Whirly Board – Helping people of all skill levels find balance

Rachel Kroeger

Staff

October 13, 2025

HAZLEHURST – Erik Olsen said his love of board sports – “I’m a snowboarder, wakeboarder, skateboarder; I ride all the boards” – led him to give entrepreneurship a whirl and create a board specially designed for balance and “board enthusiasts” alike.

The Whirly Board, Olsen said, was born out of his realization that roller boards made to assist in balance training didn’t emulate how it really felt to ride a sport board.

“I had the roller style – the Bongo Board, an INDO BOARD and some homemade roller boards that I had made – but the roller concept just didn’t feel like it applied to real life,” he said. “For me, it didn’t feel like it helped with the board sports I was into.”

At that time, more than 10 years ago, Olsen said he sought a balance board that would help him enhance his rotation skills.

“That was something I struggled with a little bit – spinning 360s and 540s,” he said. “I just got uncomfortable as I spun around, so I wanted something that would help me train that spinning motion.”

Olsen said he built the first Whirly Board using a skate deck, a bowling ball and two pool balls from a local alley and bar near his previous home in Lake Mills.

“I just cut a bowling ball in half and put it on a skateboard,” he said. “Then I cut two pool balls in half and put them on the nose and tail [for] something to push off [of] in order to initiate the spin. Then it turned out I could actually tip up and spin around on the pool balls too, so it added a whole other dynamic.”

Finding he “had a lot of fun with the prototype” Whirly Board, Olsen said he home-manufactured a few more and shared them with friends to try out.

“Everybody [said], ‘This thing feels pretty legit,’” he said, “So, I said, ‘All right, well, I am going to quit my job and start this [business].’”

From across the country and back

Using his savings, Olsen said he decided to travel and pitch the Whirly Board to retail stores on the country’s west side – leaving southern Wisconsin and his career in manufacturing insurance sales.

“I traveled around with a car full of Whirly Boards I had built and planned on putting them in board shops out west and snowboarding a lot along the way – that was kind of the secret agenda,” he laughed.

However, Olsen said the product didn’t “take off” like he had hoped.

“My whole western tour, I had sold maybe 50 or 70 boards,” he said. “So, [I thought], ‘I better go home and figure this out.’”

Just before leaving Wisconsin, Olsen reconnected with his former high school girlfriend – now his wife – Joanna.

“We had dated in high school a long time ago, and we kind of reunited right about the time I started this, but I was already leaving town, so I went out west,” he said. “Ultimately, I came back and we started running [the business together] and launched it online.”

Officially launching the product around 2015 – first on the third-party market website Grommet – Olsen said it wasn’t long before Whirly Board’s demand skyrocketed past its production capabilities.

“[Grommet] made a video, sent it out to their subscriber list and on the first day, [someone] called at like 11 and [asked] when I was going to get more boards… [because they had] sold through everything I had available,” he said. “I was like, ‘Holy crap, I better get to work.’”

Leveraging the relationships he built with manufacturers over the span of his insurance career, Olsen said he approached a local company about helping him manufacture components of the Whirly Board in order to meet demand.

“I had a good relationship with a company, right next door to my house in Lake Mills, called Seljan Company, and they do a lot of plastics manufacturing,” he said. “So, I just brought my bowling ball prototype in, and was like, ‘Hey, can you guys help me do something like this?’ And they were super helpful.”

Olsen said another local company he worked with – Atlas Gaskets Inc. – helped him “cut out the grip tapes that go on top” of his boards.

“Pretty much everything at the very beginning was all made in Wisconsin – I actually found a skateboard manufacturer in Wisconsin back then, too,” he said. “So, all the components were made in Wisconsin. I brought them into my garage [and] put them together.”

Initially, Olsen said his home served as both his assembly and shipping facility.

“I’d have the production/assembly area in the garage, then we’d bring them downstairs and I had the whole basement set up for boxing and shipping [the boards],” he said.

However, when he and Joanna became pregnant with their first son, Lander, in 2018, Olsen said they decided to move their family – and therefore the business – to North Central Wisconsin.

