Why Cooling Down Is Becoming the Hottest Trend with Coolmitt | EP. #196

Craig Gile 00:02
My mandate, and frankly, this is a great forum for me to do. It is to educate the market as to this whole new thing.

Andrew Maff 00:10
Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I'm your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of Bluetusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e-commerce industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.

Andrew Maff 00:24
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show as usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by Craig Gile, who is the present founder over at CoolMitt. Craig, how you doing, buddy? Ready for good show?

Craig Gile 00:36
Andrew, I'm doing great. Thanks for the time and having me on and pleasure to chat about what we're doing at Coolmitt.

Andrew Maff 00:43
Awesome. I am so excited to have you on the show. I've done so much work with, like, many different fitness devices, whether they're techno technology or whether they're like different like gym stuff, like, all over the place. So really excited to talk about this product with you. I obviously like starting these off relatively stereotypically. I kind of want to give you the floor. Tell us a little bit about your background, how you got started with CoolMitt, and then we're gonna take it from there.

Craig Gile 01:08
Okay, sounds good. Let me I'll start with what the technology is and does, because it is, you know, heat and overheated human body is a big problem, and so these brilliant Stanford scientists discovered an entirely new way to address that. So people might know, like, I'm hot. I'm working out, or I'm working out in my yard. I get hot. I put a missing fan or something on, feels good for a second, doesn't do anything. These guys actually figured out a better way to get the heat out of your body and solve this. So I am the founder of the company. Thankfully have the founding scientist as part of our company. Little bit of background on me. Not that I love to talk about myself, but that is, I guess, relevant to the story. I basically came across this technology as a function of my background, previous career. So out of college, I went to college on a navy scholarship, so that I flew jets off an aircraft carrier for the Navy for a number of years, and then got out. And then, actually, we were talking earlier, moved to Philadelphia, went to business school at Wharton, and then, like presumably every Wharton grad, I majored in finance and went to Wall Street. So did that for a while, traded bonds and commodities for exit hedge funds for a bit. Circling back to the Navy part. So this stage in my career, getting into a startup venture world, I met and started working with a gentleman who had funded this for the US military. The US military has a R&D arm called DARPA, which is and has for decades, invest in revolutionary science and technology. And my colleague Joe is looking for a solution for soldiers working in extreme environments like Iraq, settles on investing in this discovery at Stanford about the way to get heat out of your body. Invest $5 million in them to create technology at their discovery. And effectively, they are able to prove it that they is the most rapid way to get heat out of your body and cool down your core temperature, which is actually is actually what impacts your performance. And then, you know, we're taking it from there, commercializing basically that technology, working with them and leaning on them from all they've learned, but getting products that are a good fit and usable for consumers. Have our first one out on the market, and then we have future products in development to get this solution out to as many hands, literally as possible.

Andrew Maff 03:27
Interesting. So tell me about the product in itself. So it's literally a device that you essentially put your hand in to cool the body temperature down, correct?

