CIRAS Helps Oh Ball Get Rolling with New Production Methods, Design
The following article was featured on page 5 in CIRAS News, Spring 2018
By the time you read this, Kipp Hagaman hopes the “SnOh Ball” will be on a roll.
Hagaman, a former insurance salesman with a history of plantar fasciitis, formed his own company in 2013 to market the treatment he created for that painful foot condition, which affects roughly two million people each year.
The Oh Ball—essentially a fist-sized ball with a rope handle through the middle— has been sold for several years on Hagaman’s website. But the company is poised for significant expansion thanks to a coordinated package of assistance that included a loan from the Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA) and technical design help from CIRAS’ Technology Assistance Program (TAP).
Chris Hill, director of CIRAS TAP, said program experts helped Hagaman redesign the latest version of his product—the “SnOh Ball,” which is hollow and filled with a freezable gel. CIRAS helped the company discover a new way of manufacturing using plastic-injection molding. The first fully functional versions of the new design were produced in November using a mold that had been created in CIRAS’ metal 3D printer.
“We helped him find a new process and a new technology that will work better for him for the long term,” Hill said.
The result for Hagaman was a drastically reduced cost structure and the chance to widen his project’s reach. The entrepreneur estimates that post-CIRAS, his products will cost roughly 50 percent of what they did before the CIRASdriven redesign.
“Before this, I was making them with rotational molding at a company in Minnesota that had been helping me since 2014,” Hagaman said. “But rotational molding is a laborious, timeconsuming, and therefore expensive process, and I was severely limited by how many I could afford to make.”
Hagaman currently sells the Oh Ball mostly online and through Des Moinesarea chiropractor offices. They also can be found at Brown’s Shoe Fit and a handful of central Iowa clothing retailers.
The coming Oh Ball expansion will be aided by a $100,000 incentive loan from the IEDA, and the company is pursuing new investors to fund both planned increases in production and staffing, as well as an overall upgrade of the products. Hagaman said he has plans to improve the Oh Ball handles and make them “more robust.”
“CIRAS has been absolutely great to me,” Hagaman said. “They went above and beyond the call to help get this thing figured out. I can’t say enough good things about them.”
Read the article at ciras.iastate.edu
