Work
The
Ventures
Three companies. One through-line. Each built from zero — designed, manufactured, marketed, and sold. Here's what went into each one.
It started with a frustration — always riding borrowed boards on ski trips, never owning gear that felt like mine. I looked it up: no snowboards on Amazon. Not one serious option at an accessible price point. That was the gap.
From a $10K family investment, I built Stauber Sports into a full outdoor equipment brand — snowboards, bindings, skis, wall mounts, bags, a hangboard I invented and 3D-prototyped myself. I handled everything: designed every product, sourced every factory, shot every marketing video, managed every shipment. Peak season hit 5,000 units. We exited at 4× valuation.
When we launched the Solstice ski line, I booked flights, hired a film crew, reserved mountain access, and coordinated a full production shoot in harsh winter conditions at altitude. Midway through, we lost critical camera equipment to the conditions. Most productions would have wrapped and gone home. We improvised, adapted, kept the crew focused, and pulled off the shoot. The final video sold out our first 200-unit run.
After the Stauber Sports exit, I took everything I'd learned and started over — leaner, smarter, fully solo. No partners, no warehouse, no employees. Just me, a 10×10 storage unit, and a better product.
I designed the Model X snowboard binding to solve the exact problem the market had: every competitor sold cheap plastic with flapping straps. I built something clean, premium, and precise — inspired by Tesla's design language. Then I engineered a pre-launch strategy that put 45 verified 5-star reviews on the listing before a single unit landed. First season: Amazon's #1 ranked binding in its category.
For the Model X launch, I commissioned and directed a full 3D animation — an exploded-view product breakdown that floated every component apart on screen against a dramatic dark background. No live shoot, no crew, no location. Pure creative direction: brief to animation house, multiple rounds of revision, final delivery. The video became the hero asset for the Amazon listing and helped drive the #1 ranking.
Every company I built taught me something the last one couldn't. Stauber Sports showed me the cost of heavy, seasonal, high-touch inventory. S-Tech refined the model but still had friction. Journal Theory was designed to eliminate every remaining operational bottleneck — and it did.
A premium hardcover workout journal, manufactured in Canada, shipped directly to Amazon FBA. I never touch a single unit. The brand is built around "The Romance of Pen-to-Paper" — a counter-cultural bet that in a world of apps and screens, people are hungry for something intentional, tactile, and analog.
Every journal includes a QR code that bridges the physical product to a digital ecosystem — funneling Amazon buyers directly into owned channels. The vision is a full journal brand: workout editions, leather binders, a companion app, and a growing library of niche journals.
One year of design work — every page layout, every typographic decision, every illustration, every workout structure, every motivational spread. The topographic runner figure rendered in contour lines. The "To The Summit" mountain illustration. The Quick Pick workout wheel. The Honest Assessment body mapping spread. All designed to solve the core problem: every other workout journal on Amazon had the same generic vertical table format. Journal Theory is the first one built for how people actually train.