Craig Gile 03:38
Yeah. I'll tell you how it works First, I'll tell you how they discovered it originally. So the way that it works the current Coolmitt, which is on the market and can be bought on our website. Coolmitt.com is a portable, battery operated product. It's about a foot high and eight inches in diameter. It does take ice in the lower part. I'll get to two questions. We always get takes ice and water in the lower part, that's a heat sink that does not flow through the system. The reason for that is, if the body comes into contact with something too cold, it's called vasoconstriction, and then it kind of retains the heat in your body. So what the Stanford scientists discovered is the hairless parts of our body, that's the palms of the hands and the soles of feet and the upper part of the face, have a different vascular structure that when we overheat, it radiates heat out of there. So our body wants to radiate heat when it needs to dump heat. The different vascular structure for very, very layman's biology here is most of our body has arteries to capillaries to veins. The capillaries are narrow and resistant, so only a set amount of volume can go through them. Doesn't vary at all. This part of our body, called the glabrous part of the body, has a different structure, confluence of arteries and veins that come up near the surface, but also has what are called arteriovenous anastomoses, and these. Abas. When you overheat, they open up to form a wider shunt to let more rapid blood flow from arteries to veins into the atmosphere. That's the basic discovery that the Stanford scientists had that ultimately the military investment. So circling back to the product, so the product has water flowing through tubes that go to an interface. You put your hand in, and the water comes out of the ideal temperature. Again, it can't be too cold. It's, you know, mid 50s, about 13 degrees Celsius, is what it's set up. Again, they've dialed that in through years at Stanford, kind of like dialing in with the ideal temperature is cool, but not too cold. So water is running through this pad you put your hand in, and so when you're overheated, heat is transferred from the blood in your hand to this water, and convection takes it away, goes back to the system, gets re chilled at the ideal temperature and comes out. So it's a closed loop of water through the upper chamber, spitting water out of the ideal temperature your hand. Heats of water back up. It comes out, gets re chilled, goes back through. So you have a constant flow of water pulling heat out of your hand as well. I like to vision that allows colder blood to flow to your heart and cools you from the inside out. And then, helpfully, you know when you're doing anything exerting yourself or whatever your body your brain is, is smart enough to prioritize cooler blood to wear to your overheated muscles. So again, it cools you from the inside out, and also smart enough to kind of prioritize where the colder blood should go first.

Andrew Maff 06:22
Very interesting. Obviously, one of the kind of big trends I would say right now in especially in the fitness space, is these cold plunges. Is it? Is it? Would you say it's kind of a competitor to that type of product line?

Craig Gile 06:38
No, I think it's the same general space, but definitely a different use case. So, and I not going to pretend I know all the benefits of cold plunges. I do know that. You know, post workout recovery, it's great for inflammation. I can argue it's unnecessary, if you can use our technology, but, but We're different because you can actually use it while you're doing something. No one at a basketball game is going to jump out and jump in an ice bath. Time out, right? So again, our devices is portable. It can be on the sideline, it can be in the gym, whatever. And so I mentioned the vasoconstriction thing. So people always ask me, like, Oh, what is my hand a bucket of ice? So the hands are, what works? Bucket of ice would be fine. Getting the bite doesn't work that way. So the again, it retains heat. The other question always get is like, and it's generally phrased this way, is, how long does this take for it to work? Because people think, Oh, I have to do it for whatever amount of time. It could take a long time it could take a long time for this to work. Be great if it could. The reality is, it starts to work right away. So if your body has to dump heat, you put your hand in this mitt, it's going to start pulling heat out right away. Hopefully. We've seen with data from both the Stanford lab as well as our partners in the field, it's exponentially faster rate of heat transfer the first minute, and then it starts to revert to the mean. About we've seen third, fourth minute depend upon people, depend upon conditions and all but so like, we tell people, like probably, you know, if you have less than 30 seconds, it may not be worth the trouble to do it. We have 30 Seconds to three minutes. It's a really ideal window to do this, and you're going to get a noticeable amount of heat out of your body. How do you notice it? Is it is? It probably a good question, if you and this is kind of like, what really kind of a headline thing that people really get into? And for good reason, so Heller and grown at Stanford discovered they can get he out of someone's body quickly. They stumbled upon the athletic training benefits that you can get by doing this. And so, long story short, and people can go to our website and get some more details. We do have, you know, published papers. But if you can, if you're going to failure in working out, what happens there is your localized muscles overheat. And you know, the way I understand it is they heat up the pyruvate kinase that sends a signal to your brain to stop sending ATP your muscles and used to basically fail safe mechanism. You stop doing that, that exercise. If you can get heat out before your next set, you can then go do more work. You get almost back up to get out rapidly with our product, get back up to where you started. So you can go do like more pull ups, bench press, whatever you're doing. You can do more work, similarly, on, like endurance training, if you're doing some kind of endurance training where you're going, like, to exhaustion or failure, what happens here, as opposed to, like, localized muscles overheating, you have your core temperature is slowly rising, and it gets to about 100 202 and a half Fahrenheit, that's when you start to have performance degradation. So if you can forestall that from happening, like getting heat out while you're working out, you can go harder for longer. So our customers and athletes, use it on stationary bikes for endurance. They use it during interval training, for on the track or on the field. They use it in the weight room to get, you know, substantially more volume or strength training and. And you know, when I first heard about some of the discoveries at Stanford, I got to be honest, I thought it didn't make any sense. I never heard anything. And some of the volumetric strength gains are getting beli belief, unless you look into it, because it's actually, it's, you know, legit scientific and revolutionary discovery by them. And so, you know, I can say almost, you know, with 100% confidence. If someone is used to working out, they go into a gym and they go to failure. If they as a benchmark, if they can use this in between sets, they will see at least a 20 to 30% increase in volume the very first time they do it. And then they keep training with that. There's a metabolic adaptation to your body. We have these sustainable training games. We've seen it, you know, in the lab. We've seen it in the field. You have like these, as long as you keep working out, you're going to maintain these gains. It's not an ephemeral thing. Like, oh, I don't have my Coolmitt today. I go back down to doing like, 10 pull ups. You kind of, you know, adapt to your body to that volume of work, and you have these sustained strength gains.

