How Ministry of Supply Survived the Pandemic

How Ministry of Supply Survived the Pandemic Speaker 1: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today I have the founder of Ministry of Supply, Aman, who actually flew in all the way to record this podcast. Because he's created an incredible brand over the last 12 years, and he's here to share the tactics, some of the tips, some of the tricks, and some of the learnings of building an incredible brand. Amman, first of all, thank you so much for making time to come out here. Speaker 2: I appreciate you having me. This is good product testing. I made travel clothes, so I figured I'll shoot some UGC on the way. Speaker 1: There you go. You're wearing some of your fits already. Speaker 2: This is actually made in New York, like a half an hour from here. Speaker 1: I love that. I'm on for the few people who may not know you, okay? Give them a little bit of your background and what even got you to making and getting into the apparel business after going to school in Boston. Speaker 2: Yeah, so really quick background again. Thanks so much for having me. Grew up in Georgia, you know, was a child of immigrants who said kind of go get a normal job. And so after school went and worked at Deloitte, which I loved. Monday to Thursday on a plane, you know, Sunday at the dry cleaners, hacking the local hotel iron on Tuesday morning. And it was there that I really kind of found my love for functional clothing. How do we make closer? It's soft stretch and machine washable, but also look great in a business or travel setting. And so when I went to business school in 2012, I decided that that was where I wanted to put all of my attention, love, time. And so that's where we started Ministry of Supply. It was just for the simple goal of using that engineering background to kind of change what clothing can be. Speaker 1: That's incredible. And you know, we take this world of apparel, right? And I feel like so many people kind of shy away from it because it's like a lot of SKUs, a lot of variants, sizing, refunds. You know, you got to get product from everywhere. You got to do a lot of testing. Then you got to come out with styles. Then you got to stay hot, stay fresh. Honestly, it's overwhelming to even think about. So first of all, kudos to you to take that leap to go and create something. Before we get started, a quick word about today's sponsor, Instant. As a brand, you know you're spending real money to drive traffic to your site. Problem is, 90% of the traffic is anonymous. You don't know who they are, and once they leave, it's pretty much impossible to get them back. That's where Instant comes in. It identifies up to 10 times more of those lost shoppers, so you can send more abandonment emails, build stronger retargeting audiences, and actually win back that lost revenue. Liquid IV, 3rd Love, Truly Beauty, these massive brands use Instant to get an average ROI of 21.7X and Instant guarantees you a 4X ROI or your money back. That's right, 4X ROI. With the start of Q4, there's no time to waste. Triple your email sales and lock in smarter retention today. Just go to instant.one slash chew to claim 50% off your first 60 days before this offer expires. That's instant.one slash chew. Now let's get back to the episode. Give me a little bit more of like where at one point did you have the confidence of saying, I think I can do this. Is it the engineering background? Is it the fact that you were such a big part of the pain point and you're like, I have to get a solution here? What drove it? Speaker 2: Yeah. You're saying, when did we kind of figure out that we'd figured it out? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, like at a point where we're like, hey, this is it. Speaker 2: Maybe a few weeks ago. All seriously, when you're saying this, you know, about inventory and like the challenge of like 20,000 SKUs at one point. Speaker 1: That's wild. Speaker 2: It was just out of control. And I kind of say that jokingly, but only about four months ago, we completely scrapped the supply chain, a result of tariffs. And decided to go down this route of super rapid production from PO to doorstep of about three to four weeks. And it was only then that we got the confidence to say, okay, we have a business that's profitable and scalable. At different points we've been profitable or scalable. And only when we solved the inventory issue, which is still a work in progress, but only when we figured that out did I really get the confidence that this is now a machine versus a time bomb. Speaker 1: That's really cool. I want to understand and want to get into it about When you create something that I think people, when they hear about it, they're like, oh, this is smart. Oh, I want this or oh, I would like that, right? But then there's a lot of people who just don't even think about the fact that they could have this or whatnot, right? So take me back to the early days where you create a really cool product. A few products. You create a really cool brand, right? But now you have to also go and educate people, get them excited about it. How'd you guys do that? Because you're probably so fundamentally focused on creating really good product, but you also have to remember you have to build a brand that's marketable. Give me a little bit of that early day color. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a really insightful question. I think one of the things we were so excited about early on was being trailblazers and this idea of a blue ocean and that we would create the industry, but turns out you're right. When you create an industry, you also have to create manufacturers who don't know how to put the tailoring of a suit into a single needle machine when it's stretchy. It won't work, so you've got to start from scratch. Investors. I've never invested in athleisure, work leisure, performance professional. I don't know what that is. There's no comps. Employees don't have experience in writing copy or marketing campaigns for something like this. So anytime you're in a blue ocean, I think that you forget that it's much more than just building a great product. It's the story around it. Now, for us, if there was a silver lining to the pandemic, it's that everybody realized at the same time You could be comfortable and feel joy and actually that would improve your productivity, right? And it was a message we've been yelling for six years. We sometimes joke and said, maybe we started this company six years too early. Because by that point saying, hey, look, it turns out this is right now. What if you can carry that forward post-pandemic and still be comfortable and look sharp and be ready for anything? And so I think that kind of shifted mindset away from awareness advertising and towards, hey, you already know. Now we're the one to fill the gap. Speaker 1: Wow, that's really, really cool. You know, I remember the days and it was like, you know, I think they had just done like pretty large campaign around it, but it maybe was like Uniqlo or like some of these other brands and they're just like, you could wear joggers that look like pants and you could dress, you know, there was jeans that looked, you know, that were actually like stretchy jeans and you started to see people like adapting to like, hey, I don't want to just conform to To just wearing these, you know, this one type of fit, one type of look. And then so I'm curious, right? Especially, take me now to like the middle of the time, maybe like four or five years into the brand, right? You guys have proven some concept. You also started to explore retail, right? Give me the journey of what DTC early looked like to retail and like, give me that early, say, Pre-pandemic. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll say a little bit of a pro and a con in our kind of omni-channel, let's get out of DTC, let's get into wholesale, let's get on Amazon, let's open up 10 retail stores in every major US city and let's pour a bunch of cash into it. The pro is that I think touch and feel is so important in product, right? So the idea that you would have that aha moment in a store before you put down your credit card, whereas online that order of operations is the opposite. You put down your credit card and then you hope for the aha. Retail was wonderful in that way. The con is that I think we took a playbook approach for our first half a decade in business. What are we supposed to do, right? What do our investors think we should do? What are our customers telling us to do? And in hindsight, every decision really should come back to product, product, product and saying the one thing we should do is make incredible product. Beyond that, just create the simplest possible playbook around it and don't get too excited about any specific wild channel innovation or selling innovation, but rather just make better product and that will win. Speaker 1: And what was like, because you guys started with product, product, product, what were the things that kind of drew, is it the typical founder, like, oh, you start to see, you know, shiny objects here, or you start to get pulled from maybe a bunch of new sets of advisors, or this or that, like, what, you know, I think It's rare for us to have a founder on our channel that's been in the game for 10 plus years on a single brand. It's you and I think we had Dude Wipes, Sean Reilly. And I think it was incredible having him because the way he was able to talk about his brand was like just this overwhelming amount of learnings. And it was like, I'm still learning. I'm making money, but I'm still learning. But the way he adapts to the learning and teachings, it was incredible. So really, again, super, super, super blessed to have you here. I think it's like What I'm really curious about is what are some of those shiny object syndromes and what are those things that maybe drove some of those decision making away from product and then how did you have to reel it back in? Speaker 2: I think we had this kind of feeling in