Clarke Entrepreneurs: The Fascia Stick

Dashing through my office doorway, a tall young man stammers to the front of the desk and exclaims, “my professor from Business told me that you have a 3D printer and that I could get a model made. They said that I should come talk to you.”

Yep. He found the right guy.

“It works sort of like this!”, and he demonstrated the physical action with the eraser head of a pencil massaging between the knuckles of his hand. A miniature massage pencil. It is a manageable print, modest in fact.

“Can you provide me with an STL file?”, I ask.

“An S-T-L…Sure thing.”

It was such a strange and fleeting encounter. I don’t recall any formal introduction. I never even caught his name. I received an email later that evening from Casey Kostrzewa, the mystery student with an entrepreneurial spirit.

In his own words, this is his story of invention and progress.

One day while browsing Instagram, me and my roommates came across a video of a manual therapy technique using a pencil eraser to press in between the bones of your fingers. The idea is that it relieves pain in your arms, shoulder, and neck by breaking up the connective tissue, fascia, and moving around lymphatic fluid. The next day, one of my roommates who had been dealing with arm pain for 3 weeks had his pain reduced significantly through one session. The only problem was the eraser didn’t feel comfortable on the skin and would bend or completely break off after just a few uses. Another problem was that it was hard to handle because of the sharpened pencil tip. So we came up with the idea of a durable, smooth plastic stick — one side equipped with a small tip for the hands and feet, and a slightly larger ball tip on the other side for the neck and jaw region, another common site of myofascial tension.

In the current wellness market, there are many products such as the Hypervolt massage gun to get the larger areas, but nothing currently for the small areas which are just as important. The goal is the fascia stick is to help others alleviate pain, especially in today’s world of a 9-5, constantly typing on keyboards, neck tilted forward, and holding a phone for hours on end. This could also benefit athletes who constantly use their hands, especially rock climbers, baseball, volleyball, and basketball players, and can also help with plantar fasciitis when used on the feet. We should have Fascia Sticks available in the next few weeks.

Over the course of the last couple weeks Casey’s printed two additional Fascia Sticks and has secured more high-yield production than the MakerBot on campus. Casey reports that “manufacturing is going really well!” and that the first 250 will arrive in early December.  You can follow them on Instagram @fasciasticks.