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Andrew Maff 11:34
That's very interesting. So like is, they're using it with them in different scenarios. Obviously, there's a ton of different types of athletes that can be using this. How are you kind of doing this from like a marketing perspective, it's a wildly differentiated product. There's really nothing out there like it. So how are you kind of getting over that barrier in terms of educating the market and getting it in front of people?

Craig Gile 11:57
It's very good question. So we are effectively, again, one thing I couldn't probably focus on enough like this, uh, military, R&D, arm, DARPA mandate is to invest, like, literally, in revolutionary ideas. It's not It's like moonshots. It's not trying to invest in a better gun. It's trying to invest an entirely different type of weapon system. And I get from my military background, I knew about DARPA. I did not know that. You know, part of their mandate is to invest in things that ideally can have a civilian use case. So things like the internet, and people don't know, internet, GPS, email, robotics, were all originally DARPA projects. It does kind of take a while for them to get get to the market. So the way this product works is a new category. So our mandate, my mandate, and frankly, this is a great forum for me to do, it is to educate the market as to this whole new thing. So it's not like, you know, different hydration solution is not a different protein bar. It is a whole new way of doing things with, you know, I'd argue a a step change of differential impact. So to date, you know, we've, again, we took the most recent version out of Stanford. There is something of a Stanford diaspora that's kind of out there that kind of knows about the science, and they've kind of reached out to us. So a lot of word of mouth advertising has come. We have had some good earned media, both on some podcasts similar to this. You know, some are like the Huberman lab had Dr Helder on it a while ago. So we're trying to get the word out smartly through that we have had some good PR that we've arranged. And actually, sometimes it's kind of stumbles upon us, like, actually, today, there was a story in The New York Times sports page, the athletic detailing how major league baseball teams are dealing with the heat. And we have, you know, over two thirds of Major League Baseball is customer of ours that you kind of use it in game. They kind of mentioned, they raise player using it in between innings, and they mentioned using our product, so that was kind of like we stumbled upon that. PR, so yeah, that's how we're trying to get it out. And you know, we will get more into digital marketing again, for we are available to buy online so someone hears about us that can go online and buy our product. We have done some email campaigns. Have a reasonable house list of emails that we kind of keep people updated on. I view it less as a sales channel, but more of a building community channel to keep people aware of what's going on and educate them on this. But we do need to as we develop as a company and develop our new products, we will lean more into digital marketing, e commerce, to get the products out there. Just a quick aside we do have. We took the most recent version out of Stanford lab, created a manufacturable version of that which is on the market now it has been for a little bit over two years. So we have had really good traction with our target customers. To start off because of these crazy athletic benefits, we started off with the early adopter market of elite athletes. So we have is going on 80 professional teams across all the different sports who are customers dozens of college programs. They're great because there's multiple sports in a college athletic department. Yeah. Olympians, Tour de France teams, CrossFit athletes, combat athletes, Special Forces, military and training. And a new push, which from outreach, from us, from kind of this earned media, a really good traction away with large industrial companies who have workers working in hot, hot temperatures outside or even indoors in a hot factory. So as long as they have a break, they can use our product have get that heat mitigation. So it's not just an athletic performance solution. It is a health and wellness solution for people as well. So long winded, way to your question, like, so far, it's been earned media and word of mouth, we will get to with, with new products, more of a leaning into a more standard fair influencer digital marketing, kind of marketing campaign.

