From LSU football helmets to hard hats: Baton Rouge startup has plans to cool industrial workers | Business

Last spring, Greg Stringfellow had to cut overgrown branches and brush his property. He knew the limbs could hit his head, so he brought a helmet with him.

He also grabbed something else: a tiny cooling device used in LSU football players’ helmets that he attached to the hard hat so it could withstand the 90-degree temperatures that day.

“This fan wasn’t even designed for a hard hat, but you could feel the air moving around,” said Stringfellow, LSU’s assistant athletic director for equipment.

Stringfellow texted Jack Karavich — the founder and CEO of Tigeraire, the LSU Innovation Park startup that makes the devices — about the idea of ​​adapting the football helmet gimmicks to hard hats. Both men sensed an opportunity.

Almost a year later, with 50,000 units already ordered and plans underway to ramp up manufacturing, Karavich is eyeing Tigeraire’s expansion into the industrial helmet market.

Its push was shot in the arm in mid-January when Tigeraire hosted an exhibit at the 2022 edition of World of Concrete, an industry show in Las Vegas with 1,100 companies and 37,000 registered attendees. Stringfellow traveled with Karavich to promote the devices.

“We’re really excited because when you look at the industry opportunity – 5 million people on planet Earth play American football, and the vast majority, 99% or more, live in the United States,” said Karavich. “You look at hard hats, and you have 350 million as the total addressable market. This is several orders of magnitude larger.

Karavich declined to name specific companies that signed up for the hard hats, but he said Tigeraire was working with a personal protective equipment distributor in Louisiana to increase its customer base.

The device should continue to generate interest as industrial plants grapple with summer heat waves, particularly in the southern Gulf, Karavich said. Heat exhaustion is such a major worker safety concern that OSHA announced in October that it would develop stricter regulations to deal with such injuries.

Karavich poked fun at other heat-busting tricks industrial workers have used over the years. He spoke to a veteran worker in New Orleans who for more than 20 years took a Dixie cup, cut it in half, put ice and water in it, then wrapped it in Saran Wrap and taped it to his helmet.

“The hacks that guys have done over the years to really try to fight fatigue and all that hot stuff in the warmer months, it’s hysterical,” he said.

Tigeraire started cooling heads in 2021 when it struck deals with LSU, Alabama and Clemson to supply devices for those teams’ helmets. As other university teams show interest, Karavich said the Next Frontier continues to explore hard hats and other places, possibly military helmets.

“What we had with football is what we found here with the hard hat space, which is market-ready right from the start,” Karavich said.

Meeting future demand will require a change in Tigeraire’s manufacturing structure. Karavich said Tigeraire can build a few hundred units a month at its innovation park headquarters. He hopes to invest in additional workers and premises to bolster the company’s mass manufacturing capabilities by 2024, in Baton Rouge or elsewhere in Louisiana. In the meantime, he is working with a Los Angeles design-build company to ramp up production while outsourcing some work to China.

Tigeraire has raised $1.5 million from investors in 2021, led by General Catalyst, a Massachusetts venture capital firm that has invested in Venmo, Airbnb and TikTok. Company officials said Tigeraire was the first Louisiana company to secure seed investment from a top 50 venture capital firm.

The company is still looking for additional financiers, Karavich said.

“As far as fundraising goes, we definitely want to head towards an IPO,” he said. “But the longer you can go without taking money out of investors and without diluting, the better off you are as a business. I really make sure we’re doing everything we can to generate positive revenue.

Tigeraire makes two versions of its device: the Cyclone, designed for football helmets, and the Tornado, which fits in hard hats. The technology between the two is similar, Karavich said, but they have different structures in order to fit each space.

Tigeraire is already working on a second version of the Tornado. Stringfellow, who continues to mentor Karavich, said it would be a “simpler” device in terms of overall structure, but would have more complicated microchips to enable GPS tracking.

“We brought the product to a point where you could safely reproduce and install it,” Stringfellow said.

The Tornado will also be compatible with Tool Connect, an online platform developed by DeWalt that can track the location of power tools to ensure they are not removed from a construction site.

Adding GPS capability to Tigeraire machines will allow site managers to track worker temperatures and prevent falls from heat exhaustion, said Matt Velderman, director of product marketing for Stanley Black and Decker, owner of the DeWalt brand.

“The future of where they go – with in-helmet sensors, reporting of potential drops, overheating events, and everything that works with our Tool Connect infrastructure – is the big vision for us,” said Velderman said of Tigeraire.

Meanwhile, Tigeraire’s football helmet empire continues to expand. Karavich said Texas A&M signed and installed the Cyclones five days before the Aggies upset Alabama. He also said he had attracted the interest of “almost every high school coach in the state of Louisiana and beyond.”

Stringfellow said he had about 10 Tigers who used the devices consistently. Some key players adopted him quickly, like All-American linebacker Damone Clark.

“He would get mad if they weren’t loaded,” Stringfellow joked.