A Jefferson County man who gained international attention after designing a bullet-resistant groin protection cup – and testing it out himself – wants to work on a new idea.
Jeremiah Raber, who moved from St. Louis to High Ridge in 2006, has seen some success with the Nutshellz products he launched in 2013.
Raber, a 47-year-old former Muay Thai kickboxer, came up with an idea of creating a better groin protection cup after watching a UFC fight between Matt Hughes and Georges St. Pierre in 2006 or 2007.
“(Hughes) lost a fight to St. Pierre because Georges kicked him twice in the leg and both of them slid up and hit him in the (groin),” Raber said. “And I know that pain and I know how cups fail a lot of times. A lot of times that cup will move up with everything inside. My initial idea was to create a cup that wraps further underneath.”
Raber researched the cups on the market. He came up with an idea for a bullet-resistant cup made of Kevlar, carbon fiber and aerospace grade epoxies.
He created a Level 1 cup geared for athletes and Level 2 and Level 3 cups for police and military personnel.
“I’ve put $250,000 of my own money (into the company),” Raber said. “And at the time of the launching, I worked at the (St. Louis) Metropolitan Sewer District so I was making $60,000 a year. It was just nothing but sacrifice and just throwing all my money behind this thing.”
He got some attention when he set his sights on working with the military for a pelvic protection system to prevent injuries from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which ultimately didn’t happen.
“The one cool thing about the Nutshellz cup is … people like to talk about it,” Raber said. “It’s funny. It’s very newsworthy.”
Raber applied for “Shark Tank” and was accepted. He asked his friend, Matt Heck, to be his business partner for the show because he knew he had to bring his A game.
“I knew nothing about business,” he said. “I probably still don’t. I’m bored with business. All I want to do is create cool stuff.”
Raber said they prepared for the show for three or four months but got bumped off a week before filming.
Then Raber had a “wacky idea.”
“I’m going to wear this (Nutshellz) and let (Matt) shoot me,” he said.
Raber said he felt he needed to stand behind the cup that was geared for police.
He wore a bulletproof vest and protective paneling for his abdomen and legs while Heck shot him with a 22-caliber rifle.
“It wasn’t an AR-15,” he said. “An AR-15 would go right through my cup. But I actually make a Level 3. I have a patent on that as well. I make a Level 3 unit for like SWAT.”
“And I’m not going to do that test,” he added with a laugh.
The shooting stunt did what Raber wanted it to do. The video went viral, getting millions of views.
“So, that got me invited on to a show called ‘To Tell the Truth,’” he said.
The premise is for three contestants to claim to be a person with an unusual distinction or occupation. Four celebrity panelists guess which one is the real person.
“So I was the real Jeremiah Raber,” he said. “I went on there (in 2016), and the comedian Anthony Anderson was the host. Jalen Rose the basketball player was one of the celebrity guests and Betty White, she was 92 or 93. Daymond John from Shark Tank was one of the celebrity guests and NeNe Leakes – she was like on some Real Housewives thing.”
Then, on July 26, 2016, Raber and his business partner appeared on the reality show “West Texas Investors Club.”
“That was kind of like a hillbilly ‘Shark Tank,’” he said. “It’s these two oil tycoons from West Texas, and one was Rooster McConaughey, Matthew McConaughey’s older brother.
“They went out and they tested my product. They hit it with a baseball. They shot it and they used multiple pounds of high explosives to see if it would survive, and then we sat around a table and drank beer and pitched our product to them to see if we could get an investment. And we did. We made a deal.”
But the $130,000 deal fell through because it was contingent on the show having a second season, which it didn’t. He said they did receive a small fraction of the money.
“So me getting shot had a few benefits,” he said.
Raber, who no longer has a business partner, has had some success with Nutshellz but not enough for him to quit his day job as a union laborer.
Several professional sports teams worldwide have purchased the product.
“Like almost all the Major League Baseball teams’ catchers wear Nutshellz,” he said.
It started with Baltimore Orioles catcher Caleb Joseph in 2016.
“He had an injury where a foul tip exploded his testicle . . . and he was gun-shy even getting behind the plate anymore, so he started wearing Nutshellz and spoke to the Baltimore Sun about how Nutshellz has protected him since then, like he wouldn’t be in baseball without it,” Raber said.
He said the company got more press in 2018 when the St. Louis Cardinals bought a few Nutshellz cups after Yadier Molina was hit with a foul tip.
Raber said two weeks after the team purchased the cups, Francisco Pena got hit with a foul tip while wearing Nutshellz and was able to keep playing.
Now Raber has a new idea he wants to get off the ground and this one involves his love for dogs.
Raber, a small breeder of French bulldogs, said the idea came to him last year during the third day of a professional dog trainer program.
“We were discussing how in dog sport, police work, or just showing dogs, the practice is to keep dogs in kennels in cars,” he said. “If it’s hot outside, then the car is left running and the AC is blasting. Usually, one would drape the car with an aluminum blanket that would block the radiant energy a bit and fans would be placed on the kennel doors to blow air and try to cool ‘hot dogs.’
Raber saw it as a problem because when the car isn’t moving, the fans are barely enough to keep the AC cool.
He has created a prototype for Cooler Kennel. It is sized for his Frenchies, which are susceptible to overheating.
“It’s a kennel that the dog stays inside the inner box and we built a series of baffles that allow me to open it up and fill it with ice and then close the top,” he said.
The idea is to come up with a formula for how much ice is needed for certain temperatures.
“So you don’t overdo it,” he said.
On a cool summer day, Jeremiah Raber of High Ridge shows off what his product, a Cooler Kennel, can do.
Raber is working with someone on drawings that will be sent to someone to make molds of it.
He said he’d like to make the kennel in different sizes. He’d also like to retrofit police cars with police canine versions to keep canines from dying if all the fail-safes fail.
“There’s no failing with this,” he said. “You load this and it’s good for a specific period of time unless the human doesn’t remember to load it.”
Raber currently is looking for investors and funding to bring the product to the next phase of production.
He and his wife, Christina, have three children, three grandchildren and four French bulldogs. For more information about Raber, visit the website nutshellz.com.