A family business that started with a sketch, a setback, and a stubborn refusal to retire.

The Inventor

Bearback began with my dad, now in his 80s. He's spent most of his working life as a serial entrepreneur. Building, selling, building again.

Then, late in his career, a major financial setback ended that chapter. Most people would have walked away from creating new things at that point in life. He couldn't. He started tinkering.

He bought parts, sketched designs at the kitchen table, ordered prototypes from overseas, asked friends what they'd want fixed. Most of the projects went nowhere. Some were genuinely silly. One was a better back scratcher.

His thinking was simple. Every back scratcher on the market looked like it had been designed by someone who'd never used one. Bamboo ones scratched a fingernail-sized area at a time and split with age. Metal ones were sharp and cheap and broke. None of them felt good on bare skin. He thought he could do better.

The Launch

Heather and I picked up the prototype in 2018 as a family project. We're a husband-and-wife team based in Alpharetta, Georgia. Heather had been looking to step away from her corporate career to be more present with our young family, and Bearback became the project where her financial and operational background could go to work. She has run the business from day one.

We launched the first folding-handle bristled back scratcher with our family savings and a kitchen-table operation. The early years were a steady, slow build. Small batches. Careful customer service. Reviews accumulating one at a time.

About four years in, The Today Show called. They wanted to feature the Bearback Back Scratcher on a gift segment. That was the inflection point. Everything before it was a slow climb. Everything after it was a different kind of growth.

The project we'd all privately thought was the silliest turned out to be the one that worked.

From One Product to a System

What customers told us pretty quickly was that the folding handle solved more than one problem. The same engineering that made a back scratcher reach the full back also made it the foundation for everything else people couldn't easily reach on themselves.

So Heather built out a system. The handle stayed the same. The heads changed. Today the same Bearback handle accepts a rolling foam lotion applicator (which we invented as its own product category), a stiff-bristled silicone body scrubber for the shower, a natural-bristle dry brush, a massage roller, and a men's back & body shaver. One handle. Multiple tools. You can start with whichever solves your most annoying problem and add the others as you go.

What Bearback Is Now

Eight years in, Bearback is the most well-known name in the back-and-body self-care category. We're a family business built from scratch, and the only true brand customers recognize and return to. Most of our competitors are drop-shippers come and go. We're consistently top-ranked on Amazon for lotion application and back scratching, and the only brand in the category that's been featured on The Today Show, The View, and Good Morning America... more than once!  Over 10,000 five-star reviews across all our products and channels. A handful of imitators have appeared along the way, mostly copying parts of the design. None combine our unique ergonomic product geometry and the interchangeable tools for personalized self-care - or world-class, personal support.

The thing my dad got right at the very beginning, that someone, somewhere, was going to make a back-and-body tool that didn't feel cheap, turned out to be exactly what customers were waiting for.

The Bearback Promise

Every Bearback order ships from our warehouse. Every Bearback customer email is answered by a real human, usually within a day. Every product comes with a 2-year warranty with no fine print. If something doesn't work, we make it right. Bearback is run by a small family team based in Alpharetta, Georgia, and we stand behind every product we ship.

Three generations of our family have touched Bearback in some way. My dad invented it. Heather and I launched it as a family business - and our children have helped pack and ship orders! Our customers, many of whom write to tell us about their parents, their grandparents, their post-surgery recovery, their daily shower routine, are the reason we keep going.

Thank you for being part of the story.

- Heather and JP
Founders, Bearback
Alpharetta, Georgia

Browse the Bearback Line

• Bearback Back Scratcher
• Bearback Lotion Applicator
• Bearback Back Scrubber for Shower
• Bearback Back Shaver
• Bearback Dry Brush