general that as a brand who touted this idea of first in class for our product, right? It's packed with technology, proprietary, we're throwing all these kind of big, heavy academic terms around and that's fine. Maybe not the right way to talk about the product, you know, feature, benefit, separate conversation. But I think we had this feeling that we had to be first in class at everything, and this idea that if a new marketing channel emerged, we should grab it up before the arbitrage ran away, right? That if a new channel opened up, that if a new market kind of became interesting to us, that we had to go in there. We were flying to Tokyo to see how we could License our brand to Tokyo suppliers. And you imagine the distraction that comes from having 100 employees, a large retail staff, a really complex org, right? Just as in my 20s and as a new founder, there was, you know, no clear DTC playbook for advertising yet. Meta was still ramping up at the time in terms of ads. And so I think we had this feeling that we had to kind of be the trailblazers everywhere. And again, if I could come back and teach myself a lesson and share with your audiences, just do the one thing first and do everything else best, right? So Best in Class would have been a really simple meta-Google ad playbook with really clear direct messaging that illustrates how wonderful your product is in a given circumstance. And I think that kind of simplification is something that I continue now to double down on. Speaker 1: I love that. Great feedback on that. Now take me to, you know, you guys are building, maybe this is now, or is it maybe year five, year six, and you're approaching the pandemic mode, right? What's the state of the business at that point? How many stores had you guys had opened up and how much was DTC percentage-wise versus brick and mortar? And like, what did dialing into that March 20th, whatever year that was, how did you kind of, How did you react as a founder, but then how did you react as a leader? If you can share some of those insights. Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it was such uncharted territory. I think we put up the same sign everybody else did. We'll reopen in two weeks, right? But just before that we were over the moon. We had raised a private equity Series B. We had hired up a big team. We had opened our 10th store. I think that week we were planning on doing our Georgetown launch party. We had Georgetown cupcakes in. After all this happened, the New York Times did this big kind of deep dive report. They talked to our team, our customers, our investors, and they wrote this kind of long article on pandemic, will they, won't they, hopeful resilience story. And one of the things that stood out to me on that story and kind of in reflecting back on the whole time was This just burning passion for saying this has to exist, right? At no point was there a time where we said, no, let's just wind it down, right? I love that. And I think there's this idea that this perpetual, it'll end in a few weeks, we'll be done and we'll grow stronger from this, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: But really using the time to rebuild our fundamentals and say, Let's get out of the business of 20,000 SKUs. It might be time for us to rethink retail. Had it not happened, we had plans to open up another 10 stores in 2020. And let's really focus on what drives the product and makes it first in class. Speaker 1: That's incredible. Speaker 2: And what does the customer derive from that? And that's all that matters. And I think that kind of level of focus is really what took us to today. Speaker 1: You know, I think they say some of these like larger events that happen, obviously, there's a lot of people that get caught in the crossfire and go and survive. But the ones that do, your fundamentals come out stronger than ever, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: And so I'm curious, you know, when you look at Some of the decisions you had to make, even just around cash flow and operating and maybe paying bills versus not and pushing things off as you can, what were some of the most challenging ones you had to face? Speaker 2: Yeah, man. I mean, constant conversations with landlords, which I know is way too tactical for the question you asked, but my first instinct is, you've got these monster leases, right? Speaker 1: Can't imagine. Speaker 2: But what that really came down to was this piece of advice we got from an early mentor, which was this phrase, asset light. And a contract is an asset in some way, right? Inventory is an asset. A team is an asset, right? These are all huge. And the lighter and lighter we get that asset load, channels can be assets, right? They can also be liabilities, right? And so I think one of the biggest things that we came out of all this with over the last few years is asset light. So this idea of a three-week supply chain where we're turning inventory over 12 to 15 times a year. Pre-pandemic, actually at the peak of the pandemic, in our big inventory bubble, we were holding two years of inventory. Speaker 1: That's insane. Speaker 2: And you can imagine the pain that causes when all of your cash is tied up in inventory. Speaker 1: Across so many SKUs. Speaker 2: Across so many SKUs, right? And how can you sell that many SKUs? And the market's gone, right? No one's buying travel and work clothing and we're holding two years of inventory. 