Adam Torres and Erik & Joanna Olsen discuss Whirly Board.
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Show Notes:
Whirly Board is much more than a balance board. In this episode, Adam Torres and Erik & Joanna Olsen, Co Founders of Whirly Board, explore the Whirly Board story and Erik and Joanna’s entrepreneurial journey.
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About Erik Olsen
7 years ago he embarked on a journey to forge my own path. he wanted to invent and create new products that would bring people joy or even help them in life. He spent almost 10 years before that, selling commercial insurance, a “job” I didn’t enjoy, and didn’t believe in. He just did it because it was comfortable, it was far from fulfilling. When he asked myself what he want to do when he grow up, the answer was always: make things that people will enjoy and want to buy. It all began with the Whirly Board, a balance board I created in my garage as a fun way to practice skills for board sports. Since then it has grown far beyond anything he ever expected, and this is just the very beginning! WB has doubled or tripled sales each year since the beginning and we just exceeded a landmark $1M in sales for 2021! They recently moved into a larger facility and they have 3 full time employees to help continue our rapid growth. They are planning to launch at least 2 new products in 2022 and are expecting to at least double our sales again. Growing a business from scratch without any funding has been quite a challenge and eye opening experience. But he will never regret taking the leap to create something from nothing! he have learned so much, and continue to learn every day. Chasing your dreams and doing what you are truly passionate about, is the only way to reach your full potential and find true success! I’m just regular guy with a few good ideas and the passion to do something for myself. He never wanted to follow the predetermined templates of life or answer to corporate initiatives. He only wanted to follow my heart and believe in what he do. If you have a dream to do something for yourself, don’t wait, go do it! It’s not nearly as impossible as they want you to believe. It just takes dedication! It won’t be easy, not even close, but it’s worth every effort.
About Whirly Board
They are an innovative fitness company founded on the idea that improved balance can be made simple and adhere to any lifestyle. Move while at work or in the classroom, or use our board for rehabilitation and strength training! Enhance your life and reach your fitness goals with Whirly Board today.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of mission matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters. com and click on, be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guests are Eric and Joanna Olson, and they’re the co founders of Whirlyboard.
Let me tell you, if you haven’t heard of Whirlyboard yet, you are in for a treat. I happen to have one. Let’s see if I can get this in the screen over here right now with you. Me and we’re going to get into this and what this board looks like. But just to get us kicked off, I want to say, Eric, Joanna, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Adam. All right. So we got, we got a lot to cover today. I want to get into, you know, how you came up with the board, the concept. I saw some pictures I want to get into, of course, where you’re at with the company now, your vision going forward. But before we get into all that, we’ll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute.
So Eric, Joanna and mission matters. Our aim and goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s what we do. Eric and Joanna, what missions matter to you? Well, our mission started as a way to make cool products. We started with the Whirly Board, and we intend to continue making more cool products.
And Joanna has a greater mission of trying to save the world by using recycled products, promoting an active lifestyle, and just getting people to Appreciate this awesome planet and save it. It’s awesome. Love bringing mission based individuals on here to share why they do what they do, how they’re doing and what we all can learn from that.
So we grow together. So I saw some pictures of the original version of Whirlyboard and like, first off, how did this all come about? Like where, where’d you get this idea, Eric? So I’m a board sports enthusiast. I grew up loving snowboarding, skateboarding, wakeboarding, all of those. And that was kind of my favorite thing to do.
So incidentally, I was into balance boards, but the only balance boards that were out there were like the roller style. So you have our cylinder. And you roll back and forth on the cylinder, but I personally never really felt like it helped much with actual board sports or anything really, it was kind of a fun activity, but I didn’t think it did much, so I had the idea, I used to do a 180 on the roller, and I would, you know, stand one way, spin, and land the other way, and I thought, geez, what if I, what if there’s a balance board where I could keep spinning?
That would be kind of fun. Cause there’s really no end to how far you can spin and spinning is something I struggled with as a board sports person. I’d get a little awkward on my three sixties and five forties. So I wanted to be able to practice that. So I caught a bowling ball in half, put it on a skateboard deck and cut, cut a pool ball in half and put one on the nose and tail.
Turned out I really had a lot of fun with it in my basement. And I was like, geez, this thing is really cool. I think this could be something. And I had always wanted to, when I asked myself, what do I want to be? When I grow up at the time, I was an insurance salesman. That was definitely not it. And I would always say, I want to invent something and make it and sell it.
