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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.
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.
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