How I Built This with Guy Raz - Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

No athlete wishes for an injury, but when Kurt Ainsworth’s bad shoulder derailed his professional pitching career, it created a big opportunity. Kurt and two partners started a wooden bat company in his backyard, bringing their intimate knowledge of baseball to every bat they sold. Soon, big-name players like Sammy Sosa were swinging them, but Kurt knew they had to expand to aluminum bats to reach the wider field of non-professional players. The company faced a near death experience when the NCAA decertified its bats for being too powerful, but eventually regained its footing. In 2013, Marucci Sports was acquired for over half a billion dollars; and next year, Marucci will slide past Louisville Slugger to become the official bats of Major League Baseball. This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei.It was edited by Neva Grant with research from Katherine Sypher. Our engineers were Maggie Luthar and Jimmy Keeley.You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Airbnb.ca.com slash host. 2012, we were having a big coaches party. And I remember our engineer saying, hey, the NCAA just told me that they're going to decertify our bats. They tested some bats and they said the bats in the field were testing higher than the limit. That it was bouncing back too hard, which meant that it would give a player an unfair advantage. That's correct. And I literally couldn't speak. All of our bats in the market, we're going to have to recall and we're the hottest bat right now in the market. And I remember walking back to my hotel thinking the company was done. Wow. And it was a multi-million dollar hit for a company that didn't have money. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a bad shoulder injury turned a ball player into a businessman who built Marucci sports into one of the biggest brands on the baseball field. Since 1884, a single brand Louisville Slugger has been virtually synonymous with one sport, baseball.

The company has been producing the official bat of Major League Baseball since as long as anyone can remember. It's pretty fair to say that Louisville Slugger is an icon. iconic American brand like Levi's or Coca-Cola or Ford. And yet in 2025, the brand will no longer be the official bat of Major League Baseball. That designation will go to an upstart brand called Marucci and its sister company Victus. So how did Marucci, a brand founded 20 years ago in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, come to knock Louisville Slugger off its perch? Well, this is the story of a very very very risky business venture. The story of a couple of injured professional baseball players who were looking for a career after baseball spit them out. Now, to step back a bit further, most professional athletes

don't make enough money to live off for the rest of their lives. You only hear about the guys who sign multi-million dollar deals. The average length of a career in Major League Baseball is less than three years. The median salary is around a million and a half dollars. a year. That's a lot of cash, but after taxes, after paying your agent and lawyer, most guys are lucky if they have enough left to buy a house once their career is over. So it means a lot of former players get jobs on coaching staffs at universities or sometimes in professional leagues. This was probably Kurt Ainsworth's path. Kurt was initially a stud. That is actually a term in baseball. a stud, a guy who was a great player.

Kurt was drafted in the first round by the San Francisco Giants in 1999, and he made his major league debut in 2001. But like a lot of pitchers, Kurt was prone to injury. When you throw a ball at 90 miles an hour over and over and over again, you are likely to damage your arm. And after three years of injuries, surgeries, rehab, and attempts to try and revive his career, Kurt was basically out of a job. But by chance, he got reconnected with one of his old training coaches at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, a guy by the name of Jack Marucci.

And Jack, well, he had a hobby. He loved to carve his own wooden baseball bats. And even though Kurt Anzworth wasn't a particularly strong hitter, remember, he was a pitcher. He saw a lot of potential in those Marucci bats. And eventually, he convinced Jack Marucci to turn his hobby into a business and then a partnership. For more than a decade after, Kurt and his third partner, Joe Lawrence,

struggled. They struggled because, well, the wooden baseball bat market is pretty small. And it's highly regulated by baseball leagues across the country. At times, it wasn't clear that Marucci would survive at all.

But Kurt and Joe had an advantage over their big competitors in baseball. They were players who knew what other players wanted in a baseball bat, consistency and quality, flexibility, and hardness. Today, Marucci Sports is a much, much bigger business and now a major player in baseball. How they got there, well, that's our story for today. Kurtain's Earth was born and raised in Baton Rouge. His dad worked for Dow Chemical and his mom stayed at home to raise the family. Growing up, Kurt naturally played Little League, and he remembers being one of these smaller kids on the team. I remember in Little League, we had Will Clark came and spoke to our Little League one year,

and he said, one of you in the crowd is going to play in the major leagues. Oh, wow. And Will Clark was on the Giants, I believe. He was a... He was. He was. And he's from New Orleans, Louisiana, so I always woke up every morning, check the box score to see how Will Clark did. He was always my hero as a kid. And I literally I literally felt he was talking to me that day. Wow. You know, every paper I think I did for a school paper as a kid, what do you want to be when you grow up? I always wanted to be a major league baseball player.

And, you know, all the teachers would kind of laugh at me and say, nah, nobody really gets to do that. And again, I was small on my team. It's really hard. But I always believed I could do it. Yeah, yeah. And obviously, we're going to get there. And you grew, I mean, into a really serious ball player.

I mean, I think by the time you were a senior in high school, you were pitching, like, how fast were you pitching at the time? I think my mechanics were a little messed up, but I was probably somewhere in the, I would say, 82 to 87 or 88 range. So I was okay for a high school player. Yeah. And we should mention, I should mention that, like, today, if you're a player in college and you're hitting, you're reaching in the upper 90s, even if your pitches are not accurate, like, there's a good chance that you will be drafted into the majors. Because once you're over 97, 98 into the hundreds, right, it's next level. Yeah, I think when I was coming out, when you were hitting 90, you were probably a top prospect.

You know, obviously the speeds have changed along the way, and now it seems like you turn on the TV and most guys you're throwing 95 to 100. It really is amazing to see these guys throw. Yeah, it's totally crazy. I know for college, you wound up playing for LSU, your local university, Louisiana State, which it's one of those schools that I just, it is very good at baseball. Like some of, I think some of the greatest players, like Alex Bregman, the pitcher Aaronola, DJ LaMayhew. I mean, lots of amazing, incredible, like, roster of players who went through that program. But from what I understand, like in your case, you weren't actually recruited by LSC, right? Like, you were a walk-on, and you started training with the team your freshman year, right?

Yeah. So during that year, I trained, I threw, I felt okay. And then, you know, I had some elbow injuries and then went to Summerball. and in my first game in summer ball, I ended up throwing a full game, a complete game, no hitter, but blew out my elbow. Wait, in that game, you threw a no hitter, which is, and you blew out your elbow.

Were you throwing that ball in severe pain? Extraordinary pain. And I had some teammates on the team that are like, man, come on, you got to suck it up, you got to go. You're throwing well. We need you to pitch for LSU next year. So I was like, all right, I can do this. And so I pitched the whole game,

and then my elbow just blew up. And it was. Wow. So you were just damaged. it more and more and more over the course of those like three hours. But then eventually, I think you got surgery to fix that injury. And it was, I guess, a torn ligament in your elbow. That's right. And then you come back to the team in 1999. You have this incredible season, like 157 strikeouts and 130 innings. You had like 13 and 6 record for, I mean, it's awesome.

