CatTongue Grips

The founders of CatTongue Grips do not own a cat. Missy Kelly, the company notes, is allergic. The name came from her verdict on the skateboard grip tape her husband, Matt, had stuck to his new phone: it felt like a cat's tongue. The Park City company has been selling a version that does not scratch ever since.

The tape was Matt's answer to a sales pitch. In March 2015, CU Boulder's alumni magazine reported, he was at a Verizon store in Park City upgrading his phone when he said how easy it is to drop one. The salesperson offered an expensive insurance plan. He bought grip tape at a skateboard shop instead.

Missy warned that it would scratch every surface of the house, Park City Magazine reported. In the company's telling she outlawed it. The couple looked for a grip that held without scratching and could not find one. It took six months to get a meeting with a manufacturer, which Park City Magazine calls the world's largest maker of nonslip products, then a year and eight prototypes to land on a material.

The first phone grip came out in 2017. It is made of recyclable HDPE plastic, CU reported. The company lists it as latex free and waterproof. The first year brought more than $65,000 in sales, and by 2019 the grips were in 45 college bookstores. Grips carrying the U.S. Ski and Snowboard logo went into athlete swag bags at the 2018 Winter Olympics.

The turn came from Chris Waddell, whom the company calls a Paralympic Hall of Famer. He showed the Kellys how a laptop grip could keep wheelchair users from damaging their devices in a slip or a fall. Other customers followed with uses of their own. Wheelchair users put the material on footplates to keep their feet in place, and people who had trouble gripping their flatware put a strip on the stem.

That market is now a large part of the pitch. In March 2026 Matt Kelly took the material to Medtrade, a trade show for home medical equipment, and told the show's news site that the company has "a huge following in that bath safety category." Strips go on canes and walker handles. Drug Store News gave the line a Buyers Choice award for helping seniors who want to age in place.

The flagship is the Gription roll, two inches wide and ten feet long for $19.99, cut to size by the buyer. Kelly describes the material as anti-microbial and allergy free. Those claims are the company's own.

The line now includes the SkateGrip, an 11 by 44 inch sheet cut for the top of a board, and the company says the clear version lets the deck graphics show through. The whole thing started with skateboard grip tape on a phone. It has come back around to grip tape on a skateboard, and this kind spares the furniture.