By Taylor Phillips
Copy Editor
Costa freshman and entrepreneur Taylor Ryan has created a new business, Unstoppable Protective Gear, LLC, selling protective cups for sports bras to help protect female athletes who play contact sports.
Ryan thought of her product idea five years ago when she first started playing lacrosse. She played soccer prior to playing lacrosse and decided to make the switch when a family friend introduced her to the sport. According to Ryan, lacrosse can be an aggressive sport, so she came up with the idea of creating the protective cups for sports bras that would provide an extra layer of protection for girls who play contact sports.
“I play really aggressive sports and get hit all the time,” Ryan said. “I wanted to find a product that let [girls] play to the best of their ability without the fear of getting hurt, and that is when I came up with the product.”
Ryan started the process of creating her business a year ago through the Young Entrepreneurs Academy (YEA). The YEA is an organization that has chapters in 168 communities around the United States, including Manhattan Beach. The program includes an extracurricular class that teaches middle school and high school students how to become successful entrepreneurs, helps them develop and pitch their business ideas and ultimately assists students in the process of starting their business.
“I was a part of the Young Entrepreneurs Academy, which I highly recommend everyone try, and it walks you through everything about business,” Ryan said. “They had us make a business plan, they brought in mentors, lawyers, logo designers and a bunch of other professionals to help us, which really helped me along this whole process.”
Aside from being a year-long course, the YEA also gives the students a chance to compete in local and national competitions with other entrepreneurs. These local competitions bring together the best kid-run businesses in the area as they compete to receive an opportunity to participate in the National Competition, where students can win scholarship money. Ryan won at the local level and was then able to compete on the national level.
“I went to Nationals and got in the top eight young entrepreneurs in the country for 2020,” Ryan said. “I won in Manhattan Beach, so I went to the national competition and [at Nationals] I got to the final round, and I ended up winning the top eight entrepreneurs.”
The developing product that Ryan is hoping to sell is the protective sports cups. According to Ryan, the sports cups are designed to be inserted into sports bras in order to give girls extra protection when playing their sport. Ryan is currently testing all the potential materials that she may use in the final design of her product. She is working alongside a product designer, who works with a manufacturer to find the best material. She is also working with a manufacturer in California to help her with the production of her product once they have a final design.
“I will be testing [the product prototypes] because my club team is back playing,” Ryan said. “We are going to be testing and tweaking [the prototypes] to make sure that it is perfect, that way the consumer gets the best product that they can receive.”
Ryan hopes to have her product ready to sell by February or March of 2021. She has created a website, unstoppable-gear.com, to promote her brand and to sell her products once they are available for ordering. According to Ryan, after coming out with her product, she hopes to expand them to a variety of different colors so that they can blend in with different colored sports bras.
“I feel like it was important to create this because a lot of girls hold back on playing aggressively because they are scared of getting injured,” Ryan said. “They shouldn’t have to do that, especially in high school when many are getting recruited [to colleges]. I wanted to make sure that girls could play 100 percent and be unstoppable, without the fear of getting injured.
Leave a Reply