I mean, you start and you start to get scouts coming to look at you play, right? Yeah, it was a great season. It was really a whirlwind season and just seemed like I was getting better each week. My girlfriend and I got engaged going into that season, my wife now, which was kind of crazy going into that last year at LSU. And then, you know, throughout that season, it was kind of a whirlwind all the way through, you know, the regionals and super regionals until the draft. Yeah. And I think not that long after the season ended, you guys won a title, a regional title, you were trying to. drafted by the San Francisco Giants in the first round. That's correct. You know, when the Giants came up and selected me with the 24th pick, it was just,

it was a special moment we'll always remember for sure. I can't imagine. Yeah. I mean, it must have been incredible. It was. So you get drafted. Now, this is the thing about baseball is, and it's different. It's even different back then than it is now.

You get drafted. You get a signing bonus, so they give you some money. And then for the most part, they send you to the mind. minor leagues to really season you before they're ready to bring you in if they ever do. So, first of all, was it significant money? Or was it, I mean, did you make a bunch of money on that sign? By signing with the Giants? Yeah, it was, it was a, it was nice, right?

It was a good $1.3 million start at 20 years old. Wow. So that's amazing. So you get this opportunity. Yeah. And you go. And we'll, I want to talk about money and sports in a moment because I think a lot of people make the assumption that, oh, you're a professional athlete, you're set for life,

but a lot of, but if you think about it, some guys will make three, four million dollars over the course of their career, which is short, and then they blow it. They blow all the cash. By house, buy car, pay taxes, help their friends, and they're broke. So, which is a very common story. You go to play for the Giants, and I think roughly two years after you were drafted, you make your debut, your majorly debut for the San Francisco Giants, which is, again, that's really fast. I mean, you didn't, you were not in the minor leagues for very long. No, I wasn't. I moved up very fast. I had some really good chances, some opportunities early. You know, I put so much pressure on myself, I'm going to be honest with you, I didn't really

enjoy it along the way. And, I mean, I think that first season, you pitched like five or six games, right? Yeah, I was just in the bullpen that first year in September. And then you had a good season 2002. Yeah. 2003. I mean, you got 11 starts. I mean, you're, you're doing well. And then, like, right when the sea, like right when it's summertime, the peak of baseball, early summer, you get injured, your shoulder. Yeah, this time was different. Yeah. Then they finally figured out after my 11 start that I had a broken shoulder blade. And it was tough. And, but I was still pitching well. So they were throwing me out there and I didn't want to come off the mound. I wanted to keep going.

And then, of course, as I'm rehabbing, I get traded to the Orioles that year. Right. And so you are sent to the Orioles. And that's business. That's baseball. Like one day you're wearing one uniform and the next day you are halfway across the country wearing another uniform. Yeah. And so Dave Rigetti was our pitching coach time, comes and gets me out of the dugout.

And we walk up this long tunnel at Wrigley Field. And he said, he and I had a great relationship. he said, you've been traded to Baltimore. And basically, I was like, can I go tell my teammates by? He said, no, you got to go change. Take your jersey off. There's a car waiting for you, and you're flying to Baltimore. Wow.

You can't even say goodbye to your teammates? So that one hurt. Wow. It's like clear out your, don't even clear out your desk. Security will escort you from the premises. It's so crazy. Yeah. Yeah, why is it like that?

Why don't they say, because I've heard this before. Why aren't they like, yeah, go say goodbye to the guys and go like, you know. Having a last drink. Why don't they do that? It could be different now. And that was just kind of back then. And the Wrigley-filled tunnels, I mean, I think we walked a half a mile to get to our locker room at this point. Oh, you were in Chicago when that happened? Yeah, we were in Chicago on a road trip.

Then I was like, well, I'm going to show them. I'm going to go to Baltimore and really be the pitcher that they didn't realize they had. Wow. All right. So you get to Baltimore. Yep. But injured, you're not going to play. So you've got to, you're on the team, but you've got to rehab. and I guess you decided to, or you had an opportunity to go back to Louisiana for some time during that season? Yeah, it was in 2004.

So I reached out to the Orioles and said, would you let me go home to Baton Rouge, you know, Jack Marucci's the head trainer at LSU? Will you let me go home and Jack will write my reports and do my rehab? And the Orioles actually said, yes. I was like, whoa. So I had to cold call Jack Marucci and say, Jack, you probably don't know who I am. You're the football trainer. I played baseball. She goes, I know who you are.

I said, would you do? my rehab. And he said, of course, come on to Baton Rouge. And that is how my relationship with Jack Marucci started. Right. So, I mean, he's a really cutting edge trainer and always has been. So I was like, hey, I want to go back and do my rehab there. And when you were back in Louisiana, you know, first of all, you're the guy who made the major. So so people are like, dude, what are you doing here, right? You would see people. Yeah. And it would probably, it was probably kind of yet to explain what's going on. And I don't know, probably probably wasn't a great time. Yeah, it's tough. You know, being injured is not fun. You feel like you're not really part of the team sometimes when

you're in there and you're watching your other guys go through everything and you're there every day and you're rehab and it's just not the same. It's just not. Yeah. It was super frustrating to me because I worked so hard. And I think that's the one thing that bothered me, the harder I worked in baseball, the more injuries I had. You can only throw so much. You can only run and lift so much. And that was always it really hurt me you know psychologically a lot on just couldn't stay healthy yeah all right so you're back in baton Rouge and there's another guy that another player former baseball player named joe lawrence that is also help me understand the story he was a he was also a form he was a former major league player who then left baseball and went back to college and was playing

college football as a 27-year-old freshman on the LSU team, and he got injured his freshman year and was also in this rehab program that you were in with Jack Marucci. Yeah, what a crazy story. Yeah. He's just an incredible athlete, obviously. He was Mr. Football or Mr. Baseball in Louisiana as well when he was coming out of high school the same year as I did in 1996. So you knew who he was.

Oh, yeah. And his best friend at the time was my roommate at LSU. So Joe and I developed a relationship when I was playing at LSU. So when I had a chance to come back, he's rehabbing his knee. I'm rehabbing my shoulder and Jack's our trainer. I mean, here's where I think your story really takes off because Jack Marucci, who is doing your rehab, he's like kind of overseeing it. He also happens to have this hobby, which is making his own wooden baseball vats, right? Yeah.

He was always tinkering with wood. he tried to, would make bats for his son in the neighborhood. His son's name was Gino in town. And he had called Louisville Slugger one day to make a youth bat and they wouldn't do it. And so Jack said, well, I'm from Pennsylvania. I took wood shopping in high school. I'm going to make a wood bat for my son. And he did.

And he made a wood bat for his son. And then he started making other bats at night. And he would bring him into the locker room for Joe to look at because he was a hitter. I was a pitcher. And Joe and I love baseball. So we'd like to look at the bats and talk about bats. And that's really where all these conversations started. All right.

