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A Delicate Balance
Josh Rodarmel ’07 and his brother
have shot to success selling bracelets to help athletes “maximize their potential.” Today, they’re facing lawsuits. But they still believe in their company.
March/April 2011
by Alex Goldberger ’08
Alex Goldberger ’08, an Olympics researcher at NBC, is a frequent contributor to the Sporting Life department of the Yale Alumni Magazine.
I bumped into Josh Rodarmel ’07 in
the Starbucks at Chapel and High streets the day before the 2007 Yale-Harvard
football game. Josh and I had become friendly after I profiled him in the Yale Daily News the
year before, though I hadn’t seen him since he graduated. He told me he had
gone into business with his brother Troy, selling a line of bracelets embedded
with holograms that brought the wearer physical benefits.
To demonstrate, Josh had me stand on
one foot, arms spread parallel to the ground, while he applied force to one of
my arms. I duly toppled over. Then he handed me a bracelet, a sleek band of
brightly colored silicone, and applied the same force again. I held my balance.
There was a similar test for strength, which I likewise flunked bare-wristed
but aced with the bracelet. As I shook my head, incredulous, Josh told me a bit
about how it worked.
The holograms, he explained,
contained frequencies that reacted positively with the body’s natural energy
field. As long as the bracelet—which is to say, the hologram—was on or close to
my body, it would help optimize my innate physical abilities.
Josh didn’t spend much time on
Science Hill in college, but he speaks with a disarming earnestness that makes
him easy to listen to and a persuasive salesman. Raised in Orange County,
California, in a Christian household that valued holistic therapies, he had
been a star quarterback in high school. At six-foot-one, he was never tall by
quarterback standards, so he made up for it with a masochistic training
regimen—which eventually led to a cartilage tear in his shoulder. Yale
recruited him anyway, knowing he could dominate the Ivy League if he was
healthy. But his college career amounted to a life of surgery and rehab.
In each of his four years at Yale,
Josh hoped his shoulder would return to form, so he stayed on the team but
never even played a down. He also poured himself into other pursuits,
double-majoring in Spanish and political science and devoting time to the
campus Christian group Athletes in Action. When I asked him about career plans
in 2006, he wasn’t sure about specifics. But he was interested in working with
his brother Troy.
Five years later, on the strength of
the little bracelet Josh showed me that day, the Rodarmels preside over one of
the fastest-growing brands in sports. Their company, Power Balance, grossed
over $35 million in sales in 2010, buoyed by ubiquitous exposure from paid
athlete endorsers like Shaquille O'Neal. The wristbands, which cost about $30
in the United States, are now sold in 30 countries on six continents. In
January, the company announced a five-year deal for the naming rights to the
Sacramento Kings' arena, soon to be designated the Power Balance Pavilion.
To get to these heights, the
Rodarmels followed a path that has become familiar in the sports apparel
market. In the late 1960s, an ex–University of Oregon runner named Phil
Knight—with design help from his former coach Bill Bowerman—produced a new kind
of running shoe. He packed a few into the back of his green Plymouth Valiant
and sold them at track meets across the Pacific Northwest. They were the first
products of a company that would eventually be known as Nike. Thirty years
later Kevin Plank, a University of Maryland football player, sought to develop
a sweatproof athletic shirt. He stenciled an interlocking UA logo on the
shirts, urged his teammates to try them out, and called them Under Armour.
What lifted Power Balance from its
own cottage-industry roots was a similar leveraging of relationships with
athletes. The Rodarmels had a competitive advantage: they grew up as part of a
network of elite athletes in the Orange County suburb of Mission Viejo. Troy,
36, was a basketball player at California Baptist University and an avid
longboarder with many connections in the Orange County surfing scene. Josh
played football at Mission Viejo High School.
If there were a Juilliard for
quarterbacks, it might be Mission Viejo. Players who live outside the district
have been known to bend the rules in order to join the football team led by Bob
Johnson, a quarterback guru whose son Rob spent nine seasons in the NFL. In
2002, Josh Rodarmel was good enough to start for Mission. He was preceded and
followed by quarterbacks who went on to the NFL.
