Dropout Cabinet Fixtures has been built on the belief that good design should make life easier, and since 2014, that's the standard it has aspired to hold. Established in 2014 by Clint Bunch and Betty Lee, the company's mission is rooted in creating innovative functional cabinet hardware that performs with efficiency for the modern consumer.
Clint, the president and chief inventor of the company, offers a professional foundation that is built on over 35 years of kitchen design and remodeling. During those years, he came across recurring challenges across residential projects. "I had found that standard hardware had often failed to meet the real, lived needs of homeowners," he shares. Rather than accepting those limitations, Clint repeatedly reworked or developed his own solutions, reshaping them into solutions that functioned better in practice.
"I'm a contractor by trade, inventor by nature," Clint says. "Working directly with customers and redesigning items to make them usable showed me how often existing components fell short." Witnessing those inefficiencies motivated him to create something entirely new. "Once I recognize a problem, I immediately go into solution mode," he adds.
But those inefficiencies didn't just come from work. They came from lived experiences. His business partner, Betty Lee, often influenced many of his creations. Her daily experience in the kitchen highlighted persistent accessibility issues that she never found answers for. "Inaccessibility was the common thread," Betty explains. "Upper cabinets that looked fine but were frustrating to use, storage systems that wasted space because you couldn't actually reach what was inside. I'd talk through those pain points, and Clint would immediately start thinking about how to make the entire cabinet work for the person using it. That's how Dropout really began."
The result was the company's first and namesake innovation: the patented Dropout Spice Rack/Storage System. Unlike a conventional pull-out, which slides horizontally and may still leave upper cabinets partially out of reach, Clint notes that the Dropout mechanism moves outward and downward. The goal, he emphasizes, was to transform once-unreachable cabinet space into fully accessible storage. Clint says, "With The Levitator® Line of products, we are taking a functional hardware vertical. That one improvement can help in bringing the contents into the user's natural line of sight and reach, transforming an inaccessible area into a usable space."
According to Clint, the company's hands-on ethos shaped the broader identity of Dropout Cabinet Fixtures and its guiding principle: It's All About Convenience™. The tagline, he notes, is a design mandate reflected across the company's expanding product portfolio.
This ethos is further defined when Living in Place is taken into consideration. Clint adds, "As people grow older and want to stay in their homes, accessibility and convenience become more important."
Dropout's Featured collections include space-saving spice racks, waste systems, an integrated ironing center, and The Levitator®, each engineered to maximize usable cabinet volume while improving accessibility. "What we care about is using the entire cabinet," Betty says. "No dead zones, no awkward reaches. Every product is meant to improve how people move through their space and interact with it."
As the company looks ahead, its leadership is exploring multiple growth pathways. Welcoming strategic investment while continuing to create new products, obtaining more patents for the products are all possibilities under consideration, each evaluated through the same lens that built the brand in the first place. "We've always been focused on ideas that improve everyday life. The next phase is about scale, finding the right partners or structure that allows these designs to reach more homes without losing what makes them work," Clint says.
From its founding vision to its expanding lineup, Dropout Cabinet Fixtures continues to establish that thoughtful engineering and accessibility-driven design can elevate even the most overlooked spaces. In doing so, the company reinforces a simple truth that guides every product it creates. As Clint says, "It's all about convenience."