So Jack Marucci, trainer, but just as a fun kind of like hobby, would make wooden baseball bats. And I guess, as you say, it started out. He wanted to make it for his son, who was a Little League player. And anyone knows about Little League. It certainly at that time, very unusual for Little League player to use a wooden bat. They use aluminum bats in Little League. You know, he studied the industry and started making some pretty good bats. And it's just how the stars aligned is, you know, his house is two, two streets.

away from mine at the time in Baton Rouge. And so Jack was just kind of whittling in his backyard. And he had a wiffleball field in his backyard for kids to go play. And really, when Joe and I started seeing some of these bats, we're like, man, your knee's not rehabbing very well. It's not coming back. My shoulder's not coming back very well. Let's think about what are we going to do now that our careers are coming to an end. Like, we're going to keep trying to play. But if they come to an end, what are we going to do? So, all right, Jack Marucci is not, does not have a business. He is just for fun making baseball bats, but because he's the trainer at LSU also has access to a lot of potentially a lot of pros. Yeah, correct. Yeah, and Jack had relationships from his days at

Florida State. He was a trainer there first, and Eduardo Perez was a player at Florida State. And so he decided to make a bat for Eduardo Perez just for fun. He was on the Orioles? The Reds, the Reds at the time. And so he literally went there to bring him a bat, just thinking he would take some batting practice with it. And next thing you know, Eduardo Perez used it in the game. in a major league game. And it was just a no-name bat. It was just a bat that was... Yeah, he had a logo on it.

He did, okay. Yeah, he put a Marucci logo on it. So he had kind of created this on his own computer in his backyard, put some, you know, a sticker on it, Marucci Bat Company. So it was amazing. He had Eduardo use it. And then, believe it or not, Barry Larkin used it, Hall of Famer, and got a hit.

Wow. And then Mike Cameron used it and hit a home run. Thought, but, okay, let's back up for a second. What was a special? about his bats. I mean, there are wooden bats. There are other companies that made and make wooden bats. So what made those bats good? I mean, why did you think they were, yeah, what would made them better in your view? Yeah, I don't think they were at that time. I'm going to be honest with you. I think we saw an opportunity. We saw that the other competitors in the space

were sending out, you know, 12 bats to a player when they'd order a dozen players, and only three or four of them would be good enough to use in a game. Only three or four out of the dozen bats. Why is that? Yeah. So it was just commonplace to use send a dozen bats and a player would go through them and they would do their own grading scale and they'd say, man, these three or four are perfect. I'm going to save these for game. I'm going to use these three or four for batting practice and the rest I'm just going to sign and give away. And then you look player by player. I was a pitcher in the National League. So my wood wasn't as good as other people's would.

And I'm sitting there like, man, they're walking guys to get to me. I should have the best bats. I'm in the major leagues. Why am I not getting good wood? You know, just looking at wood, whether it's the grains, whether there's knots in the wood, the weight, we would grade our bats. And again, pitchers bats were never high quality. And so we actually got together and said, we're going to start a bat company where every player in the major leagues get the best wood. You know, it's just interesting because a wooden bat is, I mean, first of all, most people who play baseball,

that they don't swing them. If you play youth baseball, you only use it in aluminum bat. And a wooden bat just feels so different. It's like there's a weight to it, right? And so it really is very specific to the player, right? Like different players connect with a bat and even if it's the same brand on it,

different bats in different ways. We'd like to say a wood bat's the best training tool out there. If you can learn how to hit with a wooden bat and find the sweet spot on that, when you pick up your aluminum or your composite bat, you're going to be a better hitter. So, all right. When you go to Jack Marucci, you and Joe go to him and you say, hey, we want to turn this

bad thing you're doing into a business. And what was his initial reaction? No, we can't do that. There's no money in this. You know, we're not going to make any money doing this. This is just, you know, kind of his hobby. And Joe and I really said, you know, hey, we want to do this. We want to push this along.

So at the time, who were the, I mean, what companies were making bats? There's a Louisville slugger. I mean, I remember Easton as a kid. And like, there's already established brands doing this, right? Is that, was that the case? Of course. Yeah, Louisville Slugger. I mean, that was the crown jewel in the space, pretty much owned the market.

Yeah. So Jack was initially skeptical saying this is not really where I want to put my time and effort. But why did he agree to then? when you guys, you and Joe were like, let's do this. What got him to agree to it? Yeah, I mean, rightfully so. He should have been skeptical, right? The woodbat market at that time was small.

It was tough, and it did take us a long time to do it. But we told him that, hey, we're committed to this. We're going to build a shed in my backyard. We're going to put in the equipment. Joe and I are going to work this and sell it during the day. And we can do something with it. So Joe and I were willing to go sign our houses. We were willing to mortgage our houses on all the equipment we brought into our house.

And he finally did agree to it and trusted us. We built a great relationship. And people probably assume, even when you're back in Louisiana doing rehab, that you got all this cash because you were in the majors, right? Yeah. Yeah. And look, we had some money from the sign-in bonus for sure. But it was like at some point you're just going to continue to dip through that savings.

Right. So, you know, day-to-day money coming in was not matching what my spend was going out. Huh. All right. This is September 2004. You guys start the Marucci back company. And how did you, again, you're a very smart guy, good student in high school, but you did not know anything about business at this point, right? You didn't come from a family of entrepreneurs, which is, you know, very common.

And so what did you, how did you, first of all, how did you guys split this business up? Yeah, so we just split it up in thirds to begin with. Makes sense. Yep. And our lawyer left that meeting saying, man, I hope my friends didn't just lose all their money in a bat company. Right. So it didn't make sense at the time. And there was no playbook for what we wanted to do. And, you know, at that time, we really didn't even know where we were going to go with it. Is it just going to be Major League alone? Are we going to run camps, clinics, teams?

But I tell you, what we did commit to is making the best bats in the world and learning everything about the wood business. Okay. This is the fall of 2004. You're still rehabilitating, hoping to, come back for the 2005 baseball season, right? Yep. That's still you're with the Orioles. Still an Orioles at that time. Yeah. And went back into spring training that next year.

And, you know, kind of Joe held down the business in Baton Rouge while I was there. And we had a lot of really good players on the Orioles that year. And I was bringing in bats. So I have to assume that Jack, who knew how to make the bats was the guy who had to make the bats? Or was he teaching you guys how to, like, use, you know, table saws and, and, and, and, and, lathing machines and stuff? Or did you just naturally have that ability? Like, how was that working? Well, first things first. You know, there was no real playbook to do it. So when we ordered the equipment,

it all showed up at my house. I had built a shed in the backyard. Wow. We had a big CNC lathe. We had engraving machines. We had sanding machines. I mean, we went all out on equipment. How much money do you think it cost to get all this equipment in your, to buy it all? We were several hundred thousand dollars deep in equipment. Wow, to make baseball bats. Yeah, our neighbors thought we were kind of crazy, but they would come over and watch. And what was crazy is that, you know, Jack, after he'd be at football all day, then Jack would come over at night and cut bats late into the night on the lathe. And then Joe and I, during the day, we would sand bats, stained bats, paint bats, engrave them, and ship them off to customers.

We were kind of the sales operations. We actually made all the bats during the day, and Jack would cut at night. Wow. How long would it take to make one bat? But back then, I think it was probably a couple minutes to cut it, but then you've got to, you know, a couple minutes to sand it. Then you got to stain it, let it dry, you know, and then they engrave it. So, I mean, it took quite a bit of time. We weren't doing very many bats a day, I can tell you back then.

I've read that people have used cow femurs, the femur of a cow to smooth a bat service. Can you explain why you need a cow femur? It's just like a giant piece of bone, by the way. Yeah, we used to bone every bat. And we used to be in our logo until, you know, we had to take it off because it was an extra logo, they said at MLB. We used to say bone rubbed on our bats. We used to actually use a cal femur and compress the grains of the bat to make it a harder bat. So if you didn't compress it, you could have seam marks in your bat.

