TenXVI Designs, pronounced Ten Sixteen Designs, was founded on October 16^th, 2018.

You may be asking, what is so significant about this date that someone would name their company after it?

Well, not only was it four days before our wedding, but it was also the same day my fiance’s company laid off 50 employees… including him.

On Tuesday, October 16^th, his last day at work before our wedding vacation began, he was greeted with reduction in force paperwork as he walked in the door.

Let that one sink in…

Did they know he was getting married in four days? Yep.

In the same breath he was told he’d be losing his job they so graciously gave him a $100 Amazon gift card and said, “Congratulations! Now get out there and get married already!”

*crickets*

So what did we do? Well, the show had to go on... We were getting married after all.

We took that $100 Amazon gift card, and another $100 that we probably shouldn’t have spent and we bought some last-minute wedding decorations… Chalkboards.

$200 later we had six chalkboards and A LOT of buyers remorse. But you know what? They were a hit! We received a ton of compliments from our guests telling us how great they looked.

And looked great they did, but have you heard of “lipstick on a pig?” Well, that’s what we were dealing with.

Here were the issues:

1. The boards wouldn’t erase! $200 in chalkboards and we couldn’t get the chalk markers to erase!
2. They were poorly made. I mean no durability at all. Two of the boards literally fell apart as we tried to clean them.
3. Most of the boards had no legs to stand on. We struggled with placement because they had to lean against something… Which of course means they fall over easily.

So here we sat a week after our wedding trying to clean some flimsy, legless chalkboards and thinking, “NOBODY should spend $200 on frail chalkboards that have no legs and don’t come clean.”

And then it hit us… The wine and our idea…

One of us was jobless, so why don’t we turn this negative into a positive by saving other people the trouble we were going through?

How you ask?

By making the best damn chalkboards the market has ever seen.

Fast forward to Sunday, March 31^st, 2019, we made our first sale on Amazon to a small café in New Jersey. They must have scrolled through 10 pages of chalkboards to find us because we were nowhere near the top!

Since then we’ve sold thousands of chalkboards and have even began expanding our wares. Maybe you know us because you bought a donut wall or a mason jar sconce?

But you know what? More important than any chalkboard, donut wall or mason jar sconce is the relationships we’ve built with our customers along the way.

We truly appreciate you supporting us on this journey and we hope you’ll keep in touch. We love seeing how customers are using their TenXVI products, so please share your photos with us on Instagram and Facebook and we’ll be sure to repost them. 😊