27 months, I remember, at the peak. And so this mantra of asset light, right? Fewer leases, team members being there because they need to be there and they're doing a great job and there's no question about whether or not there's a justification for that. Channels that justify themselves and don't cause attribution questions left and right. This phrase asset light has really burned into our memory as saying that agility is the only remaining superpower. And if that's true, then asset light is the way to achieve it. Speaker 1: That's amazing. Great, great insight. Now, you guys are charting through pandemic and obviously, A two-week sign now turns into, we don't know when, right? Take me to, like, what does post-pandemic look like, right? We also got hit with iOS. We got hit with a couple of other things, and we'll lead up the tariffs, but up until, you know, really call it 2024, what did those last three years look like? Was it just a lot of maneuvering and fixing and trying to readjust? Give us a little bit of color there. Speaker 2: It's so hard to come back to that without rose-colored glasses. We did it. It was easy. We kind of fought through it. It was fine. I think at the time, our goal was purely survival. We were no longer dreaming. This idea of a mid-term, long-term vision just turned into cash flow in the next two weeks. It was A very, very tense time of just how do you continue to make it and while still producing great product and honoring your commitment to the customer. Speaker 1: What kept you sane as a founder during this time where like the truth is, is like you at the end of the day you have to go sleep. With your empty thoughts of like, I don't know what I'm going to wake up to tomorrow. You wake up to emails that you don't want to answer. You're sleeping to text messages you don't want to respond to. It's a lonely journey to some parts of it. And people sometimes lose their mind. What parts of it kept you sane? Speaker 2: Can I add one more part to that? I also think that all of that, unfortunately, carries into your personal life. So true. I've had three kids in the last eight years, a very kind and tolerant wife. My co-founder, Gihan, is like my brother, and so he's family in that way. And so all of this, it's all meddled together, right? I'll give you the actual answer here, which I don't think I've ever talked about publicly, which is like, Therapy and medication are worth considering and it's a really kind of loud thing to share in front of a mic in here with you. Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Speaker 2: But it was really miserable. There were a couple of years, quite frankly, that some dark thoughts come in and you're falling asleep and your mind is just racing with terror, right? What am I going to wake up to in my inbox tomorrow? Correct. And those of us with partners on the other half of the world know that your inbox is full when you wake up. And that can be a bad thing and it can really haunt you. And again, that causes issues that kind of permeate the rest of your life. So for any founders or operators out there listening, I cannot more highly recommend just break that barrier and talk to somebody. And whether that be a therapist, a psychiatrist, psychologist, get the help because it's not worth There's no pride in suffering through that. There's there's pride in solving it and becoming a better leader. Speaker 1: Yeah. No, wow. Again, it's a big one to drop on you, right? Super, super. No, but it's so, it's so important because it's like, I, there's so many people ask this question too, because we've all been through different parts of it and in different, obviously, ranges. And you'll see, like, a lot of people are just guarded up of like, Yeah, you know, you just got to get through it. You got to sleep it on. It's like, damn, like, no, there's there's really isn't just that there's more to it. So really appreciate that because I think there's a lot of us. You know, there's over 100,000 people who watch us every single week. Speaker 2: And it's it's like, hopefully one one one. Speaker 1: That's all that matters. Quick break to talk more about today's sponsor, Instant. 