either wouldn't hold on the surface or wasn't something we'd want near a kid's hands. We weren't going to ship anything we wouldn't use on our own children, so anything that wasn't child-safe was out, full stop.
Then the sealant. Every spray we tested either fogged the surface or dried uneven. The thing that actually worked was a brush-on, water-based sealant you apply like nail polish, a thin coat right over the print. It dries clear, it locks the print in, and it leaves the rest of the ball alone.
The base took longer to get right than we expected. It's the part nobody thinks about until it's wrong. We didn't want it to look or feel cheap. We wanted it to be an item that you would be proud to display. We settled on solid wood in walnut or maple, heavy enough to stay where you put it, finished well enough to belong on a desk or a mantel instead of in a box.
None of this is the kind of thing you notice when it's done right. That's sort of the point. When you open a Little Touchprints kit, you're not getting our first try. You're getting the one version that survived a year of us trying everything else and throwing most of it out.
We make it in basketball and football, in walnut or maple, for $44.99 with free standard shipping.
Start small. Dream big.
