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Anthony Katz developed the first Hyperice to soothe his aching knees after years of basketball wear and tear. He never imagined the homemade solution would become the foundation for a billion-dollar recovery company, backed by the world’s biggest athletes and now partnered with Nike.
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The Kobe co-sign
The idea for Hyperice came in 2009, when Katz returned from a year in Australia and realized his body was starting to break down. An avid hooper and basketball historian, Katz looked to the pros for inspiration, turning to the same recovery ritual used by stars like Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant: icing his knees.
“In Australia they didn’t use plastic bags, they had a medical ice bag with a little holder clip thing,” Katz recalls to Entrepreneur.
Instead of settling for the American standard, Katz decided to fashion one of his own. He went to Alita Wetsuits, one of the last Neoprene factories left in California as the business migrated to China.
“I drew this pattern of what I thought a knee sleeve would be, and then I asked them to sew on Velcro,” Katz says. “So I literally came in with a paper sketch.”
While the store manager was skeptical, he wasn’t about to turn down money, even for an odd job. Katz couldn’t afford enough material, so he improvised with leftover wetsuit scraps. The prototype took only a couple of hours. Once he had the binding, Katz cut a hole in the sleeve to fit his ice bag inside. He wore it during weekly pickup runs at UC Irvine, and people started to notice, including his friend Ryan.
This was the summer of 2009 in LA, and the Lakers were coming off Kobe’s first championship without Shaq. Ryan was two years into one of the most enviable jobs in the world: Kobe Bryant’s “handler.” One of his responsibilities was filling Kobe’s ice bags. When he noticed Katz showing up to open runs with an ice-equipped knee sleeve, he asked Katz to make him a pair.
“I didn’t have a business yet,” Katz says. “This was like my own art project.”
Katz went back to the wetsuit store and told the guys he needed two more.
“I told him what it was for, but he didn’t believe me,” Katz says with a laugh. Still, the store agreed to make the braces for the same price. Katz made two more prototypes, this time adding Kobe’s logo to the ice bags for a little flair.
Katz called Ryan to say the device was ready, and Ryan told him to meet him at UC Irvine at 9 p.m. to give it to Kobe.
Kobe wearing a Hyperice shoulder wrap during a Lakers game
Image Credit: John Leyba | The Denver Post via Getty Images
Katz packed the samples in a plain cardboard box and drove to the gym. “We went into the training room, and he said, ‘Ice me up,’” Katz shares. “I showed him how it worked, then put it on and strapped it down nice and tight. It seemed to fit pretty well. He said, ‘All right. I like this idea.’”
They discussed the concept further, with Bryant calling the current icing implements in the NBA “dated.” “He goes, ‘Give me a week, and I’ll give you some feedback,’” Katz remembers. Two weeks later, he got the call again — 9 p.m. at UC Irvine.
True to his word, Kobe had thoughts. He liked how snug the brace felt, but didn’t appreciate how melting ice created an air bubble that pushed the device down his leg. He suggested using a square ice bag for more coverage.
“I like your idea, but you’ve still got a little ways to go, because I’ve got to use whatever’s best for me,” Katz recalls him saying. “But he also said, ‘I’ll tell you this: if you get it to the point where it’s better than what I’m using now, I’ll wear that s*** on the bench when we’re blowing motherf****** out.’”
Mamba Mentality
That was the first time Katz considered pursuing the project full-time.
“I told my wife, ‘I think I want to start a business. Kobe said he’d wear it if I could get it right. It was kind of like, if you build it, he will come.’”
The idea of creating a brand with a built-in army of free athlete promoters was enticing. Katz began thinking beyond basketball, envisioning quarterbacks wearing his gear. He started designing devices for the shoulders and back, along with the knees.
When he brought his ideas to his “neoprene guy,” he was told he needed something called a “steel rule die,” essentially a giant cookie cutter.
“I had to learn everything,” Katz says. “I knew nothing about this, but I put my head down.”
He could handle the compression design because it was 2D, but needed a manufacturer for more complex elements like the air release valve and ice bag.
“I looked up Orange County Manufacturing on Google,” Katz laughs. “Everyone was like, ‘Sorry, we’re in a recession.’”
Not having a brand or company yet didn’t make the outreach easier. Eventually, Katz met someone who owned a manufacturing company in Fullerton and convinced him to set a meeting.
“I had the knee and shoulder wraps along with the ice bags,” Katz says. He borrowed tools from his neighbor and spent an afternoon in the garage drilling a hole in the bags and plugging them with a cork.
Katz arrived at the meeting and was greeted by a picture of the Mars Rover on the wall.
“I’m like, ‘They’re not gonna make a f****** ice bag,’” he laughs. Still, he explained what he was working on — and that Kobe Bryant was involved. The man brought in the company’s two owners. “They said, ‘He’d really wear this if we made the product?’” Katz recalls. “They told me I’d have to run the business, but they were interested.”
That was far from the end of the story. It took a year to develop the product. The manufacturer decided to outsource to China. Then the Chinese project manager was murdered over a real estate dispute, forcing Katz to start over.
Pivoting, Katz and his partners found one of the last remaining plastic injection molding facilities in the U.S., conveniently located in California. Today, Katz is one of the few entrepreneurs who can say his product was developed entirely in the U.S., and entirely in California.
“The medical-grade material for the bags was made in Pomona, the caps were injection-molded in San Bernardino, and the neoprene was cut in Huntington Beach,” Katz says. “I’d built the most unsophisticated, inefficient supply chain imaginable, because I was inexperienced. But it meant I could physically drive to each place and watch them make it.”
Petitioning The King
With the components secured, Katz got to work crafting the braces.
