The Future in Your Hands

It starts, as many stories at WATF do, with a young designer facing a very real problem.

For Ashkan Joshghani, founder of Exoligamentz, that problem wasn’t hypothetical. It was happening on the mat, in real-time. As a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu athlete and veterinary medicine student at Ghent University, he found himself dealing with torn ligaments. Like many athletes, he turned to finger tape. “I started using tape because everybody else was using tape. But I quickly realized it costs time [and] money... But more [importantly], it's not really effective.” he explains. “When you use it during sparring and you sweat, the tape comes loose. And it actually loses its supportive function. I was trying to make it work and taping all my hands. But I realized this is not really making any effect.” 

That option eventually became Exoligamentz, a patented glove that acts like an external ligament system supporting finger joints during training with anatomical precision and textile technology. It’s not just sports gear. It’s a startup born from frustration, shaped by determination, and grounded in rigorous research.

Today, Exoligamentz is emerging as a blueprint for how craft, technology, and cultural insight can meet to solve modern problems in deeply human ways.

Hands are complex. “The most complex body part to design for,” Ashkan says, and he would know.

He’s spent the past decade sketching, prototyping, testing, and iterating on the glove’s design. It wasn’t just about inventing something new, it was about inventing something better and doing it from within the community he serves.

As a lead user, athlete, and maker, Ashkan had immediate access to customer validation, and real-world feedback was relentless. The gloves had to flex, breathe, grip, and protect without getting in the way.

Compared to tape, which wears out quickly and has to be reapplied constantly, Exoligamentz was designed to stay on, stay functional, and stay out of the way. Even during intense, sweat-heavy training.

“If tape was working, why would their hands look like that?”

The result is a breathable, reusable glove made with high-performance sports textiles, designed around the natural ligament patterns of the human hand. Unlike traditional taping which fails during sweat-heavy sessions or loses function after minutes, Exoligamentz stays put, providing targeted resistance that reinforces joints without restricting movement.

And yes, the gloves have already been tested in real sparring sessions - filmed, worn, sweat in, praised, and iterated upon.

This wasn’t an overnight success story. Ashkan spent years working on prototypes and teaching himself how to pitch a project that lived between medicine, textiles, and athletics. Early on, he faced rejection after rejection until he finally secured university research funding. He sketched designs on hand skeletons, developed 3D-printed finger test rigs, and explored textile techniques ranging from embroidery to lamination to 3D flyknit.

Ashkan also hopes the textile industry will continue opening its doors to innovation that doesn’t always fit the mold. Throughout his development process, he collaborated with textile scientists and engineers, often challenging materials to perform in new ways.
“It’s not just about the comfort or the performance,” he explains.
“It’s really about where do you put what? Because the anatomy… is such a big complex structure.” 
His experience is a reminder that textiles have the potential to do so much more. They can move with the body, support it, even protect it…If we’re bold enough to imagine new possibilities.

Every stitch in the glove was hard-won.

Though the glove is functional to its core, Exoligamentz is also a brand with cultural ambitions.

Ashkan envisions a line that blurs the lines between sports performance gear and streetwear identity. Not just protecting athletes but expressing them.

“I want to really establish a brand that fuses state-of-the-art textile technology with a strong streetwear brand identity that inspires creativity and drives performance.. I also want to really focus on the culture and the lifestyle. And I really want to combine these two to make an inspiring brand.”

Still, performance is king. In fact, in earlier versions of the glove, external ligaments gave it a striking visual identity, but they were moved inside the glove after proving too vulnerable to abrasion. That design sacrifice spoke volumes.

“Functionality. Always [the] primary objective.”

Ashkan wants to raise more awareness around hand protection as a missing link in performance gear, not just within the industry, but among athletes and federations alike.
“We have knee braces. We have ankle braces. We have shoulder, elbows. But what about the hands?” His intention isn’t to disrupt martial arts traditions, but to expand them. 
“I want to actually create a new coexistence. That Exoligamentz is part of the sport. That you can wear it. And that it fits the whole concept.”

Exoligamentz is not just more sustainable than tape. It’s also sourced and manufactured within Europe, keeping the supply chain short and transparent.

Looking ahead, Ashkan sees potential in expanding the glove to other sports, adapting materials for different impact zones, or even developing new wearables for other joints like wrists, knees, ankles.

He’s also been approached by major companies. But for now, he’s choosing to go slow, protect his vision, and build something meaningful, not just marketable.

This May 13, Exoligamentz will make its international debut as a finalist in the Sport Innovation Challenge 2025, organized by ThinkSport, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and Anthropy Partners. Ashkan will present the glove at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne. This is a symbolic milestone for a product that’s spent years in quiet development, patiently waiting for its moment.

But for Ashkan, it was never about chasing the spotlight. It was about building something that mattered and trusting that the right moment would come. His journey is a blueprint for any young creative navigating their own path through uncertainty, ambition, and invention.

When asked about his message to the youth, Ashkan says: “Really pursue your ideas in a way that the engine, the driver to pursue that idea is yourself… I think purpose is really a very important aspect in that. What’s your purpose?” 
“If you define that purpose for yourself, then I think you can pursue any idea you have.”

As he puts it: “The mission is to make sport more sustainable, for this generation and the next. And that mission starts with our hands, an evolutionary foundation at the core of everything we create and pass on.”

Exoligamentz says it best: “The future in your hands.”
The future isn’t something you wait for, it’s something you make.