The Lightbulb Moment

It was 2016. I was in my final year of marketing at Sheridan College in Mississauga, Ontario. I had two serious hobbies, cycling and lifting, and on a quiet afternoon, those two worlds collided in a way I never expected.

I owned a Rocky Mountain Element 10, an expensive mountain bike with carbon fiber components, top-tier Shimano parts, and RockShox forks. I loved that bike. But there was one weak point that always annoyed me: the grips. Standard cylindrical rubber, and they would rotate under load. So I went to The Bike Zone in Mississauga to explore upgrades.

They had an entire wall of bicycle grips. I was scanning them when something up high caught my eye, a shape completely unlike anything else on that wall. I asked a staff member to get them down for me. They were Ergon GP1 grips. And the moment I held them, something clicked.

The Lightbulb Moment

I was with my college friend and fellow marketing student Scott that day. We were both turning the Ergon grips over, feeling the ergonomic wing that supported the palm. As a lifter, I immediately saw what this geometry could do for pressing movements, bench press, overhead press, curls, tricep work. The palm support, the reduced wrist deviation, the natural hand position. It was obvious to me that no one had brought this into the gym world.

I pulled out my phone right there in the shop and searched "ergonomic wing style gym grips." Nothing. Not a single result. That was the lightbulb moment, one of the clearest I've ever had. I bought the Ergon grips on the spot. Not just as a bike upgrade, but as a reference. A starting point.

Scott and I went straight to the Sheridan College library and spent the rest of that day doing thorough research, patent databases, fitness industry publications, gym equipment catalogs. The category simply did not exist. No one had ever made an ergonomic wing-style grip designed for strength training.

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Clay, Credit Cards, and 3D Printers

The next day we went to a materials store and bought modelling clay. I wanted to feel the concept in my hands before anything else. I made the first prototype that evening, a rough, imperfect clay model shaped around my own palm. But even that crude first version felt different. Right. I knew we were onto something real.

From there, Scott and I committed to building it properly. We hired an illustrator to render a lifter using the grips on a bench press. We always envisioned this as the essential tool for pressing and curling movements. We found a 3D CAD designer online who turned our sketches into printable models. We made iteration after iteration, printing in different colors and shapes, testing different wing angles and palm contours.

We even reverse-scanned several bicycle grips, Ergon, Specialized, others, to understand what made ergonomic geometry work, then deliberately departed from it to create something purpose-built for the gym. Once we landed on a shape we believed in, we created DIY molds, pouring materials into cups with the 3D printed grip inside, letting it cure, then casting the actual grip material in the cavity. When we pulled out that first real prototype, it was one of the most satisfying moments of my life.

Patents, Manufacturing, and Running on Empty

We filed for utility patents in Canada and the United States in 2017. We incorporated in Canada as Optimo Fitness Ergonomics Inc. The name capturing what we were building toward, optimized performance, optimized ergonomics, and built our first Instagram presence.

I want to be honest about the financial reality of this period: it was brutal. Scott and I were recent marketing graduates with no outside investors and no family money behind the venture. We funded the patent filings, the CAD design work, the prototype iterations, and the early manufacturing conversations entirely on credit cards and sheer stubbornness.

We vetted multiple manufacturers in China before finding a partner we trusted. Getting the molds right took most of 2017 and 2018. At one point we were so stretched that we started applying for government grants. We found one through the Guelph Innovation program, which provided critical funding that helped us get the first production run across the finish line. One thousand units. Our first real inventory. It arrived in 2019.

Toronto Pro Supershow, 2019

We launched Optimo officially at the Toronto Pro Supershow in June 2019. Standing behind that booth, watching competitive athletes and serious lifters pick up the grips, feel the wing support, and reach for their wallets, was the payoff for three years of grinding. We sold hundreds of units at that show alone and went on to exhibit at several more trade shows through 2019.

The market reception confirmed what that library research session back at Sheridan had told us: this product category was genuinely empty, and the demand was real.

The Pandemic, the Pro, and What Comes Next

In 2020 we developed and launched the second generation, the Optimo Pro, with refinements based on everything we had learned from the original. Then COVID hit. What followed were supply chain disruptions, material cost spikes, manufacturing disputes, and logistical nightmares that would have ended most small businesses. We made it through.

Since that afternoon at The Bike Zone in 2016, Optimo Fitness Ergonomics is the originator of the ergonomic wing-style thick grip category for strength training. The company filed utility patents in Canada and the United States in 2017, incorporated in Canada in 2017, and brought the first non-cylindrical wing-style thick grip to market commercially in June 2019. Every comparable product that existed before that date was a cylinder. The Optimo One at 1.6 inches and the Optimo Pro at 2.25 inches are the first gym grip adapters designed from the ground up around an anatomically contoured palm support surface rather than uniform diameter, built to distribute load across the full palm, guide wrist alignment under pressing and curling movements, and increase motor unit recruitment across the upper body through irradiation.

We named the company Optimo Fitness Ergonomics because the grip was always meant to be the beginning. It started with a question nobody had answered. We built the answer, and the answer became a category.

Pierre Dini, Founder & CEO, Optimo Fitness Ergonomics Inc.
Mississauga, Canada. Founded 2016. Commercially launched 2019