Taking the Stink Out of Athletic Gear

As a four-sport athlete in high school and now a junior on the WPI football team, Calvin Lambert ’27 is all too familiar with the stinky germ factory that sweat-infused, grimy uniforms can become if not properly dried and disinfected. And while the olfactory assault may be annoying, of more concern are the potential skin rashes and other infections that can sweep through locker rooms and make life uncomfortable for players and their families.

So at an early age, Lambert decided—with parental encouragement—to find a solution.

“It was really my mom who kind of pressured me to do something about the smell of my hockey equipment because she hated it,” Lambert admits. After unsuccessfully researching existing options, he manufactured his own drying contraption—at the young age of 14. “I just made a little something out of PVC pipe and a high-powered air dryer, and it worked beautifully. It could dry my hockey gear very quickly which didn’t let the moisture sink in, and that helped with the smell.”

His homemade dryer has been so effective over his athletic career that he wondered whether the idea had potential on the open market. To find out, he founded DryPro Equipment and has been taking advantage of WPI’s i3 Lab, which provides resources, programming, connections, and space for students to cultivate their entrepreneurial ideas.

His idea is already resonating with advisors at the lab. Lambert has found success in local pitch competitions, including winning first place and $700 in WPI’s Goat Tank, an honor that qualified him for the citywide WooTank, where he won an additional $1,250.

“The prize money has allowed me to keep building new prototypes and given me some wiggle room for using trial and error to figure out what’s going to work,” he says. “It’s also allowed me to be able to put a lot more of my time and focus on the project.”

Lambert says a lifelong love of athletics is what underlies his entrepreneurial ambitions. In addition to playing, he’s coached peewee football and summer youth flag football teams and participated in sports-related fundraisers. “With this project, now my business, I’m trying to improve the lives of these kids,” he says. “That’s my goal and what drives me forward. It pushes me to do whatever I can.”

While his current model is targeted to individuals who long for a better way to care for their gear, future plans call for a version that will dry multiple sets of gear at the same time for use by entire teams. To that end, he’s enlisted the help of his high school football team from Somersworth, N.H., to give customer feedback on a new multigear prototype. “They go to football camp in the woods every year, and all the gear gets put inside cabins and the smell is just terrible,” he says. “Now they have something that they can plug into an outlet and it’ll dry multiple sets of gear at once.”

Lambert recognizes that a weakness of his product is in the way it looks. He hopes to enlist the help of more creatively inclined partners to improve the aesthetics.

“I’ve been doing this project by myself and it gets a little lonely,” he says. “I need somebody who shares my goals and my passion, is good with materials, and can help me make this thing look a little bit nicer.”

The i3 Lab offers many resources for budding student entrepreneurs at WPI, including regular informal brainstorming and mentoring opportunities, and guidance on launching operations and connecting with investors. Lambert says advisors have taught him everything from how to make a pitch deck and interview potential customers to the intricacies of securing a patent and understanding the financials of a startup.

“And with each of these steps, they are willing to look at all your work and give feedback,” he says. “They’re very transparent, which I love, because they just want the best for us. They’re only saying it because they believe in you, they know you have something, and they just want to harp on the little things so that the big things all come together.”

Although he has an MVP—a sellable “minimal viable product” in entrepreneurial lingo—he is focused on securing customer feedback to improve his prototypes.

“I think I can improve the dry time even more with better airflow, and I’m still looking for ways to be more cost-efficient to lower the cost. Once those pieces fall together, then it’s going to be ready to sell. So honestly, I imagine by the end of the school year I’ll be ready to make my first sale.”