By Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University
The package ordered by the Prince of Dubai is arriving at the royal palace. His order was for a piece of weightlifting equipment that comes from a company halfway around the globe in rural Kansas.
Today we’ll meet the rural entrepreneurs who operate this remarkable company.
Brad and Lynn Roepke are the founders and owners of Solid Bar Fitness, which produced this order for the Prince of Dubai. Brad and Lynn’s married daughter, Jo Hammel, is the company’s sales director.
Brad Roepke is from Waterville, Kansas. Lynn is from nearby Barnes. Roepke became a Hall of Fame football player at Baker University. He came back to Waterville and worked for his father’s business, Roepke Processing.
Brad continued to be interested in sports. In fact, he started making his own weightlifting equipment in his garage.
Lynn was also interested in athletics. She operated a gym in a basement downstairs from Roepke Processing. She called it Fitness Down Under.
At a coach’s clinic in Topeka, Roepke met a man selling a hexagon-shaped barbell for weightlifting. Roepke asked him the price. When the man told him the price, Roepke said, “I could build one myself for less than that.”
The man’s reply: “Well, if you can build them for less, why don’t you build them for me?”
The two agreed and Roepke started manufacturing the barbells. Then he redid and improved the design.
In 1986, the Roepkes went into the weightlifting products manufacturing business on their own. They named their company Solid Bar Fitness for the high strength steel used in the weightlifting bar.
“My dad’s full name is Bradley Alvin Roepke, so he likes to say that the BAR came from his initials, but my mom’s not buying it,” Jo said with a smile.
Jo played basketball at Washburn University. After graduation, she joined the family business and married a farmer and construction worker named Brady Hammel.
“Our family’s all about athletics and agriculture,” Jo Hammel said.
Today, Solid Bar Fitness is a leader in the Olympic weightlifting products industry. The company offers multiple styles of stress proof, high strength alloy steel bars plus weights and collars to hold the weights in place. The Roepkes own the patent on the detachable collars.
Solid Bar Fitness outfits entire weight rooms for schools and colleges and produces weightlifting products for other companies using those companies’ labels.
In 2018, Roepke was approached by a Kansan named Zac Marrs who had an idea for a shoulder lift bar with a curved foam pad. Other manufacturers called it a manufacturing nightmare and turned him down, but Roepke saw the potential in it.
Solid Bar Fitness now manufactures this product, called the Marrs-Bar, and it is a popular item.
One day, Jo Hammel was asked by her husband’s boss if she would help him sell his new product, a tractor attachment that he had designed to clean out cattle feed bunks. She was so impressed with the product that she asked if she could buy in. They now partner on the EZ Sweep bunk cleaner company.
“I did a demonstration video on TikTok and it got 1.3 million views,” Hammel said. EZ Sweep bunk cleaners have sold across the Midwest and Canada.
Meanwhile, Solid Bar Fitness products have sold across the nation and beyond. Customers include the Prince of Dubai, Odell Beckham Jr., Aaron Rodgers, Danica Patrick, and many Division I schools. The company recently won an Army contract to produce 27,000 combat fitness bars.
It’s a remarkable business to find in the middle of Kansas. Waterville is a rural community of 658 people. That’s rural – but there’s more.
The company headquarters and shipping facility is in Waterville, but the manufacturing plant is in the rural community of Morganville, population 180 people. Now, that’s rural.
For more information, see www.solidbarfitness.com. For information on the bunk cleaner, see www.ezsweep.net.
It’s time to leave the palace in Dubai, where the Olympic bar was delivered from this business in rural Kansas. We salute Brad and Lynn Roepke, Jo Hammel, and all those involved for their entrepreneurial spirit, because sometimes being an entrepreneur is not an easy lift.
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