About the project

Apex Cool Labs develops thermoregulation technology for athletes, first responders and people working in extreme heat. Its flagship product, the Narwhals, uses palm cooling to help the body shed excess heat during physical exertion.

Starting at the beginning

I first met Evy Lyons years earlier, when she hired me to rebrand another company where she was CMO. We stayed in touch, and when she and physicist Ariel Paul began building Apex Cool Labs, she brought me in again to create the identity for the new business.

At the time, Apex was introducing an unfamiliar product based on an equally unfamiliar idea: cooling the palms between periods of exertion could help the body manage excess heat and recover faster.

The job was to make a strange-looking new device and the science behind it feel credible, memorable and desirable.

Building the brand

We built the original identity around athletic performance: bold typography, dark industrial surfaces, cool blue accents and the copper of the product itself.

The result felt more like performance equipment than medical technology—technical and serious, but with enough personality to make a new category approachable.

Even the product name helped. Its protruding copper cooling tubes resembled tusks, turning an unusual piece of hardware into the Narwhals: a name people could actually remember.

Then the market got bigger

As the company grew, so did the use cases.

The Narwhals started appearing far beyond gyms and training sessions. South Carolina women’s basketball used them during its undefeated NCAA championship season. Edmonton Oilers players used them during their Stanley Cup Final run. Apex says the devices are used in the NBA and WNBA and have been used in Olympic and Paralympic basketball; Team USA women’s wheelchair basketball used them during the Paris Paralympics, where the team won silver.

At the same time, firefighters began adopting the technology to manage heat stress during demanding operations and training. In 2025, Apex won the National Safety Council Work to Zero Safety Innovation Challenge for its approach to workplace heat stress.

The brand had to grow with the business: still credible in elite sport, but equally at home in a fire station, industrial environment or safety presentation.

Growing with the company

Rather than treating the original brand launch as a finished project, I’ve continued working with Apex as an ongoing design partner across its website, campaigns, sales materials, events, packaging and other brand touchpoints.

That continuity has allowed the visual identity to evolve without losing what made it recognizable in the first place, even as the company moved into new markets and started attracting much larger audiences.

The visibility followed. WIRED devoted a major feature to the rise of palm cooling and the Narwhals. TIME named the product one of its Best Inventions of 2025. The Narwhals have appeared on ESPN during major sporting events.

They were also selected by The Feed, a major athlete-focused performance marketplace. The Feed says it handpicks the best products on the market and is now trusted by more than 1,000,000 athletes, making the listing another meaningful signal that the Narwhals had moved into the mainstream performance market.

The result

Apex Cool Labs has gone from an early-stage startup introducing an unfamiliar performance technology to a growing company whose product is being used in the NBA, WNBA, Olympics and Paralympics, as well as by firefighters and workers facing extreme heat.

The Narwhals have been recognized by TIME, featured by WIRED and ESPN, selected by The Feed, and Apex won the National Safety Council’s 2025 Safety Innovation Challenge. In 2026, the company is on track to double its sales over the previous year.

The brand I helped build at the beginning has grown with it—from the identity of a new performance-tech startup into a system supporting a company selling into some of the most demanding environments in sport and safety.