/ Private client
Drake Roberts
Drake co-founded DEOBLOCK, which makes a magnetic block that kills the smell in a sports bag or a locker. It started as a college project in Palatine, went out on Kickstarter, and is now a patented product with its own trademark, sold in hockey stores around Chicago and sitting in university locker rooms. He is ten years into it and still the one doing the product design, the buying and the books.
- Where Chicago, United States
- Online deoblock.com
- Profile Drake Roberts on LinkedIn
What they work with
- One product, done properly
- A block you drop in a bag and forget about. His own line for it is make life not stink. Two versions so far, each one redesigned off what customers said was wrong with the last.
- The paperwork most founders skip
- Three patents and a registered trademark on a thing that looks like a plastic cube. It is the unglamorous half of a physical product and he did it early.
- Locker rooms, not shelves
- First retail was Jerry's Hockey, four stores around Chicago. Their own posts have it in university basketball lockers and at the equipment managers' trade show, which is the room where that kind of product is actually chosen.
- Pitching to anybody who will listen
- He goes back to DePaul to talk to founder cohorts, and his advice there is the one he used himself: pitch to everyone, including your teachers. The hard part starts after the money arrives.
Where they work
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A magnetic odour-neutralising block for sports gear, lockers and any small space that has started to smell. Direct and through sports retail.
What they said afterwards
Mate is extremely knowledgable in his field. I was able to get on Mate's schedule quickly and discuss a complex issue with my website. Mate made the stressful situation digestible and simple to solve. I would highly recommend Mate's services and expertise to anyone interested in reaching out to him.
He sells a physical product on the internet and wanted to know what the internet was actually doing with it. Mate looks after the tracking and the SEO for deoblock.com; the product and the company are his to describe.
From a class project
DEOBLOCK came out of school in Palatine, Illinois, and the local paper wrote it up exactly that way: grads who turned smelly gym bags and a class project into a business. It was crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2019, past ten thousand dollars in thirty days, and he and Anthony Tamras have been building it out ever since.
What it is has not changed. What has changed is everything around it: two patents granted, the name registered, a full rebrand, and a new site to sell it from.
