About Us
Beautifully Simple
Zodiac Climbing designs training-focused climbing holds and tools for home walls and spray walls, built by climbers who care deeply about progression and feel. Drawing on two fulfilling decades of bouldering experience and 20 years as an architect, we bring design thinking and practical problem-solving to everything we create.
Zodiac Climbing is a mashup of legendary 90s era training boards and high-density Japanese spray walls. The ethos is to fill the gaps in the homewall scene and provide affordable access to board-specific grips and training tools that are not available in the commercial climbing hold market.
We also like progression and measurability. We approach our designs with a base shape and build in incremental variations so holds and tools can fit a broader user group and a wide range of wall types and angles.
— Our originBorn in the desert, raised by the mountains.
Why we exist
Fill the gaps the commercial market leaves open.
Most hold companies market primarily to gyms and routesetters. Holds keep getting bigger — fiberglass macros, aesthetic first, functional second. Nobody is putting a macro on an 8 × 10 woodie.
We make small, board-specific grips and training tools for home walls: clean shapes, purposeful geometry, and sets you can actually afford to build with.
Home focused holds
Commercial climbing holds started as tools designed for climbers. Holds were small, sometimes a bit ratty, occasionally impersonating real rock, and most importantly built to help you get better at climbing.
Today, most hold companies market primarily to gyms and routesetters. Holds are getting bigger and bigger, with fiberglass macros becoming the main product. They are often aesthetic first and functional second. When you look to buy climbing holds for a home wall, the options are actually pretty limited. No one is going to put a fiberglass macro on their 8 × 10 woodie.
The cost of polyurethane resin, mold-making silicone, and modeling foam keeps increasing, which translates into higher hold prices. You can look at practically any hold company and be faced with 10 crimps for $100.
Training tools for real progression
Progression does not stop at your board. Alongside our holds, we design and manufacture climbing-specific training tools like edge blocks and other grips that plug directly into most people’s training programs.
These tools are built with the same philosophy as our holds: clean shapes, functional geometry, and purpose-driven ergonomics that reflect the demands of climbing. Our tools are compact and portable, making it easy to train consistently whether you are at home, at the gym, or on the road.
We care about measurability, so our training tools use consistent edge depths and clear design intentions, helping you track finger strength and grip performance over time instead of guessing session to session.
How we do it
- Our sets are small, either matching pairs or singles, so you can build exactly what your board needs.
- Our hold families are designed with purposeful variations such as:
- Variations of incut angle while maintaining consistent grip depth.
- Variations of grip depth while maintaining a consistent incut angle.
- Variations in width while maintaining all other aspects of the hold.
- We give our holds a grade range for difficulty based on your board angle, so you know what to expect before you install.
- Hold footprints are minimal and highly purposeful, not giant wall hogs.
- We do not make pockets, jugs, or slopers. We design edges and grips that reflect the demands of outdoor climbing and real movement.
Satisfaction
We want you to fully understand what you are getting, so we talk in detail about each of our products and show you the design intention and how best to use them.
We are climbers first, and we truly understand the goal we all share: to improve our climbing. We hope our holds and training tools can be a small but meaningful part of that.
Want to go deeper? Read our process. If you are a Salt Lake local, reach out — we’d love to open up the HQ wall to locals.
Zodiac Owner Program
Tell us what’s wrong. Get the upgrade.
We want the good, bad, and ugly. If we ship a change based on your feedback, we send you the updated set free.