You know a product has been missing from the market when it goes up on Kickstarter and receives 10 times the amount of funding it requested. Recently, that product turns out to be the FLEXR pull up bar, very surprisingly from our research one of the first of its kind. 

Frequent any house occupying swarms of college dudes and you're likely to see a typical pull up bar awkwardly stored behind their Papasan chair or by their towers of protein powder. Founders Derek Pankaew and Eric LaFleche appear to have designed the FLEXR to elevate the status of the pull bar as a legitimate design object, but also to solve a problem that frankly should not be that difficult to solve. Considering the company has already raised over $46,000 dollars on a $5,000 goal with 28 days to go, looks like it was high time a designer came up with even a simple solution to this nonsensical problem.

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According to their Kickstarter page, the almost 3 feet by 10 inch equipment folds down about 20 percent at 2 feet by 1 feet. As you can see from the animation above, it isn't the tiniest object you'll ever lug around, although it's considerably better than a standard pull up bar. FLEXR does seem to sacrifice size for the sake of easy foldability and taking away the need for disassembly, which lessens the possibility of losing essential equipment hardware. 

We should also note that the founders of this company are not designers but instead entrepreneurs who hired on designers to help discover a new solution—this inevitably means there is more room for improvement. However, creating something that can at least be easily folded into a duffel bag and stuffed away is a good start. 

Designers, how would you redesign the pull up bar? Is there any way to guarantee more compactness without the risk of losing parts through disassembly? Let us know in the comments below.

FLEXR is currently running a funding campaign on Kickstarter, which you can find here