And that was, that was what I wanted to do. And so I was like, this is it. I’m going to do it. I can make, I can start making these in my garage. Yeah, and the dust, lots and lots of dust. Yeah, Joanna, hold on. So you got a pool ball cut in half, you got a couple pool balls, a bowling ball. Let me grab it. What, what are you telling Eric at this time?
Like, what’s going on? So Eric and I actually got together shortly after he made his first prototypes with the bowling ball. Most of that came with the territory. You knew you were in for like the Yeah, I knew what was gonna happen. I knew what I was getting myself into. At that time I was done cutting bowling balls, but I was still cutting pool balls, so there was still lots of dust.
Yeah, the pool balls were a great idea though, because all the pool balls that were made were like sequential. So everybody who got the first original worldly boards were like the original ones. Yeah. The first 159 boards, ’cause pool balls go up to 15 and nine. So 159 was as high as I could go. So those are all Oh, so you had, so the original boards that were sold actually had the pool balls on them?
Yep. Yeah. And that was, yeah, just like this on the grommet with those. No, once we were on the grommet, we were switching from pool balls and the material we were using Did not turn out. And I found out last minute that it like left marks on the floor. So it was a mad scramble to find a new material and then try to make all the balls in time as the orders were coming in.
And wow. Yeah. At any given time. So a lot of entrepreneurs that watch this show and and I’m just curious from your end, like, what was it like pushing through with that early prototype in that early, like that early concept? Because like you said, things are going wrong. You’re like, ah, it’s leaving marks in the floor.
What do we do with this or that? Like, like, how did you push through that time? You just do. Yeah, I mean, yeah, just figure it out. Scramble to figure it out. That particular problem, I just found another material, which was an epoxy material, and it took longer. I was, like, mixing the liquid together on the washer and dryer.
At the end of the season, our washer and dryer was, it was just covered with epoxy, all dripped all over it, and, It’s a little chamber with a hairdryer. So they would dry faster because we had, it was like, that was the end of the first year and I was at a job at that time, I think, or no, that was that we quit, but I I had sold like 50 boards all year, you know, it was just people and selling them on the chair.
How’d you get those initial customers? Like how’d that happen? It was just talking. Taking them to out, go, go out with friends. And I always had one with me so I could show it. And most of the time, if I walked into wherever we were hanging out and somebody would say, Hey, what’s that? I got to have one of those.
So that’s kind of how I knew that. People try to buy them from you on the spot. I feel like they would have. They did. Absolutely. It was rare to not pull one out in a, in a place socially gathering and not sell one. So Eric decided he was just going to quit his job and go out West. Yeah. So he quit his job and like packed up his car and like went out west with all these whirly boards.
I had like a hundred materials for a hundred boards in the back of the car and I was just basically couch surfing at friends and family out west. So is this pre, and this just for everybody to know, like when you order one of these you’re going to get like this big old, like this really nice pamphlet.
And is this pre, you’ll see on there, pre, how do you pronounce his name? Lander? Is this pre, is this pre Big Boss Lander? Oh, yeah, this was 2015. So almost 10 years ago. Wow, what was and I’m guessing and I’m just going to throw this out there when you decided to quit your job. Obviously, there’s got to be a little bit of fear there.
Like you’re quitting the job, you’re going to do what like,
That’s for, that’s for Eric, Joanna, you got a whole nother question to answer on that one. That must have been true love, true love. Yeah, he just went out west and I, I held on the porch. Yeah, it was, I mean, that was kind of right when we got together. And so I guess she thought it was cool what I was doing.
I thought it was cool that she thought it was cool. And we were like, let’s do this. Wow. What an, what an amazing story. And so now you have the product. What happens when you go out West? Like, like, how does that, how does that work for you? I went out there and like I said, I was, I was staying with my cousin and other friends.
I basically just traveled around the mountains. My, my goal was to snowboard every day. I did that. But you know, I, like I said, I sold maybe 50 boards. So eventually I ran out of money and I had some savings from my job, which kept me alive for, for that period. I think you found out though that like just going like door to door in shops wasn’t exactly the way to sell in this.
Everybody loved it, but like, I thought I was going to go out there and just start selling them to shops and the orders were going to start coming in. But obviously it didn’t work that way. It’s not that easy. You were like doing like consignment and like hunting them down to like to get paid and it was not the way to go about it.
