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What Happened to Kettlebell Kings? The Full Story

Kettlebells / kettlebell kings
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This article discusses a civil lawsuit that remains unresolved in public records. Claims from that complaint are described here as allegations, not proven facts, and none have been tested at trial. Corporate ownership, financing, and website status for the companies named can change quickly; details below reflect publicly available sources as of July 2026. Cavemantraining is not affiliated with Kettlebell Kings, Factory 14, Razor Group, or Whele, LLC.

If you’ve bought kettlebells in the last decade, you probably know the name. Kettlebell Kings built its reputation on direct-to-consumer quality, five-figure Amazon review counts, and a founder story people liked: three guys from Rice University who started selling bells out of a shared conviction that kettlebell training deserved better gear and better information than it was getting.

If you’ve searched “what happened to Kettlebell Kings,” it’s likely because something looked off. Maybe your order sat unfulfilled for months. Maybe you noticed the brand’s Amazon listings are now sold by a third party instead of Kettlebell Kings directly. Maybe you just saw a size permanently out of stock and got curious.

The short version: Kettlebell Kings didn’t shut down. It was sold twice in under a year, the founders sued both buyers, and the company that ended up owning it walked into a financial crisis of its own. None of that happened publicly at the time, which is why the story reads differently depending on when you look.

Timeline: Kettlebell Kings’ Ownership at a Glance

  • 2012: Chad Price, Nehemiah “Bubba” Heard, and Jay Perkins found Kettlebell Kings in Austin, Texas.
  • 2021: Revenue passes $5 million; the company lands on the Inc. 5000 list.
  • November 2021: The founders sell Kettlebell Kings to UK aggregator Factory 14.
  • 2022: Factory 14 sells Kettlebell Kings on to Berlin-based Razor Group GmbH, reportedly without telling the founders in advance.
  • September 2022: A Berlin meeting between the parties over the ownership transition and earn-out terms, later cited in the lawsuit.
  • 2023: The founders file an eight-count lawsuit against Factory 14 and Razor Group for fraud, breach of contract, and unjust enrichment.
  • 2024–2025: Razor Group absorbs fellow aggregator Perch, then takes a $15 million emergency loan from outside investors in March 2025 to avoid a liquidity crunch.
  • August 2025: Razor Group (legally Whele, LLC) merges with fellow aggregator Infinite Commerce, forming a combined company that still operates under the Razor brand.
  • By January 2026: Kettlebellkings.com goes offline entirely. The company confirms via its official X account that it hasn’t shut down, but has moved its inventory exclusively to its Amazon store.
  • Today: Kettlebell Kings has no working website of its own and sells only through Amazon and third-party marketplace listings, with inconsistent fulfillment reported by recent buyers.

From Three Rice University Players to a $5 Million Kettlebell Brand

Chad Price, Nehemiah “Bubba” Heard, and Jay Perkins founded Kettlebell Kings in 2012 in Austin, Texas, according to Kettlebell Kings’ own company history and Rice University’s alumni association, which counts Price and Heard among its former players. All three had played football at Rice University and had used kettlebells during training; the company grew out of wanting affordable, well-made bells that weren’t easy to find at the time.

The business model was simple and, for a few years, unusually effective: sell direct through their own site and through Fulfillment by Amazon, skip retail shelf space entirely, and put marketing dollars into content and community instead of big-box distribution. They built a companion platform, Living.Fit, for workouts and coaching content, and rolled out live and virtual kettlebell certifications in 2019, later adding a battle ropes certification to the same catalog. A partnership with Men’s Health helped fund trainers from marginalized communities, and a standing $0-shipping offer on every kettlebell order became one of the brand’s steadier marketing hooks.

It worked. By 2021, Kettlebell Kings was pulling in more than $5 million in annual revenue and landed on the Inc. 5000 list at No. 2013, citing 220% three-year growth. The brand had, by its own count, more than 4,000 five-star reviews and a loyal base of CrossFit gyms, personal trainers, and home-gym owners who trusted the name.

That growth is exactly what made it an attractive acquisition target.

The 2021 Sale to Factory 14

In November 2021, the founders agreed to sell Kettlebell Kings to Factory 14, a UK-based e-commerce brand aggregator. An “aggregator,” in this context, is a company built specifically to buy up profitable independent Amazon and DTC sellers, fold them into a shared back-office operation, and use combined purchasing power and marketing budgets to grow them faster than the original founders could alone. Factory 14 was one of dozens of similarly structured companies that raised large amounts of institutional debt during 2020 and 2021 to do exactly that.

