All right, welcome to the AdaptX podcast where we have discussions with individuals who are building accessible businesses or products
advocating for inclusion or excelling in adaptive sports.
Our intention is never to speak on behalf of those with disabilities,
but rather to amplify their voice and ideas and learn strategies to help us scale our impact and make the world more accessible.
Today, we are joined by Mark Harris of Equip Products, a company that designs and sells equipment that is either
accessible in of itself or makes pre-existing gym equipment more accessible.
Mark, thank you for joining us today.
Hey, Brendan, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Can you explain what Equip Products is,
what you guys offer, what you sell, and kind of maybe how it came about?
Absolutely. So Equip Products makes accessible adaptive fitness products.
So what we try to do is we look at a
issue, if there's an issue for somebody with an impairment and they come to us and say, I want to use this,
but right now it just doesn't function well. This is how it would work better.
We try to take and make a product that would work for whatever that that system may be and
not only make it work for the impaired athlete, but also for anybody else.
So we don't like to make major modifications. We want to make modifications
that allows me to work out next to anybody else, whether you're in a wheelchair, loss of limb, visually impaired.
We just want everybody working out together and that's kind of our mission.
Yeah, I think that's an essential point to make where it's like
accessibility and inclusivity benefits all members, not just those
that the product was initially designed for.
And we see with our Ski Erg, handles, all of our clients use the modifications that we've made to them.
So I think some people think that gyms can either be
inclusive or not, but the thing that I like about Equip Products is it demonstrates that
accessibility and inclusivity can kind of be easily achieved to a degree
versus large-scale changes to the entire layout of facilities, but kind of incremental changes that improve the accessibility of things.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
We've seen a lot of all-or-nothing kind of approach where people think if I'm going to have an accessible gym that I have to have a very specific
accessible place for people to work out. That's not our goal. Our goal is to make it open for everybody.
And the reason being is there's so much you can learn from working out next to somebody that has to do something different.
And you know, it's not wrong. It's not right. It's just different.
And so having an all-or-nothing kind of approach instead of trying to bring everybody together, to me it just makes a lot more sense.
Yeah, I mean, I think environments like Spalding and Project Walk and like those kind of SEI
rehabilitation places have kind of given people the idea that like that's what adaptive fitness is.
So they think like, oh, that would be a
drastic overhaul. It might be too much to take on.
Whereas it's kind of really refreshing just to see how your products are used kind of seamlessly within
traditional gym environments. So that's what I really like about it. Kind of these small changes that can drastically improve the accessibility of a facility
without kind of breaking the budget of
these small gym owners and stuff. That's always going to be a main consideration.
But you mentioned people come to you with specific needs that they need addressed.
How much of your product development comes from within versus comes from external sources?
Excellent question. The question kind of leads to an origin story of sorts. And so I kind of I'll lead with that if you don't mind.
We were doing able-bodied fitness at a major fitness competition.
And just looking at a lot of fit people running around. But I happened to focus on a lot of former vets that were running around either with prosthetics.
And there was some other folks in wheelchairs. And so I just stopped one of the gentlemen that was in a wheelchair and asked him what, you know, type of fitness and what his needs were.
And he said, yeah, there's not a lot for adaptive fitness.
And so I just casually made a comment, maybe we can help you with that. And that's what really brought us to where we are today.
Now, I only mentioned that to say that I've never put a product on our site. I've never sold a product that I designed.
Everything that we do comes from the community. And the reason it comes from the community is because I'm able-bodied to the best of my ability other than some pretty poor decisions I made playing football and baseball as a young man.
But, you know, I don't have to use it. So I want to know if you're in a wheelchair, what do you need to protect your legs?
What do you need to strap you into a chair when you're doing, you know, movements?
If you're using a Ski Erg, what those types of things. So when I say I never designed them, I do design it, but I really take their input.
And it's really because I ask the community what they need. That's a long way to answer that. But I hope it's thorough.
No, that definitely answers it. Because I think sometimes, and like I say in the introduction of the podcast, like, I'm not intending to speak on behalf or be the authority.
It's more so just like a crowdsourcing of ideas and learning from people's lived experiences and then making the adjustments based on that and not assuming that we know what they need, but asking them what they need to be able to coexist in the gym.
There's not much that makes me anchored in somebody telling somebody what they need. They'd never ask them. It just bothers me and it doesn't matter what your position in life is.
You know, communication is two ways. It's not one. And so that's a big part of our mission is to make sure that we're communicating to the audience, making sure that our athletes know what that we're here to help them develop something.
If they need it, they come to us and we try to determine how feasible it is to do.
What is kind of the process of that, like between idea to implementation, someone comes to you and then kind of what are the next steps?
