The Wand Story

About five years ago I separated from my wife and got made redundant all at the same time. I had a really tough time looking for a new job. I carefully wrote, tailored and sent my CV everywhere, but for the few companies that bothered to reply, it seemed that I was either too experienced or not experienced enough. I had absolutely no money and while desperately looking for work I thought I'd start a website to help people in my position. I focused on my children and my website was going to be filled with ideas and practical advice for separated dads on how to get the most out of the time they spent with their kids. I called the website dadcando.com and hoped that if I made it really good, it might bring in a little bit of income to help towards the mounting bills whilst also allowing me to work from home so that I could spend some valuable time with my children, who needed my support as their mum and I went through our divorce.

I built dadcando around a core of creative projects that would really give dads and their kids something to enjoy together. To make the projects as interesting and as exciting as possible I took my inspiration for the projects from things the kids enjoyed - their console games and their favourite movies. Like just about everybody on the planet, my kids had always been into Harry Potter. The Harry Potter saga is as much about the wand as it is about the boy wizard himself, so one Christmas a few years before, I had dusted off an old wood lathe and turned each of my children their own polished wooden wand, complete with feather, dragon heartstring and unicorn hair inserts. They were a huge success. As I started to create the projects for dadcando I thought it would be nice to have an easy project that would show dads how to make beautiful and realistic looking wands of their own, but without using a lathe. The idea grew quickly, but the solution took a month of hard thinking and experimentation to work out. The result was the phenomenally successful dadcando Make a Wizard's Wand project, which has since been downloaded over a quarter of a million times.

Seeing the success of the Wizard's Wand project started me thinking that it would be even better if a real magic wand could be made: a truly magical device that would allow its owner to control things at a distance with just a flick of the wrist or a theatrical swish, exactly like Harry Potter, his friends and all the other fantasy characters that came before him, wielding wands to make their wishes come true.

I can design and draw a bit so I knew what I wanted the wand to look like, but I haven't got a clue when it comes to electronics, so I had no idea how to make it work. A friend of mine called Richard, who played guitar in a band and was also pretty good with a soldering iron, agreed to help me, so we met up one winter evening at a pub after a gig and hatched a plan there and then to make the world's first real wand using a mash-up of new technologies from mobile phones and remote controls, scribbling the designs on beer mats and spare napkins. Over the next few weeks it turned out that Richard was a bit of an electronics wizard and the magical engine of the wand started to take shape pretty quickly. I knew then that we were on to something special. Even early tests with the guts of the wand buried in the handle of a wooden spoon proved beyond reasonable doubt that what we wanted to do was not only possible but very exciting to just about anyone we showed it to. Before long the project was becoming interesting enough for Richard to leave his day job and that meant we could set up The Wand Company... and the rest as they say, is History (or Magic if you prefer).