And to us, that meant softer. So we were compressing every bat with a calfemer. And a calfemar is better than like a steel rod? No, I think it was probably, it was kind of bringing back the old school days. I got you. All right. As we've gone on, we've used other products that are not calphemer. We started with the calphemer.

I got it. It's a better story than using modern technology. All right. So you guys are doing this through the winter. And then you go back for spring training. So you're going to go to Florida to go back and work out with the guys at the Orioles, hoping to obviously make the roster, right? And you come with a bunch of bats with the intention of handing them out

to your teammates? Yeah, it was, you know, basically you would take a model they liked. You would copy it, make it in R wood, our finish, send it back to them. And the players really started liking the bats. So, all right, how much was it, like $100? Back then, it was probably more like $65. It should have been a lot more than that with the amount of time and effort we put in. But I think they were like $65 when we started.

And at that time, this is 2005 now, Spring Train, 2005. Again, like, you could probably still get away with. with it and not have to get like a, because the MNFL, MLB, they're so obsessive over anybody being involved in those leagues without approval or paying licensing fees or whatever. So you could kind of get away with it at that time, like players could just use it in spring training? We got license that year. You got a license in the MLB.

Okay. Okay. So once you got the approval, then it was okay to use it in major league baseball. Okay. And in terms of like weight, for example, because you said that you would. You were on the Orioles, right? And you'd ask players, hey, you want to try this bat. You would take their bats that they liked and then send them back and you would try to match the weight and everything.

But there has to be like a range, right? Like a bat can't be heavier than this and lighter than this, right? Yeah, there's a lot of regulations. And it's changed over the year with MLB. And, you know, we adapt to those changes. But, you know, certain players want certain things. And you've got to work with them to give them what they want. And, you know, of course, over the years, we're a little bit more sophisticated than we were back then.

But the biggest thing for us is consistency. Makes sense. Yep. And it's just the three of us. We weighed our bats down to the tenth of an ounce, which we still do to this day. And we wanted to be perfect. So when a player would order 12 bats from us, this is where it gets crazy, is we would send two. We'd send four.

We'd send three. And the clubhouse guys would call us and be like, this is why we don't order from small bat companies. We ordered 12. You send us two or three bats. And we're like, well, hold on. We could send you 12, but all we had good wood for was two or three. And the other, you know, the phone would go. silent and they go, what? Yeah, we could send you 12, but, you know, we only had that good wood.

So I think players realized when they got our bats at the beginning, every bat was perfect. Given that your bats were better, I have to assume that you were throwing away a lot of wood. Yeah. Like you would get wood in, and it would just not be good enough, so you just had to eat it. You couldn't use it. Yeah, that's another lesson we learned early. I think we started looking at our numbers. It's less than 10% of our wood.

more like 7% probably goes to a pro player. Well, what do you do with the other 93%? And in those days, we didn't have an outlet. We didn't have any retail bats. We didn't have a whole lot out there. So our wood started building up and adding up. And you start looking at it, each piece of wood, let's just call it a $20 bill. There was a lot of $20 bills laying around.

It made for some uncomfortable conversations when you would miscut a bat or miss sand a bat or misprint a bat. You're like, ooh, you just wasted a really, good piece of wood. So what would you do with the wood that you're not going to, because if it had to be perfect for the professional players, you just like turn it to sawdust? Or would you do with it? No, we would do a lot of souvenir bats. We did a lot of graduation bats, birth bats, high school senior bats. And then the truth of it is, is that, you know, Joe and I would take off with one of our other employees, our first employee who's still here to this day. You know, Brett Laxton, he pitched in the big leagues as well. We would load up a trailer of all of our

extra cut bats and we would drive to Alabama to men's senior base. ball league tournament. This is 40-year-old and older men up to like 65, and we would sell every bat at the tournament and come back with an empty trailer. And that kind of kept our business going. All right. So also, from what I gather, pretty soon after you guys started this business, you shifted from ashwood to maple wood. Why does that matter? Why is maple better than ash? Yeah, that was a huge move for us. That was kind of one of the early ways the stars aligned for us in the industry changed. You know, Barry Bonds made Maple popular. He came in and started hitting with Maple and he was hitting all his home runs and then Maple became more and more

popular and people looked into it and maple is just a harder wood. And if you really, you know, show people, a player comes in, you could take a nail with a hammer and drive it right into an ash bat. You take that same nail and try to put it in a maple bat. It's going to bend the nail. And you show a hitter that and they're like, why wouldn't you use a harder bat? And so players started go into Maple really quickly over ash. And then the Emerald Ash Beetle, the Ash Borer Beetle came in and kind of wiped out most of the ash in the United States. So then it really forced everybody into Maple. And we had a really big head start on the Maple side. So that allowed us to gain market share pretty quickly. Okay. Let's go back to Spring Training 2005 with the Orioles.

You guys get the MLB to get licensed by the MLB. So they're legal. You are handing them out to players. Any, by the way, any, because I would think that if you get in the hands of a star player, that's a bigger deal, were you able to get into the hands of any players who were particularly visible? Yeah, sure, with some Hall of Famers on that team and some superstars, right? I mean, well, Sammy Sosa, Raphael Palmero, Brian Roberts. Wow. But yeah, to have those guys use it and validate the product, I think that is when we knew we were on to something. Were you, I mean, at that time, did you have to pay players to agree to just test out your bats or was it kind of casual? Like, yeah, no problem.

Because today it's a completely different world. Everybody's an influencer, right? Everybody's like, where's my cut? I'm not going to use your product until I get a, like, it's totally different world for the worst, I think. But back then, could you've just been like, hey, Raphael Palmer and Palmero, like, use my bat? And he'd be like, sure. Yeah, it was even better than that for us. You know, we've never paid a player to swing a bat.

And a lot of that was because we just couldn't afford to pay players. I'm going to be honest with you. But again, we were very fortunate that the major league teams were actually buying the bats. So I would go to the players and say, hey, do you want to try these? We'll have the clubhouse guy order them. And they were actually buying the bats. Okay. So all they had to do is go to the clubhouse guy, like their quartermaster, and say, hey, I like this bat.

Can you order a few of these? That's correct. And that's, you know, just kind of passed around from there and really helped us grow that brand. And by the way, I should have asked you this. You called it Marucci, that company, because it was. because Jack was making them. And that was the only reason you just thought it sounded cool. Yeah, it sounded better than Ainsworth Bat Company or Lawrence Bat Company.

It has that designer feel to it. And I think that was probably our first really good decision we made is just keeping it as Marucci Bat Company. It just has that Italian high-end feel to it. Prada, Gucci, Ferrari, Marucci. Yeah. And I think Joe and I were kind of, at that point in time, we were thinking you could put it on anything. And it would kind of add value, right? We weren't thinking just wood bats.

Joe and I weren't at that time. We had always been thinking outside of wood of where could this take us down the road? All right. You start spring training and once again, season ends early. You re-aggravate that injury that you had in your shoulder. So again, that season's done. I'm curious, does your salary get affected when you can't play or it's just the contract they've got to pay you no matter what? It's pay or play.

Yeah, it depends on where you are. So if you're in the major leagues, you'll get your major league pay. If you're in the minor leagues, you get your minor league pay. And I had already been sent down that year, I think, at that point to not get the full major league pay. And I had two kids at that point when I got home. Wow. Yeah, it was two kids, not having a salary coming home, working for a company for free. It was definitely challenging times.

