Stands made of cardboard are commonly used for displaying merchandise. Such stands are made of corrugated or card board material and have a vertical board extending upward vertically from a relatively large supporting base and the board inclines slightly backwards to provide better stability to prevent the stand from tipping forward when the merchandise is placed thereon. The stand is constructed by a single design pattern formed on the cardboard material and it has various parts which may be manually folded and/or engaged together to form the display stand. Such stands are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,899,345 to S. M. Fuller and U.S. Pat. No. 6,098,820. Due to the complexity of the design pattern and the numerous parts that must be folded and engaged together manually, such stands are time consuming and awkward to erect.
Some known stands such as that shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,570,805 to I. Smith are provided with a self erecting base to facilitate their erection. However, the entire self erecting base of such stand is complex in structure, and it is subject to operating problems as it would readily become inoperative in use. Furthermore, the entire stand as a whole is difficult to fold into a collapsed condition for transportation and storage.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds