A Golden Gloves boxer and a business partner in Kansas.

TITLE Boxing is a boxing equipment company based in Lenexa, Kansas, in the Kansas City area. According to a company announcement distributed by Business Wire on 15 August 2014, the co-founding partners Tony Carbajo and David Hanson, together with the business professional Joe Wally, formed TITLE Boxing LLC in June 1998. The same announcement describes the company as a distributor of boxing, kickboxing and mixed martial arts equipment, apparel and accessories.

Carbajo came to the business from the ring. In an interview published by the Kauffman Foundation’s Entrepreneurship.org on 2 August 2016, the writer Amanda Schnieders described him as a former Golden Gloves champion who went on to Kansas State University and then built TITLE Boxing, moving, in the article’s words, from boxer to supplier and on to product development. The piece presents the company as a passion turned into a trade: a man who had boxed since childhood making and selling the kit he had once used.

The same 2016 article explains why the company stayed where it began. Carbajo and his partner chose to keep the business in the Kansas City area, and in Lenexa specifically, partly, the article says, because of the practical advantage of being centrally located in the United States.

The Kauffman interview also notes that TITLE adapted its product line to the sport’s changing audience, which now includes women.

An equipment brand and a fitness franchise.

The TITLE name is carried by two related businesses. One is the equipment company, TITLE Boxing LLC. The other is TITLE Boxing Club, a boxing and kickboxing fitness franchise. The 2014 announcement lists the franchise’s founders as the retired professional boxer and promoter Danny Campbell and the Kansas businessmen Tom Lyons, Tony Carbajo and David Hanson, so two of the equipment company’s founders were also at the start of the clubs.

According to that announcement, TITLE Boxing Club formed a partnership with TITLE Boxing in 2007 and began franchising in 2008. The clubs then opened across the United States and, by 2014, outside it, including a club in Cancún, Mexico. The clubs offered TITLE equipment and clothing for sale, and the company said the clubs had increased the distribution and awareness of its products.

That partnership changed how the equipment was sold. Before 2014, the announcement says, TITLE’s products had been available to the general public only through online and catalogue orders, and to professional boxers through their affiliated organisations. In August 2014 the company announced plans to move into mainstream sporting-goods retail, citing the exposure its products had gained inside the clubs. David Hanson, quoted as co-founder and partner of TITLE Boxing, said the timing suited a move into sporting-goods stores.

The fitness franchise later changed hands on its own. On 6 January 2021, Athletech News reported that the California fitness boxing company BoxUnion, founded in 2016 by Todd Wadler and Felicia Alexander, had acquired TITLE Boxing Club, with terms not disclosed. The report said Wadler would become chief executive of the combined company, that Rotche would stay on its board, and that Brooke Budke, until then TITLE Boxing Club’s vice president of marketing, would become president of the franchise system. BoxUnion had launched a digital class service in April 2020, the report added. The 2014 release had already listed planned clubs in Canada, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Dubai and Mexico City. That deal concerned the clubs; TITLE Boxing’s own site still trades under the TITLE Boxing name in 2026.

Design and documentation.

Boxing, fitness and yoga brands put their names on objects that are handled, stretched, sweated on and stacked in a gym corner. A logo on a glove has to sit on a curved, padded surface; a mark on a mat has to survive being rolled and unrolled; a name on a treadmill or a rack is read from across a room. That gives these brands a practical design problem as well as a commercial one.

Many of the names in this group have also changed hands over time. A brand may begin with a founder in one city, pass to a holding company or a licensing group, and be sold in places far from where it started, while the logo on the product stays familiar to the people who use it.

Each guide sets out what independent, dated sources record about a brand — who started it, who has owned it since when, and what it is known for — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and typefaces shown are our interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

One word, set in capitals.

The brand’s name is its main device. The company writes it in capitals, TITLE, both in its 2014 announcement and on its own site; that release also set a registered-trademark sign after both names, as TITLE Boxing® and TITLE Boxing Club®, and the word does double duty: it names the prize in boxing and it gives the company a short, loud mark that fits on a glove cuff, a bag or a shirt. Sharing the name with the fitness franchise gave it a second home in studios that, by the company’s account, introduced the equipment to new customers.

Behind the name, the company presents itself through the people who started it. The Kauffman Foundation’s 2016 profile tells TITLE’s story through Carbajo’s own route from amateur boxing to running a business, and the 2014 announcement puts Hanson’s voice forward on the move into retail. In the same release, John Rotche, then president of TITLE Boxing Club, said the equipment brand’s recognition at home and abroad had been an important factor in the clubs’ growth, describing the relationship as one that worked for both businesses. Both describe a supplier to boxers and gyms that reached a wider public through fitness.

That gives the brand a clear set of cues to design around: the capitalised word, the Kansas City address and the language of the ring, from the championship belt the name refers to through to the gym floor. The company’s range covers boxing, kickboxing and mixed martial arts.

For a design guide, TITLE Boxing shows how a single word can hold a supplier and a fitness franchise together: one name in capitals, set over two businesses that started in the same Kansas City suburb. Compare it with the American boxing heritage of Everlast, the Mexican glove maker Cleto Reyes and the London brand Lonsdale. For this guide we use ring black, title red and championship gold with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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