Phillies slugger Bryce Harper swings a hometown bat — one made especially for him by two baseball fanatics from Pennsylvania.
Based in King of Prussia, Victus Sports was co-founded in 2012 by Jared Smith and Ryan Engroff in a friend's garage, where they sanded, molded and finished the bats themselves.
In the decade since their humble beginnings, Victus has grown tremendously. It now has 44 employees and manufactures 70,000 bats a year, as of the end of 2021. And its workshop, batting cages and bat artists are now housed together in a 25,000-square-foot facility, which hums loudly with the sound of machine lathes. Dust flies from maple and birch "billets," the round, raw wood hewn specifically for baseball bats.