It's an interesting scenario. My wife runs the business with me, so I call myself the co-founder because she's a big part of it. So what happens is that somebody will come up with an idea, I will take it and nerd out on it.
So I'll throw it in CAD. I'll do all kinds of analysis that way, plan on what kind of tools I would need to make it, create bills of material and then I'd cost them.
And I do all this stuff. Dana, my wife will take and go find some clay and model something and throw it out there and say, oh, look how it works.
So we come from two ends of the spectrum. Oftentimes we'll fight and argue a little bit about wanting to own our own designs.
But what we end up coming up with is usually the best thing for the athlete. And we get to that because we don't put anything out until we both are approved.
Then we put it out to not just the athlete that brought it to us, but several others that have the same impairment. We say break it.
Tell us where it broke. Tell us how you broke it. What it looked like and what can we do different. And we get feedback from multiple people.
That's the big picture. I would say that most of the products we develop take at least six months. And many of them have taken two years before we got to a point where we felt like we can really put out a quality product for the community.
And you don't have your own manufacturing facility, right? So I know the products cover different domains, whether it's a ski or a modification or a barbell gripping aid or a medicine ball that's accessible for someone with a visual impairment.
Do you outsource these projects to already pre-existing companies in those spaces?
No. In fact, I would say that we do do some light manufacturing. We have a facility here in southern Illinois out in the middle of cornfields, run two and a half acres.
I think we're at like 4,000 square feet total. And so we do a lot of like the soft goods manufacturing here, sewing, cutting, sewing, that type of thing.
If we get into metal, we have local partners that we deal with in sheet metal and machine shops. And most of these guys are making things for the farming and agriculture community, because that's the community we live in.
And we go sit down with them and say, hey, this is what we're trying to do. And we'll get a product. Now we'll assemble a lot of that when it gets, you know, the basic metal formings done or a machine block is done.
We'll take and assemble a lot of things once it's back here. So we're kind of a hybrid of a manufacturer that way.
Does that does the uniqueness and kind of the small scale of it kind of make the profit margins slim? Like what have you found to be most effective in terms of like improving profit margins and just improving the profitability of your sales?
Well, profitability is an interesting one. I think most people that have never run a business, and I was one of those people for a lot of years, don't realize all the things that you have to pay to do things, right?
I mean, there's just a lot of stuff right down to paper towels and soap in the bathroom.
Getting to profitability for us is we had to determine what products were truly scalable. And it always sounds like such a business conversation.
I hate that it sounds that way, but our first product was called the Latman. And I wasn't entirely sure that wheelchair people that were using wheelchairs and barbells and dumbbells and all those things really wanted something to protect their legs.
I had several athletes say they did. So we made it, put it out there and it literally took off. So it's scaled to a point where it made it realistic for us to make that product and put it out there.
In terms of profitability, though, most of the market in the, if you can use the word the disabled community is marked up outrageously high, like 5 to 10X what I think most of it should cost.
And we do that. And maybe some of some of that's probably to our not to our benefit. We put it out there pretty low because we wanted to make an accessible and affordable product for everybody.
So like a lat mad is $85. Realistically, it probably cost me half of that material to make it in labor. Not giving away any big secrets there.
It's a typical manufacturing thing. A lot of people would really like to get three times that. So if I was to be at three times, I would have to sell that for, you know, $145.
And I just felt like that was outside of the realm of possibilities. So if you look at our site, there's only one product that's over $300. And that's the Ski Erg.
And that's just because the cost of lumber and the metal that we have to use for a grab around everything else just adds.
I can appreciate the way to look at accessibility from not just a physical standpoint, but also show economic standpoint as well.
But like you said, like you don't want to talk about the business and the profitability of it, but the more profitable your business is, the more products you can grow, the more people you can serve.
So I think you probably have a similar mindset to me where like we got into these industries because we want to help people.
And then we had to figure out how to be business people. And like it's almost like you do one or the other, like you do good or you make money, whereas the two don't necessarily have to be mutually exclusive.
That's such a great statement because if we wanted to get rich, this is the last place in the world to venture into.
You know, I could have put the next jiggling device to sell on QVC or, you know, on TV or something like that. And probably would have made a lot of money.
But most of that stuff doesn't work. And I get no benefit in my mind. I don't go to sleep at night and think, wow, I did good for somebody.
This every night, you know, I look forward to getting up and coming back into our little facility here and seeing what we can produce.
And I do, Dana and I both enjoy it immensely. We don't always enjoy some of the trials and tribulations that come with running a business. And as you well know,
and there's things that you don't even see coming that get in your way frequently. But my gosh, what's better than to help people do something they didn't know they could do.