Yeah. So it was, how did you pivot? How did you adjust from that? You had an initial idea and then like, how did you pivot? Well, that was, yeah, that was it. I came back, kind of found out that. What I, well, the good news was I proved the concept because I bring it into board shops and it always was well received.
People were like, Hey, that’s really cool. And yeah, I want like, I like these don’t really have a space for it in our shop right now, but I actually sold more on chairlifts and. You know, other places just talking to people incidentally, but yeah, so I came back home and we realized that we needed to figure things out and figure out how to, how to sell them.
Did the website. That was the, that was the grommet. So I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the grommet. Yeah, I don’t think the grommet exists like it used to. The grommet does not exist like it used to, but it was like a platform where they would, you’d make a video, they’d make a video for you and you’d launch your product to their audience.
And they had a pretty sizable audience. So we did this launch day, which was December 7th, 2015. And I was, you know, I had felt good about it, but I didn’t really know what was gonna happen. And then we had this call before the launch day and they’re like, well, we’re projecting to sell 200 boards, you know, on day one or on launch day.
And I was like, oh, wow. Yeah. Good luck with that. That’s, that sounds like I sold 50 all last year. I’m like, well, yeah, sure. I got those ready to go. Sure. Yeah, that sounds good. And then they called me at like 11 and they’re like, are you, when are you gonna get more boards in? And I’m like. Why? And they’re like, well, we’re sold out of the 200.
You said you had, I was like, Oh, I better go start pouring epoxy.
Oh man. That was a great, like, Hey, this is, this is probably going to work maybe. Yeah. And so that’s the initial bump. What happens after that? Because you, sometimes you get that initial bump, that initial, so then, so then what do you do? It tapered off. That normally happens by the way. So I kind of knew it would have to take, we put it on Amazon.
We were doing like one a day, if we were lucky, maybe one or a day where we sold three was kind of exciting. And, but we were, we’re, you know, we’d talk about it and be like, Hey, if we could, if we could do three or four of these every day, maybe we could make a living. And then. Turns out that’s not how it works, but we, we kind of slowly grew it and we’ve really taught ourselves everything.
Joanna built our first website and she’s kind of managed more of that side, managing the website and all of that stuff. I’ve kind of been in charge of production and figuring, figuring out the product and developing new stuff. And yeah, I mean, literally everything we’ve just. Stumbled our way through and figured it out.
We both have biochemistry degrees. So this is not our background. No, it’s totally your background. Everybody goes to school. It says biochemistry balance boards. They both start with something very relatable. Exactly. And so your original board you mentioned had had a bowling balls and let’s see if we can see this and pool ball here, bowling ball there.
Yeah. Like how, so you’ve obviously upgraded, you’ve continued to like improve the board. It’s absolutely beautiful. Just for everybody at home that’s watching this. I mean, it’s heavy. It’s nice. It’s quality stands up to any like skateboard or board you’d think you’d buy. You can, you’re obviously, you obviously manufactured and created this for something that you wanted yourself as well.
It’s definitely really high quality product. When I first saw it, I didn’t really know what the weight would be like. I didn’t know the. But I feel like once you get one of these, like you’re going to, it’s going to be really hard to wear that thing out. It is. I mean, I, I design them item unless you’re like out on site.
It’s really, if you’re using it indoors, I mean, like this beautiful, like talk to me about how you continued to To upgrade the product because it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s absolutely a beautiful board. Thank you. Well, yeah, we, we definitely build them to last. We offer a lifetime guarantee and you know, anytime there are issues, which is very rare, we’re happy to replace it or fix it or whatever, whatever the customer wants to do.
it’s not a great business model. Yeah. Unfortunately we found that a lifetime should have factored in that planned obsolescence. No, we’re very much against that concept. So I want to make products that last for people, but it is running a running a business, but yeah, how it all started is I was selling insurance in the manufacturing industry.
So I had customers who were plastics manufacturers and things like that. Some of those relationships you had. Yeah, actually that really helped me get started. Cause there was a guy who helped me. gave me a really good deal on the tooling, which is the more expensive part of getting things started. So we, we made this the center ball by Roto molding, which was a cheaper way to do it.
And since then we’ve upgraded to injection molding and in the near future, we’re hoping to And improved by like offering some sort of making everything out of some recycled materials. Wow. That’s interesting because Many times as entrepreneurs business owners are just people going through life, right?