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That just erupted and you're like, all right, I survived this. Walk me through some of the most fundamental changes, what you've learned in the last 24 months. Speaker 2: I'll even tighten it up to the last nine months. December 20th of last year is when the President of Mexico announced the pre-emptive strike on Section 321, diminished for those shipping physical product. You probably know that that meant the beginning of the trade wars. And, you know, it's a company who is producing a lot proudly with some really wonderful factories in China. We also produce right here in New York, about an hour from here, from the studio. And we fulfill a lot of product out of our Pennsylvania warehouse and out of our Tecate, Mexico warehouse using 321. And so this was like the perfect storm of you're just getting hit in every single direction, right? And so at that point, credit, I shouldn't say to me, but to my partner, Gihan, who kind of saw this coming and said, there's no way out of this, right? There's no easy solution. You can either kind of completely shut down all your factories and resource all your product, or you can rebuild your supply chain to kind of create a positive working capital cycle or cash conversion cycle. And we ended up doing the latter because we love our factories and so we consolidated. We came from kind of six or seven active factories down to the two that we knew could handle this next chapter. One in New York, one in China. We worked with both of them to say, how do we spin up a two-week lead time? How do we get to the point where we can dream of turning our inventory over 20 times a year? How do we get to that? That way, with no obsolescence, we have no massive sale liquidation events next year. All of a sudden, your margins can maybe handle what you lost through tariffs. And so I don't know if it's right or not, but this is at least our cut at saying, is there a way around this that doesn't just involve raising prices? Or dropping your best products that were made somewhere where tariffs are high, right? Those are the two wrong answers. So this seemed like another choice and we took it and we've spent the last 11 months rebuilding that and it's here now. Speaker 1: That's incredible. To go through some of the stuff you guys have gone through and then to be hit with like a totally different type of challenge. I think it's one just gonna make you absolutely resilient like anything else you probably do next and whatever you guys do is gonna be probably like a piece of cake. But I'm curious now right like especially at the time of when we're recording this we're a week out from Black Friday, right? What do you do in times like this where it's like, all right, I'm just kind of reconfiguring my pricing to incorporate all these new costs, right? That is probably a heavy line item for you. But now I got to give back too. I got to incorporate my customers and make sure that they feel like I'm doing something for them. What do you do in the Black Friday moment? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'll throw a couple things out there. Throughout all this, I think our kind of mantra internally was like, don't forget the why. Everyone's heard the Simon Sinek TED Talk, start with why. And so much of that was kind of this deeper purpose of bringing kind of joy, comfort and productivity, which I mentioned earlier. And so how do we continue to do that? And so I think throughout all that, that's been the steady drumbeat to say, look, if you didn't care about this, whatever it is you're doing, if you didn't care, you would have quit a long time ago. Because all this is tough, right? It's a lot more difficult than it looks. And so I think a couple of things there is like part of that soul for us is Especially around the holidays and as things get colder, giving away just a ton of clothes. And the people that are about to go for a job interview and can't afford it are about to go on their first work trip and want to look sharp. And so that was priority one and has been. It's twice a year doing these massive drives where we get to give away as much clothing as we can handle. And that number changes. It's not always a big number, but it's whatever we can handle. And then the second big thing is kind of creating a system financially where you're no longer afraid of what happens if we don't hit our comps or what happens if we don't hit our numbers. Because that system breeds really toxic financial thinking, right? And I think we've all been there where it's like, we'll spend into it. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: We'll hit that revenue target, you know, and we'll deal with the repercussions later. And that is just never worth it. Speaker 1: It's never worth it. Speaker 2: We've kind of had this financial principle, which is a bad month should be profitable, right? And so if a bad month is profitable, then a great month is really profitable. And all of a sudden, just getting to that point and structuring it with brutal honesty, structuring your P&L and your budget, allows you to start thinking a lot more clearly about, hey, let's build a healthy business, not just a big one. Speaker 1: Awesome. I'm curious about, you know, when you, and this is one thing that Sean Reilly had said when he had come on and he said, you're not a brand until you've been around for 10 years. Speaker 2: I like that. Speaker 1: And so he