Made because it didn’t exist.

What we found

The cleaners we could buy didn’t work, and it took a while to understand why.

In our country, and as far as we can tell in most countries outside the US where the ball makers are, what’s on the shelf is water-based. That isn’t a judgement anyone made about what works. An effective cleaner needs alcohol, alcohol is classified as dangerous goods, and the freight on it costs multiple times more than a bottle of cleaner is worth. Water-based is what can be imported at a sensible price, so water-based is what there is.

Very little of it says so anywhere a bowler would notice, and it matters more than it sounds. Water and oil don’t mix, so a water-based cleaner can’t get inside a pore that’s already full of conditioner. It cleans the top of the ball and leaves what’s underneath exactly where it was.

Knowing that didn’t give us a cleaner. What the job needed was a liquid that would wick into a pore, blend with the oil sitting in it, carry that oil back out, and then leave without a trace of itself. No single solvent does all four. It had to be built, and building it meant working out which chemistries could do each part, and then finding the narrow window in which all of them stay in one clear, stable phase instead of separating, hazing or cancelling each other out.

That took a long run of formulations, and most of them failed. Some did nothing at all. Some did one part of the job and left the rest untouched. Some left a film behind. Some wouldn’t hold together as a single liquid.

When it finally came together, it worked immediately. One spray, a light wipe, and a mark that had needed an abrasive was gone.

That was the point it stopped being something we were making for our own bags.

What we’re trying to do

Three things, in this order: make equipment that genuinely does what it claims, explain exactly how it does it, and sell it at a price that doesn’t decide who gets to improve.

Bowling is a skill and a sport. It shouldn’t be pay-to-win. The price of a bottle of cleaner shouldn’t be part of what separates two bowlers, and there’s nothing in a good cleaner that justifies treating it as a luxury good. We set our prices as low as we can get them without touching what’s in the bottle, and we’d rather grow slowly at that price than quickly at a higher one.

What premium should mean

The industry seems to have agreed that premium means expensive, and that expensive means fewer people have it. We think that’s backwards. A premium product is one with no wasted effort anywhere in it: the formulation, the testing, the bottle, the packaging, and the experience of using the product. A high price is not evidence of any of that, and often it stands in for it.

Getting it to everyone

The restriction that keeps alcohol-based cleaners off the shelves here applied to us the moment we tried to send ours anywhere else: around a hundred US dollars of freight per shipment, many times what the cleaner itself is worth. Having understood why nobody else was solving this, we had no intention of being stopped by it.

We couldn’t change the regulation, so we changed the product. Outside our home market, the potion is formulated to be completed on arrival: we send the concentrate and the spray bottle, and the alcohol is added at home. It takes about a minute, and it costs considerably less as a result. It was the only way to reach everyone without the freight landing on the order.

What we’re working toward

Cleansing is the first potion, not the only one. There’s a long list of things we intend to make, and not all of them are liquids. Some of what’s in development is electronic. The range grows slowly on purpose: a product ships when it does its one job properly, and not before.

• A product for every problem a bowler actually has, and none for problems they don’t.
• Available in every country that bowls, at a price that makes sense there.
• Every product with a page explaining its mechanism, not just its claims.
• Prices that stay where they are as we grow.