Since high school, Josh has worked
every summer at Bob Johnson’s prestigious Elite 11 quarterback camp, a
week-long conclave for the nation’s top college prospects. In 2008, Josh
mingled with three distinguished counselors: Mark Sanchez, who succeeded Josh
at Mission and was then the quarterback at USC, Colt McCoy of Texas, and
Matthew Stafford of Georgia. Josh came equipped with a supply of his
bracelets—which were being produced for the Rodarmels by a small clothing
manufacturer in Santa Ana—and gave his pitch to the quarterbacks. They were a
hit.
That fall, Sanchez and McCoy each
appeared on the cover of Sports
Illustrated wearing the bracelets. As the
touchdown passes piled up every Saturday, Power Balance received free exposure
on national television. Meanwhile, the athletes became pitchmen to their own
teammates. Nic Harris, an early adopter as a linebacker at Oklahoma, described
the spread of Power Balance in the Sooners locker room.
“People are watching me, and then
it’s like a domino effect,” says Harris, who now plays in the NFL for the
Carolina Panthers and is an official endorser of the bracelets. “People see me
and they want to get it—they’re like, 'What is it? What is it?' And then you go
through the process of explaining it.” One of Harris’s curious teammates in
2008 was Sam Bradford, who wore Power Balance that season and went on to win
the Heisman Trophy.
Before long, the college
quarterbacks went pro and shared their wares with new teammates in new locker
rooms. Meanwhile, Troy continued to make inroads in the surfing scene. And NBA
players, the most conspicuously accessorized athletes in sports, developed a
particular affinity for the bracelets. During the 2008–09 season, Los Angeles
Lakers forward Lamar Odom tried one at the suggestion of his trainer. In an
e-mail, Odom—another paid endorser—says he noticed an immediate benefit. “I
just started feeling better and more efficient when I had it on,” he writes. “I
feel like I am more balanced when I’m going up for a rebound, boxing out. I
also have been hitting the ground less ever since.”
And the bracelets went viral. Odom's
Lakers teammates, including Kobe Bryant, started wearing them. NBA stars like
O'Neal and Blake Griffin swear by them (O'Neal as an endorser). In the last
year and a half, Power Balance products have become a kind of sports Forrest
Gump—always popping up at the most significant events, like on the wrist of
Drew Brees during his Super Bowl MVP performance, or Bryant in the NBA finals.
Before long, the bracelets migrated
from stadiums to the red carpet, turning up in US Weekly as often
as Sports Illustrated. Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio have been spotted in
Power Balance bands. So have several cast members of MTV’s Jersey Shore and
Odom’s wife, reality-TV star Khloe Kardashian.
“The story of how David Beckham got
it was a microcosm of our growth,” Josh remembers. “When we first saw him
wearing the product, it was just him in a photo. Then the next photo we saw of
him, it was him and his friend. Then the next time it was him and his kids and
their friends.”
The meteoric rise of Power Balance
has led to some rarefied moments for Josh.
“The coolest experience I’ve had to
date was sitting in the top floor of [rapper] Jay-Z’s conference room in his
office, talking with him and his business manager Juan Perez,” Josh told me.
"Sitting there, overlooking Times Square, just talking to Jay-Z about Power
Balance.” Baseball star Alex Rodriguez had set up the meeting.
In retrospect, a backlash was
probably inevitable. Visibility leads to scrutiny, which can be tough for a
company that has never adequately explained how its products work.
In the early days, Power Balance
used to make expansive and specific claims, but they weren’t easy to
understand. Josh and Troy launched a website in 2007, powerbalance.net, to
explain and sell their products (which were then only hologram stickers, not
wristbands). The website’s ocean of white text against a charcoal background
was a murky blend of Eastern philosophy and Western science: “POWER / BALANCE™ is revolutionary holographic technology designed to resonate with your body's
Bio-field, creating a state of coherency and harmonic balance.” The site
eventually incorporated detailed sections on quantum holography, cymatics (a
means of making sound waves visible), and the (discredited) field of radionics,
among many other disciplines. From an FAQ section:
POWER /
BALANCE™ produces all the physiological benefits it does through a proprietary
advanced technology QVC, whereby specific “energies” are isolated and light
encoded into an aluminum-silicon-based medium. This 'medium,' the POWER /
BALANCE™, emits a pure resonance that harmonizes with the body’s “subtle
energy” fields, producing an instant, sustained, substantial, measurable, and
demonstrable increase in the physiological factors of balance, strength,
coordination, flexibility, and endurance as well as a distinct balancing of the
left and right brain hemispheres.