Andrew Maff 16:21
That's what I think. I mean the obviously, for a brand like yours, or a product line like yours, when it's wildly differentiated, social media influencer tends to do the best, because they can kind of help educate that market. But I also know that the recovery space seems to be growing like a weed, like a lot of people, you know, they're really big on the standard, like the fitness side and everything from the many, many different ways that you can exercise and things like that. And now, all of a sudden, I, in my opinion, over the past several years, you've started to now look at people that are focused on the post workout, which is, what are they doing from a recovery perspective. So that's why you're seeing like, all these different types of saunas and like I mentioned, like the cold plunges and things like that. So I can see how for a product line like yours, now is a fantastic time for it to kind of hit the market, because it's definitely a growing industry. What's the plan in terms of product line expansion? You mentioned, that was kind of the goal of the future marketing efforts?

Craig Gile 17:18
Yeah, two things on that. So to touch on the recovery, that's a really good point the way. And it can confuse the market if we say we're recovery product, because in that, like, Oh, it's just like a theragun or, you know, it might kind of muscle massager, right? So, but it is in that same vein. So I like to refer to as kind of a more dynamic recovery, because, again, you can do it in between your workout, which you know, most times you're not even going to bring a massage gun in a workout with these crazy benefits, it does accelerate a post exercise recovery. So as an example, we have Tour de France teams who use the product, you know, as we speak, starting that, and so they'll use it in a few ways, you know, but probably the biggest use case for them is post stage recovery. So they have, you know, little bit less than 24 hours to recover for the next stage. But they want to accelerate their recovery. So what they'll do is, the way, when I'm told, is they'll have their Coolmitt, like, literally, like in the van, or right after the stage, going back to the hotel, and they'll get the heat out of their body. The way I look at is like your body's a checklist of things to do in recovery. If you can take care of that heat right away. It accelerates the rest of your body's mechanisms to kind of do that whole recovery. So it gets you in a better shape for the next day for that type of recovery. Another thing that, and by the way, everything I've said I have data on this, is I have anecdotal reports of this. And actually, Dr Heller Stanford is finishing up a study on this. But in terms of recovery, we constantly get reports from credible athletes of, oh, it's crazy. I did this workout, had so much more volume of work with my Coolmitt net workout, I fully expected to be, you know, pay the price a day or two later with delayed onset of muscle soreness. DOMs, delayed onset of muscle soreness, clearly. So they come back like, I didn't have any DOMs. What is going on there? And so we did it like all the time. And, you know, they're publishing this paper, but effectively, it's what they have theorized, is there's less inflammation during the workout, and that causes less soreness down the road. So how does that manifest itself, or recovery the next day, two days later, you can go hard and not worry about, you know, detracting from your workout the next day or two days later. So that's the DOMs. So, yeah, so I mean, again, I sometimes I think I come across like, Oh, this is like a magic elixir for everything but it and to be fair, it is. But. It is. You know, the human body has a lot of things that go wrong. When you're overheated. It's the enemy of a lot of different things. So if you can address that seamlessly and easily, which you can with our technology, a lot of good things happen. And so where we are on the product development side, again, we got our first product out to the market, into some key people's hands, you know, not just for because they're elite athletes, and it's a, you know, a good marketing launching pad. Got a lot of data and feedback from them, and part of that feedback was like, here's what I like about the product. Here's what I like to see in future products. So we have, in late stage development, two products. One is a a a better, more industrial version for the commercial market. So that'd be athletic teams, the gyms. It can kind of be set up as kind of a more permanent station in industry, so like break rooms for companies, it can be kind of run more as a permanent station, way less maintenance, and actually will capture data from the users, and we can tie it into an app. People can see like, how much he's being taken out of their body while they're working out. They can compare their Coolmitt workouts with other things. That's that builds a platform for that, so it's not just the cooling, but also a data platform. And then we also have, in late stage development, a was really exciting is a mobile version that'll be coming out. Get all this consistent with the science that we have the institutional knowledge of how this works, for one with the Stanford scientists, but also what they've learned in the past, it doesn't work as well. So we've that is part of our design process to make sure we are effectively the gold standard of heat transfer from the human body. This mobile version is a really unique way, and I want to give way too many, you know, quote, unquote state secrets. So we do have patents around what we're doing, but it'll basically, we're calling it, you know, working title, Coolmitt unleashed. So it'd be a mobile version kind of take around. It'll provide an hour or more of cooling and easily, you know, quote, unquote, recharge with ice. So it's going to be, like, really kind of democratize the solution to some degree, because it's going to be substantially lower price point.