Like we don’t always know what’s gonna lead to the next thing or what that looks like Like I bet you the last thing you’re gonna see thing you were thinking about when you were selling insurance and manufacturing was to think, Oh, you know what? I’m going to need these contacts one day because I’m gonna be making a balance board that kicks all other balance boards butts.
Right? I don’t think you were thinking that, right? Oh, on the contrary, it wasn’t balance boards, but my dream has always been to invent something and always come up with some idea. So I didn’t. As I was meeting with my customers and prospect, I did, I was always interested in what they did. And I always thought about, Hmm, what could I make that these guys could help me with that?
That was literally always on my mind, but you know, it’s easier. A lot of things are easier said than done. This was something where I was able to just go in the garage, get out the Dremel tool and start making them. And then I can bring it in and say, Hey, can you help me make this? So I’m always, always thinking about making stuff.
So tell me what’s next for the board. Like talk to me about the rollout, the continued marketing, like the efforts to get it out there. The way that I got your information was from your PR person who sent out a press release and I was out and I saw it and I’m like, you know what? This is an amazing gift for Christmas.
And I wanted to make sure, or for the holidays. And I wanted to make sure to schedule. So what are the plans for the board going forward? Yeah, I mean, marketing has always been the biggest challenge, I think. Just kind of delivering our message in the way that we want it to has been a challenge. I don’t know, you can go ahead.
I think like where we want to take Whirlyboard is to try to help build a more like eco conscious like consumerism like market. Just make people more aware and we want to develop an app to help people like hopefully like shop more like. Just like think about when you shop, right? Like, cause we’re just constantly shipping things like back and forth.
And so our goal is to kind of maybe take this more to be than a balance board company. We want to make it a wellness, like eco friendly company. So hopefully add more products in the fitness line. You want to get different like bands and different stuff like that to add to like your workout routine. So not only if you have a whirly board now, it originally started for like, Doing board sports tricks and training, but then we found out people loved it at their standing desk so much So it’s perfect for anybody working out, you know, the entire year at your, at your standing desk, but that’s great for the core at the end.
Yeah, kids love it too. I mean, that’s, that’s kind of our big message that we really want to always deliver is that it’s fun for the whole family. Like the kids can have fun on it. They can improve their skills. Parents can use it for workouts or at their standing desk and yeah. Anybody who’s into board sports is going to automatically enjoy it.
I think we just want people to like want to improve their wellness Overall and by doing like loving like the board and loving their sports They’ll also like in turn like love their environment and earth and hopefully we give back We’ve had a lot of slogans over the years but I think our first slogan was always more than just a balance board and that’s I feel like even though we’ve Come up with a lot of other taglines or whatever.
I think that’s the one that really we want to carry forward and become more than just a balance board. We don’t want to be just a balance board company. We want to be like a wellness and encourage people to get outside and Companies to kind of take on a similar business model or, you know, fire people to buy products that are similar to ours.
Like that are like manufactured in the U. S. And. And different things like that. Absolutely amazing. I love this story and I was, that’s why I was happy to bring it to my audience. Love to see a family business and also just creating something and coming together now that I, I liked the board before and I like it even more now that I know the story behind it.
So Eric, Joanna, it’s been amazing having you both on the, on the show. I just have to ask what’s next. What’s next for you. What’s next for the company. Well, I want to continue to innovate. I’m going to keep making products. We’ve got a lot of ideas that we’re working on. Yeah. We’ve taken a lot of customer feedback and we’ve been working on some new.
Hopefully some new things and then new innovations that I think it’ll be it’ll be great for anybody at this point We also need to or want to want to and need to add more instructional content We’ve been talking about doing like some even like live coaching whether it’s through personal trainers who put together actual workout routines for people or even I think it’s all going to start with just us getting online with people and given like a get getting started with your board coaching sessions.
Hmm. That’s amazing. Well, well, great to hear this and for all the people that are watching or listening to this and that want to want to connect and that want to grab a board, especially for the holidays. How do they do that? Best place would be our website, whirlyboard. com. Sign up for SMS. I think you can get 15 percent off right now.
Oh, we like time. We will be there in time for Christmas. Amazing. And for everybody listening to this, just so you know, we’ll put the links to the website and the, in the show notes. So you can just click on the link and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, Hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Eric, join up, man. It has really been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks for having us.