(The old website has been replaced;
these quotes are from the archived copy at the Internet Archive’s Wayback
Machine.)
Yale physics lecturer Stephen Irons
was “a little appalled” after surveying the old website, he says. “It’s a
collection of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo that at worst makes no sense at all
and at best makes claims that are completely untestable.” The site makes a few
references to peer-reviewed journal articles, Irons notes, but the articles are
tangential to its health claims—“the concepts of quantum teleportation and
those other esoteric fields don’t enter into human biology.”
“From a science standpoint,” he
says, “it’s basically a pretty piece of jewelry.”
It’s unclear whether prospective
customers ever bothered to read the material on the old website. More important
was the Rodarmels' chief sales pitch: the series of tests—similar to the ones
Josh performed on me in 2007—demonstrating the hologram’s effect on strength,
balance, and flexibility. But John Porcari, a professor of exercise and sport
science at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, conducted a study last fall
using the same tests, evaluating Power Balance bracelets against 30-cent placebo
bands. The subjects uniformly performed better on the second test, regardless
of which band they were wearing. Speaking on ESPN in October, Porcari said the
subject tends to be warmed up for the second test, and also knows what's
coming. “Does the Power Balance bracelet work? No, it doesn’t. The placebo
effect works,” he said. “To me, it’s just an absolute scam.”
Porcari wasn’t alone. Others set out
to debunk the Power Balance claims, and the situation boiled over at the end of
last year in Australia, where the Australian Medical Association prompted
investigation with its statement that the claims were “biologically
impossible.” In December, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, a
consumer watchdog, found Power Balance in violation of advertising laws. The
company agreed to issue a corrective advertisement admitting that “there is no
credible scientific evidence” to support its claims that the wristbands improve
strength, balance, and flexibility. (Asked about the incident, Power Balance
noted that “no proceeding has ever been instituted in any country … concerning
the product’s performance.”)
Since then, Power Balance has dialed
down its claims, excising large sections of its website—including videos of the
tests meant to demonstrate physical benefits—and removing the words
"performance technology” from the wristbands. The new website doesn’t try to
explain what the product does. The closest it comes is: “The company was
created out of the principle that the founders wanted everyone, no matter what
their level of activity, to maximize their potential and live life to the
fullest.” And there are no promises: “While we have received testimonials and
responses from around the world about how Power Balance™ has helped people,
there is no assurance it can work for everyone.”
Trying
to find out how Power Balance works, and how the brothers came up with the
idea, is a frustrating exercise. During interviews for this article, Josh spoke freely with me on other
subjects, but he would discuss the product’s origins and technology only by
e-mail and in consultation with his lawyers. He did explain that, in 2006, his
brother was interested in the physical benefits of a certain type of
frequency-based technology. Troy had a business selling computer memory at the
time, and Josh says his brother discovered that Mylar—the polyester film used
in anti-static bags for shipping memory components—could unlock this
technology’s benefits for humans. Mylar “is the same material [the Power
Balance] holograms are made of,” Josh e-mailed. “Thus, the reason we use
holograms in our products. Our holograms are just the medium that deliver the
technology; it is itself, not the technology or the product.”
On the other hand, when I asked Josh
about the claims on the old website, he e-mailed a statement that reads, in
part, “Our original product utilizes frequency-treated holograms, which was
intended to mimic the way certain natural elements positively react with the
human body.”
In January, customers in the United
States filed a class-action suit seeking more than $5 million in damages from
the Rodarmels, Power Balance president Keith Kato, and endorsers O'Neal and
Odom. The suit is one of at least ten filed in the United States. Regarding the
litigation, Power Balance sent me the following statement:
The mission
of Power Balance has always been to develop and deliver quality products that
enhance people’s lives. Our products are based on the idea of optimizing the
body’s natural energy flow, similar to concepts behind many holistic and
Eastern philosophies. We definitely understand that there will always be
critics of new concepts and technologies, but our products are used by those
with open minds who experience real results. Our company is absolutely
committed to further evaluating the technology behind its products' performance
so that we can continue to offer products that enrich people’s lifestyle. To
date, our products have lived and thrived in the ultimate testing
environment—the real world.
