I compete in Hyrox. It’s a young sport, and the gear is still catching up. I needed good gloves, but I couldn’t find any that worked. The ones marketed for functional fitness were always a compromise. They would survive the kettlebells but offer zero grip on the rower. The ones with great grip were often bulky and would shred after a few encounters with a sled or a rope.
One pair I tried ripped at the thumb seam after just two rope climbs. Another had padding so thick you couldn't properly feel the handle of a kettlebell, throwing off your form.
The frustration built with every failed product. I wasn't asking for much. I just wanted a pair of gloves that could survive an entire Hyrox race without me having to think about them. Since they didn’t exist, I decided to make them myself. This sounds simple. It is not. This is the story of how I built a product from scratch while working a 9-to-5 corporate job.
You Need a Company First
Before you can have a product, you have to have a company. This feels backwards. You are creating a legal and financial shell for an idea that is still just a sketch in a notebook. Because I live in the UAE, this meant navigating the world of free zones. It is a slow, methodical process of paperwork. Business licenses, trade licenses, opening corporate bank accounts.
Each step is abstract and strangely disconnected from the tangible thing I wanted to create. You are spending money on administrative tasks rather than on materials or designs.
It forces you to be serious. There is a point of no return when you have a legal entity and a bank account in its name. It is a boring but necessary foundation. Once the company existed, I could finally start asking the real question: who can actually help me make this glove?
Finding a Name and Seeing the Gaps
Before you can create a product, you must decide what to call it. This is a surprisingly hard question. A name feels permanent. It has to be something you can stand behind, something that hints at the product's purpose without being cheesy or forgettable. You find a few you like, and then you discover the domain name is taken, or the social media handle is already used by a dormant account from 2014. It is its own special kind of scavenger hunt.
At the same time, I went deep into studying the competition. I bought every relevant glove on the market. I wasn't just looking at them; I was holding them, training in them, and breaking them.
I took notes on why they failed. The stitching was weak here. The material on the palm was too slippery when wet. The wrist strap was either too restrictive or offered no support. I wasn't looking to copy them. I was looking for the holes. I needed to understand the exact shape of the gap in the market I was trying to fill. Their failures became my design brief.
Turning an Idea into a Blueprint
I am not a glove designer. I know what an athlete needs, but I don’t know how to translate that feeling into a physical product. I found a product design company that specializes in fitness gear. They became my translators. Together, we created what the industry calls a tech pack.
You think you are designing a glove. What you are really doing is writing a detailed instruction manual for a factory that you will likely never visit. How do you explain the concept of “good grip” over a Zoom call? You can’t. You have to specify the exact silicone pattern, its thickness, and the texture of the material it sits on. The tech pack contains everything: sketches, measurements, materials, and a clear list of functions. The back and forth was constant. We had endless calls, sending photos and videos back and forth until the vision was clear.
The glove had to be lightweight. It had to be breathable. And it had to be durable. As we finalized the look, the tech pack grew more and more detailed. What kind of thread for the high-stress seams? What type of velcro for the strap? What is the exact color code for the logo? The document swelled to over 100 data points. Each point was a decision, a trade-off between cost, performance, and appearance. Each one had to be right.
The Hard Part: Getting It Made
Finding someone to actually make the glove was harder than designing it. I sent dozens of inquiries to manufacturers all over the world. Many never replied. Some replied but admitted the design was too complex for their machines.
The factories that could do it were cautious. They are not set up for small-scale experiments. On top of that, they want you to order a minimum of 1,000 units. This is the infamous MOQ, or Minimum Order Quantity. For a solo entrepreneur with a day job, ordering a thousand units of an unproven product is a terrifying financial leap. You have to front the money for all of them.
Getting a single sample to test is its own challenge. It’s expensive, as it disrupts their production line. You are sending money to a company thousands of miles away, trusting they understand the 100-point tech pack and won't just send you a generic product from their catalog. The costs add up before you have anything to sell. You pay the design team. You pay for the sample development. You pay for international shipping. You pay for all of this on faith.
Test, Break, Repeat
The first sample finally arrived. It was not right. The grip pattern felt aggressive, but the material was too stiff.
So we revised the design and made another one. The second one was better, but the wrist strap was too long. We made another. This process of refinement went on for nearly a year. I tested every new version in the toughest workouts I could manage. I wore them in Hyrox races and full-day training sessions. My goal was to destroy them. That was the only way to know if they were any good.
I remember taking prototype V4 through a race simulation. The farmers carry was perfect. The rower grip was secure. But on the sled push, the new stitching on the forefinger created a small, hard line that pressed into my hand. It was a tiny detail, but over a minute of pushing, it became a major distraction. A product for this sport has to be unnoticeable. So, V4 was a failure. We went back to the tech pack and changed the stitching pattern. It’s this obsessive loop of testing and refining that ultimately makes a product great.
The Product is More Than the Product
A great glove is not enough. People buy the entire experience. The box it arrives in is their first physical interaction with your brand. It has to signal that the thing inside is high quality. The website you buy it from has to be clean, fast, and trustworthy.
This meant another round of design. I had calls with packaging designers and visited suppliers to feel the cardboard for the box. I ordered packaging samples and revised them. I spent nights and weekends learning Shopify, which is a world unto itself. I looked at how my competitors presented their products. Their websites, their photography, their social media. It wasn't about imitation. It was about understanding the standard I had to beat.
Why Bother?
I still work my corporate 9-to-5 job. This project does not pay my bills, and it has been stressful and expensive. I did it because I am passionate about Hyrox, and I wanted these gloves to exist in the world. It taught me that building something physical is profoundly satisfying. In a corporate job, so much of your work is digital and abstract. To hold a finished product in your hand, something that started as a frustration and a rough idea, is a different kind of reward.
It turns out the surest way to get something you want is often to make it yourself. I’m proud of how the final product turned out. And this is just the beginning. We have more ideas for other products, designed for athletes and the community that supports them. I am excited to see what comes next.