We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jeff Hunter. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jeff below.

Hi Jeff, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I would say our journey was pretty unique. We truly stumbled into this and it sort of snowballed into what it became.

Back in 2013, my wife Kristina, who was my girlfriend and co-worker a the time, and I were bartenders at what you might call a “Mega-Club” in Hollywood. I had decided we should try CrossFit as it was exploding around that time and we wanted to see what it was all about.

Shortly after joining, we pretty much got hooked. We drank the kool-aid and were all in on the community.

Unfortunately, as we soon learned, CrossFit was BRUTAL on your hands! We would leave the gym with massive open wounds on our palms. It wasn’t rare to rip open and it was sometimes a bloody mess, not only for us, but for most people in the class.

It was awful, but to make things worse, it truly began to affect our work. We would go into work with these open sores, squeezing limes and lemons in drinks, the pain was excruciating. We worked at a place where being 10 customers deep was a nightly situation, and not being able to perform or hold the bottles became more than a nuisance.

I decided one night that I was done with CrossFit, it was affecting my work way too much.

Kristina was not having it. We had made tons of friends and we were getting in incredible shape and she refused to quit.

She just says “Listen, I’ll just make you something.”

Before I know it, she busts out here sewing machine and by that evening she had made me these incredible grips that I’d never seen before. It was made out of this flexible material and went over 3 fingers, covered my entire palm and just to spruce it up, she added a built in wrist support.

I was dumbfounded by how ingenious they were. Nothing like them had ever existed.

The next day in class, I showed them off to all of the other classmates and people were begging us to make them a pair.

We had 9 orders by the end of class…

The next day we invested in another sewing machine and Kristina taught me how to sew.

So for a few weeks we were making these for our friends, and making small improvements to the design.

We began to realized that EVERYONE who did CrossFit suffered the same injuries to their hands and nobody had really solved that problem, and it became apparent that these grips were actually working for people. It was at that time, we figured we might actually be onto something here!

9 months later, with zero business experience between us, about $40k in my own savings, we launched our first product, WODies, and JerkFit was born.

We had no expectations, we had good jobs, solid income and so to us it was just a fun little side thing we would try and hope for the best.

Within 10 minutes of pushing the website live, we had our first order. To this day I don’t even know how that happened. But after attending a local CrossFit Competition and putting flyers on everyones car, we had our first 25 sales. And every single week the sales continued to rise.

We were really lucky. We were in a very viral sport, where people truly were passionate, where everyone suffered the same injuries and when something worked, people talked!

Word of mouth became our biggest driver of success.

Within 3 months of launching on Amazon, WODies became the #1 selling workout glove on the site. If you typed in the word “CrossFit” on Amazon, WODies was the first product to show. That was entirely organic.

Within the first year, we crossed our first million dollars. We never needed to take out a loan as the revenue funded the growth, and we were able to both quit our jobs and devote 100% of our time to JerkFit.

Since then, we’ve become a worldwide brand, with tons of unique products and we have managed to stay on top by innovating, and improving on other products in the space.

We eventually married in 2015, had 2 beautiful kids and are still partners running this brand.

I think it was a combination of luck, the right product at the right time, and consistently delivering on quality that has helped us keep this going for almost a decade.

With no business experience, to being where we are today, I just couldn’t feel more blessed.

Jeff, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We’ve always tried to be innovators in the space. We launched 2 unique products and created 2 categories of products that had never existed prior to JerkFit.

That strategy however did not serve us well at all early on.

Most other fitness brands out there simply find generic products online from some factories overseas and slap their logo on them, and they are in business.

Thats not how we wanted to do things here at JerkFit. We are designers at heart. We not only wanted to be innovators, but we also wanted to take products that we loved and just try to make them better, and make them right here in the United States.

The problem with that strategy was that other brands were popping out of nowhere, knocking off our designs and simultaneously just slapping their logo on any and all products they could get their hands on.

Their strategy made them appear to be a complete brand with tons of products. We on the other hand looked more like a wanna-be brand with only 2 products, even though we were the inventors of them.

Many of those pop-up brands ended up overtaking us, a few of them are still around and a couple became juggernauts in the space. From a knock off brand, to a full fledged major worldwide brand.

So instead of capitalizing on our massive early success and launching new products while the iron was hot, and enjoying our quick success we dragged our feet and watched as these other brands surpassed us and spent the next 5 years trying to play catch up.

Thats a tough pill to swallow, even to this day. Its not easy to simply come up with a brand new concept, and so growing our catalogue was terribly slow.

Still to this day, we refuse to slap our logo on anything generic made over seas. WE design everything we make, and nobody else makes what we make. I think long term that has served us well, as we are obviously still around, and our customers know that everything we produce is of utmost quality.