When we come back in just a moment, Kurt and his partners branch out into aluminum bats, a decision that makes all the sense in the world until it doesn't. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This, I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2005, and with his partners, Kurt Ainsworth is growing Marucci bats and hoping he can get back to pitching with the Orioles, despite a bad shoulder injury. But that year, the team lets him go. Yeah, I mean, when the season ended, I was basically released.

I was no longer under a contract, no team control. So I was a free agent. And so I had no pay coming in. And I was trying out for teams. Then started working out for teams that, you know, really that offseason, November, December, throw in. And then hopefully to get signed to go to spring training one more time to give it a run. So meantime, you guys are focused on the bats, on selling the bats. And probably even if you're selling, I don't know, a thousand bats, right?

I'm just doing the math. I mean, it's not a lot of money coming in. If you're selling them for $65 to $80, you're not doing serious revenue at this point. No, we weren't doing it. And especially you have three partners and you also have employees there every day. People helping you to do what? So we're paying, we're paying guys to help us sand bats, paint bats, you know, engraved bats, ship bats at that time. You know, we had help.

So we were paying them and not ourselves. So anything we were making was going right back into the business to pay the employees and to buy more inventory because wood was expensive. So you're a free agent and you're trying out for a bunch of teams and you get signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Yes. My team growing up in Los Angeles, 2006, you go to you get signed, you go to spring training. And there, once again, you're able to do what you did with the Orioles. You were able to bring bats and put them in the hands of some players. And did you have some success there again?

We did. And this was an upgraded bat. Our finishes got better that year. You know, Jose Cruz Jr. And some of the other players started really gravitating toward the bats and really started buying into the company. Yeah. And now I'm in the National League, so I was hitting.

So I really had better bats than our hitters. And it became, it was pretty funny that you see hitters go up and take my bats to go out into the games. But, you know, I just, my first bullpen in spring training was great. and I just couldn't recover after that first bullpen, no matter how good a shape I was in. It was super frustrating to me because I worked so hard. I mean, I was really throwing well,

and then I just had that damage in my shoulder, and I knew it was coming. So, you know, I threw one game in a field, and my wife was there, my kids were there, my family was there actually at this game, and I walked over to him. I said, I'm glad y'all are here. And I was like, what do you mean?

I said, that was the last time you'll ever see me throw. And they're like, whoa, I can't take it anymore. So I went and told the trainers, I said, look, I can't go anymore. I got to have, I got to go see a doctor. they flew me to Los Angeles, and they did MRIs again, and the doctor said, man, the labrum rotator cuff was all completely torn, and it was laying down perfectly on the MRI, so we couldn't tell how bad it was.

He goes, I can't believe you were throwing a baseball. And I was like, well, in one thing, it made me feel good that I knew something was really wrong. But in the other thing is, I knew my career was over that day. So even before spring training ends, you're done, 2006. Yeah, super early that year. It came home in a sling, and next thing you know, I'm driving my life. wife to the hospital and we deliver our baby in the car on the way the hospital wobb my arms

in a sling. So, I mean, we've had some crazy things happen along the ways. Wait, how was that baby delivered? In the front seat of our Tahoe. And I just, another, just super blessed that I'm pulling through a parking lot. We're in traffic and I see an ambulance and I get out of my car, my arm in a sling, run over, beat on an ambulance. Ambulance drives around and helps deliver the baby in the front seat of our car on the way to the hospital. Oh, my God. She's a trooper. All right, so you're done. Yeah. You're like 28.

You're done with baseball. Yeah. And did it feel cathartic? Did it feel like, okay, now I'm just going to get this dream up and now focus or did it feel where you sat about it? I was probably for a minute that day when the doctor told me how bad the surgery was. And then it was almost relieved. I was tired of rehabbing injuries. And it was one of those things where I, I, I, I,

worked hard. And I knew I worked hard. And the harder I worked in baseball, the more injuries I had. And I knew I could put that attention to something else. And the harder I worked at Marucci, I could see success. And it really just changed my focus and said, we're going all in on this thing. And let's go do it. All right. So you, you're out of baseball and you've got no salary. You've got no salary. You've got three children. Yeah. And you've put all of your money into the equipment for this baseball business, which is far from profit. Right. So what are you going to do to make money? Well, you know, my wife kind of gave me that hard discussion of like, hey, what are you going to do? You know, baseball's over. What are you going to do? You guys need to start making some money because we weren't taking anything out of Rootsie. Couldn't afford to. So Joe and I got together and we started another business in Baton Rouge called the Big Leagues of Baton Rouge. The Big Leagues of Baton Rouge. Correct. And it was a baseball batting cages and training facility. And we opened that in the summer really of 2006. And we put together a staff there of a lot of ex-majorly players that were in the area.

As you said, Baton Rouge has a lot of talent. And we had a lot of players in there giving lessons. This makes sense, right? Because you guys had expertise. You start a baseball training facility to help any professional or a college player, maybe even high school players. High school and youth, mainly. So Joe and I would show up at 6.30 in the morning and work for Marucci from 630 to 230. We would kind of change into our P.E. uniforms we called it.

And then we would go do lessons till 9 p.m. Monday through Friday. And then lessons on Sunday, 12 to 6. And we were booked out for several months at a time. We were doing 200 and, I think 220 private lessons each a month. Wow. So you were basically working like 12, 15 hour days. Yeah, it was a lot. And I, you know, I had three young kids at the time. And, you know, we did that for 18 months. And I feel like I was raising other people's kids. You know, my kids were coming up there. And they loved it. They were young at the time. But it got to the point where it's just too much. And at that point, Marucci started taking off and doing better. So we sold that business. And is it still around?

The Big League of Baton Rouge? No. Crazy stories. We actually kind of bought it back down the road. And it's Hitter's house now. Oh, wow. That same location where we are is our Marucci Hitter's house here in town. And they're still doing Batting cages retail store.

And there's an area in the back where people can do lessons and get better. So it was one of those things that's special to us because we wouldn't be here without Big Leagues of Baton Rouge. All right, so 18 months in, you sell it. And because by this point, you say, you guys, I mean, you, in your words, Marucci bad company is taking off. And from what I understand, this is 2008, you guys are selling 15,000 bats a year at this point. Yeah. So what's about, I'm thinking a little over a million dollars in revenue. Probably.

But you guys were now able to start to take a salary from that, from the sales? Yeah, I mean, that salary would have been really small. Right. We had made enough money in big leagues at Baton Rouge to hold us over a little bit. And then for this next, I would say this next adventure, we decided to go on with Marucci Sports is where we then focused all of our attention. Okay. And Jack Marucci, still a third owner of the business, he would pop in from time to time or what? I mean, how was he, he wasn't making the bats at this point.

No, he was more of a, he would talk to the clubhouse managers and some of the players would call him. And then he would send in bad order. from his phone. But, you know, he wasn't really coming to the, to the office at all and seeing the bats be made at all at that point. But he had good connections and he was able to, to use those connections, yeah. He did. Okay. So this is something that's interesting to me, because in 2008, I guess you guys had been making, had been using a woodmill. Yeah. Right? This is where you're getting your wood from. And what they were shipping, this is a wood mill in Pennsylvania. They were just shipping you pallets of wood to Baton Rouge.