“Our families are both from northern Wisconsin,” he said. “Her family is from Hazlehurst and mines in Minocqua. So, we decided we should move up north, hopefully to have some help from the grandparents.”

Hand-assembled quality

First moving Whirly Board production into Joanna’s parents’ house – “they go to Texas in the winter…, so they needed somebody to live in their house anyway” – Olsen said it wasn’t long before the business took over their garage and then their pole barn.

“As time went on, we outgrew that,” he said. “Now we’re at a commercial location just up the road, actually fewer than a couple miles from the house. So, that worked out really well.”

After the Wisconsin-based supplier of Whirly Board’s skate decks closed due to the owner’s retirement, Olsen said they initially looked for another domestic manufacturer to take over production.

“We ended up going to China [to source our] skateboards, and that’s not what we wanted to do, but everybody we contacted in the U.S. was just a dead end,” he said. “But we’re always looking for local suppliers – we want to have local suppliers – but due to necessity, we’ve gone to China for [the decks], and some of the newer parts that we’re developing.”

Offering a lifetime warranty on all Whirly Boards, Olsen said ensuring the quality of his components is paramount to maintaining the quality of his product.

“I’m definitely strict on that [because] we offer a lifetime guarantee on our product,” he said. “I build them to last, [so] I have no problem replacing it, [and] if something does go wrong, I consider that our fault.”

Despite sourcing some components from outside the U.S., Olsen said each board is carefully hand-assembled in North Central Wisconsin.

“We still assemble all the boards ourselves here,” he said. “It’s a good way to maintain quality [because] you [can] make sure everything’s perfect when they’re put together.”

In 2020, Olsen said he and Joanna had their second son, Paxton, and shortly after – during the COVID-19 pandemic – demand for Whirly Boards spiked again.

“Everybody was looking for at-home fitness, bringing their standing desk home, setting up their home office – so things were really crazy, especially during the holidays,” he said. “We were selling about 100 boards a day during the holiday season. At that time, we had four guys building [the boards], and we were pumping out about 100 a day. That was our capacity.”

The board and its design, Olsen said, have evolved over time – expanding its use case and customer base.

“Our standard boards [have] a hard plastic center ball and hard plastic end balls,” he said. “However, one of the problems is that we can’t really use that on hardwood floors or tile.”

To address this, Olsen said Whirly Board’s new design features a hard plastic cover held on by magnets that, when removed, reveals a hard rubber center ball.

“So, we still have the hard plastic ball for the advanced user…, but then there’s an easier ball that fits underneath that, and they’re removable,” he said. “The hard black ball comes off, the green one underneath [is] like half the height – so it’s easier and flatter – and then they both come off, [so] you can use just the skateboard deck with the two end balls.”

Olsen said this design allows anyone who wants to work on their balance the opportunity to utilize a Whirly Board.

“The idea is more of a progression journey,” he said. “So, you can start at a very basic [level] and work your way up to the more advanced features.”

On Whirly Board’s website (whirlyboard.com), customers can also shop a number of different accessories – including mats made from recycled tires.

“Those are locally made at Atlas Gaskets,” he said.

Future balance

With both himself and Joanna holding biochemistry degrees – “which we’re not using” – Olsen said they’re eventual goal for the business is to grow Whirly Board into a fitness lifestyle company.

“That’s our goal for the future – to create more value content and promote an active lifestyle, and my wife has much bigger visions than I even do,” he said. “She’s working on developing a formula [for] something that will help your balance system, because there’s really no supplements out there that are specifically for balance. [But], there are specific mechanisms in your body, in your biological system, that are for balance.”

As for Lander and Paxton – currently seven and five years old, respectively – Olsen said he always welcomes their company in his shop.

“They’re [in] kindergarten and first grade now, [so] they’re not necessarily involved in the business, but they come with me to the shop and play with boxes and draw on the boxes a lot,” he laughed.

Visit Whirly Board’s aforementioned website, or its Facebook page, for more.