Tom Brady could not have been a seven-time Super Bowl champion and three-time NFL most valuable player without elite protection behind the line of scrimmage.
Erin and Lee Hanson, champions in a similarly competitive arena, embody the same lofty standards as they create and advocate for protection of two different kinds.
The co-owners of Guardian Innovations, LLC have developed several sports-related products to protect young bodies, led by the flagship Guardian Cap XT—a soft-shell helmet cover made of closed cell foam designed to reduce repetitive impact that in 2022 was mandated by the National Football League for all teams’ use during contact practices. This self-described “calling” is reinforced by their commitment to intellectual property protection for their products, not just to defend their substantial research and development investments but to safeguard against infringers putting athletes in harm’s way with inferior knock-offs.
This dual mission, part of a lifetime of service for the public good, has earned the Hansons the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation’s 2025 Inventor of the Year Award.
Patience and IP foresight
Lee and Erin Hanson exemplify how IP is much more than a powerful, proven means to exclude illegal competitors. It’s a gateway to opportunity for other possibilities and successes related to inventions, sometimes even unforeseen.
They co-founded Guardian Innovations in 2010 after being approached to redesign the traditional football helmet. They knew the sports equipment business was not ready for their idea. They knew the NFL wasn’t ready for it. But they also knew something had to be done.
As founder of The Hanson Group, LLC—a materials science company specializing in advanced raw materials for the coatings, adhesives and plastics industries—Lee Hanson has extensive knowledge and a long track record related to innovative technologies. Nonetheless, he said, “The industry was not ready for that whole engagement of a soft-sided helmet.
“Our outlook was, ‘We know it works; we know there’s something here. If we don’t do it, who the heck is going to do it?’”
Erin Hanson said: “For us, it was a calling to serve. We felt very grateful that we had been very successful as a financing group and felt like somebody needs to do something, and nobody was stepping up.”
Even without an outside investor or possible partner, the Hansons went to work securing IP for the Guardian Cap.
“When we created the Guardian Cap, our patent attorney, Chris Arena, worked all different angles and wrote continuations on it—and utility patents and design patents and everything else,” Lee said. “We took it to the marketplace. After the first two or three years, people were laughing at us.”
But after dogged persistence and NFL research that showed the efficacy of the product—a 52 percent reduction in NFL concussions, according to Erin—the couple’s IP foresight proved invaluable.
The biggest competitors in the helmet industry, who shot down the idea of a soft-shell helmet, learned that the Hansons’ protection was bulletproof.
“At Schutt, for example, their CEO came to us,” Lee said. “He was a patent attorney. He said, ‘Lee and Erin, you’ve created something that works and works really well, and you wrapped patents around it—and there’s not a thing we can do about it. We can’t knock you off.’”
Although foreigners constantly try to infringe, “Manufacturers in the United States won’t even try to touch it,” Erin said. “They won’t even try to make an iteration of it because our patent game is pretty dang strong.”
Convincing the NFL
The Hansons are humbled yet proud that the Guardian Cap survived the industry’s early doubters; players who didn’t like its aesthetics; the endless scrutiny of the traditional football coach; and so much more to become common equipment at NCAA and NFL contact practices. The debut of a 2.0 version this year, featuring a sleeker design that allows teams to customize with team logos, was another milestone event.
They’re also surprised—because the NFL was not part of their original plan.
As parents of five active kids, protecting them from sports injuries was the foremost motivation. The Guardian Cap “started out as a youth safety product,” Lee said. “We weren’t targeting the NFL. We were targeting youth—young, developing brains with parents who have control over the safety of their child.”
“But when the college teams started using Guardian Caps and then the NFL, we realized when it happens at the top level it all filters down. Colleges want to replicate the NFL, high school wants to replicate college, and so on.”
She recalled attending an NFL concussion symposium in 2010, soft-shell helmet in hand.
She reminded that this was “pre-concussion movement, pre-CTE, pre everything. So at the time, they didn’t want to change the look of the game. They didn’t want to change the sound of the game. They wanted a different outcome but without changing any of the parts.”
Adding to the resistance was football’s macho mentality: “The players want a different future outcome for themselves. But we’re asking them to be the tough guys, right?
“If you show up at practice and you’re that one guy and say, ‘Hey, I’m interested in my future health so I’m gonna wear this Guardian Cap, the coach is going to look at you and say, ‘This guy is smart’—or, ‘This guy is soft.’”
When entire college teams—including Clemson University—went with the Guardian Cap, the tide began changing. (That number has surpassed 275.) Practicality began to prevail. “Coaches were like, ‘I’m not going to lose my star player in a practice drill on a Wednesday.’”
As Lee Hanson said, “The best ability is availability.”
The caps’ big NFL break came in 2015, when the league held another helmet safety conference and announced the first Head Health Challenge. “We applied to that, which put us on their radar,” Erin said. “They came back to us in 2021 and said they were doing more extensive testing.
“The NFL is so much more invested in player safety than people realize. They have tons of safety data and cameras at every practice, feedback from players. When they saw that 53 percent reduction in concussions, they were blown away.”
Anecdotal evidence amped up the momentum.
“We had former players who were now repping other manufacturers’ products who said the before and after was astounding: ‘I went to class, and my head wasn’t spinning. I didn’t have a headache. I wasn’t fuzzy.’ Injuries came down, including from quarterbacks’ hands hitting helmets. We knew were on to something.”
They got a voicemail from NFL legend Peyton Manning, ordering caps for his son’s eighth-grade team. The challenge had been met, she said, to “prove that you’re causing something not to happen.”