said anything under 10, you're just proving concept. And it'll always stick with me because I thought it was like, wow, you're so right. Like, we're none of like, you can't call Obvi a brand. He's like, don't get too stuck on the fact that you think you've built a brand you haven't yet. You're only half a year to five years old. So anyway, I what I will say is like, looking back now, you know, you guys are 10 plus years, almost 12 years now. Do you consider yourself a brand? Speaker 2: It's such a good question. There's a lot of terms that get thrown around. I love this Orin, is it a brand or a product series. I really enjoy that. And then the word lifestyle brand gets thrown around. It's almost an insult sometimes. You're like, what do you mean? Speaker 1: Is this a brand? Speaker 2: I think one of our investors had this really great kind of concept. He was like, the second you get tired of your ad campaign, of your brand message is when your customers are just starting to hear it. And so it's how you kind of continue to both reinvent, but also stay really consistent, right? Let's stick with one really clear, powerful message. I would like to say yes, but I don't know. I guess that's a question for a customer to answer, right? I can say, I think one thing is clear is why do we exist? To what end and what purpose that we've made very clear. Now, whether or not that's hitting in a way that we hope is not up to us. Speaker 1: Very true. We had a question in from when we posted about who's coming next on Twitter. We had a question from somebody which I thought was a really good question. They said, you guys preach a lot about high quality and sustainability. It's going to last long, right? You can wash it in different ways and blah, blah, blah, right? When you have something that attracts such high quality longevity, It's kind of like almost a remote concept, right? It's almost like a lifetime warranty on the bag. Does that impact retention in a negative way too? Because it's like, I got this thing that should last forever. The only reason somebody should come back and buy more is if it's a different style or color. At which point, does it impact it to where you can really only attract new customers when you have a new style? Or how do you guys look at retention in a play where you're so big on quality Whereas you look at like a true classic, it's like, hey, kind of like a price of a disposable t-shirt, come back and buy another six pack for 78 bucks, you know? Where do you kind of look at these worlds? Speaker 2: I remember that Patagonia buy it for, not buy it for life, that's the Reddit thread. But the Patagonia don't buy this jacket. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was like their best, you know, whatever it was. But I think I don't know the mechanics of why this works, but we're tiny. In the scheme of things, we're nobody. We keep on saying we want to be the 50% of your closet that you wear 80% of the time. We aren't the fashion quadrant. We're the utilitarian quadrant. We're the uniform. We're the capsule. So that way, there's infinite room for growth, not only in our most loyal customers' closets, but in every new closet that we haven't gotten introduced ourselves to. And so that way, we haven't had to cross that bridge yet. So maybe we will, but in the scheme of things, we're so small that if you love our white dress shirt and you end up coming back to buy two more dress shirts, a suit, and a pair of kinetic pants, We're good with that. Hopefully we can keep on winning. We'd be okay with that until every single customer follows that pattern and we run out. Then maybe we'll look into category expansion and geographic expansion. But for now, there's so much space left for us to win that that's where we're going to focus. Speaker 1: I love that. What's next for Ministry of Supply? Speaker 2: One of the biggest transitions we've made over the last couple of years, purely out of passion, no market research, no wild study, but just honestly, Gihan and I over evening beers talking about what the next phase looks like. We are obsessed with travel. I came on this trip because I just love putting this stuff to the test and taking a couple good photos on What does it look like to do a quick trip and can you fit two days in a backpack, three days in a backpack? And as we've kind of really leaned into that, our customers have really shown resonance there and so we get these emails saying, I went on a three-day trip in a backpack, it was awesome. And so the backpack, we're saying, wait a second, let's make the backpack and everything you might put in it, right? And so if it's good enough for a three-day work trip, it's usually good enough for a Monday morning at the office. So if we work backwards from there and kind of lean into the idea of travel and performance travel planning, It's a lot more fun. It's a lot more exciting than just work clothing. And it means we get to naturally kind of give ourselves permission to get into laptop sleeve and maybe one day