Richard Stanley
Richard grew up in Southwest Harbor, Maine and was working in his father’s shop before he graduated from high school. In the late winter of his senior year, he was a passenger in a car that was in a catastrophic accident on black ice. Richard’s neck was broken in the accident, and he turned 18 in a hospital bed with bolts in his head. The driver of the car had let his insurance lapse two weeks previous to the accident. Richard has three vertebrae fused together.
Richard went to the Boat School in Eastport (Washington County Technical College) the next fall, anyway. He realized pretty quickly he already knew more about boatbuilding than most of his teachers. Living in chronic pain, not wanting to use opiates, and relying on cannabis for relief, he really wanted to have better roach clips, and he set to thinking about what that might involve. He’d been working with clamps all his life. He started with a basic idea, modified and refined it for ergonomics and aesthetics, and ended up with the design for klipeaz.
After graduating from boat school, Richard went back to his father’s shop, becoming a master boatbuilder, a quarter owner in 1986, and full owner in 2009. In the summer of 2019, while packing up for another move, Richard came across some old clips, and made some new ones. They were once again very popular, but this time Richard had a wife who said, “What are these? Apply for a patent.”
Lorraine Stanley
Lorraine was born on Gotts Island, Maine, in 1973 and raised on "existential outlaw logic." Living in Kentucky, Texas and Maine before attending Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts beginning in the fall of 1990, Stanley graduated with a BA in literary nonfiction writing in the spring of 1994. She went on to live in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill/Saxapahaw area of North Carolina before moving to New York City 1997. Lorraine finally moved back to Maine in 1999 and has lived and worked on the mid-coast side of Downeast Maine, since then.
Richard and Lorraine met in the fall of 1999, when Richard came to work on a boat at Lorraine’s father’s boatyard. Lorraine had recently moved back from NYC and was working at the boatyard. They were married in the fall of 2005.
Some of Lorraine's past jobs include newspaper section editor, office manager for a graphic design firm specializing in corporate identity and branding in Midtown Manhattan (started as receptionist), ditch digger, lady stern man on a lobster fishing boat, sandpaperer, boat painter/varnisher, and for the last decade and a half, owner/operator at Richard Stanley Custom Boats.