Clear Ballistics: Shooting Upward with Business Recipe

Clear Ballistics owner Joel Edwards was in information technology at USA Truck when he started tinkering with recipes for ballistic gelatin. “I was looking at different jellies, different fishing lures, a lot of different products. I was mixing products together to see how they reacted,” he said.

Joel Edwards didn’t know much about guns or bullets, almost nothing about ballistic gelatin, and he had never run a business.

So, of course, 10 years after he and a friend starting experimenting with ballistics gelatin on a lark — to see if they could make it — Clear Ballistics of Fort Smith earned an award from the governor of Arkansas.

Clear Ballistics, the company that grew from Edwards’ garage laboratory, was awarded the Rising Star Award by Asa Hutchinson at the Governor’s Awards for Excellence in Global Trade in May.

Edwards said that he never intended to start a company or become wealthy; he just wanted to see if he could make the gelatin.

“I would have never thought to be here,” he said, but now he expects Clear Ballistics to surpass $1 million in sales in 2018.

Edwards, 36, was working in information technology for USA Truck Inc. of Van Buren when he and a family member began the discussion that changed the course of his professional career. The family member had been shooting printer rollers with a BB gun, so the two started talking about ballistics gel.

That led to Edwards and a friend, Mike Christly, beginning to tinker with different recipes for making the gelatin. Edwards stressed that neither he nor Christly knew diddly about chemistry or mixing components, but they both worked in IT at USA Truck — Edwards as a network engineer and Christly as a network supervisor.

“For about six to eight months, I would come home from work and I would go down to my garage and start mixing products together,” Edwards said.

“Your best friend in solving problems in IT is Google. People think that IT guys are brainiacs, and we are, but we are good at searching and we’re good at following other people’s trials and errors.

“A lot of it was online, but there was no one doing what we were doing. I was looking at things you would have never thought would come to be in our final products. I was looking at different jellies, different fishing lures, a lot of different products. I was mixing products together to see how they reacted. If you mix A and B together, what do you get?”

Rocky Start
Edwards said it took about eight months to develop a product he thought he could sell, and about three years to fine-tune the process into the gelatin Clear Ballistics manufactures today.

Edwards’ gel is 100 percent synthetic and clear and can be used to demonstrate the effects of gunfire. Other gels are clear, Edwards said, but a major competitor’s product is opaque and, unlike Clear Ballistics’ gel, has to be mixed.

If you’ve seen a crime show or a “Mythbusters” episode showing someone shooting a bullet into a square of jello-like substance in slow motion, you’ve seen ballistics gelatin.

The early years were not resounding successes. Edwards said his fledgling company faced a lot of closed doors from industry buyers who weren’t interested in his new clear ballistic gel.

In 2010, the first year he marketed the product, Edwards said, Clear Ballistics had about $1,000 in sales. Still, he felt he was onto something, so he kept refining the production process and thought creatively on drawing attention to his brand.

He turned to the direct-to-consumer market and found partners in YouTube users. YouTubers — people who make or try to make their names with entertaining online videos — made videos of Clear Ballistics gel being shot or blown up or subjected to whatever creatively destructive thing that struck the YouTuber’s fancy.

“First four years, we relied heavily on YouTube advertising,” Edwards said. “We knew YouTubers were a cheap way of getting your name out there. The consumer market for us was almost 90 percent of our business. Then a lot of interesting things started to happen for us. All those doors that were shut really started taking notice of us because YouTubers started having a voice and people were listening to their voice.”

Edwards was still making the gel and running the company out of the garage of his home in Fort Smith. The effort had swallowed up the downstairs living room and an adjacent space in addition to the garage, but Edwards was still doing Clear Ballistics after his workday at USA Truck was done.

That changed four years ago when his father, Roger, visited from Wisconsin, saw his son’s home filled with bakery ovens and blocks of clear gelatin and suggested, as a father would, that perhaps the son might consider moving his business. Joel Edwards said the company wasn’t making enough to make that move for another eight months, at which point Clear Ballistics moved into a 4,000-SF building on Zero Street in Fort Smith.

Edwards, with the blessing of his wife, Alexandra, also quit his USA Truck job to devote all his attention to the startup.

Expanding Markets
Edwards said the direct consumer was an important part of the company’s early survival, but eventually industry clients began to dominate sales.

A common customer is an ammunition manufacturer buying blocks of Clear Ballistics — or a body mold of the gel — to take to demonstrations at local, state or federal law enforcement agencies. They show what bullets do to the gelatin, which closely simulates the effects seen on human tissue.

A law enforcement agency bought some gel after its officers shot a man wearing a bullet-resistant vest. The agency wanted to determine the effectiveness of its firearms and ammunition by firing into a body gel-mold wearing a vest.

Edwards said one promising market is Europe, where there is less competition for clear ballistic gel. Clear Ballistics has Canadian and European sales representatives to create business. The company still runs leans with three full-time employees and two part-timers. It ousources the rest of its work.

Edwards said Clear Ballistics is also going to focus on expanding its medical-field business; the company’s body molds can be used for medical research into bullet wounds and other injuries.

“For us, we don’t promote our gel as an object to show how to kill more effectively; we don’t promote it as a war item; we don’t promote it as pretty much anything,” Edwards said. “We give a gel that can be used for good and it can be used for bad. It can be used for life-saving techniques, solving crimes.

“The medical industry for us is huge. We can sell for a lot more and sell a lot less. For us, our goal is to put Clear Ballistics out there and keep it growing and keep reinventing it.”