footwear. We've been sampling footwear for We've been doing this for four years and haven't found the direction that we like yet. Speaker 1: Would you also go the wallets and phone accessory route too? Speaker 2: One day. There's two questions you want to answer. What do you have permission to do? And then also, where is there a hole in the market? And I think there's so many great accessories players out there. And I find that I'm waking up every day and finding someone new and I'm like, yeah, there's some really cool stuff out there that I, you know, if we're happy with our own accessories, then we don't need to make our own. Speaker 1: Yeah, fair. Well, I want to jump into a little bit of rapid fire. Speaker 2: Oh, I like it. Speaker 1: But so far, I mean, just incredible insights. I think you really show and possess like Somebody that's gone through it but has come out, not just on top, but like come out with a lot of learnings. But let's hit some rapid fire. My number one that I'm curious about, what was the biggest waste of time or waste of money channel that you spent money on? Speaker 2: Channel, oh, this is a harsh one. We've just never been able to hit it with Twitter. We can't seem to make it work. So we kind of come back to the meta Google playbook and it seems to work well. Speaker 1: What's one DTC rule you think founders should stop following? Speaker 2: Stop following? Unknown Speaker: I like that. Speaker 2: Okay. I think we all go to the same conferences and we see the same sponsors at all of these. But I would just say, generally speaking, be way more skeptical. of plugins. So it's 30 seconds to get something live on your site, and you're getting 5K of free credit, and it may be a home run for you, right? But accept that it's gonna be a 50% hit rate. And if you're batting 500, that's still great, but don't assume it's gonna work for you, right? And don't assume that the playbook that's working for your neighbor works for you. Speaker 1: I love that. Product innovation or brand storytelling, which wins long term? Speaker 2: Oh man. Speaker 1: It's a tough one. Speaker 2: There's two great running companies based in Boston, quick plug, Tracksmith and John G. I don't know if you've come across them. Speaker 1: I haven't. Speaker 2: They're both just wonderful. If you're a runner, you should check out both companies, but they're both exceptionally good at both. And they're both doing well. And I look to them a lot for inspiration. And when I grab a beer with Dave and Matt, I'm always trying to pin questions on them. Kind of what is it that's making you do well? And I think if you think about the brand and the storytelling as the promise and the product as the delivery, right? Expectations versus reality. It has to be in alignment, right? I really don't think, we say only great products win, but not every great product wins, right? And this is in our head how we have, you know, Gihan and I talking about this. You have to have both. Geraldo, who's our third partner, is an exceptional storyteller visually, and I think if it were just Ehan in a closet making the world's greatest product, or if it were just Geraldo in a closet, you know, making the world's greatest brand, neither one can stand alone. It's such a cop-out answer, I feel terrible. Speaker 1: No, no, I love it. I think I agree with you on this, and I'm not supposed to answer these questions, but I will say if you just do one really well, I think what happens is the other one becomes the reason why either retention or acquisition can't keep up. Speaker 2: It's exactly right. You acquire a brand, you retain on product, and that's it. I think they have to be in harmony. Speaker 1: They have to be. What's one lesson you learned the hard way as a founder? Speaker 2: Almost all of my lessons as a founder come back to people, right? And I know that's such a cop-out answer there, too, but I think we probably, frankly, way over-invested in the kind of HR playbook, what perks and what benefits and what, you know, like how do we make sure that we're studying the art of retention? And your retention rate is incredible, like, you know, excusing involuntary exits. Years and years and years, people will stay with us. And we're so proud of that, but on the other side, it's like, wait a second, the retention, the goal should be really coming back to the mission. And I think that bringing your culture back, not to all the perks and the ping pong tables, but rather a shared vision and saying, we all care about this. Actually, back to Tracksmith and Jonji, it's a bunch of runners making running clothes, which is so wonderful, right? And I think that's an exemplary version of what culture should be, is not the perks, but rather the mission. Speaker 1: I love that. What's the biggest myth about sustainability in apparel? Speaker 2: And you look at the math here, and we've spent a lot of time, instead of looking at the buzzwords of organic cotton, looking at the actual numbers. The numbers don't lie, but the number