Physical product
Pad Bracket
An early iPad wall mount accessory that turned a simple treadmill problem into a manufactured product.
At a glance
Project Origins
Pad Bracket started from a small, practical irritation: running on a treadmill and wanting a clean way to watch video on an iPad mounted to the wall. The iPad was still new, accessory categories were forming quickly, and a simple wall mount felt like something that should exist.
After starting and stopping a number of earlier ideas, this was the first project I decided to push all the way through. It became a real manufactured product, with packaging, advertising, inventory, sales, and the operational work that comes with shipping hardware.
The project never became huge, but roughly 30,000 units were produced and nearly all of them sold. It got traction in the early iPhone and iPad accessory era and taught me a lot about the difference between having an idea and building a product.
Technical Highlights
- Moved from a personal use case into a manufacturable accessory with packaging and fulfillment requirements.
- Combined product renders, physical photography, printed packaging, video advertising, and ecommerce presentation.
- Required practical tradeoffs across design, production cost, packaging clarity, inventory, and customer education.
- Reached meaningful production volume for an independent accessory project in the early iPad market.
What It Was
Pad Bracket was a wall mount for the iPad, designed around simple hands-free placement in places like workout rooms, kitchens, counters, and workspaces. The core idea was not to turn the iPad into furniture, but to give it a reliable resting place where watching, reading, or following along made sense.
The project included the product itself, packaging, product photography, ad creative, and the operations needed to turn a small accessory into something customers could actually buy.
Why It Is Interesting
The technical interest was not just the bracket geometry. The larger lesson was the full product system around it: communicating the use case, making the object manufacturable, creating packaging that explained the product quickly, and handling the mechanics of selling a physical accessory.
It was also a timing project. The first iPad created a new accessory market almost overnight, and Pad Bracket was built inside that early window when customers were still discovering where tablet computers fit into everyday spaces.
Pad Bracket Video Ad
Project Images
