A Winnipeg-raised industrial design student just graduated from Iowa State University with more than a degree. She is leaving with a patent-pending business built around a deceptively simple idea: people should not have to choose between keeping their hair and keeping their job.
Boluwarin Ojo, a 2021 graduate of Kildonan-East Collegiate, created SparkDefy, a welding cap designed for people with long or thick hair after discovering there were few practical safety options available in the trades.
Ojo moved to Iowa to study industrial design and took a part-time welding job while attending school. At the time, she had little experience in welding and was still learning the rhythms of the shop: sparks, grinders, and steel dust.
Then a co-worker told her a story.
“He just kind of laughed it off,” Ojo said in an interview. “But I wasn’t laughing.”
The co-worker had caught his long hair on fire while welding underneath a vehicle and ended up cutting it off.
Ojo said the moment stayed with her because she had already been struggling to fit her own hair under traditional welding caps.
“I knew I couldn’t let that happen,” she said. “There has to be something out there.”
There wasn’t.
She searched online and found improvised workarounds like bandanas, layered head coverings, people making do. But she was surprised there was no product designed specifically for the problem.
That surprise eventually became a school project.
During a university assignment focused on apparel and technology, Ojo began researching flame-resistant materials and protective equipment. She consulted firefighters, used resources at Iowa State’s Student Innovation Center and started sewing prototypes herself.
At first, she said, the goal was modest.
“I just wanted to look into this issue for myself and design a cap that I could use for myself and work,” she said.
But sometimes the difference between a classroom assignment and a company is momentum.
SparkDefy grew from prototype to startup as Ojo entered entrepreneurship programs and pitch competitions across the United States. Along the way, she won funding, business support and a growing audience of welders and tradespeople who recognized themselves in the problem she was trying to solve.
Last year, Ojo placed second at EntreFEST in Iowa City, earning the People’s Choice Award and $3,500 in prize money. She later won first place at the Global CEO Conference and Pitch Competition in Tampa Bay, Florida, collecting another $8,000.
According to the university, Ojo has earned roughly $35,000 through pitch competitions over the past year, money she has used to help pay tuition and support startup costs.
She said the response online has been particularly meaningful.
People have messaged her saying they thought they would have to cut their hair to work in welding. Others said they had spent years improvising unsafe solutions.
“I’ve had a lot of people … say, ‘I’ve been looking for something like this for years,’” Ojo said. “People with long hair, thick hair, straight hair, dreadlocks. I mean, it’s really cool to hear these stories come out.”
The deeper story here is not really about fabric.
It is about who industrial spaces quietly assume belongs there.
Factories, workshops and welding bays were largely designed around a very particular worker that has been historically male, short-haired, standard-sized, unencumbered by difference. Everybody else has often been expected to adapt themselves to the environment, sometimes literally by cutting parts of themselves away.
SparkDefy does not overthrow that reality. It’s just a cap.
But history is full of inventions that began with somebody finally asking a practical question out loud: Why are we pretending this problem is normal?
Now newly graduated, Ojo said she plans to pursue the business full time while expanding into additional safety products.
“The plan is to expand the brand,” she said. “My focus is women, but safety gear can work for anybody.”
For now, she said she is simply trying to follow the momentum.
“It’s been rewarding. It’s been frustrating at times. It’s been challenging,” Ojo said of running a business. “Quite literally everything under the sun.”
By Steven Sukkau, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on May 27, 2026 at 10:57
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