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Like his bands, Hartzell looking to bounce back
NORTH LIMA
Dick Hartzell is as resilient as his Jump Stretch, Inc. business.
Proof is that the 72-year-old Hartzell vows to rebound again from another of his several financial setbacks over three decades.
“This is the third time I’ve been back to zero, so I get to start over again,” Hartzell said. “My situation is ugly,” he said with a signature blunt description.
Because of it, Jump Stretch, Inc. has disbanded and changed to Flex Performance & Training and put in the names of Carl LaRosa and Sherri LaRosa, Hartzell’s son-in-law and eldest daughter.
“Those two have the company because I wasn’t able to re-establish Jump Stretch,” he said.
The change also involved moving Jump Stretch’s N. Meridian Rd. location to a business complex inside the old South Range High School building.
Jump Stretch was on Meridian Rd. for 10 years, although Hartzell worked out of his garage since 1992. He started in 1980, when Hartzell invented the Flex Band exercise equipment and founded his company, Jump Stretch, Inc.
Hartzell said he encountered overhead problems when his main supplier of bands sold to distributors. As a result, Jump Stretch, Inc. lost more than $1 million in sales that put a financial strain on the business, Hartzell said.
“He sold to our distributors and made it extremely difficult for us over the last two years to get the bands [in stock],” he said. “We’ve been working on new suppliers now.”
Hartzell said he has a lawsuit against the supplier.
“We had an agreement that they wouldn’t do that — that they wouldn’t sell to other people, that they would just sell to Jump Stretch,” he said. “They violated the agreement. The company did a good job on manufacturing, but when we found out it was selling to other distributors, that’s when we severed the relationship.”
Hartzell said he’s trying to get American-made bands and the new potential suppliers could be here in Ohio.
“The whole time we had to import bands because no one in this country would make decent bands at a decent price,” he said.
Hartzell said that membership at Flex Performance Training hasn’t dropped since the relocation to the high school on Rt. 164, just west of Rt. 7.
“We set up equipment and we’re running classes now,” he said. “Membership has been good. We haven’t lost any people. The problem is that 90 percent of our income came from rubber band sales, not membership.”
Hartzell clarified that an expired design patent isn’t the problem.
“That’s not the issue that put us down,” he said. “I was never able to get a patent on the bands; my patent was on the design,” he said of the jump stretch squat board, which is a combination of a squat board, two bands and adhesive belt.
The design patent, which he obtained in 1982, expired after 17 years (1999).
“There’s no patent protection at this point,” Hartzell reiterated. “The problem was that I had an agreement with the supplier not to sell bands to anyone but us. That put me in the lurch.”
The Flex Performance phone number is 330-717-1229.