And if you look at some of our social media, it's filled with people doing things that somebody told them they couldn't do. And I just I love that.
Yeah, that's super rewarding to open up your Instagram and getting tagged in people's videos of them lifting. I see the lap mats like everywhere.
I think a tough part of running a small business or something like this is that there's like always work that can be done.
So it kind of gets hard to shut off. I know it's hard for me sometimes to separate like work from at home tough like life.
So I wonder if you've kind of ever experienced that as well where it's tough to differentiate the two, especially working with your wife that must present an even additional challenge in that regard.
It's actually extremely difficult. It's an issue that we talk about frequently.
I'm naturally prone to like working because I enjoy this if I didn't enjoy it, you know, I put in my time and just forget about it.
But and as you mentioned, being married to my co founder Dana doesn't quit. And she has one of those brains that doesn't shut off either.
So the only way that I can get her to stop sometimes is to put a grandkids in front of her give her some other thing because she'll sit out here for 20 hours a day.
And while there's times I don't mind that I've also got a mo seven acres around here.
Do some of those other things, you know, that life gets in the way with our homes just I can see it out my right window here.
It's two lots away from us. So we just spend a lot of time here enjoying it.
But yeah, getting making time to stop and focus.
There's an old thing from the 90s about sharpening the saw. And honestly, if you don't stop sometimes and sharpen the saw, it's impossible to cut down the tree to use a really used well used analogy.
Now, that's a perfect analogy. In regard to products, do you guys do you guys have to patent various things?
Are you ever concerned that someone's going to come in and kind of knock it off or.
Yeah, and that's a that's a big issue. We've patented three items officially we have we hold patents on to our design ones utility and I think we have six patents pending.
And it's a it's an expensive process.
I believe it's probably the smart thing to do. Although people that have done things that look an awful lot like my patents. Sometimes it's it's just paying attorneys to do more.
And it frequently doesn't do much for my bottom line.
That said, we're going to continue to do that because I think the IP is important.
And at some point in our lives, you know, we're getting older, I'm getting older.
We may want to step away from this and I think those those patents then become important for who may want to invest or buy the company later.
Yeah, absolutely. I and I have no experience running a product based business like yours. But I think my concern would be less so someone knocking me off since you've already established yourself as kind of like the go to company on the market and more so
someone coming after you and saying or like or kind of getting a patent on one of your products and then and then you're no longer able to make it.
So I would be less concerned about someone copying me and more concerned about someone copying me and then stopping me from creating a product.
I don't even I don't even know if that's logistically possible, but that seems to be the first thought that my mind goes to.
Yeah, it's it's not unrealistic. The US Patent and Trade Office is technically supposed to do a search and if something's been in commerce before you apply for that, then it's not patentable.
But things slip through the cracks all the time and I've had some issues like that that have come through.
We were doing some things way back in 1516 that people came out later and said, oh, look what we invented.
Well, yeah, you could say that fine. It's not going to make much sense to to litigate it.
I think what you have to do is just make a better product and let it fall out from there.
I'll also say too, sometimes it's good to have competition.
It's not a bad thing because it pushes you and there's also those customers sometimes that you're like, yeah, you need to get talking to them.
Yeah, no, competition can definitely be a good thing.
I think it's it's seen as like negative by so many, but it's going to introduce more people to the marketplace and then the quality of the product kind of determines who's going to win that and the price point of the product and the durability of it.
So you kind of are approaching it from, I guess, at least from my perspective, the right approach where it's the price point is accessible and it's durable.
It's been tested hands on and kind of on the floor of the gym to make sure it's as durable as possible.
But do you do you guys have I know you athletes bring ideas to you.
Do you also use ambassadors or affiliates?
Kind of do you leverage the athletes use of the equipment to kind of hopefully market it to others?
I guess in some degree we do. If you were to cruise through our Instagram at equip products, what you would see is basically repost of all the people using our products.
We rarely put ourselves in front of the camera.
A few people want to see that anyway, at least for me.
And at best you might see some dog pics from shop dogs or our grandkids on there.
But mostly it's going to be repost or retweets of athletes using products that we manufacture.
And I kind of like that. I think that if we were to become more profitable, I would love to see a day where I could pay certain athletes to be brand ambassadors and sponsors.
We're not there yet, but it is something that that's been a goal of mine.
If we could ever do that, I had to learn how to run a business first like you said in the beginning.
So we're working on that. It's gotten a lot better. We're seven years in now.
So you can shake out a lot of mistakes in seven years.
Yeah, my gym just has seven years as well.
Do you have, for the athletes that do use it, are they coming up with new ideas relatively regularly?
