How a horror-and-heavy-metal gym brand raised $26,100 from 33 Pittsburgh believers

Zak Rosenberger runs a health and wellness brand whose logo would look at home on a death metal record sleeve. Death Comes Lifting sells training programs, virtual coaching, classes, and a line of apparel covered in original horror-inspired artwork. The customers are people who lift heavy and listen to heavier, and who have spent most of their gym lives feeling like they were dressed for the wrong room.

The business started as something closer to a creative project than a company. Zak was coaching clients, designing shirts, and building a following among lifters who wanted fitness gear that did not look like every other piece of fitness gear. The brand grew through word of mouth, through shows, through the kind of slow community-building that happens when a small thing genuinely belongs to the people who find it. By 2023, Death Comes Lifting had a real customer base, a real apparel line, and a coaching practice. What it did not have was a room of its own.

Without a dedicated studio, every class Zak ran had to happen in someone else’s space on someone else’s schedule. Every piece of content was shot wherever a camera could fit. Hiring help meant paying people unpredictably out of unpredictable revenue. The brand was real. The infrastructure was not.

A traditional small-business loan is hard to get for a young apparel-plus-coaching brand whose books read like a young apparel-plus-coaching brand’s books. Zak did not want to give up equity in something he had built by hand either. The whole point of Death Comes Lifting was that it belonged to him and to the community that wore it.

Why Zak went to his own people

Honeycomb fit the business because the business already had a community willing to put money behind it. The people buying Death Comes Lifting shirts were not anonymous customers. They were lifters and artists and musicians who had been following Zak’s work for years. A community-funded loan let those people back the brand directly, with the loan repaid to the same community that had funded it. Zak kept ownership of what he had built.

The alternative was the slow grind of self-funding a studio out of apparel margins, which meant either no studio for another two or three years or a smaller, less ambitious version of the one Zak actually wanted. The shape of the business he was trying to build did not fit that timeline.

What a $26,100 raise actually looks like

The campaign opened on August 17, 2023 and closed on October 13. Thirty-three investors put in a combined $26,100. Most of those thirty-three were people who already owned Death Comes Lifting gear, who had taken Zak’s coaching, who had been in the room at shows where the brand showed up on someone’s back.

That is a small investor list by any measure. It is also exactly the kind of investor list that means something. Thirty-three people who already wore the brand now had a financial stake in seeing the studio open. They were not strangers writing checks based on a pitch deck. They were customers writing checks based on years of knowing what Zak was building.

The shape of a Honeycomb raise like this one is what makes the math work even at a smaller dollar figure. Apparel margins on their own do not pay for a studio buildout in any reasonable timeframe. Twenty-six thousand dollars from people who already believe in the brand do.

What the money went to

The funds were earmarked for a studio space of Death Comes Lifting’s own, with regularly scheduled classes and events instead of borrowed-time sessions in other people’s rooms. The capital also covered equipment and reliable pay for the people helping Zak run the operation, which had been the other constant constraint. Paying employees on a real schedule, instead of when apparel sales allowed, was the thing that let the business start producing content and advertising at the cadence the brand needed.

The money was not going to turn Death Comes Lifting into a big company. It was going to turn it into a coherent one. A studio, an equipment list, a payroll the owner could plan around, and the bandwidth to keep making the work that brought the community in to begin with.

The thirty-three investors got a small piece of all of that. The brand kept belonging to the lifters and artists who had been wearing it since the beginning, and to the founder who had spent years convincing them that a fitness brand could look like a record sleeve and still mean what it said.