“I had the medical ice bag, the plastic parts and the valve. I had to hand-assemble them at my apartment in Laguna Beach. I had to hand-assemble and glue them together on my kitchen table,” he recalls. “I would make like 10–15 at a time with whatever cash I had.” He wasn’t selling them yet; instead, he focused on getting the product into the hands of as many influential people as possible.
Katz tapped his basketball connections to find out when and where NBA players were working out in the area, then showed up with a sample. By 2011, he had attracted serious attention, including a $500,000 investment from an NFL player’s family office.
“It felt crazy to me that I raised a half a million dollars off of just prototypes, with no sales,” he says.
By then, Katz had raised about $750,000 without a real brand. He got back in touch with Kobe and showed him the product changes, giving him a new sample to use throughout the season.
“I wanted to make Kobe like the face of the company,” Katz says. Bryant’s business manager had other ideas, blocking Katz from making real inroads. Frustrated, he pivoted to the player he viewed as the next biggest star: LeBron James.
James first wore the Hyperice on the bus after a charity game in 2012. His trainer, Mike Mancias, told Katz that James loved the product and wanted to bring more on an upcoming Nike trip to China with Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul and other NBA stars.
Katz whipped up a batch and dropped them off with Mancias, who promised to let him know what the players thought.
Three weeks later, Katz got a text: “The boss wants to meet you. 4 p.m., Peninsula Hotel, Beverly Hills.”
Surprised but determined not to squander the opportunity, Katz headed to the hotel, where he met Mancias by the pool.
LeBron’s table included his usual crew: Rich Paul, Maverick Carter and Randy Mims. But Katz didn’t meet LeBron right away. First, he debriefed with Mancias, who told him the players loved the product. Then a surprise visitor interrupted them: Nike’s Global Vice President of Sports Marketing and Basketball, and sports industry power broker, Lynn Merritt, who has since become a friend and mentor to Katz.
“He comes up to me and says, ‘So this is the Ice Man,’” Katz recalls. “It was funny because Kobe used to call me Ice Man, too.” Merritt then pointed out that Nike athletes were wearing Katz’s product with someone else’s logo.
“At Nike, they want their guys head to toe. They don’t want to see another logo on their bodies,” Katz says. “I told him, ‘Maybe there’ll be a Swoosh on it someday.’ He said, ‘I don’t know about that. That’d be really expensive for you.’”
Finally, it was time to meet James. Katz sat down at the table, and LeBron thanked him for the samples, saying he’d been using them all summer. Then Maverick Carter told Katz about a charity game they were having in Miami during the NBA lockout. Carter liked the idea of gifting every player a Hyperice knee brace. He offered to pay, but Katz said he would do it for free. Then Carter invited him to the event. So Katz flew to Miami.
After the game, Katz helped ice the players. He had one guy left when Wade called a players-only meeting in the locker room to discuss the lockout. “I heard Wade start talking: ‘All right, look, the players’ union is saying this to the owners: We’ve got to stay strong’—and I booked it out the door,” Katz recalls. “But right before I left, I looked up, and every single guy had on Hyperice. I remember thinking, ‘That picture would be worth so much if you were raising money.’ But that was their space. I respected it. I didn’t take a picture. I just played it cool, walked out and thought, ‘Take the W.’”
Full circle moments
From there, things started rolling. Katz launched a website and named the brand Hyperice, inspired by Kobe Bryant’s Hyper Dunks. In its first year, he estimates the company did around $350,000 in sales, primarily with pro and college teams.
Emboldened by early success, Katz began exploring other inventions, starting with a vibrating foam roller that became the Vyper, which launched in 2014. That same year, CEO Jim Huether joined the company as one of its earliest employees.
“Back in 2013, the more advanced athletes were thinking about longevity, but it was very early, so recovery kept coming up,” Huether says. “Nobody really knew what it was at the time.” This aligned with Katz, who felt recovery was an untapped market. “No one used the word recovery back then,” the founder recalls. “When I Googled what do athletes do for recovery, a bunch of athletes that had gone to alcohol rehab came up.”
Eventually, the two sat down for lunch. There was no formal agenda — Huether had actually accepted another job at a company in Silicon Valley. But the two hit it off.
“We really aligned on the vision of transforming Hyperice,” Huether says.
Huether saw the potential for Hyperice to become the Apple of recovery — an industry-leading innovator focused on branding and the consumer experience.
“Apple doesn’t launch 30 products a year,” Huether explains. “They’re not chasing trends. We feel similar around that. We want things to be intuitive. We want things to be functional. We want things to be very design-driven, so they look and feel premium, and they’re easy to use.”
With a new CEO running the business, Katz could focus on innovation. He created the Venom, a wearable heating wrap that became a staple on sports sidelines. Then came the Hypervolt, a portable massage gun that helped take the company from $10 million to $65 million in revenue in a single year.
Most recently, Hyperice partnered with Nike on a new recovery slide that combines Air Zoom cushioning with built-in heat and vibration technology. For Katz, it’s a full-circle moment: Years earlier, he had been told a Nike deal was out of the question.
The other full-circle moment came in 2019, when Katz sent samples of the Hypervolt to 100 brand influencers — “people that really live in culture, not the jerk-offs on social media that should be working at Walmart,” he clarifies.
One was Kobe, whom Katz had stayed in touch with over the years while occasionally discussing the possibility of Bryant investing in the company.
Katz brought the Hypervolt to Kobe’s office, having not seen him for a while.
“I’m like, ‘Hey, I want you to open it,’” Katz recalls. Kobe pressed the button, revealing a sleek presentation inside. He looked at Katz. “Man, you’ve come a long way since that s***** cardboard box.”
