Partners

We did not get here alone

StingMaster began in a pain research lab. It ended up on dive boats, in save-a-dive kits and behind the counter at shops along the Florida coast, and that did not happen because of a marketing budget. It happened because people in the diving and lionfish community took a chance on a small brand and told other divers about it.

They did something more valuable than that, too. They told us what was wrong with it. The cream you buy today is not the cream we started with, and every improvement along the way came from someone on a boat or behind a counter telling us plainly what did not work. We listened, we reformulated, and we came back. That is how a product gets good.

These are the people we owe it to.

The lionfish community

ZooKeeper
Tim Robinson and his family build the containment units that let divers take lionfish off the reef without getting spined on the way up. They were carrying StingMaster before almost anyone, they have been honest with us about what works and what does not, and they have put our cream in front of more divers than any advertisement we have ever run.

Lionfish University
A 501(c)(3) working on lionfish research, public awareness and removal across the invaded range. Getting people to understand why a beautiful fish is a problem is slow, unglamorous work, and they have been doing it for years.

Lionfish Central
Scott Gonnello's 501(c)(3), built around evaluation, education and eradication. They maintain an open database on the invasion and give the material away free to anyone else working on the problem, which tells you what kind of organization it is.

Lionfish Divers
Roger J. Muller Jr. hunts lionfish across the Caribbean and North America and writes up everything he learns, from safety and gear to how to cook what you bring home. A one-person education effort that reaches further than most funded ones.

Lionfish Caribbean
Lisette and the team in Curacao, working the invasion from the southern Caribbean. They were one of the first places outside the United States where a diver could pick up StingMaster, and they sold through every unit they had.

The people who talk about it

CJ Duffie
Like many other generous people in this community, CJ has opened his contact book to us. He has introduced us to shop owners, to creators, to people worth knowing, and he has never once asked for anything back. A small brand lives or dies on introductions like that.

On the water, and around the world

Ace Diving, Key Biscayne, Miami
Carlos and his team have been generous with their time and blunt with their feedback since the beginning, which is worth a great deal more to a small company than a polite order. They also work with us on the scientific side of what we do, which is rarer than it sounds and harder to repay.

And on any given day, holiday or not, Carlos and his outstanding team of divers are out on the water making sure somebody has the trip they were hoping for, and doing it in the best of moods. That is the whole business, really. We are lucky to be near it.

North Florida Divers
Malcolm and Amanda Kneale hosted our students when they travelled down to collect lionfish spines for our venom research. That is the unglamorous end of science, it cannot be done from a lab in Montreal, and it does not happen at all unless somebody with a boat and a compressor decides your project is worth their weekend. The work behind this cream has their fingerprints on it.

Ferdy Wenas, Indonesia
Our partner on the other side of the world, and proof that a sting hurts the same in the Coral Triangle as it does off Key Largo.

Doris Dive Trading, Curacao
Carrying StingMaster in the southern Caribbean, and one of the first places outside the United States where a diver could walk in and buy it.

The shops that stocked it early
Emerald Coast Scuba and Scuba Tech in Destin, Blue Water Divers in New Jersey, and dozens of others across the country who gave shelf space to a cream nobody had heard of, made by a professor nobody had heard of either. Thank you.

Dive 1st Aid
Our distributor for years, and the reason StingMaster reached dive shops across the United States at all. Every relationship has its season and ours has ended, but a small brand does not get onto shelves in fifty shops on its own, and we would be somewhere else entirely without them.

Where to buy StingMaster near you

You can order StingMaster from us here, or on Amazon. But if you are already heading to your local shop for a tank fill or a new mask, consider buying it there instead.

These are the shops that keep this sport running. They are the ones who answer the phone when your regulator fails the day before a trip, and who talk a nervous new diver through their first ocean entry. Every unit they sell helps them keep the lights on. So pick one up while you are there, and support a local business at the same time.

• Ace Diving
  Key Biscayne, Miami, Florida
• ZooKeeper
  Sunrise, Florida
• Doris Dive Trading
  Willemstad, Curacao
• Viking Diving
  Pensacola, Florida (soon to carry it)

This list is shorter than it should be, and it is growing. We are working through the shops that carried StingMaster before, one at a time, and adding them here as they come back on board.

If you carry our product and your business has been left out, please let us know and we will correct it as soon as possible. Email us at info@stingmaster.com and you will be on this page the same week.