Like how often, like what's the life cycle of like a new product or how often do you guys introduce a new product to the market?
I would say that I get ideas probably three, four months of things people say, hey, you should do this.
And we're pretty picky. I mean, there's certain things that, yeah, I could do that, but it might be in a me too.
Or can I make it in a way that I think would be quality enough or a high enough level that would be represented by our brand?
That said, we're currently working on a couple of pretty major things that we've done.
We just launched a set of bike handles for assault bikes and for rogue echo bikes so that seated short stature amputees
could use the bike from the other side without having to sit on a cedar pedal.
And that creates some issues.
We also created a monitor that would flip on those bikes so that you can look at your own monitor.
And then if I was to jump on the bike behind them, I could flip it down and turn it and still keep using it and seeing the monitor.
So again, getting back to trying to design for being accessible to everybody.
Those just dropped recently. That was a big endeavor.
It took a huge investment in some carbon fiber 3D printing tools and some other things to get that done.
And because of that investment, though, it's a lot us to start focusing on making some other products that we think can be really beneficial.
I can't say too much about them, but maybe look for some jump ropes for people with one arm that don't want to use a monitor or something like that.
When you're modifying a piece like a assault bike or a rowing machine or a Ski Erg, are concept two or assault fitness working with you?
Do you talk to them before you release a product or are they kind of mutually exclusive?
We've reached out. We have a pretty good relationship with rogue. They actually sell some of our products.
We've told them what we're doing. Haven't had a lot of feedback from that perspective of what we're doing with their bike.
We did make some efforts to reach out to assault fitness and really haven't got any work.
But I want to make a highlight point. Concept two has been amazing to us.
We approached them years ago with an idea to make a wider base and they said it didn't make sense to them to do it financially,
not because they didn't want to do it, but just to break down the line and have to redo that would be really difficult for them.
We said, well, if we did it, would you give us your blessing?
Not only did they give us their blessing, but they made us dealers for concept two, which is not something they give out easily.
They sell us the wheel sets and a lot of the other parts that we need to make up those products.
So we do that on the Ski Erg base when we sell the wider base and they couldn't have been more, I don't know, just great, a great company to work with.
We also make a rower hook for the concept two rower.
So if you only have one arm, you can use that hook to get two points of contact.
And probably our largest referral and backlink on our website is from Concept two and all their different various worldwide websites.
Is that the most popular product? Do you know what products most popular?
It's up there. The wider base is the product, the aforementioned product I said earlier that's over $300.
But it still sells quite well. We saw a lot of those.
I would say our most popular product is our multi-rope.
And the multi-rope are really unique in that we partnered with RX Smart Gear, which is another one of those companies that had already done great things with jump ropes.
They're basically CrossFit and USA Boxing folks.
So they've really, they do a lot with the jump rope community, but they worked with us to make a handle specific for our multi-rope.
And why that's important is that you get a really good bearing that spins very well and you also have a handle that's ergonomic and makes it really easy to use.
So that would be the number one product and they're busily making handles for us pretty much weekly out of RX Smart Gear.
So I kind of failed to mention them before, but they've done a lot with us.
Yeah, absolutely.
From a marketing standpoint, have you guys, I know you go to trade shows, have you sponsored or been visible at anything like a Wada Palooza or a Wheel Wad games?
Are there any events that you partner with and kind of do you know how you would determine whether those are effective partnerships or not?
Well, we were born out of that market, sort of speak. So starting in 2016, really 17 to be fair, we started working with Wheel Wad, which was Chris Stoutenberg at the time.
And we've grown to such a point that there's really not a whole lot of space between Wheel Wad and Equip Products anymore.
He needs something or he needs a product. We make it for him.
We've been at every Wada Palooza since then. We've been at every Wheel Wad games, whether they were in Canada or now they've been in Raleigh, North Carolina for the last two years.
We've also been part of the CrossFit team, not officially part of that team, but part of the adaptive equipment group, making sure the folks that are working in that venue have access.
But most recently, we've branched out into things like working with Move United and they have an amazing program that really focuses on getting the adaptive community into sports and making things accessible.
And we're really excited about where that's going. And I'm going to forget a ton of them. There's a lot of other organizations, but Move United has been real good to us about let us go to an educational conference and speak about some of the things we do.
And that's opened up the eyes of a lot of other folks out there, especially like at the rehab, the USA Paralympics Group, some of those folks, they've put us in touch with a lot of them.
So that's been awesome for us.
Would you say that kind of that partnership building has been primary driver of like marketing or do you guys use any other like paid marketing or any other strategies?
