A better way to sharpen skates
Russ Layton is the founder of Acton-based Sparx Hockey, Inc.
Russ Layton wants to make ice skate sharpening as accessible as everything else seems to be in 2017. In this age of Amazon Prime and Blue Apron, it seemed silly to Layton, an engineer by trade, that getting ice skates sharpened can still be such an ordeal. After about four years of planning, Layton thinks he found a solution. His company, Sparx Hockey, Inc., makes the Sparx Skate Sharpener, a portable machine that can sharpen hockey or figure skates in two and a half minutes.
The Acton company’s product is used by National Hockey League teams and is the official skate sharpening partner of the National Women’s Hockey League. It also has financial backing from Thomas Vanek of the Detroit Red Wings.
Layton spoke about starting a company and expanding into new markets.
Why this product?
There is an unmet need in hockey from the time you’re six years old and playing the game until you have kids of your own -- the need to get skates sharpened, and the need to get them done 20, 30, 40 times a year. I could not believe that this problem I had faced two to three decades ago was still around, and somebody hadn't solved it -- especially in this day and age when we have things like Amazon Prime, or even more recently Blue Apron. You don't have to go shopping anymore. Nothing you need to buy is not more than a click away. With a skate-sharp problem, you have to get in your car drive somewhere get your skates sharpened and wait 20-30 minutes at a time.
The product I kept staring at was the Keurig machine in my house. You drop a pod in, press a button, and a few minutes later have a pair of skates sharpened. I wondered, could I build such a product for skates?
How does it work?
There's a handle that operates the clamp that grabs the skate. You push the handle down, you drop the skate in. It looks like a printer, but it’s like toaster oven where you push the handle down and opens the jaw. You put the skate into a slot and when you let the handle up, it grabs the skate and holds it securely, and you more or less hit play. It goes back and forth, just like a head in a printer would go back and forth printing paper. After about two and a half minutes for each skate, the light turns green. The product has window in front of it, like a toaster oven, so you can see what’s going on inside, which is unique. We wanted to build an affordable, accessible consumer product, and have it be this great experience where you could watch it happen.
How did you fund it?
In March 2016, we went into Kickstarter campaign with a goal of, we hoped, $60,000. We thought, if we can sell 100 or get $60,000 in 45 days at least we’ve proven somebody wants product, and we'll have a sense of what our pricing was. We had a $499, $599 and $699 products. We had really just a vague idea of what it was going to cost to produce this. I had done some preliminary market research, so I knew people wanted it, and I knew what about they wanted to pay for it.
We hit that $60,000 I believe in under five days, once we hit the goal we were on the hook. Then we were like, "Ok, we’re in business." And the campaign ran for the full 45 days to the tune of $176,000. We had 365 people back the campaign. We thought that was really encouraging.
How many employees do you have?
Nine full time, about 17 in total. The nine are professionals: engineers, manufacturing folks, salespeople, marketing and administrative like myself. And then the balance to get up to 17 is production, warehouse, shipping and receiving. They’re either making products for us or fulfilling orders, or in quality control or the warehouse.
There are two parts to the product: main product, which goes back to the Keurig analogy: the ‘coffee machine’ itself, is made with a contract manufacturer; the pod, the ‘coffee pod,’ like in the Keurig analogy -- we call it a grinding ring, that's what sharpens the skate -- are made here in Acton.
How did you get the attention of professional hockey players?
Once we had prototype and did a Kickstarter the awareness broadened. In that round we picked up one of the owners of an NHL team, and a group that had owned two NHL teams previously. We also picked up a retail sports store owner, and an NHL player. That was very early on still, that was still in 2015.
Most recently last season we did a trial with NWHL to where they had a need for sharpening capabilities that wasn’t easily met by existing equipment, so we supplied product for a trial and they liked it so much that we developed a more formal relationship this season where we are now the skate sharpening partner of that league.
Where do you ship?
Right now we are direct-to-consumer business. So you have to go to sparxhockey.com to buy it. We right now formally ship to customers in the U.S. and Canada, and we have plans this year, 2017, to establish a physical presence in Canada so we can keep products there as well. We also want to establish a physical presence in Europe and Russia. We can’t even really serve that market from here, much too expensive to provide support for those customers. Just like the Keurig analogy, those grinding rings have to be periodically purchased by the customer. We get about 40 skate sharp out of every grinding wheel. We hope to do both expansions this year.
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