We’re the Beams

We’re a family of four (soon to be five) in Albany, Oregon. We make a one piece chip clip called SLIDESEAL, and right now every one of them is printed in our basement and sold at what it costs us to make.

In July of 2025, Jimmy’s uncle Dave sent us a text message. Four pencil views of a chip clip on one sheet of paper and a video of a cut piece of PVC sliding onto a bag of chips on his kitchen counter. He gave us the opportunity to run with the idea.

The drawings sat for a few months. By October 2025 we made the decision to move to Oregon from Southern California. While we were waiting to move we lived with Jimmy’s parents for a bit, and that is when Julia gave the go-ahead to buy a 3D printer.

Nobody here is an engineer. Jimmy taught himself enough CAD to draw Dave’s sketch as a solid model, and the first piece off the printer was so oversized it slid straight off the bag and onto the floor. Seventy-five more went into a no-go bin. Julia looked at it one day and asked which version we were actually going to sell. Left alone, Jimmy would still be printing. That question is the reason there is a product on this page.

Julia works full time. Jimmy has James and Jackson during the day and homeschools them, so work on producing SLIDESEAL happens once the house falls asleep. Four printers run around the clock, sixteen clips to a full plate, and every ten hours or so he is back down there setting magnets by hand. He pulls each one off the plate, checks it and packs it. Nobody else touches it between the printer and your door.

The next step is a mold. One steel tool, cut once, that every clip after it comes off. It runs to about $12,500, and it is the difference between printing them one at a time downstairs and making them properly, twenty minutes down the road. We are not raising that from investors and we are not putting it on a platform. We would rather raise it here, from a few hundred people who have actually held one and think it deserves to exist.