1. Chalkless started because we were frustrated by a really simple problem: grip would fail even when people were already using chalk. Our founders, Greg Pope and James Pidhurney, came from aerospace and defense engineering, so they approached it differently. Instead of asking, “How do we absorb more sweat?” they asked, “What is actually causing the slip?”

They discovered that the bigger culprit was oil at the skin-to-surface interface. That led to years of testing and eventually the Chalkless formula.

The difference is pretty fundamental. Traditional chalk manages moisture. Chalkless is designed to remove the oil that creates the slippery boundary layer in the first place. You’re not putting a thicker layer between your hand and the thing you’re gripping; you’re removing the layer that’s getting in the way.

That’s why we think of Chalkless less as “better chalk” and more as a completely different approach to grip. We now apply that same science across fitness, golf, racket sports, climbing, team sports, music and performing arts.

2. Today, it’s a combination of direct-to-consumer, word of mouth, social content and the credibility we’ve gotten from putting the product in front of people in very visible places. Shark Tank obviously gave us a huge awareness boost, but the more interesting engine is what happens after somebody actually tries it.

Grip is one of those products where the customer doesn’t need a long explanation after the first use. They feel the difference. So referrals and repeat purchases become incredibly important.

Where I’d like more of the business to come from is organic discovery within the individual sports and communities we serve. There are millions of people searching for solutions to very specific grip problems—“my hands slip on the bar,” “my racket grip gets slippery,” “I can’t use chalk at my gym,” etc. We want Chalkless to be the obvious answer when someone searches for the problem, not just when they’re already familiar with the brand.

3. We’ve increasingly handed AI the repetitive work: research synthesis, first drafts, analyzing customer feedback, organizing information and helping us turn a large amount of raw input into something the team can actually work with.

It’s incredibly good at getting you from zero to something useful very quickly.

Where we pulled back was anything involving the actual voice of the customer or the final creative judgment. AI can tell you what customers are saying, but there’s still a difference between understanding a sentence and understanding why somebody cares about the product.

For a brand like Chalkless, that’s important. We’re selling a physical sensation. We’re selling the moment somebody grabs a bar or racket after using the product and says, “Whoa.” You can’t completely automate that understanding.

So our philosophy is basically: let AI handle the scale and repetition; keep humans responsible for taste, judgment and the moments that actually define the brand.

4. Definitely. Customers are becoming much more educated before they ever talk to us. Someone can discover a product on social media, immediately research the science, compare it with traditional or liquid chalk, read reviews and then come to us with a very specific question.

We’re also paying attention to AI-assisted discovery. People increasingly ask ChatGPT or other AI tools questions like “What’s the best grip product for tennis?” or “What can I use instead of chalk?” That’s a fundamentally different discovery behavior from traditional Google search.

We’re seeing signs of that shift, and I expect it to become much more significant. The important thing for us is making sure the underlying information about Chalkless is accurate, understandable and easy for both people and AI systems to discover.

That’s one reason we’ve invested more heavily in explaining the science and creating content around specific sports rather than simply saying “buy this grip product.”

5. I’d tell them to get extremely clear about the problem they’re actually solving.

Don’t spend the next 12 months trying to manufacture content because everyone says you need more content. Don’t chase every new AI tool. Don’t try to be everywhere.

Figure out the specific problem your customer has, prove that you solve it, and then build the most useful body of information around that problem that you possibly can.

For us, that means going much deeper into the actual science of grip, creating content for individual sports, collecting real customer feedback, and making it incredibly easy for someone to go from “I have this problem” to “I understand why it happens” to “I want to try Chalkless.”

And I’d absolutely use AI. But I’d use it as leverage, not as a substitute for understanding your customer.

The companies that win over the next year won’t necessarily be the ones using the most AI. They’ll be the ones that use AI to move faster while becoming more knowledgeable about their customers, not less.

In our case, the mission is pretty simple: get Chalkless into the hands of more people and let the product do the talking. We set a goal of reaching one million people because once someone actually experiences the difference, the value proposition becomes very simple.