Storm Bowling is a fitness brand headquartered in Brigham City, Utah. It was founded in 1985.
The first Storm bowling balls were mixed in a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket. Hank Boomershine, a Storm executive, told Fox 13 in 2024 that the earliest prototypes came out of one. The company now fills a factory in Brigham City, and Fox 13 reported that up to 4,000 balls leave it in a day.
It began as a cleaner. In 1985 Bill Chrisman started High Score Products to sell a treatment for urethane bowling balls, which, as he told US Manufacturing Report in 2015, "would soak up lane oil and lose some of their action." The company made that one product until 1991, when it brought in Keith Orton, an expert in high-performance urethane, to start a ball factory. It became Storm Products in 1994.
Chrisman then got the idea to put fragrance in a bowling ball. The patented process drew a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal in 2005, and KSL reported that Storm can make more than 11,000 fragrances. The product page for the current Ion Max Pearl lists its fragrance, Pineapple Cherry Delight, in the same block of specs as its color.
The factory work runs like a kitchen with a spec sheet. When KSL visited in 2016, batchers were mixing liquid resin for the cores and weight blocks, which Corbett Austin, then the vice president of production, called "almost like making a cake." The materials reach about 260 degrees. The cores come out of their molds after about six minutes, and a urethane cover goes on over them. KSL put the full process at about three days, with the balls cooling overnight on drying racks. A testing facility in the same building measures where and when a ball hooks, and KSL said Storm studies competitors' balls there too.
Storm also owns the Roto Grip and 900 Global brands, and Fox 13 counted more than 220 employees in 2024. In April 2020, citing the pandemic, 900 Global moved its production from San Antonio to Brigham City. US Manufacturing Report reported in 2015 that the reject rate had fallen from about 5 percent of balls in 2000 to 0.1 percent.
Bill Chrisman died on September 28, 2023. His wife and co-founder, Barbara Chrisman, became CEO, and Tyler Jensen moved up from executive vice president to president, 11thFrame reported. Chrisman said in 2015 that Storm makes more high-performance bowling balls than anyone in the world. That is the company's own claim.
Steve Kloempken, a Storm vice president, told Fox 13 that there are only 11 places in the world dedicated to making bowling balls. One of them is in Brigham City.
Bill and Barbara Chrisman were inducted into the USBC Hall of Fame in 2021, the first husband and wife to enter in the same year.