Factory 14’s pitch, according to the founders’ 2023 legal complaint, was that it had the resources to grow Kettlebell Kings into a $20 million company. Price and Heard stayed on to run day-to-day operations under consulting agreements, with an earn-out structure tied to the business’s future performance.

Problems started almost immediately. The founders’ complaint alleges Factory 14 regularly violated the purchase agreement’s terms, and that Price and Heard were blocked from buying inventory even when they had the sales revenue on hand to do it. For a company whose entire identity was built on being reliably in stock and shipping fast, that’s close to an existential problem. These are allegations from a civil complaint, not proven facts, and they haven’t been tested at trial.

The Undisclosed Flip to Razor Group

While Factory 14 was telling the founders it was still building toward that $20 million target, it was simultaneously negotiating its own sale, according to the lawsuit. Factory 14 was acquired by Razor Group GmbH, a Berlin-based aggregator, and Kettlebell Kings went with it as part of that deal. The founders say they weren’t told in advance.

The complaint, filed in Texas in 2023 by IL Ventures LLC (the Kettlebell Kings entity) along with Price, Heard, and Perkins, names Factory 14 UK Acquisition VI, Factory 14 UK Acquisition VII, and Razor Group GmbH as defendants. It lays out eight counts, including fraud, breach of contract, and unjust enrichment, and argues the Factory 14-to-Razor sale was one of several similar transactions Factory 14 used to inflate its own books ahead of future fundraising, using the credibility of brands like Kettlebell Kings to do it. Again, these are the plaintiffs’ allegations as filed, not established findings of fact.

Court filings describe a September 2022 meeting in Berlin meant to sort out the transition, followed by what the founders characterize as delay and stonewalling on recalculating the earn-out payment they were owed, which required access to accurate EBITDA figures they say Razor withheld. The complaint also alleges Razor Group stopped purchasing inventory altogether, stopped paying manufacturers and vendors on time, and left some consulting payments to the founders unpaid.

Public records don’t show how the lawsuit was resolved. No settlement announcement, dismissal, or verdict has been reported since the 2023 filing, and none of the defendants’ allegations against the founders, if any were made in response, turned up in public search results either.

Kettlebell Kings Wasn’t an Isolated Case

None of this happened in a vacuum. Factory 14 and Razor Group were both part of the Amazon aggregator boom that peaked around 2021, when investors poured billions into companies whose entire business was buying up successful third-party sellers. Razor Group alone has raised more than $1 billion in debt and equity funding since its 2020 founding.

The model depended on continued pandemic-era e-commerce growth that didn’t materialize. Thrasio, the aggregator that arguably started the trend, raised roughly $3.4 billion and hit a $10 billion valuation before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 2024, emerging about three and a half months later after eliminating roughly $495 million in debt. Perch, one of Razor’s main US competitors, tells a similar story: Victory Park Capital extended roughly $425 million in financing to Perch, with Apollo covering about $170 million of that through an asset-backed facility. By the time Perch sold itself to Razor Group in early 2024, its backers had already started looking for a buyer to limit losses. Performance kept declining after the merger, and by the end of that year, the preferred equity in the combined Razor-Perch business had reportedly been written down to zero.

Razor Group’s own finances have been shaky since. In March 2025, Bloomberg reported that outside investors agreed to a further $15 million loan to Razor Group as the company tried to avoid a liquidity crunch, the same report that first surfaced talks of a possible merger with fellow aggregator Infinite Commerce. That merger went through: in August 2025, Razor Group and Infinite Commerce announced they had merged into a combined company operating under the Razor brand, headquartered in Berlin and Boston. Razor Group’s legal name is Whele, LLC. It didn’t fix the underlying problem: specialist lender-tracking site BDC Credit Reporter reported in April 2026 that one of Razor’s lenders had written down all $25 million of its loans to the company to zero following the merger, booking $73 million in realized losses.

In other words, whatever happened to Kettlebell Kings’ inventory, fulfillment, and customer service after 2022 tracks a sector-wide cash crunch among aggregators generally, far more than any decision made about kettlebells specifically.

What Buying From Kettlebell Kings Looks Like Today

The most direct sign of trouble: kettlebellkings.com itself is no longer a working store. By January 2026, kettlebell forum users were reporting that the site “doesn’t exist anymore.” Kettlebell Kings’ own official X account confirmed the shutdown directly, posting “We are NOT out of business. Our inventory has been transferred from our website to our Amazon store, making shipping cheaper for our customers.” Discussion on the StrongFirst forum corroborates the timing and links to the same statement. So the company that once sold direct-to-consumer as its core identity now sells through Amazon and third-party marketplace listings only, with no storefront of its own.

