Bolu Ojo Couldn't Find a Welding Cap That Fit Her Hair. So She Built One.

The SparkDefy cap doing the job it was designed for. The pouch fully encloses long hair, braids and locs against sparks.

A Problem She Was Living

Boluwarin "Bolu" Ojo, founder of SparkDefy.

Ojo describes the company in one sentence: a workwear brand making functional, comfortable headwear designed to protect and accommodate hair in the trades, starting with welding caps for long and thick hair. The idea came out of Howes Welding and Metal Fabrication, the shop where she works and where she found what she calls her why. Traditional caps left her hair exposed. The same was true for other welders with braids and locs, and for electricians, pipefitters and construction workers who wear the same headwear.

What she built is a fire-resistant cap with a full-coverage pouch that encloses long hair completely. When she entered the 2025 CEO Global Pitch Competition, her submission called it the first of its kind.

Her industrial design training is why the product is not just a bigger hat. The discipline teaches you to find problems, ask why, listen to users and take apart the pain points they describe. The harder part was applying that to a problem she had personally.

Patent First, Then Product

When Ojo pitched at the 2025 CEO conference she was pre-revenue. She had a finished prototype and a stack of competition wins, but nothing for sale.

The turning point had come a few months earlier at the NewBoCo competition in July 2025. She was the youngest founder in the room and the only one without revenue, competing against companies that had been operating for years. She took second place and the people's choice award.

She has now raised roughly $35,000, all of it from pitch competitions. The first thing she spent it on was not inventory or marketing. It was the intellectual property process, which took SparkDefy to patent-pending before a single cap went up for sale.

SparkDefy caps in production. Ojo learned to sew while building the first prototypes and now works with a seamstress on runs.

With the filing in place, the rest moved quickly. She signed up for a campus holiday market, started production with a seamstress and rebuilt the website from a pre-revenue placeholder into a shoppable store with her story, product photography and a social campaign behind it.

The SparkDefy mark embroidered on fire-resistant fabric.

The Full Circle Episode

Before SparkDefy existed, before Ojo had any intention of starting a company, she co-authored an article for the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association about the very issue she now solves. She was writing about the problem as a problem, with no product and no plan to build one.

In June 2026 she walked into their studio as a guest on The Fabricator Podcast to talk about the company she built to fix it. They reached out and asked. Of all the press SparkDefy has picked up, this is the one she names first.

On the episode she covered how she got into welding and the trades, how SparkDefy came together, and Howes Welding, the shop where the whole thing started.

The Part That Wasn't the Prize Money

Ojo won the pitch competition at the 2025 CEO Global Conference. Ask what that did for her and the prize is not what she leads with.

She still talks regularly with Dillon Rosenthal, founder of BounceBack Pickle, and Roz Burgess, the 2025 CEO Chapter President of the Year. Both were in the same room that year. Roz named her in his own member spotlight, saying that watching what she had built over the past year was incredible to witness.

Ojo at CYstarters Demo Day 2025, with a SparkDefy cap on display.

Her faculty adviser at Iowa State, Megan Sweere, sharpened the pitch, challenged the business model and worked through the unit economics with her. What Ojo quotes is none of that. It is a single line Sweere told her: Bolu, you know your business better than anyone else, you got this. She needed it early, when the self-doubt was loudest, and she has needed it more than once since.

The next year is about range. More styles, more colors and more variety for welders with long hair, then an expansion beyond caps into other workwear for the trades.

	Start with a problem you have. Ojo was a welder whose hair kept getting in the way. The best product ideas usually come from the thing that annoys you at work, not from a brainstorm.
	Then get out of your own head. She interviewed other welders and built more prototypes to confirm the problem was bigger than her. Being the user is a starting point, not proof of a market.

	Protect it before you sell it. Ojo's first spend from prize money was the patent process, not inventory. For a physical product with a genuinely new design, filing first is what makes the rest defensible.
	Pitch before you're ready. She was pre-revenue and the youngest in the room at NewBoCo, and placed second. Competing early is how she funded the company and found out people believed her.