We don't do any paid marketing. And pretty much everything we've done has been relational. So kind of like the first time you and I talk, I mean, that's literally how everything we've done is started.
We just get to know people and then we have a high bars, one, they want to work with us. So that's a good thing. But two, we want to make sure that they're going to carry out the vision of what we're trying to do.
There's been people that want to get involved and throw a lot of money around, but their goal is not necessarily the same as ours.
So we try to stay very focused on that. And again, sometimes to the detriment of profitability, but you know, it would be kind of like saying, you know, selling a diabetes drug and taking a sugar sponsorship.
That's what I'm trying to say, if that's a good way to put it.
Yeah, so I mean, just making sure that your partners and affiliates are mission aligned with what you're working on.
Because if the two are contradictory, then I can't imagine the marketing would be particularly effective.
Maybe as maybe as like a prompt to kind of wrap this up, what do you think globally are kind of on a macro scale needs to be done to make the fitness industry more accessible or inclusive?
Great question. And you mentioned international, I do want to point out that we currently probably ship products 40% of what we do international.
And it's a big part of what's going on. What needs to happen is that every gym in every corner of the world, no matter where they're at, needs to look at how to make things accessible.
So that if you were to come in with a prosthetic or if you were to come in with a wheelchair.
And I'm not talking about thousands of dollars, I'm talking about under $500 have things available so that if somebody wants to come in and be included in a workout, make it available, have it there, or at least give them the resources to know that it exists.
And I think that, you know, if every LA fitness or every global gym or every other gym that's out there, just made a small effort. And I do mean a small financial effort, it would go a long way for the adaptive community people with impairments.
They don't even know they can do a lot of these things. And I've seen progress from folks that you wouldn't believe that they can do just by moving every day.
So that would be, I think that awareness would be huge. And I would like to someday figure out how to put a little more pressure on that community.
So again, spend less than they're spending on hand wipes at the front desk to make things accessible for people in every gym out there.
Yeah, it's like, do you really need another $4,000 treadmill, or can you get by by adding five or six pieces that come from your website and benefit dozens of people.
So yeah, that's where like communicating like the value proposition of inclusion is important to like I understand from being a for profit gym, like a kind of a lean startup, starting from nothing that you have to kind of have expenses and stuff in mind.
And everything is essential. But we've learned that like the inclusivity of our gym has been integral to our growth as a whole.
So I think not just demonstrating that inclusions like the right thing to do but also demonstrating that it can improve your business is another important thing.
But I think like your social media showing what people are capable of doing with these small modifications can really be motivating for gym owners and fitness professionals and kind of changing the narrative to to that more so than just more like rudimentary inclusion oriented things.
So yeah, I think your your company has been a great addition to the to the fitness world. Very glad that it exists and appreciate you taking the time to talk today.
Hopefully we're able to introduce gyms and fitness professionals to your products so we can get them in more gyms like you said around the world.
And I too am interested in that challenge of making commercial gyms more inclusive and accessible and just demonstrating to them the value and benefit of inclusion.
So hopefully these these conversations can can do so.
Oh, they I think this will I think it does every time you have a conversation like this it does. We really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and into the folks that that are listening.
This is the future in our opinion. And if I could just make me add one more thing about the adaptive community, you know, if you're looking for somebody that's going to really stick at your gym, you make something adaptively accessible.
Those folks are never leaving.
And it's so it's not a one and done kind of thing where they show up and then they don't show up again for six months.
They're thrilled that they get to do something. And that's a great way to really drive profitability for your gym. You find 10 to 15 additional folks in every gym that can come in and use adaptive equipment.
That's going to make a huge impact on the bottom line.
In any regard, like we have wheelchair users come and train at the same time as our able bodied adults. And I know that our able bodied adults are not only like motivated by their presence, but they also think that their membership is going to something that's benefiting the community at large.
So you're kind of like developing customers that are like really like fans of your business. And so they're they're going to be like you said kind of lifetime value of that customer is going to increase exponentially when they believe that they're part of doing something that's kind of doing good for the community.
So a couple inadvertent consequences of accommodating people with disabilities is kind of how your membership base really buys into the product as a whole.
100% it's also a great way to make guys like me not complain about the workout when I see somebody in a wheelchair doing the same thing.
There you go. Absolutely.
Well, Mark, thanks again. We'll definitely share links to products in the show notes. Hopefully direct some people your way. Looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with next.
And if there's anyone listening that has run into any challenges in the gym and they they think of some piece of equipment that that could help them function more easily within their fitness space, I would encourage them to reach out to you guys because you guys are always putting out excellent equipment.
So, Mark, thanks again.
Thank you so much, Brendan. Really appreciate it.
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