The founders’ allegations line up with what customers have reported since. On kettlebell forums, buyers have described ordering popular sizes, like 40 kg bells, and waiting months past the estimated ship date, with the item alternately listed as in stock and sold out. One buyer on the StrongFirst community forum described placing an order in December 2022 that still hadn’t shipped by July of the following year, and connected the delay directly to the ownership change.

On third-party marketplaces, current Kettlebell Kings listings are frequently fulfilled by outside sellers rather than the brand itself. Walmart listings show items sold by accounts like “RGA Ben,” and recent reviews on that platform include complaints about receiving the wrong item entirely, such as a neoprene sleeve instead of the kettlebell it was meant to protect, and Slickdeals discussion of a November 2025 Amazon listing notes complaints about missing accessories and welds that don’t sit flush on adjustable models.

That said, the brand hasn’t collapsed into universal bad reviews. Basic cast-iron and powder-coat kettlebells still carry strong ratings on several platforms, and some 2025 buyers report solid, unremarkable purchases. The pattern that emerges is inconsistency: fulfillment quality now depends heavily on which product, which seller account, and which week you’re ordering from, in a way it didn’t when the founders ran operations directly.

Where the Founders Are Now

Chad Price and Nehemiah Heard are still listed in company records as co-founders and managing partners connected to Kettlebell Kings as of recent filings, while Jay Perkins is listed as a former co-founder. The company’s employee count was reported at 8 as of mid-2024, down from what it would have needed to support $5 million-plus in direct revenue at its peak. Living.Fit, the training platform the founders built alongside the kettlebell business, remains associated with them.

What isn’t publicly clear is how much day-to-day control, if any, the original founders currently have over sourcing, fulfillment, or customer service, given the lawsuit’s core claim that Razor Group cut them out of exactly those functions.

So, Should You Still Buy From Kettlebell Kings?

This isn’t a “the brand is a scam, avoid it” situation, and it isn’t a “nothing changed” situation either. It’s a brand that built its reputation under one ownership structure and is now operating under a different one that has its own well-documented financial problems.

If you’re considering a purchase, a few things are worth doing that weren’t necessary in 2019: check whether the specific listing is fulfilled by Kettlebell Kings directly or by a third-party seller account, read reviews from the last few months rather than relying on the brand’s older review volume, and expect the possibility of shipping delays on less common sizes, even when a product page shows it as in stock.

None of that means every purchase will go badly. It means the “buy from the trusted DTC brand” logic that made Kettlebell Kings popular in the first place doesn’t fully apply anymore, because the company making the promises isn’t the company that earned the trust.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Kettlebell Kings still in business?

Yes, but its own website is gone. By January 2026, kettlebellkings.com had gone offline, and the company confirmed on X that it hadn’t shut down but had moved its inventory exclusively to its Amazon store. It no longer operates a direct-to-consumer storefront of its own, and it has changed ownership twice since 2021.

Who owns Kettlebell Kings now?

Razor Group, legally Whele, LLC, controls the brand after acquiring it along with Factory 14 in 2022. Factory 14 had purchased Kettlebell Kings from its founders in November 2021. In August 2025, Razor Group merged with fellow aggregator Infinite Commerce, and the combined company continues to operate under the Razor brand.

Are the original founders still running Kettlebell Kings?

Chad Price and Nehemiah Heard are still listed as co-founders and managing partners in recent company records, but the founders’ own lawsuit alleges Razor Group cut them out of purchasing and operational decisions, so their current day-to-day role isn’t publicly clear.

Did the lawsuit against Factory 14 and Razor Group get resolved?

There’s no public record of a settlement, dismissal, or verdict since the suit was filed in 2023.

Is Kettlebell Kings quality still as good as before?

It’s inconsistent. Basic kettlebells still get strong reviews on some platforms, but recent buyers have reported shipping delays, wrong items shipped, and fulfillment issues that weren’t common complaints before the 2021-2022 ownership changes.

2009: Before Kettlebell Kings Existed

Cavemantraining started in 2009, three years before Kettlebell Kings was founded and well over a decade before any of the ownership changes above happened. Kettlebell Kings started as a kettlebell retailer and built its workouts, courses, and certifications on top of that later. Cavemantraining went the other way: workouts, courses, and certifications were the business from day one, and that’s still the business now. Kettlebell Kings’ own website is gone, by the company’s own account, folded into an Amazon-only storefront after the ownership changes above. Cavemantraining’s hasn’t gone anywhere.

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