Turtle Dad making Turtle Docks for Turtle Families
I started this journey by making a dock for my own turtles back in 2018. It was a trial and error process and I would have preferred to buy something, but the pickins out there are slim! Pet stores sell docks for baby turtles but not adults, and there was nothing on Etsy that didn't either look cheap or cost way too much. I made my own, then made a few more until it looked like I wanted it to. Eventually I decided to list it and see what happened, and I made a sale!
That was my standing dock, which was the first model. The first picture on that listing is still the picture of the dock I made for myself as a test. Then I had a customer ask me about something hanging to free up more water space, so I came up with the Hanging dock model with four arms. That sold really well.
Eventually a customer with a stock tank asked me about a dock that could hang off of one side. I spent a few days making sketches and building prototypes until I had something I liked, and it became my best selling model.
Now I've introduced my most requested new dock, the tank topper. It maximizes the amount of water in the tank and is easy to assemble and is extremely durable.
I'm very proud of what I've built over the past few years and pride myself on making customers happy. I regularly get returns and send out new models when docks don't fit right or get snagged somewhere, the danger of doing custom work! But at the end of the day I do this to make safe places for turtles to bask, and at least once a month I look through the pics in my reviews to give myself a warm, happy feeling. I imagine like the one a turtle gets while basking on one of my docks.