Being a premium brand is something that has to be earned, and we certainly have succeeded on that end.

We know that our stubbornness to be innovative has held us back in some ways, but we’ve come to not only accept that, but own that as a brand.

Our customers now expect that from us and that gives us a bit of an advantage when we launch something new. Its very exciting.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In January of 2020, just before COVID hit the US and everything was shut down, we sort of had inside information that something bigger was happening with COVID and that it was going to be more than what the media and Dr. Fauci was telling us.

Our factory in Los Angeles was getting MASSIVE orders to produce Hazmat suits. Millions of them. So when it would typically take 2 weeks to place an order to produce more of our product, we were being told, “sorry, our production line is tied up for 6 weeks.”

Quickly we ran low on product. And those 6 weeks turned into 6 months of no production. The government essentially made making hazmat suits pretty much the only thing any factory was allowed to make. We were screwed.

As we know 2 months later, the entire world shut down. We’re already low on inventory, everyone is wanting fitness products because they are stuck at home and not working, but we couldn’t deliver for long.

Then all of the sudden Amazon decides to ONLY ship essential items and incredulously deemed fitness products as “non-essential”. So if you wanted to order a JerkFit product off Amazon, you would have to wait over 6 weeks for it to arrive.

Needless to say, our sales tanked. We were down 80% over the previous year in revenue.

Our revenue was barely a trickle, yet all of our overhead, salaries, warehouse rent, and everything else was still due every month.

It was a 5-alarm fire for our business and our personal lives. We are stuck at home with 2 toddlers, no product to sell, no clue if/when these lockdowns were going to end, and hemorrhaging cash.

That and a lawsuit we were involved in, we were in uncharted territory of fear and concern and honestly it was difficult to even sign in every day to see how bad it actually was.

We had to completely stop paying ourselves a salary, and had to live off of our life savings just to hang on, and no back-up plan if JerkFit ran out of money. We are a husband and wife team, so we were all in on this company.

Thankfully, the PPP money the government was giving out allowed us to stay afloat a couple more months. But without our products on the production line, going out of business was imminent.

Every time we reached out to our factory, more and more months were being added to when they could get back to production for us. Their hands were tied, this was a government mandate.

Finally by July, I was a desperate man. I decided to write my factory a letter. I told them how we had worked with them for years, and that this pandemic one day would be over, but JerkFit and our business relationship will also be toast if they can’t make some room for us.

“I’m on my knees, I have a family, this is our livelihood. You have the power to save this business, if there is ANYTHING you could do.”

I sent that letter off, and within 2 days I got a response. “We’re making room for you, production starts tomorrow.”

We were literally on our last month before we would have to shut our brand down for good. That one letter, and that incredible showing of grace by our factory saved our business.

It was not easy to scratch and claw our way back by any means. We had to go an entire year of no salary, had to put our mortgage into forbearance just to protect our savings, and slowly but surely get enough cash reserves into JerkFit before we could afford to pay us again.

I learned a very valuable lesson of resilience. We made it through one of the darkest times in our lives, and certainly in our business.

We are still feeling the hangover in our business, and for sure some PTSD in our personal lives. But I know that when you can get through something like this, a lot of the minute problems every business owner faces on a daily basis just seems so much more manageable.

Would I want to go through that ever again? God no! But grateful to the lessons that I learned in the process.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

I would say that the best piece of advice that I ever got for my business was about time management. “Work to the clock, not to the list.”

For entrepreneurs and business owners who are also parents of young children, its pretty well known that you never have enough time in the day.

No matter what you do, you can NEVER get through your list in a day when trying to grow a business. With young kids around, it makes it impossible to shut it all off and be present with them during their most important developmental years.

This was really difficult for me. I always felt like I was missing out on everything, and distracted during those really precious moments with them, constantly thinking about my list of tasks I needed to complete.

One day I received a newsletter over email, and they had that quote “Work to the clock, not to the list” and it was like a lightning bolt hit me across my body.

My brain instantly understood what this quote meant. Its amazing how framing something in such a simple way can have such a spectacular effect on your life.

The concept is clear, your list will NEVER end. Work to the CLOCK! At 6pm, my day is done with my business. Whatever tasks I didn’t complete until then will get pushed til tomorrow.

At 6pm I am present with my kids. My business brain and mind are shut off, and my wife and kids get my full attention. It was an absolute revelation for me in my life.

It brought me balance, presence and joy that I otherwise was starving for.

Contact Info:

• Website: JerkFit.com
• Instagram: @jerkfit
• Facebook: /shopjerkfit
• Youtube: JerkFit
• Other: Tiktok @JerkFit