The honest version.
How a dry cleaner from Naples built a better spray bottle, got it into 500+ stores, and had to hit pause.
PIVOT started behind the counter of my family’s dry cleaners in Naples, Florida. Every day, our spray bottles lost prime the moment we tilted them. I knew there had to be a better way.
My friend and mentor, Bryan McNelis, became our first angel investor and co-founding partner. His energy was unmatched, and none of this would exist without him. Bryan believed in people, product and process, and he knew we needed a team. That led us to Brad Forrest, our Chief Innovator and engineer, who brought on Tom Perelli. Both are elite at what they do. Together, as Nexshift, we designed a bottle that sprays at any angle and earned a patent for it.
In 2021, Larry Kosilla and the AMMO NYC community helped rally 1,172 backers on Kickstarter, four times our goal. Taking PIVOT from prototype to production meant tooling, factories and a lot of late nights. It wasn’t easy, but we delivered every order.
Then came the moment we’d worked for: PIVOT on more than 500 Walmart endcaps and in True Value stores. We sold over 20,000 units, many stores sold out, and at trade shows we watched people try it for the first time and light up.
Retail at that scale means paying for inventory months before any revenue comes back, and every order stretched our small team further. We also found a costly assembly issue that raised our defect rate, and we weren’t willing to keep shipping a product that wasn’t right. In 2024, we made the hard decision to pause. We should have kept you updated, and we’re sorry we went quiet.
We know PIVOT is something special. We’re fixing what needed fixing and preparing a relaunch built to last.