Such proof entails extensive testing—for the Hansons, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Two years of testing preceded the sale of the first Guardian Cap in 2012.
“We continue to test,” Erin said. “Universities have done testing. The NFL is heavily invested in testing through its lab, Biocore. Every time we have a new iteration, that thing gets tested before it ever sees the light of day.”
They wish infringers had the same commitment. When the Hansons hear about a knock-off, Erin said, “We pick up the phone and say, ‘Whatever it takes, please do not put those on your players’ helmets. You don’t know where those came from, or the testing behind them.’”
One essential question
A shared emphasis on testing can help legitimize and grow a product. Shared intellectual property protection can facilitate collaborations between entities of all different types and sizes.
Guardian Innovations has no investors—“It’s just us,” Lee Hanson said—but when the company receives collaboration requests from inventors, an elementary rule starts all conversations.
“We have people come to us all the time now saying, ‘Can you help us get our project started?’ My first question is, ‘Do you have IP around it?’
“If they have IP around it, they’ve taken a big step.”
Erin sums up their thought process: “We’re not interested in going down a road with somebody and something that you put all of your time and energy into, and then it’s ripped off three months later.”
IP is “definitely a necessary thing for fundraising,” Lee said. “We just never raised funds.”
“We had people come to us in the beginning wanting to invest,” Erin said, but “we didn’t know if [the Guardian Cap] would make it. We didn’t want to lose anybody else’s money.”
With the product and IP securely established, the Hansons are free to pursue opportunities related to their invention—and other inventions—that include marketing, advertising and more.
“It gives you protection around the product, protection around the brand,” Erin said. “When you are investing so much money into a marketing team and building a brand, the last thing you want is someone to come out with the same name, the same logos.”
Little wonder that between The Hanson Group and Guardian Innovation, the bulging toteboard currently shows 23 patents and six trademarks that are registered.
A palette of purpose
Far from being a one-trick pony, the Hansons and Guardian steadily and purposefully fortify their stable of safety-themed innovation.
When the Hansons set out to redefine the football helmet in 2010, one of their sons was beginning to play football. Three years later, a son who was a lacrosse goalie sparked the motivation for another game changer.
“We were at one of the safety conferences for the Cap,” Lee said, “and one of the technical guys said, ‘We are having problems with the lacrosse balls. They are getting harder and harder over time, hitting players and breaking orbital sockets, jaws and more.’”
This common problem with traditional balls, made from vulcanized rubber overseas, result in their becoming greasy and hard. Leveraging their more than 25 years as owners of a chemical engineering business, Lee and Erin developed the PEARL ball—the only lacrosse balls manufactured in America and formulated out of an elastomer that meets lacrosse ball specs and standards without changing over time.
With the increasing popularity of flag football, especially with girls, Erin is proud of Guardian’s LOOP headband for non-helmeted sports. Stylish and comfortable, it reduces the impact of incidental hits in a fast-paced game.
“You really didn’t want those 5-, 6-, 7-year-olds playing tackle,” she said. “That’s when we said the headband is the way to go.”
Any helmeted sport poses the constant threat of the wrong kind of hit in the wrong place. “Fifty percent of helmet-to-helmet hits are facemask to facemask,” Lee said. “No one is doing anything about these hits”—so enter the Guardian Chinstrap, developed in partnership with SoftShox and Stanford University, which he said has been shown to reduce about 40 percent of impact during such collisions.
Guardian’s innovation spans the whole field, figuratively and literally.
In the turf industry, the company created Guardian Infill, a USDA Certified bio-based TPE used as a sustainable alternative to crumb rubber, and Guardian Pad, a high-impact, recycled polyurethane underlayment for turf fields. Lee also recently launched Catalyst Technologies and the first commercially viable polyurethane disposable glove that features superior tear resistance, tensile strength and flexibility compared to latex and nitrile gloves—without causing skin irritation. They have the potential to become ubiquitous in hospital, cleaning and food processing environments.
The new and newest
Possibilities excite the Hansons as much as what they have accomplished. More innovation—and the resultant IP—are constants.
They’re already working on the 3.0 version of the Guardian Cap; the NCAA will use the 2.0 this year. In the past several months, they have been working with the University of Massachusetts on a thin material to be worn under a baseball hat that reduces the impact to the head from batted balls, which Lee said have an average exit velocity of 83 mph.
The Hansons say their professional skillsets—he a lifetime chemical engineer, she with a Bachelor of Science and a concentration on math—are diverse yet complementary.
“I love numbers and I love logic, so that helps,” Erin said. “But the best training for the company that we’ve grown is raising a big family. You learn how to organize a lot of things—time management, motivation, managing expectations.”
Speaking of numbers, she said their 2025 goal is not in revenue: “Our goal is to serve 500,000 athletes in some way by the end of the year—how many different individuals we’re making safe in some way.”
“God gives everybody a purpose,” Lee Hanson said. “This is one of our purposes.”
IPOEF Inventor of the Year Awards Celebration
Lee and Erin Hanson will be honored as part of ceremonies at the JW Marriott in Washington, D.C., on December 16 to celebrate accomplishments in the fields of IP, innovation and creativity, with a shared purpose of raising money to support IP education.
IP practitioners, IP professionals, government officials and attendees from all over the world take part in this event to promote IP awareness and support the work of IPOEF to further efforts of promoting an understanding of and respect for intellectual property and its value to society.
To register: ipoef.org/awards-celebration
Past winners: ipoef.org/inventor-of-the-year
