Celebrity Apprentice features Kansas City fitness startup OYO Fitness
February 3, 2017 | Bobby Burch
A trio of celebrities were briefly among the sales staff for a surging fitness tech firm in Kansas City.
In a recent episode of NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice, musician Boy George, basketball hall-of-famer Lisa Leslie and former Queer Eye for the Straight Guy expert Carson Kressley helped sell for Kansas City-based OYO Fitness.
OYO founder Paul Francis said the appearance of the firm’s DoubleFlex product has provided a nice sales bump as well as spurred support for the company’s wildly-successful crowdfunding campaign. The fitness tech firm’s new DoubleFlex Black has already quadrupled its $30,000 Kickstarter campaign goal, raising $132,600 so far.
With ambitions to make the firm a $100 million company in the next three years, Francis said the campaign and national TV appearance are setting the stage for a remarkable 2017.
“January has just been going crazy,” Francis said of sales to open the year. “We want this to become a ubiquitous product that people need to have in their desk drawer, at home or travel bag. … It’s really starting to pick up.”
Resembling a bendable, futuristic bow with a center wheel to create re
sistance, the DoubleFlex features some impressive technology that enables dozens of exercises arm, leg and core exercises.
The device — about the size of a loaf of bread when compact — creates resistance similar to a cable machine via the firm’s patented “SpiraFlex” technology. The tech uses coiled rubber-band-like straps within a removeable wheel that are then snapped into the center of the bow. Each wheel creates five- to 10-pounds of resistance, but weighs only a few ounces, enabling the device to have a low-profile and be lightweight.
But consumers aren’t the only one to take note of Francis’ tech. The SpiraFlex was developed for NASA and is used by astronauts on the International Space Station. Francis said that the tech appealed to NASA for not only keeping space-dwellers fit but also as countermeasure for bone density and muscle mass loss while floating in the cosmos.
Francis said that more than 50 crewmembers on the space station have used the firm’s tech.
“We had to go through a lot of development that would create a system that would fit their specs and work in space,” he said. “When the first (American crew) got up to the station, the commander text down to us ‘The weight room is open on Alpha.’ They were excited to workout an hour a day on it. It was a big feather in our cap.”
A 62-year-old inventor that studied architecture at the University of Kansas, Francis launched OYO in 2014 and has largely bootstrapped the firm since. Now the firm’s products are sold around the world on QVC, in Brookstone stores, Sharper Image, Amazon and dozens of catalogs, Francis said.
“We’ve got some big plans for this,” Francis said from his Country Club Plaza office. “We went from crawling to walking and now we’re just starting to run.”
To learn more about the firm, check out the video below.
Featured Business
2017 Startups to Watch
stats here
Related Posts on Startland News
$1.6M grant will create incubator for low-income, minority entrepreneurs
A large federal grant will help reanimate an older industrial building in Kansas City to serve as a small business incubator. The U.S. Economic Development Administration recently awarded a $1.6 million grant to the Hispanic Economic Development Corporation of Kansas City, Missouri. The Kansas City organization said that the grant should create about 90 new…
Kauffman report: KC ranks 28 out of 40 in entrepreneurial growth
Fewer Kansas City companies are growing to become medium- or large-sized firms, according to a report released Thursday by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. It’s a common story across the U.S., as the nation rebounds from the slump of the Great Recession, the report says. The 2017 Kauffman Index of Growth Entrepreneurship report suggests the…
Housing trends show young professionals don’t care about Troost’s stigma, UC-B says
Lance Carlton initially was skeptical of developing east of Troost Avenue, he said. “But the mentality of the market has changed,” said Carlton, co-managing partner of UC-B Properties, which brought its offices to the 4300 block of Troost in August 2016. The company helped prove an appetite for residential development on the corridor with 19…
Mac Properties plans four-corner food startup village at Armour and Troost
Mac Properties’ Kansas City arm wants to turn a “sleepy intersection” on Troost into a four-corner incubator for thriving residential and restaurant activity. The vision is to create a “food startup village” as the foundation of the development, which would bring 400 new market rate apartments to Armour Boulevard and Troost, said Peter Cassel, director…