About Us
Hi there! We’re the Baders and we’re the Owners/Creators of THB (The Hockey Boys).
Like many Canadians, our story begins with hockey. With 3 young boys (Theo, Harry and Bo… The inspiration for THB (our hockey boys), hockey is a big part of our lives. We’re at an arena multiple times a week, cheering on our 3 stars! And like every hockey family can attest, when we get home all that gear just went anywhere you can find room. Maybe you have a certain corner of your basement where you unload the gear, maybe you have a drying rack that you tediously dress up after every practice/game. In any event, what was available to dry your equipment today is space consuming, disorganized and/or time consuming. We’re here to help.
Byron (the dad) stumbled upon the idea a few years ago. He thought there must be a way to better organize hockey equipment. Something that all fits in one solution, that rolls up and unrolls, almost like a toiletry bag for equipment. Not to mention the time spent unpacking gear and packing it all up again. Assuming that this product must exist, he searched every hockey/ sports store as well as online for anything similar. And there was nothing close. So Byron set out to make it. Starting with a friend and his mom’s sewing machine, they made a rough prototype of the bag. This evolved into having professional samples manufactured. At this point, Theo (the 1st born) and Harry (the 2nd) were thriving in their little Timbit hockey careers. Naturally, we brought out the sample bags from the garage to hang all their gear and they worked like a charm for our hockey family!
Candace (the Bader mom), like a lot of moms, likes a neat and tidy house. She keeps a clean home and she was thrilled that the bag could hang up all the gear, keeping a clean area in our modest mudroom. She also remarked about how the bag, with its mesh pockets, dried the equipment. And, unlike a lot of players’ gear that we’d come across, our boys’ gear didn’t smell… like at all. Fast forward a few more years and we have added our 3rd and final boy (Bo) and… we now have 4 sets of equipment. Using the last prototype bag for Bo, our equipment was all neatly contained, organized and smelling fresh!
In 2024, Candace approached Byron and said we should bring the bag to market as it could be really helpful for hockey families, just like ours. Byron agreed with little convincing and got to work on the 2.0 version of the bag, finding a supplier that could make the full vision come to life. Taking all the learnings from the first run of prototypes, Byron, Candace and the new supplier, working hand-in-hand, improved the usability, material, and functionality of the bag and brought in vibrant and fun colors. Eventually the perfect drying bag was created, and THB (The Hockey Boys) and the Travel Locker were born!
THB is dedicated to helping busy hockey families organize and manage the chaos that all that gear brings. The Travel Locker is intricately designed in Canada for the Canadian hockey family by a Canadian hockey family, with a standard and quality that we can be proud of. The bags are sized and designed to hang in any locker room, closet or hotel room. They are designed to enclose all loose small equipment (shin pads, elbow pads, gloves, neck guard and jock) with hooks to hang the bigger pieces like shorts, helmets and shoulder pads. They are sized to perfectly fit in most any existing hockey bag as its own independent insert. They are made with high quality materials to be water and sweat resistant, extremely durable and leaving equipment free to dry in open air and leave that stink behind.
We love our Travel Lockers and use them every day and we hope you’ll love them just the same!
The Baders