Why I Started Bestboard in 1996 - and Why I'm Still Obsessed With Boards
Mark HamburgerShare
I started this business in 1996 with a bakkie, a contact book, and what my wife politely described as an unreasonable obsession with notice boards.
She wasn't wrong.
I'd spent years working in the display and signage trade before going out on my own, and somewhere along the way I'd developed this deep conviction that the humble whiteboard, the thing everyone walks past without looking at, was actually one of the most important objects in any building. School, hospital, boardroom, garage. Didn't matter. Find the board. That's where the real thinking was happening.
Nobody else seemed to find that as fascinating as I did. So I started Bestboard.
The things people bring to a blank surface
In the early years, I delivered boards myself. I'd load up the bakkie before sunrise and drive across Johannesburg, sometimes twice in a day. And I started noticing something.
People would sign for the delivery, drag the board inside, and within twenty minutes, sometimes less, it would be covered in writing. Arrows. Numbers. Someone's name circled three times. A question mark that looked like it had been pressed into the surface with real urgency.
Nobody was precious about it. The board was just there, and so the thinking came out.
I saw it in a small accounting firm in Randburg where the owner had mapped her entire five-year plan across two boards pushed together. I saw it in a government clinic in Soweto where a charge nurse had turned a battered pinboard into a shift-management system that put most software to shame. I saw it in a school staffroom in Pretoria where a deputy principal had filled every centimetre with timetable permutations, trying to fit a square peg of teachers into a round hole of classrooms.
None of those people bought a board because they were inspired by a marketing campaign. They bought a board because they had a problem to solve and their brain needed a bigger surface than a piece of paper.
That stuck with me.
What the industry taught me - and what it couldn't
The board business is not glamorous. I'll be honest about that. You spend a lot of time talking about frame finishes and surface coatings and whether magnetic glass is worth the price differential for a particular customer's use case. It's technical. It's detail-orientated. It rewards the people who actually know the product.
But the industry also taught me something that no sales training manual ever put into words: the quality of a board reflects the respect you have for the person using it.
A cheap surface that ghosts, that leaves shadow marks no matter how many times you clean it, isn't just an inconvenience. It undermines the thinking. It makes a teacher look unprepared. It makes a presenter lose confidence mid-sentence. It makes the surgeon sketching a pre-op layout for her team squint at yesterday's marks and wonder whether the new ones are even reading correctly.
That's why I never chased the bottom of the market. Not because I wasn't tempted, there were years in the early 2000s where I could have shifted enormous volume on cheap imported stock and made decent money doing it. But I kept coming back to those people I'd watched using boards. They deserved better than a surface that let them down.
The moment that changed how I thought about this work
About ten years in, I got a call from a primary school in the Northern Cape. Small town. Limited budget. The principal had ordered two porcelain steel boards, our best classroom boards at the time, and I remember thinking it was a stretch for a school in that situation. We talked about it when I called to confirm the order.
She said something I've never forgotten. She said: "Mr. Hamburger, my children deserve to stand in front of the same quality board as the children in Sandton. A board is the first thing they look at in the morning. I want it to be something worth looking at."
I drove that delivery myself.
That's when I understood what we were really doing. It was never about the surface. It was about what the surface said to the person standing in front of it and the person sitting in the front row looking up at it.
Almost thirty years later
I'm still at it. The bakkie is long gone, we've got proper logistics now, delivering nationwide but the obsession hasn't changed much.
The boards have got better. Glass surfaces that would have seemed absurd luxury in 1996 are now standard in any serious office. The frames are lighter, the hardware more refined, the coatings more durable. We've moved with all of it.
But the thing I watch for, still, is what happens in the first twenty minutes after a board goes up on a wall. Because every single time, in thirty years, without fail, someone picks up a marker.
And that's when the real work begins.
Herbert Hamburger founded Bestboard in Johannesburg in 1996. To learn more about the company and the people behind it, visit our About Us page.
If you're looking for a board worth writing on, browse the full range at bestboard.co.za