Claims of improved strength,
balance, and flexibility are now left to the athlete testimonials, of which
there is no shortage. Washington Nationals pitcher Collin Balester, who wears
necklaces by Power Balance (and by Phiten, a competitor) to improve his balance
on the mound, bristles at the skeptics. “I don’t really care what people
think,” he says. “I just do things that are going to give me the edge, even if
I have to wear a dunce cap on my head to make me balance better.” Still,
Balester told me his decision is a combination of empirical experience and
superstition. When he was called up to the majors in late August, he forgot his
Power Balance necklace, so a teammate let him borrow one. Balester was nearly
unhittable the rest of the year. “It probably had nothing to do with the
necklace,” he says, “but I’m definitely going to go into next season with that
same one.”
Nate Jackson, who spent six seasons
in the NFL and has written about his experience for the New York Times and Slate, has seen this
sort of thing before. “The success of that kind of product depends on an
athlete who thinks deeper than the average athlete but wouldn’t overanalyze
it,” he says. “You don’t want the athlete that digs too deep and realizes it
isn’t a panacea.”
The road ahead for Power Balance is
precarious. Even if the company can emerge from litigation intact, it faces an uphill public relations battle. When Paul Swangard, an authority on sports
marketing at the University of Oregon, looked at the Power Balance website in
its current form, he couldn’t help but think of a missed opportunity.
“If Shaquille O'Neal said, 'When I
wear this, I feel more confident—I can’t explain it but it works for me'—if
you'd taken that approach to begin with, people probably would have still
bought it,” Swangard says. “But because they’ve found themselves in the midst
of all this controversy, they may not be able to reposition themselves in that
way.”
As Power Balance begins to
reposition itself, at least tacitly, in precisely that way, its most urgent job
is to hang on to its corps of athlete clients. The notion that something works
if one believes in it is as deeply ingrained in locker rooms as in the aisles
of the self-help section, but a little bad PR can infect prevailing opinion.
"The sustainability of the brand is whether they can deliver on the brand
promise,” Swangard says. “Phil’s always said Nike is a testament to great
branding but if the product sucked, the brand would basically collapse upon
itself. As we look at Power Balance today, that is the Achilles' heel here.
There is a growing skepticism of whether there’s really anything to this
product. And if that begins to weave itself among some of the people who've
been using the product, it does run the risk of not being relevant.”
Josh seems acutely aware of this.
When I asked him if he thought the company could survive as just a fashion
statement, he told me, “If Kobe really believed it didn’t work, the fad would
die out.” But Josh was merely indulging my hypothetical. He, and many others,
will tell you there is no question that the product works.
People can agree to disagree. It is
possible that the denouement of this winter’s conflicts will be a peaceful
schism between believers and the skeptics—leaving enough market share for Power
Balance to persist, as so many other products do without the imprimatur of
Western science.
In 2006, Josh and I spoke a lot
about his Christianity (another brother, Todd, is a pastor), but when I
proposed an analogy between his faith in God and faith in Power Balance, Josh
demurred. He sees Power Balance linked to his faith only insofar as everything
in his life is. “My faith has helped me become the person I am today, and that,
in turn, has helped me get through all the challenges that I’ve been presented
with in my life, whether it’s when my Mom died or whether it’s business
challenges,” he said. “But I’ve definitely encountered more skepticism around
Power Balance than in my faith in God.”
Even with the future uncertain, the
Rodarmels have big plans for Power Balance. “We’re not under the impression
that we can just make one product and make it forever,” Josh told me. When I
asked if Power Balance was ready to move in on the apparel giants with its own
clothing line, though, he said, “We’re not there yet.”
Equally important to Josh are the
company’s philanthropic initiatives. Already supporting the Ovarian Cancer
Research Fund in honor of their late mother, JoAnne, the Rodarmels plan to
launch a foundation that would build playing surfaces in blighted areas. “I’m a
firm believer in ‘To whom much is given, much is expected,’” Josh says. “I’ve
been very blessed in terms of what’s happened with Power Balance, and I want to
give back in a way that other people can be blessed from Power Balance.”
Josh reads his clippings. He’s heard
the cries of snake oil. The job is harder than he'd imagined, and the constant
travel wears on him. But none of it can spoil his sunny disposition. When he
thinks about Power Balance, all he sees is positive. “It’s been the best
learning experience of my life,” he says.  |
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