Andrew Maff 22:10
Yeah, very cool!

Craig Gile 22:12
And so back to your point. When we get to that, we think that'd be a really good fit for a a smart, ideally effective marketing campaign to kind of get this word out there. And, you know, step one is create education awareness of what the capabilities and benefits of this technology. And then step two is, like, you know, converting that interest into sales and getting out to the customers, which is not just, you know, for me to ping ramp up revenue numbers, but to actually get the solution out to people. Because, you know, every day, you know, typically this time of year, here are people dropping like flies in the heat, and when I see it, you know, yesterday and today at Wimbledon, where, you know, you know, crazy hot days and players are dropping like flies. We do have a lot of tennis players who use this in training, where it's a really good use case for tennis, and you know, it's our job to get it, you know, more mainstream use for tennis as a frustrating aside for me, every single sport, professional sport has had no problem for our athletes incorporating this in competition. Tennis has had a little bit of, like, questions or pushback, so we're trying to get over that with tennis tournaments. But yeah, every time I see like, a report in the press, like, so and so, like, had their fault or something because of heat, I'm like, oh my goodness gracious. I have the solution for that, but we'll get there.

Andrew Maff 23:40
One day.

Craig Gile 23:41
Yes!

Andrew Maff 23:42
Craig, this was awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you're super busy. It was awesome learning all about Coolmitt. I'd love to give you the floor here tell everyone where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Coolmitt.

Craig Gile 23:52
Well, I am particularly on uninteresting, so don't want to learn much more about me. But LinkedIn profile Craig Gile, we have a great team on our early startup team. Like I mentioned this, the founding scientists are part of our team. I've plucked away two good friends of mine from business school to help me run this over the last couple of years. So we're all excited to get this out to people the they just want to, you know, emphasize that, you know, the benefits are just making the human body work more effectively. All student is having your body naturally get back to where it wants to be in an accelerated fashion, easy to implement. Benefits are vast and so, you know, I think companies teams are a really good use case for our current product. As we get moved down the road, it would democratize this or everyone can use it. So, you know, look us up, follow us on @realcoolmitt is our primary channel on Instagram, where most of our stuff goes out, but we'll expand that website. Coolmitt.com. There is a lot of information. If you can give us your email address, you know, we have a distribution list. We're not, like, pinging you constantly. Like, I get from the latest one I'm getting is from J Crew, sending a lot of stuff, like, I'm gonna buy new clothes, they've somehow got my email. But if we try to send out regular, like, good, authentic content to educate the marketplace on all the benefits of this technology. So love to build that community for anybody that don't need to be a professional athlete, if you're working out in earnest and want to maximize your workout, we have the solution for you.

Andrew Maff 25:36
Love it. Craig, thank you so much for being on the show, buddy.

Craig Gile 25:39
Thank you!

Andrew Maff 25:40
Everyone who tuned in. Thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us. See you all next time. Have a good one!

Narrator 25:56
Thank you for tuning in to the Ecomm show. Head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the Bluetusker YouTube channel. The Ecomm show is brought to you by Bluetusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show!