About Us

Hi, I’m Paul Gugisberg. I grew up in Southern California with a passion for inventing. After graduating from Grand Valley State University in Michigan, I went to work in retail but continued to come up with new ideas for everyday problems. Meanwhile, my mother, Kay Hanson, was working on her Ph.D. in Education at the University of Michigan.

One day I was describing a new invention I’d thought of when she turned to me and said, “That’s all very good, but why don’t you solve the problem I’m having with this appliance.” A week later, I brought her a solution. My Mom said, “That’s all very good, but this is the problem I have this week.” Again, I came back with an idea to fix it. That afternoon we sat down at her dining room table and created Mikael Kai, naming our company by combining her first and my middle names, but in a nod to our ethnic heritage, spelling Michael Kay the Swedish way - Mikael Kai.

We invented the Heavenly Handbag Holder to solve my mother’s ongoing problem of where to store her collection of handbags. In frustration, she asked, “Why can’t I have what I want?”

What she wanted was a storage system for her handbags that used unclaimed space in her tiny closet, allowed her to see all of her handbags at the same time, held the handbags securely but didn’t damage them with plastic hooks that dug into the leather, and allowed her to use just two fingers and five seconds to switch from one handbag to another. The Heavenly Handbag Holder was born!