A 1980 car accident. A motocross goggle. A son-in-law who walked away from a tech career. Six kids on the cap table — three who sold houses to keep the company alive. This is the story of the family that built Intake, and the fathers behind it.
Most consumer brands tell their origin story the clean way. Inventor sees problem. Inventor builds solution. World rewards solution. The clean version of Intake's story would go: a brilliant inventor designed a structurally superior nasal breathing system, a savvy CEO scaled it, the customers found it, the brand grew.
That story is not true.
The true story is that the product was almost not built. The company was almost not started. Nine of the company's first ten years were spent at, near, or below zero. At every juncture where the project should have died, somebody in the family decided not to let it.
This year, for Father's Day, we want to tell that story honestly — because it is, at its core, a story about what fathers do for the people they love.
The inventor
In 1980, on a street in Bellflower, California, a car traveling forty-five miles an hour hit a man named Jim Castillo. He flew through the windshield, traveled sixty-five feet, and woke up to a body that had been almost entirely taken apart. His heel was crushed. His back and ribs were broken. His skull was cracked. His left knee was hanging by skin.
He was twenty-something. He had small kids. He spent sixteen months recovering.
That was the first thing Jim ever invented. A featherlight carbon-fiber ski brace, sourced from materials he got by calling NASA Moffett Field directly, built on a borrowed table in his brother's shop. A stranger in the Mammoth parking lot saw him walking and told him to bring it to Dr. Steadman, the U.S. ski team's orthopedic surgeon. Within months, the U.S. ski team was wearing it at the World Cup. Within a few more years, Jim had founded Innovation Sports, then Asterisk, and built what is essentially the modern motocross knee brace category.
While he was doing all of that, he and his wife raised six kids.
This matters because Intake is not the work of someone who learned to invent on this project. It is the work of a man who has been inventing since the day a windshield broke against his body and he refused to be told what he could no longer do — for himself, or for the family he was raising at the same time.
The goggle that became a sleep brand
The original motocross goggle — and the clip that, years later, would become Intake.
The product you can put on your dad's nightstand this Father's Day was not designed for sleep. It was not even designed for breathing. It was designed for a motocross goggle.
Jim is, fundamentally, a problem-solver. The problem he was trying to solve, somewhere around 2014, was that the foam on a motocross goggle pressed against riders' nostrils. The most physically demanding sport in the world, and these guys were riding it with their noses pinched shut.
So Jim built a small clip with magnets inside, paired with a tiny piece of metal sandwiched into a sticker on the rider's nose. It was a goggle accessory. He hand-made the first batch in his shop and brought it into the office. He had never tried it on himself. He handed it to one of his employees.
The first words ever spoken about Intake, by the first person to ever wear it, were a question about sleep. The brand's future was already in the room. It just took years for anyone to listen.
Patient zero
The first person who actually slept in Intake was a wife.
Jim's son Dave — the oldest, the one who would eventually finance the first production run — got frustrated trying to install the original goggle clip himself. He took a couple of paper clips, magnets, and a piece of bent wire, and made a prototype band. He gave it to his wife. She had been a Breathe Right user for years.
She put on the prototype that night. She woke up changed. She has used Intake every night since.
This is the founding sleep customer. A wife. Made by a son. For her husband to help her sleep better. The brand exists because a man tried to make something for the person he loved, and it worked.
It also, in that single night, told the family something the inventor himself had not yet seen. A Breathe Right strip is a piece of flexural plastic acting as a spring. Springs go dead. A magnet seated against a fixed point doesn't go dead — it holds. That is the entire structural difference between Intake and every nasal strip your dad has ever tried, told by the man who invented the alternative.
The decision
By 2017, Jim's motocross knee brace company was failing. The breathing product had never really been part of it — it sat on the side, unloved, mostly ignored. Jim would have walked away from it. His son Dave wouldn't.
Around the same time, a young man named Alex Hauck was finishing an acquisition at the tech finance company where he worked. His stock options paid out. He had planned a three-month trip through Southeast Asia. He was dating Jim's daughter Natalie. He was, by his own admission, a skeptic of the entire nasal breathing category.
Alex did not take the trip. He walked into Jim's office instead and asked for a shot at building the breathing thing into a real company. Jim's first response was no.
Natalie, who is Jim's daughter and Alex's wife and the person who has, more than anyone else, kept this company together at the moments it almost came apart, made the case to her father directly.
That was the decision. The product became a company. The company became a family business in the most literal sense. A daughter advocating for her husband to her father. A son-in-law betting his career payout on his father-in-law's invention. A son who refused to let his father's project die. Three skeptics, somehow, becoming the people responsible for keeping it alive.
What they gave up
If you are a dad, you already know that the gap between deciding to do something for your family and actually being able to do it is the part where everything gets hard. The next three years of Intake were that gap.
The 2019 Kickstarter went well — top one to two percent of campaigns, over a hundred thousand dollars raised, thousands of subscribers. The brand had real demand. It had no way to make the tabs at scale. By 2021, the cash had run out. The team had to be let go.
Alex did the gardening for his apartment complex to subsidize rent. Natalie went on the road designing weddings to bring in income; Alex flew out on weekends and broke them down with her as her assistant. Jim sold the ranch he had borrowed against to pay for the original patents. The office Alex had built by hand, where he had laid the flooring himself, was sublet to a tech company that had raised three million dollars overnight. He kept a corner desk underneath his own logo on the wall while their team built around him.
When the SBA pandemic loans came online, the maximum was $250,000, with a personal guarantee. Alex had nothing else to put up. He hesitated. Natalie didn't.
He signed it. About a year later, the first finished tabs began shipping at scale. During the months in between, the only people receiving Intake product were the original Kickstarter subscribers, hand-packed by Alex and an assistant in an empty office, using imperfect tabs sorted from a bag because the manufacturing line was still spitting out as many bad tabs as good.
Six of Jim's kids are still on the cap table. Three of them sold houses to keep the company alive. This is the part of the story Intake has rarely told publicly. It is not a hardship narrative — it is just what these particular people did, because they refused to let a tool die that they believed should exist.
The word the customers gave back
During the lowest point — no inventory to ship, no marketing budget, no team left — Alex started reading customer reviews. He had nothing else to do.
He kept seeing the same word. Then he saw it again. Then again.
The slogan was not invented. It was adopted. The customers wrote it. The brand listened, and then said it back. Everything that came after — the Logan Paul moment in late 2024, when the boxer was photographed wearing Intake on his nose during a pre-fight press tour and the brand's debts were cleared in a single week; the creator partnerships; the steady growth into a real business — happened because the brand survived long enough to be in the room when the moments arrived.
For the dad in your life
This Father's Day, the bundle ships with free mouth tape and alcohol prep pads — our preferred combo for dads. The full nightly system, in one box.
