There’s no electronics in this story, but there’s a powerful lesson in product design and development. I had to hang a mirror in my condo yesterday. This is not just any mirror. It’s a special ceramic-encapsulated mirror my wife bought in Barcelona during a visit to the 3GSM show early last year. She found the mirror in a shop off of Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s main walking street. It reminds her of the fanciful architecture of master architect Antoni Gaudi, Barcelona’s answer to Frank Lloyd Wright. The mirror is heavy, and it wasn’t cheap. So I don’t want it falling off the wall.

I’d hung the mirror previously with an ingenious product called a Beehive Hanger that I’d found in Walgreens during a trip to Denver. The wall part of the Beehive Hanger is a simple square spike with a flat stop to prevent it from going all the way into the wall. It’s the other part of the hanger that’s interesting. It’s a 1x1-inch metal piece pierced with a literal honeycomb of holes (hence the name Beehive), allowing you to precisely position the wall hanging both vertically and horizontally depending on where you stick the wall spike into the hanger. I used two heavy-duty hangers, which should easily have held the mirror based on rated load. However, the square wall spikes are thin and they immediately started to slice into the drywall under the weight of the mirror, further enlarging the holes they’d made in the drywall during each subsequent positioning of the mirror. As a result, neither my wife nor I were confident in the long-term stability of this arrangement.

Yesterday, we painted the wall where the mirror lives. Naturally, I had to first remove the mirror. That gave me an excuse to revisit the mirror mounting. During a trip to OSH, a local hardware chain, I found and purchased another ingenious hanger, The Hangman. It’s nothing more than two angled aluminum extrusions that interlock when hung together. You bolt one extrusion to the wall and the other to the picture (or mirror) you want to hang. The bloggable innovation of The Hangman is the integrated bubble level. The wall extrusion contains a semicircular channel into which you place a bubble level, included in the package. You loosely screw one end of the extrusion to the wall with an included wall anchor and use the bubble level to help you mark the spot for the other wall anchor. Drill a hole and install the second anchor. You attach the other extrusion to the item you want to hang with a couple of pan head screws.

Hangman Products charges a premium for its bag of two aluminum extrusions, plastic bubble level, four screws, and two plastic wall anchors. I paid $5.99 plus tax at OSH. And I was happy to do so. It’s a solid mount for an expensive piece of decor that has sentimental value. I absolutely, positively don’t want to see that mirror falling off the wall.

Hangman Products goes one step further by claiming that its product makes picture hanging fun. I shan’t comment on that bit, being a marketeer myself. I can say that even at an overblown six bucks, I got my money’s worth with The Hangman. Wouldn’t you like your customers to say the same about your products?