Every ChalkBlaster starts with the same two people in a workshop in Denmark, and the two of us started with a sales call that went sideways. If you've wondered who's behind the brush in your chalk bag, this is how it started.
A climber who happened to be an engineer
I found climbing about two years ago. Indoor bouldering first, then trad, then outdoors in Fontainebleau, where the sandstone slopers teach you very quickly what friction is and how fast chalk ruins it. I fell hard for it. I was also running TridimLab, my mechanical engineering services company, spending my days prototyping other people's products.
In August 2025 I was out on a prospecting afternoon for TridimLab, the kind of day where you knock on doors and hope. One of the doors was Kent's. He was passionate, full of ideas, and he comes from communication, the opposite end of a company from where I sit. It clicked instantly. By the end of the afternoon we weren't talking about engineering services. We were talking about launching a climbing hardware brand together.
Two months to a prototype, and then the internet showed up
Two months later we dropped the first ChalkBlaster prototype online. The response was faster than either of us expected: 500K views almost instantly, massive traction on the product, pro climbers reaching out, and a community that started giving us feedback before we'd asked for it. What started as a random afternoon turned into something real very quickly. Sometimes the best projects come from unexpected meetings.
What client work never taught me
I thought three years of mechanical engineering for clients had taught me product development. It took four months of building my own product with SWEEP Climbing to see what I'd been missing.
Working for a client, you solve a clearly defined problem inside a fixed scope. Cost, risk and timelines are mostly abstract, somebody else's spreadsheet. Building your own product, bootstrapped, is a completely different beast. Every decision has a cost you feel. An MVP means cheap, fast and imperfect, and you ship it anyway. Iteration happens in public, with real climbers watching. Supply chains fight back with minimum order quantities, delays and lead times that move. You have to document everything, because content is how a two-person company gets found. And cash flow dictates the roadmap, not ambition. Going from prototype to an industrialised ChalkBlaster exposed every gap in what I knew.
Clearly defined problem
Fixed scope and expertise
Cost and risk are abstract
Every decision has a cost you feel
Iteration in public with real climbers
Cash flow sets the roadmap
What this means for you
The split that started on that afternoon is still how SWEEP Climbing works. Kent handles the brand, the story and the parts of the business like worldwide shipping that nobody photographs. I handle the product, the jet fan, the brush head and the thousand small decisions this blog is full of. When you pick up a ChalkBlaster, you're holding the result of a communicator and an engineer who met by accident and couldn't stop talking about chalk.
Paul: "He comes from communication, and I come from engineering. It clicked instantly. Sometimes the best projects come from unexpected meetings."
Quick answers
Who makes ChalkBlaster?
SWEEP Climbing, a two-founder company in Denmark. Kent runs brand and business, Paul runs engineering and product.
Is ChalkBlaster designed by climbers?
Yes. Paul climbs, mostly bouldering and Fontainebleau sandstone, and the brush exists because of the chalk problem he kept running into there.
Is SWEEP Climbing funded?
Bootstrapped. Which is why every post on this blog is about doing more with less and getting the fundamentals right.
SWEEP Climbing builds tools for climbers who take friction seriously.
