Joe Lowinske
Co-founder & CEO
Greg Vehlies
Co-founder & Chief of Product
Our Mission
Welcome and thanks for visiting us at GridGrips. We're very grateful to that you've considered us among your many choices for riding grips. We share your passion for riding and we want to put grips in your hands that bring even more fun and more excitement to your sessions.
At GridGrips we live by 3 core values:
Relationships for the Better
We want literally everyone who engages with GridGrips in any manner to come away better for it. Whether you're a customer, a partner, or just someone we were able to spend a few minutes chatting with at a trade show it is our aim that your life has been improved by the relationship we've established, whether short-lived or long-standing. Wherever this ride goes, it means very little without the travelers we meet along the way and we want you to remember us for the positive impact we had on your day, business, or life.
Quality
In the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig's main character and past alter-ego Phaedrus is fatefully beset by the apparently simple question: "What is quality?". Here at GridGrips, we may not be quite so eager to plumb the philosophical depths of that question as Pirsig did, yet we prize the value of quality just as highly.
To us, quality is as much a practice as an outcome. It means we strive for attention to detail. It means we honor form as well as function. It means we apply the consistency of a gardener in examining all aspects of our product and business for opportunities to improve.
We know that you will only trust us if we deliver a consistently exemplary product and experience-- and we can only take pride in our work if we do just that. A dedication to quality is the means by which we arrive at such a result.
Growing Stewardship
At GripGrips, we believe it's not enough to seek success. The world is a big and complex place with many problems that need attention. As our business grows, it is absolutely imperative that we use our success to be good stewards of this world by bringing resources-- whether financial, organizational, or through volunteerism-- to projects and initiatives that benefit the planet and all its inhabitants. We're all in this together and we at GridGrips seek to play an ever-increasing role in making the lot better for everyone.
Our Story
GridGrips was born from the spark of an idea in the mind of Greg Vehlies. Greg spent his early years riding trails and competing in downhill mountain bike races in New England and subsequently grew up to be a product designer where he spent his days developing concepts for various sporting goods. Somewhere along the course of his ideations on product concepts during his downtime, he realized that you could leverage 3D-printing to achieve grip designs that increased the degree of hand freedom and shock absorption far beyond what would be possible with existing injection molded grips. He quickly latched onto the idea of using fully independent layers of 3D lattices (patent pending) to achieve the desired performance and he was off to the races modeling out design concepts.
Greg realized that it would take more than compelling designs to turn his concepts into a physical product available on the market so he turned to his longtime friend Joe Lowinske for some organizational help and extra gumption. The pair had spent several years spitballing product ideas and other possibilities but Greg's grip concepts arrived at just the right time when Joe's working life yielded enough space needed to provide the kind of time and dedicated effort to get this new design concept and business off the ground. And with that, GridGrips became a real living pursuit with the goal of bringing genuinely new innovation to a category of riding kit that really has only seen innovation at the margins for quite some time.
It is our hope that as time proceeds and our business grows that we can continue to innovate and bring even more joy to the riding of everyone with a pair of GridGrips on their handlebars.