Bear Mayer (left)
Happy Wednesday,
Bear Mayer is the founder of Bruce Bolt, the premium baseball brand that turned batting gloves from an afterthought into a status symbol. However, what makes his story different from most founders’ is where it started: his dad gave him two options when he got his first car.
Option 1: Get a job
Option 2: Start a company
Bear chose the harder of the two, and it worked.
This week, I sat down with Bear to talk about building a product from scratch, going viral in English class, and why his family took out a home equity line of credit to go all in.
If we're gonna go bankrupt, we're going bankrupt big.
How He Got Here
Sophomore year of high school (2017): Needed gas money. Couldn't work a normal job around baseball practice and a 30-minute commute. Decided to start a company instead.
First product: Pine tar, through a manufacturer connection his dad had from the hockey industry. It sold, and Bruce Bolt was born.
Designing the glove: Sat in the parking lot outside baseball practice, waiting for traffic to die down, designing batting gloves on Photoshop. Went through 18 prototypes before putting anything on the market.
First sale (October 2018): His dad secretly asked a friend in Maryland to buy a pair. The second order (from a stranger in Texas) came the next day.
Early marketing: Hand-delivered flyers, windshield to windshield, at youth baseball tournaments, then walked into the tournaments to sell parents face-to-face. Eventually got escorted out by security, but kept handing out flyers on the way out.
The video: Whistle Media came to Austin and filmed a "My Hustle" segment on Bear without his dad knowing until a week before they showed up. It dropped on February 6th, 2020.
English class: Bear heard his phone going off from the phone caddy in class. Thought the Shopify app was glitching. Called his dad after. They were at 70 orders before lunch.
Going all in: COVID hit. The family took out a home equity line of credit, bought 10,000 pairs of gloves, and put pre-orders on the website. They sold out, paid off the loan, and never looked back.
The Big Idea: Creator Influence > Pro Athlete Influence (At Least for Kids)
This is the thing I kept thinking about after we wrapped.
Bear made a distinction I hadn't heard framed this cleanly before: when a kid sees Coach Rac wearing Bruce Bolts on TikTok, he goes to his dad and asks for them. When that dad sees Harrison Bader wearing the same pair on an MLB broadcast, he says yes.
Two different audiences. Two different forms of validation. One purchase.
Coach Rac (left), Savannah Bananas, and Harrison Bader (right), MLB star
The pro athlete validates the parent. The creator validates the kid (even though the kid is the one asking for them).
I think about this a lot in the context of brand strategy in sports. Major league players used to be the only influence that mattered. Now the high schooler with 100k followers might be moving more product just because the audience feels like they actually know him.
5 Tactical Takeaways
1. Solve a problem you actually have. Bear's dad told him early: all great companies solve a problem everyone has. Batting gloves had always been a secondhand product made of synthetic leather. Bear just wanted one that actually fit; that was the whole business plan.
2. Go direct-to-consumer first and protect your margin.
Bruce Bolt launched D2C only
Bear's dad drilled this from day one: that's where the margin lives
Retail came later (Dick's, Academy, Baseball Monkey), but the business was built on the back of a healthy margin first
3. Seed the product to the right people in the room, not the biggest people online. Bear's early “influencer” strategy:
Got his best friend, the starting shortstop at the rival high school, into the gloves
That shortstop talked to opposing players at second base
Best player on the team wears something, now every other kid notices
No followers required.
4. Your first hire matters more than almost any other decision. When Bruce Bolt needed operational help, Bear's dad went after the one person he'd worked with in 25 years that he trusted completely. She moonlighted first, saw the vision, then came on as COO. From there, every hire was intentional. They're now 25 full-time team members, and Bear describes it as a family.
5. Let the catalog build; the viral moment only works if there's something to come home to. The Whistle video drove a wave of orders. But what kept it going was a product worth coming back for. Bear had been improving the glove every year since 2018. By the time the world found it, it was ready.
Why It Matters
What stuck with me about Bear is that he never set out to build something big. The goal was simply gas money. The company was called a "project." The expectation was that he'd sell it off after a couple of years of college and figure out his life.
And yet, every decision along the way was made with more care and more craft than the goal required. He went through 18 prototypes for a product he expected to make a few hundred dollars on. He was out at youth tournaments getting escorted out by security. He was sitting in a parking lot designing gloves on Photoshop.
The work ethic and genuine love for the product came first, and the ambition followed.
📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.
See you then,
Tyler & Jake