I’ve been quiet on the blog for a few weeks, and there’s a good reason for it: I’ve been heads-down building an entire new brand from the ground up. It’s called State of Stick, Co., the site is live at stateofstick.co, and I’m finally ready to talk about it.

If you’ve followed the TechBinBytes story — from trading the day job for a Glowforge, to chasing a Fanatics license, to experimenting with color laser engraving on metal — this is the next logical step. It’s the moment all that tinkering turns into an actual product line you can buy, stick on your water bottle, and put on a shelf in a store.

What Is State of Stick?

State of Stick, Co. (ESTD 2025) makes laser-engraved metal emblems — adhesive-backed, die-cut, and built to last. Not printed stickers that fade and peel in a summer. Real metal, engraved on the same lasers I’ve been running nonstop in the MakerSpace, finished in warm brass-gold and copper tones.

The theme is Michigan. The mitten. The Great Lakes. Shipwrecks and lighthouses. Pine trees and the open road. If you grew up here or you’ve spent enough time up north to feel it in your bones, the designs are going to hit.

Here’s what’s in the first run of designs:

  • Northbound Vibes — a classic VW bus rolling down a pine-lined road, die-cut into the shape of the mitten. This one’s for everybody who’s ever pointed the car north and just driven.
  • Midnight Mitten — a crescent moon over a tent and a campfire, with the moon phases running along the bottom. Mitten-shaped, of course.
  • Lake Bound — a bottle-shaped emblem with a bus, a campfire, a folding chair, and a Great Lakes sunset packed into the silhouette.
  • Great Lakes Wild — a lighthouse standing over crashing waves, again in the mitten die-cut.
  • Michigan Wanderlust / Strange Shores — my favorite of the bunch. A copper-finish bottle with a shipwreck, a skull on the rocks, and a weathered signpost reading Shipwrecks · Skeletons · Stories · Worth Telling. The Great Lakes have a darker history than the postcards let on, and this one leans into it.

Alongside the emblems there’s a whole family of products coming: tiny under-1-inch envelope seals, 1-inch mini emblems, holographic stickers, and larger statement pieces. Plus fully custom work — store-specific, town-specific, event-specific designs for retailers who want something nobody else carries.

Why a Separate Brand?

People ask why I didn’t just fold this into TechBinBytes. Fair question. TBB is my live-selling and treasure-hunting world — Whatnot shows, storage unit finds, Wacky Packages, Labubu blind boxes. It’s curated chaos, and I love it.

State of Stick is something different. It’s a product brand — a focused line I design, manufacture, and want to get onto shelves and into wholesale accounts. It deserves its own name, its own logo (that lightning-bolt “S” in the badge), and its own front door. Same hands, same lasers, same MakerSpace — different mission.

Bootstrapping Every Bit of It

Here’s the part I actually want to write about, because it’s the truth of how this gets built when you don’t have investors writing checks.

I own the means of production. The Glowforge Pro that started as a survival purchase after a layoff is now a manufacturing line. Every emblem is cut and engraved in-house. No factory minimums, no overseas lead times, no middleman. When I want to test a new design, I cut one. If it works, I cut a hundred.

I do the design work myself. The same Adobe and DTF pipeline I built for apparel feeds straight into this. Every emblem you see — I drew it, laid it out, dialed in the laser settings, and pulled it off the bed myself.

I host and build everything on infrastructure I already run. The stateofstick.co site sits on the same Cloudflare edge stack that powers TechBinBytes and everything else under the Cozyartz umbrella. No monthly SaaS storefront tax. When you own your stack, launching a new brand costs you a domain and a weekend, not a runway.

I’m funding growth out of cash flow. No debt this time. Every dollar that comes in from a show or an order gets recycled into more metal, more designs, and the displays I need to pitch retailers. It’s slower than burning someone else’s money, but I’ve been through bankruptcy once already, and I’m building this one to stand on its own from day one.

The Wholesale Push

The next chapter is retail. I’ve put together a wholesale retailer program with a proper price sheet, counter displays, and a founding-retailer tier for the first shops that come on board — including custom store-themed designs so a retailer’s display has something exclusive to them.

I’m actively pitching it. Top of my list: getting State of Stick into places like the AC Hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan sports venues, and independent boutiques and gift shops around the state. These designs belong anywhere a Michigander or a visitor wants to take a little piece of the mitten home — and a metal emblem on a counter display sells itself in a way a bin of printed stickers never will.

If you run a shop, a venue, or a gift store anywhere in Michigan and you want to carry State of Stick — or want a custom emblem made just for your location — reach out at info@stateofstick.co or 269.425.1770. I’d love to talk.

What’s Next

More designs are already on the laser. I want to round out the Great Lakes series, do town- and team-specific pieces, and put the color-on-metal process I’ve been developing to work on a premium line once it’s production-ready.

This is the brand I’ve been quietly building toward through every laser experiment and every late night in the MakerSpace. It started as a survival purchase and a stubborn refusal to let a broken promise decide my future. Now it’s a Michigan-made product brand with its own name on the door.

Follow along on Whatnot, check out stateofstick.co, and if you’ve got a wall, a water bottle, or a store counter that needs a little Michigan on it — we’ve got you.

— Andrea