Yeah, and other bad companies were buying from them as well at this point in time. And it was an Amish run mill that we would get the best wood from. And I guess you get tipped off in June of 2008 that somebody, some other bad company is looking to buy them. When you say some other bad company, I'm just thinking there's just one, big one. Yeah. Big one. Was it that one big one? Yes.

At that point in time, that's what we were told, that the big one was at that point. But you were, but do you think Louisville Slugger had noticed you guys at this point? They did at that point. When we started having Albert Poo holes and some of those guys winning MVP's at that point in time, they started taking notice. Because we were taking a dent in the market at that point in time. And so when we got word from that employee that our competitor was there trying to buy it, Joe and I actually got on a plane against our lawyer's advice, brought a document with us and bought the company. And we knew there was risk. But how, so you want to acquire this company. you're thinking we've got to acquire this to keep the pipeline of wood.

But how are you going to do that? I mean, your revenue is low. You've already over leveraged with all the equipment that you bought a few years earlier. So how are you going to buy that mill? We actually took on another investor and bought it outside of Marucci. You created a separate company to buy this mill. We did. We did.

And took on another investor and bought it under a different LLC name. I mean, so basically, as a separate business now, the mill is selling the wood to Marucci. So, I mean, the investor is getting that. I mean, it's automatically there's going to be revenue coming into that business. That's right. Now, it would be a little bit different because we pretty much cut, we cut off every competitor at that time. And so now Marucci at that point in time now had access to more wood than we've ever had before, but now we needed more capital to go buy that wood. And so that's when we took, we took on a couple of early investors in Rucci Bat Company alone, just small investors to help us pay for some of that.

How much did it cost to buy the mill? I'm just curious. How much does it cost to do that? At that point in time, I think we were somewhere just under half a million dollars for the whole mill. Oh, it's only half a million dollars to buy the mill. Yeah. That seems like a pretty good deal. It turned out to be a great deal. Yeah. And we kept the team. We kept the family involved. Yeah. You know, we covered a lot of debt that they obviously had. that time. So we ended up paying a lot more than a half a million when you end up adding in all the other stuff we paid. Yeah. You were, okay, so you now got the mill and you've got to, but you cannot grow this business just by selling wooden bats to professional players. Because that's a

limited market. I mean, that can't be more than a $10 million market opportunity, maybe. So to really turn this into something, you knew that you had to invest in the business to grow it further. what was the first thing you guys started to talk about? Because it seems to me like the opportunity is with like kids playing in little leagues and grown men playing in their fun softball leagues, whatever it might be. Like that to me seems like where the market opportunity would be. Yeah, youth baseball, right? And that's aluminum bats. So that was our next focus is we wanted to come out with an aluminum bat.

And the aluminum bat was designed for high school and college players. Yeah. And so this is a huge, this is a, like you're going to quintuple your potential market, right? There's tons of college teams and there's rec teams and there's high school teams. So, and probably aluminum bats you could sell for more than a wooden bat, right? Yeah, the bats, it was, you know, you can manufacture them easier. You can mass produce them. It was higher margins.

And it was a bigger addressable market, right? That's kind of the big buzzword that we learned along the way. The total addressable market of wood, as you've highlighted, is very small. Right, right. But in order to make aluminum bats, I mean, you guys were going to need an infusion of cash, right? Like capital. I think this is where you got introduced to this new potential investor, a guy named Reed Dickens, who would eventually become your CEO, right? That's right.

And I guess from what I've read, Reid had been working in politics and he wanted to get back into business. So, I mean, the timing probably was good, right? Yeah. And so Reed cold called us. And I can tell you, he said, look, let me come down there and meet with you and Joe. And Reid came down and he said, look, if we create this other separate LLC under Marucci Sports, I can raise the money that we need. And we can create this other brand and go do aluminum bats. Huh.

He kind of laid out a vision that we had never seen before. What did he say? He just said, look, I think this company can be the number one bat in the game. And Joe and I kind of looked each other and like, hold on, man, you got Louisville Slugger's been here, you know, 120 years or whatever. Like, don't get carried away. And he said, I really believe that we can create this stale industry. Because baseball at that time was pretty stale. So Reed wanted to bring a different energy and come in and create this momentum around this brand that we had.

So, all right. So Reed comes in with all these ideas and says, let's start a separate company. We'll call it Marucci Sports. 100%. And he brings in some outside capital. and I guess it was like two, two and a half million dollars that he helps raise. That's right. Some of it was players, but some of it was, you know, kind of, I would say, family office or just, you know, wealthier people.

Well, it would seem to make sense to bring players in because then they have skin in the game. And if they're playing, they're using the bat. So it's a double win, right? They're going to put in money and they're going to use the bats. Yeah. Well, what we didn't realize is that when you're successful, you actually need more money than when you're not successful. And we needed to go raise more capital fairly quickly after he joined and was the CEO and we were running because we were actually having some pretty good success early. And we needed more capital.

Who are some of the players that got involved early on in that early race? Yeah. So, I mean, Albert Pujols was an early one, of course. Ryan Vogelsong, The Next Giant at that time. Sean Casey, Harold Reynolds. You know, we've had David Ortiz, Jose Batista. I mean, it was kind of a who's who of players. Will Clark, my childhood idol, was in there.

So we had a really group of guys that we started going to raise that next round of capital. And that's what really brought us to acquiring Marucci Bat Company and eliminating that license. Because as you're raising money, some of the people are like, their advisors were like, wait a minute, you don't own the brand and you're paying a royalty to Marucci Bat Company on everything we're doing. Okay, so because in order to put the Marucci logo on Marucci sports products, you had to pay the Marucci bad company, which you were a third owner of to license the name because it's Jack Marucci's name. So ultimately, that had to be untangled. Yeah, and that's what happened in 2011 is we negotiated with Marucci Sports and Marucci Bad Company to acquire Marucci Bad Company, become one company. And so, I mean, Jack Marucci probably, you know, he had to agree. You and Joe and Jack Marucci, shown a third of it. And you guys probably were like, let's do it. But he had to agree to that. He had to agree to either be paid a license fee or get some equity in the new business or sell his shares.

Yeah. And I think there was a little bit of all of that. I think we all kind of rolled some of that. We took some cash off the table. Yeah, look, we had great relationships with Jack. I think he respected what we were doing and what we were trying to do. I think he could finally see that there was some other opportunities out there. He had always kind of joked that all I want to do is pay for my kid's school and I'd be happy. Obviously, we paid a little bit more than the kid's school, but he trusted us to go build something with the name that we created together. Right. And you start to produce an aluminum bat. And I think it's available in the consumer market in early 2010. So how did you get anybody to even care? I mean, I guess some kids probably knew

about the Marucci wooden bats. They did. And I think locally, we probably did okay early in 2009. We would go out to those tournaments and we would bring bats on the mobile tour. And we would go bring bats out on the road and show people and let them hit with it. And I would say 2009, we did pretty well in the first year. But then when the NCAA changed the regulations to BB Corps, which is just a basically a rule change that made the bats perform more wood like, everything changed. can we just unpack this for a look? Because this is really complicated.

