Flag Mount

[Zeric]

I am a former Infantry Officer so in my garage gym I have a lot of flags hanging. Dont tread on me, Old Glory, the Arizona and Texas flags and many more all spread on the walls of my garage. One morning while working out I noticed that all my flags were either droopy or not level despite spending a lot of time and effort trying to make them look nice. Being former military, I really like to have things looking nice and professional and "dress right dress" which, in short, means having everything looking equally perfect.  Part of the problem for the imperfection is because hanging flags to be “perfect” that is, having nice 90 degree corners, level to the ground with no sagging in the middle, is difficult. Most people hang flags like I do, using nails or tacs and then try to best spread those for to create a perfect square for the flag to hang nice and neat.

However, there are lots of issues with the traditional tac/nail method.

1.       Stretching and sagging – when improperly placed can leave to fabric stretching and/or sagging make the flag look ugly either in the middle of the flag or at some of its corners. We have all seen flags like this.

2.       Leveling issues – achieving a perfectly level flag is difficult due to how easy it is to accidentally misalign corners.

3.       Potential damage – nails and tacs puncture the flag and can lead to long term material tearing.

Example:

 

 

 

 

 

I went to the trusty Amazon store to look for a mount that would hold the flag across the top and therefore give it a nice and neat appearance. To my surprise, there was nothing. There are many accessories for hanging flags on flagpoles or using a clip for a wall. However, there are no single piece solutions where you can attach your flag to give it the uniform support and effortless leveling it needs to look perfect.

 

“Lightbulb”

Perfect flags just look better, lots of people enjoy the wood versions of flags for many reasons, one of which is that they are perfectly 90degree cornered and not saggy.

 

If you want to have a flag look perfect on your wall I suppose you can get it framed but unless you have a specific flag that is sentimental to you I don’t see a lot of people buying frames for all their flags. Especially if your like me and just have them in your garage.

 

 

 

Ever since that day I reached out to my Cousin / business partner and we began mocking up prototypes in CAD. It is basically a long plastic piece (60”) with a metal attachment that can be used to hold the flag across the 60” plastic piece.  The benefits of such a device are as follows:

1.       Perfectly square flags – the entire 60” of flag hung from the top gives it a clean look with no sagging and less wrinkles.

2.       Easy leveling – since the flag is mounted to the clip and then the wall it is much easier to level the flag (a small leveling piece will be provided to customer, or maybe we will add it to the piece itself)

3.       Increased Hanging Versatility –With a mount you could tie the mount and the resulting flag to a tree or a horizontal object. You can have a perfectly looking flag on a fence regardless of where the corners would be. Suction cups can be added to the mount and give it the ability for flags to be hung on smooth walls, trailers, windows…etc.

 

the increased hanging versatility feature is something we originally didn’t think would be a feature to this product but as we started designing the mount we realized how many more options the customer now has to hang a flag that actually looks good on almost anything.

At this point we have created a couple of prototypes that have all have been different in there own little ways. The general idea of a plastic piece is it will actually be hung to the wall and/or tree…etc and the metal piece will be used to secure the flag onto the plastic piece. We have recently pivoted our design but some of our earlier prototypes look like this

 

 

 

We are restricted currently to the 12” of 3d printer we have so to solidify our concept all of our prototypes are only 12”. As soon as we lock down our MVP design we are going to produce a couple of 60” versions and give them to customers for them to test and leave us reviews. We think the concept make sense and is viable but we want customer validated learning before we go ahead and go to market with this.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Zeric

[Noah Burk]

Awesome solution! Have you explored using something like dowels, magnets, or stand offs to assemble multiple ~12” pieces in a semi permanent fashion? Then you could used printed parts for the test units, possibly making the testing phase more cost efficient before diving in to another manufacturing process like injection modeling, etc. If you are using SolidWork for the design I could create a short video showing one way to do it! Let me know if you would like me to do that! Another option could be using a belt printer, I know Creality makes one, they allow for very long prints like life-sized swords.