The motivation was personal: I wanted to keep riding. Other riders had the same frustration, though, and a private experiment started to look like a product.

Making a sealant meant learning why one mixture behaved differently from another. I worked through formulations, tested them and let the results tell me what to change next.

Chris Richardson and Lucas Pawlowski helped with those early tests and kept encouraging me through them. One of my favorite records from that period is a late night at the shop with the two of them and a new Onewheel tire.

The punctures kept getting larger as we pushed the test further. Eventually we were pushing pliers into the tire and pulling them back out, and that's when we started laughing. We were a long way past the ordinary flat that started the whole thing.

The footage is rough, which is part of why I value it. It shows three friends surprised by what they're seeing, before any of it had been reduced to a bottle and a product description.

By 2019 the questions had changed. I needed suitable starting materials, a way to process them repeatably and costs that worked. A successful test answered none of those.

During COVID, demand for hand sanitizer made eight-ounce bottles hard to find. We could have product mixed and nothing to ship it in. I talked about those shortages in my 2021 VoyageMIA interview because they taught me something practical about manufacturing: formula, materials, process, cost and package all have to arrive together.

The legal company is Overkill Inc.; Armor-Dilloz is the name people know. I lead the technology, science and formulations. Anna is our operations manager and runs the day-to-day business. We work closely across those responsibilities.

My side also reaches the Shopify store and the product information. I know far more about each formula than a customer needs at once, so the work on the page is deciding what someone actually needs in order to use it well.

I developed the metal protection plates before the sealant, and Draggin Tail came out of testing them. Bead Buddy came from the installation side: a gel I formulated to help mount and seat a tire, which meant another material to blend, bottle and explain. Each has its own story on the Riding page.

I still work on the formulations, alongside the production, packaging and product information needed to get them into riders' hands.