It is. B.B. Corps is a certification, right? It stands for batted ball coefficient of restitution. And it's a safety, performance, testing, and standard. And the first year, you had these bats come out, they were ready to go. They had complied with this new standard. That's right. And you guys were one of the few batting, you know, bat companies that had this ready to go because as they, as they

as the NCAA changed the certification, you guys could create the bat to that certification. But the second year, 2011, so the first year was great. But then you were decertified in 2011. Why? What was wrong with the bat? So they tested some bats and they said the bats in the field

were testing higher than the limit. What does higher than the limit mean? They sent it to a lab at Washington State and they shoot a ball off a stationary bat and it measures the rebound off of the bat. And so they measure it every, you know, every inch along the barrel. And they had sent us reports back and said that our bat had failed. That it was bouncing back too hard, which meant that it would give a player an unfair advantage.

That's correct. I see. Okay. At that point in time, we had no idea that there was like, you know, variances in the test. And we didn't even really know what to do. This was so new to us. We didn't even have, you know, engineering labs at that time. We were young in business. We didn't know how to fight back at that time, right?

Huh. So in 2012, we were having a big coaches party. And I remember our engineer walking myself and our CEO at the time outside and saying, hey, the NCAA just told me that they're going to decertify our bats. And I literally couldn't speak. And I was like, wait a minute, what does that mean? We just bought Marucci Bat Company. We just took on these shareholders.

All of our bats in the market, we're going to have to recall. And we're the hottest bat right now in the market. And I remember walking back to my hotel thinking the company was done. Everything we had done to get to this point was over because I just didn't understand what was going on and how they could decertify it. How much money did that cost you? Because you made all this product and now it's, I guess you could sell it to high school players. No, it was taken off from the high school too. So when they decertified it, it was totally decertified.

So we had vessels coming over from Asia with all decertified bats on them. What did you do with them? Melt them down? Like, what do you? We did. We actually took them to a scrapyard and recycled them. There was nothing else we could do with them. And it was a multi-million dollar hit for a company that didn't have money. I mean, in part, you know, again, like, it's just so fascinating because on the one hand, all your eggs were in that basket and the NCAA basket. But in the other hand, they had to be. Yeah. You had no choice because that's where the market was. So like the obstacle was the, there was no other way around. it. Like, they could make or break a business, but it's so risky. Like, from an, I would just be thinking from, like, a business perspective, if that happened, like, did you guys, could you even, did you even anticipate the possibility of that happening? We didn't, right? Because we didn't change anything. We sent a bad end. It passed. We didn't change anything in our production. And the next thing you know, we're getting decertification notices, like, oh, my gosh, what is going on?

And, again, you find out down the road, obviously, that we were taking so much market share that, you know, our competitors were sending our bats in to the test lab and trying to say that our bats were over the limit. And look, that's, that was a learning lesson for us because at that point in time, we then took bats from the field, sent them to the lab and they were all over the limit, but nobody else was decertified but us. And so that was, you talk about frustration. That was a tough learning lesson right there in 2012. Was any part of you like, conspiratorial is not the right word, because I don't think that's the right word, but any part of you is suspicious that you guys were decertified because the bats were doing so well and there were maybe more influential competitors who were trying to get the NCAA to shut you down?

Yeah, there's no question. We've had conversations with some of those other companies across over the years and they said, we could take some hits from some smaller companies, but what you guys did, y'all were taking so much market share, you know, we kind of had to slow you down. Oh, wow. We were growing so fast. At the end of the day, I can look back now and say it was a blessing because we weren't ready for that growth that we were having. But at that point in time, that was the end.

When we come back in just a moment, how Marucci Sports recovers from the great aluminum bat meltdown of 2012. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2014, and Marucci Sports is reeling from having its bats decertified. The ball is coming up the batter swing with too much power. So to compensate, the company puts out a bunch of new bats, which, frankly, are kind of underpowered. Yeah, I think we overcorrected, right? We came out with bats that were so far under the limit that didn't perform very well.

They weren't hitting as well. 100%. We put some subpar product out there just to make. sure we were under the limit and we had great sell-in, but we didn't have good sell-through. They weren't selling the kids. The kids weren't excited about the bats, and so we had to do something. Yeah. And then as soon as that happened, I was named CEO, I guess I would say early in 2014. And I think that was, I think that was one of the first things I did when I was named CEO is I made the very unpopular decision of taking back bats from our retailers.

You basically lost all this money. So you lost the money on the decertification. Yeah. Then you flood the market with bats that were not as good to try and see if you could salvage this thing. But that's another financial hit. That's correct. So you just melted those bats down again that you took back? We did.

We did. And I will say our board, that was the first time we had a board, is an independent board of some really high profile and quality board members. and it was pretty shocking for them for my first move to take those bats back, but they stuck with me and they trusted me through this whole process. My first year was not very good, and I brought in a CFO that year that I said, hey, man, sorry, right after we hired you, we're going to take these bats back. So our number one customer and all our sales, we're going to take these bat,

but I promise you it'll be the right move moving forward. And I do think they thought I was crazy at the beginning, but it ended up being probably the best decision we've ever made. All right. So now you're retooling the bats to make them at the standards and quality that you had come to be known among players. Yep. How long did it take now? You're 2014.

You're the CEO. How long did it take before you start to claw back? Because I still imagine it's going to take a while for you guys to get profitability and to recover from, you know, what happened in the previous two years. Yeah. In 2015, we were pretty, we were profitable again, fairly profitable, actually. And that was on the strength of better aluminum bats? Better aluminum bats, deeper in woodbats, better in woodbats. So everything started going that year.

And then we had more product categories, of course, that we were launching at that time. But 2015 was a big year for us. Okay. And when you say big year, like breaking $10 million in revenue? I'd say we were probably more like $25 million in revenue that year. Wow. So you're 11 years into the business now. And now you're a player.

Yeah. When you took over a CEO, was it clear to you that at that, this is 2014, was it clear to you that within a few years you needed to find an acquire to get you guys to the next level? And, you know, to really bring in serious capital to let you do what you wanted to do? Yeah, I don't think so. I think we thought we could do it on our own. I really do. We were putting together a great team.

We were having a lot of success. We made a great acquisition with Victus in 2017. Victus was a company that was making custom wood bats. Yeah. I mean, if you're out there, we see this up-and-coming company. Every single piece of wood we can make was going on the field to a major league player, right, at the major league level. And so we couldn't make minor league player bats. And we were having to turn down orders every year.

And we saw this company, Victus Sports, was getting all the younger players, getting the minor leaguers, and getting all these young big league players that we couldn't service. And we're like, man, this company's doing a really good job. And so we built a relationship with them over some years, and we ended up acquiring them. And, you know, we could tell they were going to be the future in bats. And quickly, as we surpassed Louisville Slugger, I think in 2013, they surpassed Louisville Slugger in 2018 is the number too bad. Used by major league players, I should say. Correct.

And those are the stats that people are like, whoa, you surpassed Louisville Slugger on field. And that's when people know that baseball is, everybody knows Louisville Slugger. And so when they hear that, that's kind of a big stat. And so I think acquiring Victus was one of the biggest moves we made. All right. And to overtake Louisville Slugger among professional players is a big deal, but Louisville Slugger was bigger with youth sports, for example. So they may not have cared all that much.

I don't know. Maybe they did or no. But I want to ask about Victus because this is another company. They're making bats. You guys acquired them in 2017. It didn't make sense to just fold it into Marucci and just to stamp the Marucci name on the Victus bats? Yeah, I don't think so. It's a different culture.

