In any good story, nothing worth fighting for is ever easy. For BATS-TOI, Inc., a New York-based developer of contact sports equipment, it could have been the supply chain challenges that assailed even the most robust manufacturers during the pandemic, that forced it to hang up its headgear and quit.It could have been when the National Federation of High Schools (NFHS) came knocking and demanded it stop selling its product, which had already been embraced by hundreds of student athletes across the United States. But for Mario Mercado, founder and CEO of BATS-TOI, which takes its name from the French to “fight to overcome any obstacle,” a new form of headgear that would better protect the health and careers of athletes, was absolutely worth the battle.
It started as a graduate school project, first at NYU and then at Columbia University. Mercado had been a wrestling coach atNYU and also Deputy Commissioner for the New York State Athletic Commission, assisting in the regulation of professional boxing and mixed martial arts. That experience led to the realisation that, while high-profile sports like football and hockey are synonymous with protective headgear, wrestling, a sport which requires consistent, intense grappling between opponents, endures greater risk to concussions and head injuries than any other. It gave Mercado the motivation to design a new form of headgear that focused not only on ear protection, as industry-standard wrestling headwear traditionally has, but also reduces the risk of concussion.
Armed with this idea, he started knocking on the doors of NYU’s Mechanical andAerospace Engineering Department where Dr. Nikhil Gupta introduced him to the lab’s additive manufacturing capabilities. A first prototype, made using FDM, planted the seed around 3D printing's potential, but this wouldn’t be an overnight AM success story. Instead, the start-up went ahead with the traditional route of injection moulding, manufacturing its first headgear in Italy and in Asia. It wasn’t cheap, and against the backdrop of the pandemic, where global travel restrictions made in-person quality control impossible, Mercado realised, it simply wasn’t going to work.
"The cost of that as a start-up was just crazy," Mercado told TCT. “That really sparked my interest of going back and revisiting additive manufacturing."
Mercado spent a year working with different service providers until Dr. Gupta directed him to a place on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue where he could take a look at HP’s Multi Jet Fusion. There, he met another hurdle – there was no 3D printer to be found. Deflated, he sat in the waiting room, scrolling through LinkedIn and hastily connecting with anyone related to HP’s 3D printing division. The following day, a flurry of messages appeared in his inbox, and Mercado quickly began working with Akash Valavala from HP’s Professional Services team. In just seven weeks, the headgear was converted into an AM-optimised design and printed using MJF.
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BATS-TOI
The Mercado in action
“I believe that first MJF helmet was the point when we realised this could really work on MJF,” says Brian Ingold, Head of GTM Solutions at HP. “There have been many iterations and design enhancements throughout the years but getting that first helmet to work was a pretty big “aha” moment for the team.”
Mercado was finally getting somewhere. AM, suddenly, appeared to be a viable production method.
“Could it be done with injection molding?” Mercado reflects. “Yes, but not economically.”
Still, the additive economics didn’t come straight away – initially, Mercado recalls being quoted $800 to print a single helmet. With ambitions to scale to 10-20,000 units as a minimum, this pushed him to figure out a way to use additive to his advantage and simultaneously get costs down. Today, a single helmet, known as the Mercado III, retails for less than $100.
“We've lowered the part costs through this journey as we've designed for nesting while keeping function,” Ingold continued. “I think the key to production is finding that right part cost. It's been really impressive to see the iterations of the helmets as a new idea comes out, but also how quickly we can turn that around into a product that can get into the market. It's something you would never be able to do with the traditional methods of manufacturing.”
In wrestling, there is no ‘one size fits all’ and to withstand grabs and takedowns, headgear must fit like a glove. The Mercado is geared to provide coverage to the athlete's head and ears and is fitted with an adjustable chin strap. In one early pre-AM iteration, made in Italy, BATS-TOI planned to incorporate the headgear and chin strap as one piece, but wildly underestimated the difference in athlete chin size. A semi detachable version, made in Taiwan, was introduced but presented several failure points and, in all the markings of an early start-up story, left Mercado manually fixing hundreds by himself with duct tape and wire cutters. For a new company, the costs of starting over with injection moulding would prove prohibitive, but working with AM allowed Mercado to iterate quickly.
“[HP’s] design team has a ton of experience in working with commercial products that have been scaled in the millions of units,” Mercado said. “The great thing about engineers is what really excites them and pushes them is how to solve a problem that people think is almost impossible to solve.”
Mercado worked with HP’s design team to determine the structure of the headgear – which parts needed to be stiffer, more flexible, how thick or thin it should be? – and develop a product that could effectively scale for serial manufacture with minimal human interaction and assembly. BATS-TOI took scans from several athletes to get the right form factor and determine five that would fit the greatest range of shapes and sizes. The designs were developed using the HP Lattice Design Engine and printed in TPU via HP’s Digital Manufacturing Network.
"With additive, we're able to have four styles without having to invest that large amount of money that would normally be required for injection moulding,” Mercado explained. “We went through that process by modifying the CAD. If there was a problem at a wrestling competition on a Saturday, someone would tell us about it either on a Sunday or Monday, we would address it that week, look at the CAD, and then print a new one the following week. We've had a customer receive multiple iterations of our headgear within a month.
BATS-TOI
“We are standing behind our pact to give their daughter or son something that actually works. But then also it shows that the beauty of additive in this application is that we can be responsive to that person in real time without having to start from scratch, and then continue to move forward and make that progress.”
While the final products are said to be lighter than the mass of foam and deliver greater energy absorption, it’s not just about performance and durability on the mat. Throughout the headgear's many iterations, BATS-TOI has worked with athletes to learn where it needed to adjust, understand their psychology, their needs. When athletes fed back that it was too hot to have headgear pressing hair against their necks, for example, they adapted, creating a ponytail hole, first for comfort, but also to allow wrestlers to show their personal style.
“Designing a product, particularly in sports, you have to understand what is the anticipated behaviour of, in this case, the wrestler,” Mercado explained. “They're not just going to put it on and take it off. There's an emotion behind it when they're winning or they're losing.”
Like any start-up, Mercado had taken many risks. The biggest, perhaps was going straight onto the market and selling, bypassing the old guard of the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA). This was an entirely new product and Mercado knew it would require a change in mindset. Within three months, BATS-TOI had sold around 1,500 units before a cease and desist arrived from the NFHS, the body that writes the rules for high school sports in the United States, instructing the company stop selling and leaving BATS-TOI almost bankrupt. It was a fight Mercado was prepared to take on, and the company went head-to-head with the NCAA to get the product accepted. In a fortuitous case of timing, shortly after, new rules from the state associations started to come into play, stating that if an athlete were to get three concussions within a season, they would be out. Now, both the athletes and the associations that looked after the sport understood that this product was a necessity, and pretty soon, BATS-TOI was getting letters from athletes praising the Mercado for saving their season. Now, BATS-TOI is recognised as an Official Wrestling Headgear Partner of the NFHS.
“It was never a problem about product market fit. It was really about the timing,” Mercado said. “We started to see more of a grassroots adoption of the headgear and we realised that we had struck a nerve. And that's what allowed us to improve on the headgear, even to the same athlete with multiple iterations, because they knew the value of our product towards their athletic career and their athletic goals.”
