The Dayton Daily News profiled the company and its founders on April 11.
Noxgear’s two sports vest designs use battery-powered light-emitting diode (LED) technology and flexible fiber optic cables to encircle the wearer in highly visible cords of light.
About 75 percent of the pre-orders were for the Tracer 360 vest, intended to improve night safety for walking, running and cycling. The rest are for the Torch vest, designed for night sports such as Ultimate Frisbee.
Curran, the company’s president, said a portion of the Kickstarter funds went to tooling at overseas manufacturers to produce plastic parts and printed circuit boards for the vests’ electronics.”We are ahead of schedule by about two months with producing parts,” he said.
Some of the funds went to creating a website, Noxgear.com, where the company continues to take pre-orders for its products.
In addition, funds were used to purchase fabric and reflective material used to create the vests.
Assembly of the first 500 to 1,500 vests will be done in Dayton, “simply just to keep the process under control and to get to know our product a little better,” Curran said. “After that, depending on demand, we are open to anything.”
Walters and Curran developed their concept while playing night sports with friends in Buffalo, N.Y., where both worked as aerospace engineers at Moog Inc.
On Friday, Noxgear was scheduled to co-host a night Ultimate Frisbee game as part of the Poultry Days Ultimate Tournament in Versailles, which draws nearly 1,000 players from across the country. Walters, the company’s chief executive, said it was “nerve-wracking” but exciting to demonstrate their product for the first time on such a large scale.
Curran said the first 15 Noxgear vests were produced last week for “Power, Pedals and Ponytails,” a team participating in Race Across America, an annual transcontinental bicycle race from the west to the east coast of the U.S. that runs June 11-24. “It’s exciting because they are going to put Noxgear on their jerseys and they are expecting to set the world’s record for a two-person female team,” he said.
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