The Story Behind The Writer's Glove
Since not many people visit the About Us page on websites (it's OK, I don't either), I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Ben Sobieck, and in 2017 I invented The Writer's Glove® in my basement in Minnesota.
Actually, that's not quite right. I invented it two floors up, in a small room in a house built during the Depression. The heat didn't make it to that room, and the leaks in the design meant frequent visits from bats, but it was quiet. I needed that to work on a book deadline for a publisher.
That's right. I didn't start in gloves. I started in writing and editing. As it's said, you don't choose the gloves; the gloves choose you.
OK, no one says that. And no one said much of anything in that tiny room, because once winter came around, all I could do is chatter my teeth and curse the cold. I piled up blankets and lit candles to warm my hands, but my fingers always hung on the edge of freezing. This slowed my progress at the keyboard, which made it difficult to meet the deadline.
Fingerless gloves didn't do the trick, either. They didn't cover my fingers. It says it right in the name! What I needed were fingerless-less gloves, or full-fingered gloves, or non-fingerless gloves, that still let me feel the keys on a keyboard. There wasn't a word for it, because there wasn't a product.
Lacking the vocabulary, technical prowess, experience, and--most importantly--money to design that very glove did little to blunt my sudden enthusiasm (or naivety) for glovery--or for casually using words I just made up to compensate for all this. To the basement I went, taking many concerned looks from my family with me.
Dr. Frankenstein himself could not have dreamt up a more elaborate effigy to human hubris and the blade's edge. I experimented with all sorts of materials and designs, cutting and pasting pieces together and stacking the rejects like lamb on a gyro spit.
This is the point in the story where I'm supposed to emerge a hero, shouting "Eureka!" from the basement while wearing the perfect pair of gloves.
That is not what happened.
What happened is that I got "close enough" with a pair of gloves that by today's standards would not pass the quality check. At the time, though, I thought it was brilliant. Not only that, I had six of these. I built a rudimentary website and waited to see what happened.
What happened is that someone bought a pair of gloves. And what happened after that is the gloves weren't immediately returned. This was the sign I needed to keep going.
And this is where the story must stop, at least for this blog post, because there's a long, frustrating stretch of starts and stops that I can't massage into entertaining copy. I can tell you that the feeling of "keep going" never left me, and it's driven every version of The Writer's Glove since.
This is a constant process, which means I'm perpetually in a state of absolute exhilaration and utter terror. What balances it out is you. Customers are as much a part of The Writer's Glove as I am.
Which is why I hope you'll consider becoming one. Slip a pair on and join me on this journey. I hope it makes your day a little better. It sure does for me.
~Ben