Bear Blocks are really the result of a happy accident and a great Saturday morning sleep in. I literally had a dream about the design early one Saturday morning.

I don’t normally remember my dreams, but on this particular morning I had the chance to roll it around in my head and imagine the possibilities.

I was excited by the idea because I have injured both of my wrists over the years, which made push ups and other body weight routines very uncomfortable.

The next step was a quick 3D model using Sketchup.

The first prototypes looked pretty rough when we made them from 3.5″ x 3.5″ fence posts. Check out that artistry!

My boys were pretty excited about this first test and decided one needed to be black and one should be gold. I came home from work one day and they had gone ahead and spray painted them to look like this!

Pretty cool!

The success of the rough prototypes was convincing and helped us take the next important step, which was to hire Spark Innovations, a product design and engineering firm in Toronto.

Thanks to the great work from Spark, we were able to test the structural concepts related to the design, confirm the efficacy of the ideas embedded in Bear Blocks, and prepare the design for manufacturing.