When it comes to getting items custom fit, fewer are harder to find than a pair of gloves. Custom colors and textures are easy enough to find but made-to-fit options, especially for sport gloves, are incredibly rare.
A local man, Jerry Albertson, is looking to change that with a new product he has invented called Sportclawz. It scans your hand, pulling its exact measurements, and creates a glove pattern derived from that scan. No more need to worry about a glove being uncomfortably tight, or one leaving loose fabrics at your fingertips. Albertson aims to provide gloves that match your hand exactly.
“It’ll produce a made-to-fit glove that’s very customizable, personalized, and fits your hand completely,” he said. “Normally when you put a glove on, you can’t feel anything. You lose the sensitivity and dexterity to do what you need to do. Creating a glove that can fit your hand exactly is the first step in creating one that can restore that sensitivity, particularly with certain substrates like leather or aramid.”
Albertson designed Sportclawz with athletes in mind. As an avid golfer himself, he knows the difference a quality glove makes in both comfort and performance for any athlete. His vision for the product is to allow athletes to choose specific textures and materials that suit their needs. A football quarterback, for example, would have different needs than a tennis player.
“A major product that I’m working on is a quarterback glove that has both gripping and release properties,” he said. “In addition to sizing, we’re also looking into certain geometric structures that we can laser onto the glove’s surface and can give athletes those features and benefits. I make high value gloves for high value tasks.”
Albertson is a certified safety professional. He works with companies, currently Microsoft, to keep their worksites safe, evaluate risks, investigate incidents, and much more. He’s seen a lot over the years, and is very familiar with the struggles workers go through thanks to poorly-fitting gloves.
“I can’t tell you how many times I tried to fit gloves on people,” he said. “If the glove doesn’t fit, what does a worker do? They take it off. Hand injuries are the number one worker’s comp injury in the workforce. It’s a major problem across all occupations.”
For now, Albertson is focused on getting Sportclawz ready for the public. Part of that process is ensuring his intellectual property is protected. Everything from the logo to the scanning and production process are valuable pieces of work, so he turned to Hartman Global Intellectual Property (IP) Law to ensure they stay secure. Led by Domenica and Gary Hartman, the group boasts over three decades of experience in IP law.
“The Hartmans are unbelievable, I can’t say enough good things about them,” he said. “What surprised me is that if you really want to progress and get patents and some IP, they know it inside and out. They can cut through the bureaucratic type of stuff and make sure that it’s done correctly. They’re key to my success.”
The Hartmans discussed every aspect of Sportclawz with Albertson, from his current designs to his future plans. He said that the experience not only secured his IP rights, it also helped him refine his business plan.
“They helped me design my whole process and product in a more official way,” he said. “When you submit something to the patent office, you need to do it in a very technical way with an engineer’s eye. They took my idea and were able to express it that way. My company is about combining technology into a process and applying it to what I want to do, and they’ve been very helpful.”
Albertson is leaning on Hartman Global’s expertise as he readies Sportclawz for the market, particularly its attorney’s backgrounds in engineering.
“They have such a good grasp of engineering, automation, and robotics,” he said. “I just can’t say enough about what they do, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with the Hartmans.”
To learn more about Hartman Global IP law and its services, visit hartmanglobal-ip.com.
