Issie Lapowsky | Inc. magazine

Peel-and-Stick Whiteboard

The story behind the creation of the WhiteyBoard

 

Courtesy company

The "aha" moment: As a business student at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Saachi Cywinski often wished he had his own whiteboard. But available whiteboards were too pricey, and whiteboard wall paint was too permanent. Last fall, he and two friends, Jason Wilk and Sherwin Kim, decided to make an affordable adhesive whiteboard that could be restuck multiple times.

R&D: The partners tested various erasable surfaces and settled on vinyl, which retained the least marker residue. They stapled a piece of adhesive vinyl to the back and dubbed it the WhiteyBoard. Wilk and Cywinski invested $4,000 in the stock market and used the 400 percent returns to have 15,000 WhiteyBoards manufactured in China.

Hitting the market: In March, Wilk used his contacts in the tech industry to announce WhiteyBoard on the TechCrunch website. Since then, he and his partners have sold $125,000 worth of WhiteyBoards, which come in three sizes and start at $10, at whiteyboard.com.

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Issie Lapowsky is a reporter at Inc. magazine. She has covered lifestyle and entertainment for the New York Daily News, and her work has been published in BlackBook magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.