one thing he's taught me is that you have to look at the full life cycle, not just the production. People love to tout their low production carbon output. But when you look at a life cycle, we spend a ton of time doing ASTM and AATCC testing for longevity, durability. Can this thing last for five plus years of rigorous use? And if that's the case, and instead of buying five dress shirts over five years, you buy one, we're gonna win that carbon battle every time. Even if we were using horrible techniques, which we happen to not be. But I think the myth there is that it's all about the production math, and I think it should be about the entire life cycle of the garment. What happens after you make it? Speaker 1: That's true. Well said. What's one advantage smaller brands have over big retailers right now? Speaker 2: Agility. I've said it so many times here and I'm going to come back to it. When we had our company values, we added agility on in 2021 as our newest and only addition since we founded the company. We had five core values, we added a sixth. And it was the right one. And I come back to AssetLite and saying, as a big company, I can sit there and tell them about an awesome new tool that is printing money for us. It's amazing. You should try it and just give it a two-week test. And as a big company, there's just too much bureaucracy and red tape to get through it. But as a small company, Not only should we be able to say yes to that, we should be able to go live on the call, right? Someone pitches you on a great product, go live right there on the call. And then terminate it seven days later if it's not working. I think that kind of a wild rapid cycle time is our only key advantage and everything else is in their court. Speaker 1: What's the one thing, if you could go back, that you would change indefinitely? Speaker 2: Oh man, I hope it's not a dark note and it's an uplifting one, but I would just say like Don't go it alone, man. There's some really rough nights in there. In the darkest parts of COVID, the pandemic in particular, it was kind of like, I spent 10 years on this baby and now it's destroyed. What am I going to do? And talking to a wonderful therapist, looking into medication options, talking to an open dialogue with my wife, with Gihan, and just being open about this stuff completely changed my life. Wow, how am I going to wake up tomorrow? I can't wait to wake up tomorrow in just a couple of years and I think if I could have done that five years earlier, man, I would tell myself, go for it. Speaker 1: Before we wrap up, just a quick reminder about Instant. A good abandonment email can make all the difference, but 88% of shoppers never get one. With Instant, you can send up to 10 times more retention emails and use AI to personalize every single message. Fast-growing brands like Higher Dose, Garrett Popcorn and Karen Kane have tripled their abandonment flow revenue since going live. You could be next. Don't miss out. Book a demo today at instant.one slash Chew and receive 50% off your first 60 days. That's instant.one slash Chew. Now, let's get back to the episode. First of all, you've shared incredible insights. I wish our episodes could be like an hour long because I could talk to you for a long time and a lot to learn from you. But we like to wrap up our episodes where we ask if you could share one thing you want to leave everybody with, one thing to chew on, one thing for everyone to take away. Could be anything. If you don't mind sharing something. Speaker 2: I'll say ditch the optics. I don't care how much you've raised, how big your team is, about your wild new innovation and PR and the news article you got that landed. If your customer uses your product and then cannot fathom living without it the next day, that is the only form of winning that will be left tomorrow. Once AI does its job and eats up arbitrage, the only thing left is getting customers addicted to your product. Putting all of your attention into the real bones of what makes your product great. Can I give a quick anecdote? Speaker 1: Absolutely. Speaker 2: There was this great Seinfeld podcast that I was listening to years ago. Someone said, what made the show so great? And I'm going to do a horrible job paraphrasing, but it's really stuck with me. And Seinfeld said something to the effect of, while other shows would struggle to spend 50% of their time in the writer's room, Larry and I would spend 99% of our time in there and we would just lock the doors. And it was all about the script, the writing. And the remaining time was on bureaucracy, voicemails, calls, whatnot. But we spent time on the product, where other shows at the time were lucky to spend half their time. And I think the equivalent should be true for any startup. How do we spend 99% of our time creating real material value for our product to our customers? And get rid of all the other shit. Speaker 1: Chew on that. Speaker 2: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and check out the website chewonthis.io.