From Homes to Holsters

Mike Christoff has a lot of ideas, a lot of irons in the fire. You could call him a Renaissance man, although when a reporter did, he demurred. 

Christoff has a number of current and former businesses going, some of which date back to his time as a Marco Island police officer.

“Yeah, I patrolled the mean streets of Marco Island,” he said with a laugh, noting that policing on the island was much less intense than his former law enforcement job in Dearborn, Michigan. Christoff spent 12 years on the MIPD as a patrol officer and firearms instructor after nearly 16 years in Dearborn. 

While on the Marco Island force, Christoff started a business called Mobile Tactics, with a gun shop and shooting range on the island. After five years on Marco, he moved the shop to Naples and transitioned Mobile Tactics to a traveling indoor pistol range. Built on a repurposed 40-foot shipping container, the semitrailer-mounted range has traveled to law enforcement facilities, events, and gun shows from West Palm Beach to Nashville, from North Carolina to Nebraska, and from Michigan to Quantico in Virginia, servicing Marines and their families adjacent to the military base. 

A spinoff from the shooting range led to what is today Christoff’s most productive venture – “Sticky Holsters.” These low-profile pistol holsters are designed to allow concealed carry in comfort, in a waistband or pocket – as well as versions for ankle holsters, waistbands, or garter belts – what Christoff calls “guard her” belts, to be worn under a skirt. They also have products for automobile consoles and motorcycles, to hold cellphones as well as firearms. 

“These are the only holsters on the market with no clips, loops, or hooks. We needed something simpler, easy to carry,” he said. “They’re not icky, but they are sticky. The construction of the holster uses the pressure from your clothing waistband to secure both the holster and the gun.”

Christoff also has invested in and become part owner of American Sewing Corp., a North Carolina-based company that does the majority of the fabrication of the sticky holsters. They have produced nearly one million units. All the products he has created or is associated with, he said with pride, are “100-percent American made.” 

Another venture, not currently active, was “Quickpants,” designing and manufacturing clothing to give female law enforcement officers or military personnel the option to use the restroom without the necessity of removing all the duty gear they wear. Christoff designed the garments when, as a police patrol officer, he saw how long it took for female officers to turn around a bathroom break. 

“Women were dehydrating themselves just to avoid having to go,” with all the problems that entails, he said. 

But Christoff’s latest venture, and the one he thinks could make a big difference in how Southwest Florida homes are able to survive hurricanes, is Rampart Technologies. Using composite fiberglass construction, Christoff has built several structures in Naples, all of which passed through three hurricanes – Ian, Helene, and Milton – without sustaining any damage. 

To demonstrate the strength of the building materials, he shows a test video firing a wooden two-by-four stud at walls made of three different constructions: an eight-inch concrete block wall, a composite of five thicknesses of three-quarter-inch plywood, and the (much thinner) quarter-inch Strongwell/Hardwire storm panel. Propelled end-first at 115 mph, the two-by-four crashes through the block and the plywood with ease but bounces off the fiberglass panel. 

Christoff has built a “tiny home” mounted on a trailer to showcase the product. For an on-the-spot demo, he takes an “eight-pound cannonball” and repeatedly whacks the wall without causing visible damage or even a dent in the stucco covering.

“It’s basically a mobile showroom,” he said of the tiny home. Not just the wall panels, but the studs are made of fiberglass, two-by-six C-channel. “Even if this got flooded, you just hose it out and dry it off.” The application would be ideal, said Christoff, for homes raised on stilts that have a ground floor level.

Rampart Technologies is the holder of a U.S. patent, # 11,993,931, for a “building system with modular interlocking panels,” but Christoff is hoping for an established industry player to take the concept and build out the structures. Lacking home-building experience, he doesn’t want to go into production with the product himself, he said, but is looking for a homebuilder, probably a manufactured home builder, to add this concept to their portfolio.

“I believe the off-site industry could bring this to market almost immediately. Built at scale, the product would be very price competitive. You can do a lot of the work in a factory setting and deliver and install the panels. I just need the right company – I’ve taken this as far as I can myself.”