Louisville

We made it to Louisville on Wednesday and Thursday morning had the chance to head into town for a tour of the Louisville Slugger Museum.

I was guiding Jim and looked down at the GPS as we got close. “I think it’s just up ahead,” I said.

“It’s right there,” Jim said, pointing to a 3 story tall bat leaning on a red brick building.

The first thing that we were shown was a new line of products that Louisville Slugger is branching into – Gloves. And not just batting gloves either.

In fact, proving that innovation can come from anywhere, the genesis of this product line happened when Louisville Slugger started hearing from customers that they were purchasing the batting gloves for use in the garden. As you may expect, this was not a demographic that Louisville thought was in their market.

That spurred them to start working with Dr. Klein, a hand surgeon, to research how gloves for sports, work, and other activities could be made better. They poured significant resources into research and development and it’s paying off for them. Some of their key findings were how the fingers curled but most gloves didn’t follow naturally and how the arc of the bone means most gripping is done with the knuckles.

The brand that came out of this is Bionic Gloves, they are designed to fill in the valleys of those arcs that put stress on your joints when holding a golf club or tennis racket for example. The gloves pad specific spots giving you more usable surface area on the hand. Rick Redman and Vickie Boisseau described for us how much innovation they were putting into the gloves. They weren’t just taking one idea and putting it into mass production but really looking at the different needs they could fulfill. They currently have versions for baseball, golf, driving, motorcycles, work gloves, gardening, and roses. Yes, they found that people had a desire for specific handwear while trimming their flowers – notably, something that protected their forearms.

What struck us most from the innovation stand-point was how much research they had to put into their idea before the innovation could start affecting their customers. It’s a bit of a different ethos than we see online where it’s so easy to start trying things that seeing what sticks is the research.

For a company that’s been solid in one business for so long, it’s interesting to see them branching out in a way that fills a completely separate market need but keeps them close to their core audience of sports enthusiasts.

How can other companies push themselves to innovate in new directions that allow them to build on their core communities?

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