Richmond Italia

Richmond Italia has been one of the most influential people in the Sport of Paintball for the past fifteen years. The Founder & first President of Procaps LP, developer of the Matrix and inventor of XBall, his ideas, concepts and inventions have played a major role in shaping the way the sport is played and televised. A true visionary, Richmond’s fertile imagination and tenacious nature have resulted in a string of successes and product launches that have become household words in the global Paintball community.
Soon after graduating from Toronto’s Ryerson University with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1986, Richmond worked for communications giant, Nortel, for a year. Quickly discovering his own irrepressible entrepreneurial traits, he began his own automotive sales enterprise with his brother Richard. Their complimentary skills were immediately evident as the business flourished for four years. During that time, Richmond discovered Paintball, and since then, he has never looked back.

After playing his first game of Paintball in 1987, the game immediately appealed to Richmond’s competitive side, and soon he naturally gravitated to the tournament world. Before long, he became a member of Team Avalanche, which quickly became the most powerful force in the entire USA-based National Professional Paintball League circuit. Winning events across America and around the world, Avalanche gained the respect and recognition of the entire tournament world, and they were soon the media darlings of the industry.

By the early `90s, Richmond had opened his first Paintball field, retail store and wholesale distribution outlet, Paintball Laval (PBL), which is still operated today by his original partner. In 1993, he opened a theatrically imaginative indoor field, Tombstone Paintball, with outrageous Disney-like scenery, complete with an Old West town, hillsides, caves, a flowing river and a waterfall! Tombstone became the legendary host to one of the industry’s richest and most fun tournaments, the annual “Showdown at Tombstone”, which drew top Pro teams from all over Canada, the USA and Europe.

His experience as a distributor, retailer, field operator and Pro player gave him a recognition of certain gaps that existed in the industry. He identified a major shortfall in communication that existed between the manufacturers and the players, and he soon realized that a huge opportunity would be available if a solution were created. The idea of a paintball manufacturer that was owned and operated “By the Players, For the Players” had great appeal, and in the summer of 1998, he launched Procaps Encapsulation with his brother Richard and their original partner, Greg Vance.

They turned to their old Paintball industry friends, Craig Miller and Mike Ratko, to establish distribution and production capabilities. The original Diablo Paintballs brand was created, Diablo Direct was formed as a wholesale distributor, and within a year, the organization had an executive team of experienced partners operating six warehouses around the USA. The group produced many lasting innovations that were universally copied throughout the industry, including today’s full color paint box packaging, conveniently containing four bags of five hundred balls, now the standard of the industry.

In 1999, Richmond completed the development and launch of an innovative Paintball marker with breakthrough design and technology, called the Matrix. The imaginative design enabled the use of very low operating pressure, and a strategic combination of features proved to deliver remarkable accuracy and an incredible rate of fire. The Matrix became an instant success, with sales quickly exceeding demand. Eventually the Matrix design rights were sold to Dye, who continues to refine and market the product today as one of the most respected and desirable high-end paintball markers in the world.

As Diablo Direct and the Diablo Paintball brand grew and gained momentum and market share, Richmond conceived of more products to move through the company’s distribution pipeline, including the SKUL mask, which was marketed by the Crosman Corporation. The group gained more and more key products and exclusives including VForce Vision Systems, and within two years, Diablo Direct had become one of the top three wholesale distributors in Paintball.

The Diablo brand and the organization’s rapid success was evidently a major thorn in the side of Gino Postorivo, founder of National Paintball supply, a major discount retailer and wholesale distributor. Threats of lawsuits ensued based on Gino’s claim that the un-trademarked Diablo brand name belonged to him due to some sales of a Mexican-made pump gun of the same name back in the period around `1993. After years of dialogue, an innovative solution was reached, in which National Paintball Supply purchased Diablo Direct and the Diablo brand, and became Procaps’ exclusive wholesale distributor.

In order to maintain a marketable identity, Procaps quickly launched Richmond’s new DraXxuS brand, and put their previous sub-brands of HellFire, Inferno, Blaze, Midnight and RecSport under that umbrella. Without skipping a beat, the DraXxuS name became synonymous with Procaps, and the flag was quickly raised on victory podiums at all of the major events around the world, establishing Procaps’ new branding identity as DraXxuS.

Sometime in 2000, Richmond began conceptualizing a way to make tournament Paintball more appealing to stadium and television audiences. He recognized that, unlike Paintball, traditional televised sports are able to captivate audiences by presenting play after play, goal after goal, in a repeating format that can fill a timeslot of an hour or more. Together with other experienced Procaps executives, Richmond crafted a new “Stadium” concept for Paintball that included penalty boxes like Hockey, Pit crews like Nascar, Time-Outs like Football, and an excitement level that skyrocketed beyond any traditional sport. Thus, “X-Ball” was born, and the official “National X-Ball League” (NXL) soon followed. Today, X-Ball or derivatives thereof are the most commonly played tournament formats in leagues all over the world and on television screens everywhere. Once again, Richmond’s imagination created a concept and a word that is known and spoken in Paintball households the world over.

In 2004, a private equity firm named Imperial Capital Corporation purchased a controlling interest in Procaps LP.  Richmond remained on board as the President and CEO. Just halfway through the next year, ICC’s principals elected to terminate the supply agreement with National Paintball Supply.  In the interim, Procaps replaced National as their sole distributor by once again creating their own distribution pipeline, a 100% Procaps-owned wholesale distribution organization called Procaps Direct. They are operating several warehouses in the USA, with branches in Europe and Canada.

Richmond remained enthusiastically at the helm of the organization until 2008, when he opted to sell his shares to spend more time with his wife and children as well as enjoying some travelling and fishing.

Feeling the itch to get back into paintball, and looking to make many of his innovative ideas into reality Richmond started a collaborative effort between himself and his long time friends, Billy and Adam Gardner.

Enter Paintball 2.0

Project name : GI Milsim

Pioneers of the sport's past, and builder's of its future!

A new chapter begins.