LSU grad's magnetic notebooks stack, stick and draw customers

Max Salvant was frustrated. Not by his class schedule or studies but by his notebooks. Three times a week, the LSU architecture student juggled a sketchbook for one class and two or three additional different-sized notebooks for other courses. Toting the unwieldy pile around between classes without something sliding out and falling to the ground required a series of awkward adjustments.

Salvant saw other students on campus doing the same ungainly dance.

“I thought, ‘This is stupid. There’s got to be a better way to organize your notebooks,’” Salvant said.

So, he created one: SketchStak. Notebooks with magnetic covers that stick to each other and stack, like bricks. The orderly approach appealed to him architecturally.

The first version of SketchStak used refrigerator magnets. He sunk all his cash into a limited production run of 200 notebooks, then posted about them on Instagram and TikTok shop. Orders poured in from all over the country. SketchStak sold out within months.

“It was pretty cool. I posted one video, just a simple one of me showing how the notebooks worked, and it went viral,” Salvant said. “So I did more of them.”

One video has racked up 2.5 million views.

Salvant has since shot videos of himself pitching the notebooks at a restaurant, an oil change shop, to teachers and students, and to engineers and architects. He’s also videoed himself snapping pens to the notebooks, attaching them to a stair stepper, the heavy bag at a gym (spoiler alert: the notebooks can’t stick to the bag when it’s punched), keys, weights, rulers, laptops, and refrigerators.

The videos demonstrated people’s interest in the product, not to mention Salvant’s willingness to pitch anyone, anywhere, anytime. The videos also offered another major advantage: they didn’t cost anything to make. Salvant was a student without a marketing budget. He did everything on his own.

Salvant has since redesigned his notebooks and graduated. The first SketchStaks required users to interlock the notebooks, connecting the inside of one notebook to the inside of the next. The second version is truly stackable. The sleeker design will incorporate neodymium magnets, which are thinner, stronger, and remain magnetic longer. Using neodymium magnets also means users can connect other metal objects. Salvant wants to create a much larger batch of the notebooks, but the recent graduate needs to find investors to fund the production run.

“I want to pursue this as a business, to see how far I can take it,” Salvant said. “The amount of interest SketchStak has drawn so far, the orders, the video views, shows the potential market is pretty large,” Salvant said. “But to take the next step, I need to secure additional funding.”