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Keap Athletics
Who are the people behind this company?
Hello, nice to meet you. My name is Patrick, Founder of this company. I work on Keap Athletics from Fremont, California.
My best friends and I started Keap in 2014. Since then we've grown much and today I work on Keap with a talented group of past co-workers, friends, family, and new people I've met along this journey. We work to be as thoughtful and considerate behind everything we produce- like how we add a swoop on the bottom-right on our photos as a reference of our innovative pocket designs.
Want to partner, work with us, or just chat? You can reach out to me direct at Patrick@KeapAthletics.com
WHY DID I START THIS COMPANY?
I started Keap out of necessity and a dream to create something that people love.
Necessity. I simply couldn’t trust athletic shorts pockets to hold my expensive phone, and my inconvenient-to-lose wallet and keys anymore. Regular shorts with regular pockets just didn’t fit into my lifestyle. My friends and I lived in athletic shorts - not just when we were active or outdoors, but for 1.) comfort while running errands or 2.) relaxation at home.
We kept finding ourselves having moments in college like this: Put on regular shorts, put stuff in pockets, walk to car, open door, sit down, hear phone rattle down under the seat, feel bad, open door again, get out of car, kneel down on hard and jagged asphalt, reach under car seat (can’t reach phone), re-adjust car seat, get phone back, re-adjust car seat back, put phone in cup holder or on dock, move along with day.
We noticed that we weren’t the only ones feeling this problem and were confused why big-name-brands hadn’t solved this. We thought the problem was solved when companies added zippers to their pockets. Although zippers can secure the phone, they are not convenient at all. We found ourselves unzipping and re-zipping every time we wanted to check a message or instagram on our phone. Needless to say, that’s a lot of zips in the course of a day. Fast forward to summer 2014 when our skills and ambition caught up with our desire to solve this problem and we went to work on what would become Keap Athletics.
A dream to create something that people love. At this time (2014) we still had our day jobs, so Keap truly started as a weekend-warrior project that was completely bootstrapped by our time, skills, and resources we’d earned. Even though we had great jobs, we were incredibly motivated by the dream of making something that people loved. At our jobs, there kept being moments where we felt like the end-product could have been better. We believed that the only way we’d truly be able to make something people loved was to own the idea and the execution ourselves. We didn’t want money to be an excuse as to why we couldn’t fulfill our dreams so we used what we had a ton of, which was a burning passion to create. Whenever we faced a challenge that we knew nothing about we had a simple motto that got us past it - “Google it. Ask someone. Read a book.” We repeated this process, and after a lot of hard work we created our very own Kickstarter campaign featuring Keap Athletics shorts! There wasn’t one stitching, pixel or a line of code that we didn’t place ourselves. Our Kickstarter campaign ended with ~500 backers who gave us ~$20,000 for shorts with pockets that worked.
