All New - GripWeights
GripWeights - A Modular Pickleball Weighting System
Glad you're here! This is our brand new product: the GripWeight. It's a revolutionary way to customize your paddles. More details below!
A Note
Before I give you all the juicy details about the GripWeight, I'd like to preface by noting that I'm doing everything myself, from product design and production to photography, storytelling, and web design. With this in mind, please forgive my mistakes, everything is a work in progress! I'll be constantly updating this and other pages with more information as I come up with it.
Most of this info will also be on the Kickstarter page, so feel free to read both, but a lot of info will be the same.
Feel free to contact me via the contact page with any questions or suggestions, thank you!
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GripWeights - The Patent-Pending Modular Weighting System
Background
Hey there! I'm Samuel Tomich, a young entrepreneur and pickleball fanatic. A little background on me - I was born and raised in the mountains of Flagstaff, AZ. Making new things and solving problems were always things I found myself pursuing with a passion. Now I'm 19 and completely addicted to pickelball. In the Fall and Spring Semesters you'll find me attending Grand Canyon Univeristy studying Entrepreneurial Studies with an Emphasis in Engineering Management and playing pickleball for their club team, and in the summer you'll find me honing my skills on the court, mountain biking, and bouldering!
The Challenge
As pickleball players, we've all faced the frustration of limited options when it comes to customizing our paddle's weight. Traditional solutions like lead tape can be messy, cumbersome, and just plain out lack versatility. That's where the GripWeight comes in.
Introducing GripWeights
GripWeights are a modular weight system meticulously crafted to enhance your gameplay. With a sleek design and easy-to-use functionality, GripWeights allow you to fine-tune the weight distribution of your paddle, giving you the control and power you need to dominate the court.
Innovative Design, Maximum Performance
What sets GripWeights apart are their innovative approach to customization. Our modular clips seamlessly attach to your paddle, allowing you to move and adjust the weight according to your play style, or even your opponents' play styles. Picture this - you're playing on a normal day, and have GripWeights on your paddle. They are lower down on the paddle to match your usual slow-play and dinking style. However, your opponents step on the court, and are the dreaded tennis-turned-pickleball players, driving every ball and never making it to the net. A couple of points in, you simply slide the GripWeights to the top of the paddle after a point, giving you more power and making your counters the most dangerous thing since the Gearbox Pro Power.
The Difference
Imagine stepping onto the court, knowing that your paddle is perfectly tailored to amplify your skills. With GripWeights, you'll feel the difference in every swing, with more power when you need it, and control when you don't.
Sustainability
Did you know that lead NEVER decomposes, so when you throw that old lead tape strip into the landfill, it's staying there forever? GripWeights both improve upon the functionality of lead tape, and are bounds more sustainable. Besides being reusable and adjustable (unlike lead tape), GripWeights are also made with polylactic acid, a type of renewable plastic made from byproducts like corn starch, sugarcane, and cassava. Polylactic acid only takes 6 months to 1 year to completely decompose, so when you are done with your GripWeights, you can feel better about disposing of them.
Join Us
Our Kickstarter campaign aims to bring GripWeights to life and revolutionize the pickleball scene. By backing us, you not only get early access to this revolutionary invention at a discounted price, but also become part of a pickleball community that cares about pushing the boundaries of performance, and making the sport we love better and more sustainable.
Extras
If you've made it this far, you must truly be excited about GripWeights, so back us now, we'll wait!
Now that you've done that (thank you so much!), here's the nitty gritty, with all the extra details and behind-the-scenes my proofreaders and advisors said not to include in the Kickstarter story.
Development Story
Initial development of the GripWeight began in the summer of 2023. Our development pipeline looked like my younger brother and I messing around with CAD and my old Ender 3 3D printer over and over, looking for an idea that would let me adjust my paddle's weight while on the court. We had a passion for the sport and idea, but then I had to move two hours away for college, and the project died.
Early 2024, I took an engineering and innovation course at GCU, and decided to develop the GripWeight in tandem with what I was learning in that class. I went through a ton of iterations trying to find the right weight, the perfect design that allowed the GripWeight to stay on the paddle without moving, but also be easy to put on and remove, and a sleek and appealing design. From January - April of 2024, development was my top priority (aside from school and actually playing pickleball), and I completed the design in early April.
Next was the patent. This design is so unique and revolutionary for pickleball that I had to patent it. Working with professors and the internet, I wrote my own provisional patent application, and filed it on April 4th, 2024.
The Production
During development, we used a Bambu Labs 3D printer to rapidly prototype and iterate. When we begin full production, we are likely to continue using 3D printing as the main manufacturing process. We looked into alternative production methods, like injection molding and extrusion, but 3D printing is the best solution for us, at least for now. 3D printing is extremely easy to scale, allowing us to buy and run more 3D printers if we need more manufacturing capacity, while also allowing us to tweak designs or try new ideas without the high overhead of injection molding.