Marucci has an honor the game feel, and Victus has this changed the game. They're more artistic and creative and almost like graffiti-type art. And Marucci was more of this, I don't want to say, conservative brand. Like we show up, we kind of joked about, we'd show up and our shirts will be tucked in.

We'd be wearing suits, and the Victus guys would show up in a t-shirt and a hat on backwards. But it was different, and it worked together, and we pushed each. other to the point of, you know, we made each other better. When did you start to make a decent salary? By 2014, I imagine you're actually making a pretty good salary. Yeah, we're making good money at that point in time, right? When we started Marucci Sports, we decided to take bigger salaries as we were raising some capital and, you know, we were putting in crazy hours. You know, I was traveling

all over the place to all of our dealers. I was traveling to Asia. I was still doing, you know, all the product meetings that I still do to this day. So, yeah, we were making more money at that point. And not every hour is created equal. There are certain people that add value without putting in the hours, right? I think what I did was I put in a lot more hours from the beginning, right? I was the guy that was, you know, here first turning on the lights and turning off the lights at night and traveling like crazy and really putting in the time because I knew that the more I worked, the more success we were having. And I kind of got addicted to that. And I think in 2020, you guys get acquired by a private equity firm called Compass.

I think it was for around like $200 million, right? That's correct. Tell me the thinking around that acquisition. It was, I imagine the idea would be, hey, now that we have a bigger fish here, we can scale in the way we want to scale. Yeah, I think some of it was in 2019. We decided that some of our shareholders had been in since 2009, right? It was no real return because we kept putting money. money back in the company. This was an opportunity for us to return some capital to shareholders.

And at that point in time, we had had a lot of shareholders that had been in for a while. So there was a little shareholder fatigue. And, you know, we saw an opportunity with the success we were having to then capitalize on that, go to market. And, you know, we went and did the whole roadshow with private equity and strategics. And I had a great outcome for all of our shareholders where everybody was super pleased. And it was great for us as well. And you stayed on as CEO. I did. They kept my entire team. Huh. You know, that acquisition was awesome for us.

And we quickly almost tripled our business within just three years with their ownership. Compass basically, so they bought you guys for $200 million, making these acquisitions and growing. And that's the playbook, oftentimes for private equity, doesn't always work out. But it clearly did. Yeah. In November of 2023, they then sell the holding company that they had the parent. company that they built around Marucci Sports. They sell it to another holding company called Fox Factory for over half a billion dollars in November 2023. So a new parent company comes in. I mean, wow,

what an amazing return in just three years. Yeah, it was an incredible run. For us to find Fox through this process is just a dream come true, going from private equity to a brand that literally has the same DNA of us. And Fox factory makes like mountain bikes, right? That's right. Shocks, trucks, bikes. Yeah. You know, it's those high profile athletes. And it's what's crazy is if you walk their halls, it's all bike riders. It's all people that have the trucks. They're out in all the, you know, the desert races and they love it. So it's got that same feeling as Marucci. Obviously, we were a lot smaller than Fox, but it's, it's been just amazing being a part of that family. And you stayed on again, part of that deal. You stayed on as CEO.

I stayed on. They kept my entire team again. And they're investing in us and letting us go. And it's been fun. So let's talk about where this is heading now because from what I gather you guys are and you're set to do a couple hundred million dollars in revenue, right? Marucci sports this year. And the, it's just basically the basic sort of knowledge I have about the baseball opportunity or the market would be, you know, for sure Japan and Korea are huge opportunities. They are. We've been highlighting Japan for the past five or six years. We have a full team there now, a full office and a hitter's house located in Tokyo. So we're doing a lot of investing in Japan. We see that as a huge opportunity. And I think that's our biggest goal is to grow our addressable market, right? Because we know baseball. You know what the size of baseball is. softball is a huge emphasis of ours, you know, and then, of course, going in Japan and then other

categories. There's plenty of other categories we're in now, but it's not just these products that are out there. We're just going to make them. There has to be a story with it and a technology. Yeah. So what is Marucci sports today? And I never met you before. And I'm like, what is it? What do you guys sell? How do you describe the brand today? You know, that's a good question. We are definitely outside of the diamond now. I think that was probably a stigma we had for many, many, many years that we were just a bat company. We now have our training facility. We have apparel. We're launching footwear at the end of this year. It's on field and training. Like spikes, like cleats and stuff? That's correct. Yeah, because you were a pitcher.

I mean, you could, I mean, is there a world where you make ball, you make baseballs? We make baseballs now. So we pretty much make every product for a baseball player head to toe now. Gloves, batting gloves, socks, you know, now footwear hats. I mean, we pretty much have every Now, we used to say we could outfit a player head to ankle. Now, as of December this year, it'll be head to toe. All right. So this year, you brokered a deal with Major League Baseball. Yeah.

And starting in the 2025 season through the 2028, you will become the Rucci Bats will become the official bat of Major League Baseball. The only the second company to get that designation. after, of course. Louisville Slugger. So you guys are, Louisville Slugger's always been the official bat of the MLB next year. There'll be Marucci bats.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a pinch yourself moment, right? This is kind of a validation of all that hard work and all the years we put into this to be the official bat. And of course, Victus as well. Willamrucci and Victus will both be official bats next year. So that's a, it's a huge opportunity for us. We don't take it lightly. And, you know, we want to bring that new cool factor

to the game. Like, we like to change. We like, we like the new changes that are happening in MLB and making it more fun for kids to play and making the games faster. We think it's really good for the game. Yeah. Curr, when you think about where you got, you know, where you got to here, we're talking about, again, if I met you in 2004, I'd be like, I don't know, man, you know, wooden bats, you know, the market opportunity here is limited. You got to sell tens of thousands of these things. Like, you know, I'd have been skeptical. But here you are. You know, you're now heading up a brand that's doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year. How much of where you got to now do you attribute to the work you put in? And how much you think has to do with just getting lucky breaks? Man, that's a great question. I think we've been very lucky along the way. Just where we're located, being in Baton Rouge, we've had some doors open just from being here.

But I definitely can say just being consistent and putting in the time has helped. Yeah. You know, there's a sense of pride in this, I'll be honest with you. And I think when we sold this last time, it came out when I was addressing our whole team's the first time. Not an emotional person. But it came out as I was addressing the team that I broke down. I couldn't get it out. It was just, it was such a special moment to us that we got to that point to sell to Fox.

And then I enjoyed it for about one week. And now I'm driven again to do it again. I mean, I'm having fun. I got to be honest with you. This is such a challenge for me. I kind of like it. I can't stay home. And this team here is spectacular.

And I'd go to battle with these guys any day. That's Kurt Ainsworth, co-founder and CEO of Marucci Sports. By the way, even though Kurt's MLB career was cut short by injury, he did play a role in at least one legendary triumph as a pitcher for Team USA during the Sydney Olympics in 2000. That year, for the first time in history, the U.S. became gold medal championship. champions in baseball, beating Cuba in the finals, 4 to 0. That game became known as the miracle on grass. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week.

Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at gairoze.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by Devin Schwartz with music. composed by Ramtin Erebleu. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Catherine Seifer. Our engineers were Maggie Luthor and

Jimmy Keeley. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, J.C. Howard, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, Carrie Thompson, John Isabella, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.