After a competitor edged Easton Diamond Sports out of first place for market share, the world’s leading manufacturer of baseball and softball equipment decided it needed to try something different in order to regain its top position in the space. The result was the ghost development project, a reconceptualization of one of the sport’s most essential components: the bat.

The project would call for the unified effort of roles with widely different skill sets to come together, from marketing managers to project engineers.

Julie Tobyansen works as the softball sports marketing manager at Easton Diamond Sports. “I work closely with professional players, making sure the product is feeling right, performing right, sounding right,” says Tobyansen. 

Tobyansen tells us that she began playing softball when she was about 8-years-old. “Early on when I fell in love with the sport of softball, I was playing it a ton.” Tobyansen says. “It was something that I truly loved to do, and I couldn’t really see myself or my life really any different than that.”

She kept up with the sport throughout middle school and high school via travel ball and competing in exposure tournaments, and she was ultimately offered a full scholarship at UCLA. By her senior year, her team won the national championship, and Tobyansen went on to intern at Easton. “Working at a company that made products for the sport that I played really felt like a seamless fit for me,” she says.