As a former sports physical therapist for elite college athletes, Garrett Drumheller has seen his fair share of injuries, oftentimes to the hamstring muscle. When he realized Nordic curls were one of the most effective exercises to prevent hamstring injuries, Drumheller came up with an innovative solution to help his patients train their muscles at home.
“I got a rolling pin and a ratchet strap, rigged them together, and used that to help hold my athletes’ feet down [in the clinic] so that they could strengthen their hamstrings and hopefully stay on the field,” he said. “As a physical therapist, the hardest thing for me was seeing an athlete sit on the sidelines and watch their four-year college career pass them by because you only get really one shot at it. I was just trying to help one person have one better year or one better career.”
When a pandemic layoff later derailed Drumheller’s career, the former athlete leveraged his sports and wellness background to flip his scrappy prototype into an affordable hamstring strength trainer. He spent months on research and development before turning his parents’ garage into a makeshift warehouse to store inventory for the product that has since transformed his family’s life: the NordStick.
Today, sales for Drumheller’s at-home exercise machine have soared to $6 million since it began selling in the Amazon store in July 2021. With support from Amazon Strategic Account Services, Drumheller has been able to leverage Prime Day as a sales multiplier to drive brand awareness and get the NordStick in front of millions of Prime shoppers.
“Amazon completely changed my life. It’s just been a dream come true so far for me,” he said. “Our whole family three years later is in a completely different space because of it.”
“I’ve been able to pay my family a really awesome rate to package all my products for me. The NordStick paid for my cousin’s college. It paid off my aunt and uncle’s mortgage; they put in a pickleball court at their house. It completely changed all of my family’s life,” Drumheller added.
Drumheller’s road to success has been paved with learnings. While he’s always felt confident in his product, he said he quickly realized he “didn’t know what [he] was doing in the marketing sense” after missing his first Prime Day, not realizing the power of the annual deal event.
He credits his decision to hire a trusted advisor through Amazon Strategic Account Services as a pivotal moment in his entrepreneurial journey.
“After a year and a half of having my business, I knew I needed a little bit of help,” Drumheller said. “[My account manager] held my hand for a good year and a half, guiding me through the whole process of how to optimize my Amazon account and how to prepare for peak holidays. He gave me the playbook for things that I can do to maximize my Prime Day, like getting the deals, discount codes, and coupons set up so that there’s natural attention for our product.”
When Prime Day came around in 2023, Drumheller was ready. By turning on deals, adding coupons, and driving external traffic to Amazon through Facebook, NordStick sales multiplied tenfold on the first day of the deal event. On day two, sales multiplied by eight.
Drumheller’s small business generated a month of revenue over just two days during Prime Day last year.
“It was just amazing to me how much the extra eyeballs that Amazon brings on those days helps our business,” he said, adding that Prime Day “comes at a perfect time where we need that cashflow to purchase our Q4 inventory.”
“When you get that paycheck after Prime Day, then you get to just invest it back into product to have the ability to buy and have things in stock for the Q4 holiday,” Drumheller said. “It certainly helped us a lot last year and I think it’ll help us a lot this year.”
Drumheller is taking the NordStick international in 2024 through Amazon Global Stores, with plans to expand sales to Canada and Mexico in the next few months. By the end of the year, he hopes the hamstring strength trainer will be accessible to European customers, and his partnership with Amazon is leading the way.
“I’m one hundred percent devoted to growing my business and helping more people outside of what I can do in just one physical therapy clinic through my products, and Amazon remains a staple of that,” he said.