1991
A blow to the chest
In the spring of my first year of middle school, older students called a group of us out and beat us. One blow landed in the middle of my chest. I didn’t tell my parents. By the time it stopped hurting, the bone had set where it had been pushed, and I grew up round-shouldered, short of breath on the stairs, with my head drifting forward.
I didn’t talk about it for a long time. What I understand now is that every product I have made has had the same first customer: that boy. If it hurt him, I changed it. If he said it was comfortable, it shipped.
Training
“You have no talent for this”
I chose physical therapy for a simple reason: I wanted to fix my own body first. After my military service I went to learn massage properly. A man who had done it for more than ten years watched me for a few weeks and told me I had no talent for it and should find other work.
Around then I met someone three years older who had been called a master within three months. I asked for his secret. There was none, he said. His parents had died, he had two younger siblings to feed, and he practiced on two or three hours of sleep. I stopped talking about talent that day. My rule since has been not to leave myself a way out. I later passed the national licensing exam with 198 out of 200.
In the clinic
They came back a week later
The longer I treated people, the more I ran into the same wall. However well a session went, a week later they were back, stiff in the same places.
I came to believe that loosening a body was never the hard part. Keeping it that way through the rest of the week was. Which meant people needed a way to lean their own weight into the places my thumbs had worked, either side of the spine, without me in the room.
The roller
Two versions that failed
I bought dozens of foam rollers and cut them apart to work out where a groove should go, how wide and how deep. The first DeepRoller was molded in EPP. People told us it was too much on tight spots and that it slid across the floor. That was the first failure.
The second was a resin mold, and it came out too hard. We threw it out. The third was premium integral skin foam. The three rollers sold here are made of it.
I still put every new product on my own body before anyone else’s, and I keep changing it until I am convinced. My body isn’t a forgiving test. That’s the point of using it.
Until 2025
Russia found us first
We didn’t go looking for export. A buyer in Russia came to us, and for a few years most of what we exported went there by the container. Then the war went on, payments and freight tightened, and because ninety-nine percent of our exports went to that one market, our sales fell with it.
The lesson was simple and expensive: put roots down in more than one country.
2025–2026
New York, and 1,055 people
In August 2025 we set up DEEPROLLER, INC. in New York. The rollers are still made in Korea; the company that sells them to you is American.
Early in 2026 we put the Travel Roller on Kickstarter. 1,055 backers pledged $58,894, 29 times what we had asked for. I watched the first notifications come in at three in the morning with my wife, who has kept the books for our work for twenty years. Neither of us said anything for a while.
Why I am telling you this
Because a roller is a small thing to spend money on and an annoying thing to get wrong. You’re buying from someone who has been wrong before, more than once, and kept going. If one of the three sounds like your week, you could start with that one.
— Hee Soo (Mason) Kim, founder, Medsapiens Co., Ltd.