RipFix has been in my family for three generations it was concocted in the kitchen of my grandmother and passed down to my mother then me. As a kid we called it “Miracle Cream” and we depended on it for almost everything, dry cracked lips, heels, rashes , scrapes, burns even zits!!… but for me, as gymnast who never wore grips, it was essential in my gym bag. It works amazingly on hand rips. My Mom made it for gymnasts and ball players and I’ve known since my 20’s that I was suppose to market our family recipe, I just didn’t know where or how until CrossFit!!!. When I started CrossFittng, I knew it was my market. First I had to figure out how to make it. It took a lot of trial and error because my mother is trapped in the world of dementia and the recipe would change every time I asked her (you can laugh she has a great sense of humor)..I figured it out, tweaked it a bit to make it more holistic and like that, my business started. I started selling RipFix to athletes locally and to my own CF community and received rave reviews and requests for more. Thanks to the pushing of my community (CrossFit Talon in CoolSprings TN) my business partner and I now have vendors all around the world.
While working events I have discovered that a lot of athletes do not know how to care for their hands, and guys especially, are skeptical about treating their calluses. I was a sponsor at an event last weekend where a guy ripped so bad it was a bloody, ugly,gnarly mess about a 1/4 inch of skin ripped….I told him he had RipFix in his gift bag, he said “No way it will work on this”…I said “Just try it, it’s free”…he contacted me two days later on my RipFix Facebook page saying “You win, It works, I did pull ups today, I owe you”. I love stories like that and I have many.
For some athletes rips are a right of passage, a warrior wound, a sign that you worked hard…but that gets old quick, especially when your daily workouts are affected by a hand that is not healthy enough to hold you on a bar. We have found that if you do daily maintenance on your hands the less likely you are to tear. When you build up those hard mounds of flesh, known as calluses, and then add friction, they have no where to go but to tear off causing painful rips. If you take some time every night to pumice the calusses down, then apply RipFix your hands become more yielding to the hard work and beat down a WOD like Fran or Helen doles out on your palms. RipFix not only mends a rip it is a great preventative.
The RipFix story has come around full circle because I am now a single mom to a state champion Gymnast and her whole team uses the product. Our product is selling worldwide and I am now known on the local competitive circuit as the “RipLady”…Fixing and treating WOD hands one Box at a time!
- Robin Stewart