Recovery For Athletes touches every aspect of an athlete's life

Jared Hiltzik has the goods.

A former professional tennis player, Hiltzik used the latest gear and technology to recover, stay in shape, and keep his game strong.

Because he had the goods, other athletes asked about them.

"I'd be using my compression boots or something and someone would ask me where I bought those. I'd say, 'Oh, I went to this website,'" said Hiltzik, an all-stater at New Trier High School and an All-America at the University of Illinois.

"And they'd ask me about a different product. I'm like, 'I went to this other website.'

"So then I'm like, all right, let's create a website where you can buy them all in one," he said.

Voila. He'd hatched the concept for the 4-year-old business, Recovery For Athletes.

An online retailer and authorized dealer for nearly 200 industry-leading brands, Recovery For Athletes is part of a growing health and wellness industry. In December 2021 the Global Wellness Institute predicted that by 2025 the health and wellness market would be valued at about $7 trillion.

The company has ridden that growth, increasing its customer base more than 1,700% from 489 customers in 2018 to 9,119 in 2022.

Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, Recovery For Athletes offers fitness equipment, products geared toward athletic recovery, nutritional products and supplements, and items such as saunas and massage chairs.

"We just want to be a company that brings, with a very reliable customer service presence, a one-stop shopping platform that gives you the ability to learn about and purchase products that are among the industry's top needs that you would have for an athlete," said Adam Singer, Recovery for Athletes' co-owner and business development executive.

A Stevenson High School graduate from Buffalo Grove, Singer, 31, joined the company in October 2022. That was several years after co-founders Jared and Aron Hiltzik started Recovery For Athletes in September 2018. Their first infusion of outside capital came in 2021.

Like his older brother, Aron Hiltzik was an ATP professional before their company started blowing up. Both their names are all over the University of Illinois men's tennis record book.

Wilmette natives Jared, 28, and Aron, 26, brainstormed the company name while in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, while both were still on the ATP Tour. Jared peaked at about a 330 tour ranking, he said, with Aron in the 700s.

Jared, who brought prior e-commerce experience to Recovery For Athletes, first started filing customer orders while in Uzbekistan for a tennis tournament, he said.

In the company's infancy the Hiltzik brothers rotated their responsibilities with their tennis schedules. While one practiced, the other would fulfill orders and cover the phone lines. They also crisscrossed the country to personally enlist manufacturers to join their product roster.

After about a year of that, seeing positive results with the business but diminishing returns on a tennis circuit where travel expenses can be an issue, the brothers put their entire focus on Recovery For Athletes.

"It's different," Jared Hiltzik said from company headquarters. "I'm not on the road three weeks of the month anymore. I'm making money instead of losing over $50,000 a year playing tennis."

The company's principals, who include ATP pro Bjorn Fratangelo as an adviser, all have sports backgrounds and live in cities from coast to coast. Jared Hiltzik and his wife moved east, where Recovery For Athlete has office and warehouse space; Aaron relocated to Denver. Others are in Chicago, New York and California.

Working remotely, management and staff nimbly communicate with each other, their customers and their purveyors.

"It doesn't hinder us because everyone's attentive and everyone's committed," said Singer, who has a State Street office in Chicago. Singer has experience in a variety of sports, including coaching and operations with the University of Hartford men's basketball program.

In only a short time Recovery For Athletes has forged mutually beneficial partnerships with an extensive list of brands available at recoveryforathletes.com. They range from the latest technology to weight-room standbys such as York Barbell. An emphasis also is to provide customers with information on products across multiple sectors.

"We started as a company focused on helping people recover and get back to performing at their highest level," said Josh Trueblood, a senior manager specializing in sales and business development. He played tennis at Wartburg College then earned a master's degree in sports administration from Valparaiso University.

"We were and continue to focus on injury recovery but have grown to be a part of every aspect of an athlete's life, from recovery to fitness to nutrition, and now we delve into mental performance," Trueblood said.

The company does stock some products in Charlotte but mainly takes customer orders and places them with a manufacturer, which then ships the products directly to the customer. That saves people money.

Recovery For Athletes guides the entire process.

"We're all about customer service," Jared Hiltzik said.

He has the goods. And he'll vouch for them.

"There's a lot of stuff out there that doesn't work," he said. "Marketing, it's whatever it is, but everything that we sell is something that we have used personally and can put our name behind because we know it works."