[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:38] Brad: In this episode, I talk with Kevin Lavelle, the founder and CEO of Mizzen+Main, a men’s clothing brand that literally created a brand-new category in men’s fashion, performance fabric dress shirts. For those unfamiliar, think Under Armour meets Brooks Brothers for button-downs. On the personal front, Kevin’s been named to the 40 Under 40 list by the Dallas Business Journal and was also recently named to the Men’s Fitness list of game changers. Here are just a few highlights from our conversation. We get into how Kevin’s ideas, a 19-year-old intern on Capitol Hill, led to him founding a company that changed the game in men’s fashion by creating a product that didn’t even exist before 2012.

Next, the conversation goes to how, as Kevin says it, being dumb enough to ask the wrong questions and ignoring traditional industry standards was actually an advantage that led to him thinking differently about the fashion industry and creating a product his customers actually wanted to buy. Then we hit on the challenges of scaling a company that’s out to earn six offices in five years and the lessons learned along the way. Finally, don’t miss the marketing lesson Kevin learned from taking a leap of faith by cutting his biggest check ever to advertise on Tim Ferriss’ podcast and the insane growth that followed and changed the trajectory of Mizzen+Main.

Now before we get to the conversation, I’m incredibly excited to announce that Kevin in conjunction with my buddy Phil Randazzo over at American Dream U have partnered together to create a serious win-win for all you Blueprint listeners out there. For every purchase made at Mizzen+Main utilizing the coupon code, AmericanDreamU, that’s no spaces and with the letter U at the end, not the word, you’ll not only have the opportunity to upgrade your wardrobe but also to serve a greater cause at the same time because you’ll get both free shipping on all orders as well as donate $25 to American Dream U for every purchase. For those unfamiliar with American Dream U, they’re a nonprofit whose mission is to help American veterans transition back into the workforce after serving our country.

[00:02:32] Brad: So, if you’re intrigued by the idea of a performance dress shirt that actually feels good to wear, now is the time to check it out as you’ll serve a greater cause as well. We’ve made it easy in the show notes at BradleyJohnson.com/22. Just click the Mizzen+Main icon at the top of the post and make sure to use the coupon code, AmericanDreamU, no spaces, letter U at the end and as always show notes with links to books mentioned, people discussed as well as a complete transcript of the show are available at BradleyJohnson.com/22 as well.

Thanks for listening and without further day, my conversation with Mizzen+Main’s Kevin Lavelle.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:03:13] Brad: Welcome, everyone, to this episode of the Elite Advisor Blueprint podcast. I’m excited to have Kevin Lavelle of Mizzen+Main fame joining us here today. Welcome to the show, Kevin.

[00:03:24] Kevin: Thanks. I’m not sure what fame that is at this point but glad to be here.

[00:03:28] Brad: Well, hey, I can say that at least for my listeners or my viewers about every single episode that I’ve ever done I’ve been wearing a Mizzen+Main shirt so worst case scenario, very small amount of fame up to this point.

[00:03:39] Kevin: Excellent. Love it. Love it.

[00:03:41] Brad: So, for I just wanted to start at the front end of this. I’m very familiar with your company, what you guys have done, facts and stuff, being founded in 2012. But on the frontend, I just want to for those financial advisors that aren’t out there, I’m going to give you guys an unpaid endorsement, Kevin. Your shirts changed my life. I think back to the early days of when I was a football player back in college and it was kind of like the days before Under Armour ever existed where you used to have these cotton t-shirts that you wore around everywhere. That’s really where dress shirts were before 2012 and you changed that game. So, my early plug is if you’re a listener out there, you’re a financial advisor having to wear a stuffy suit around all day long and you’ve never heard of Mizzen+Main and you don’t have one in your closet, you need to literally hit the pause button right now and run out and buy one. So, I wanted to start with that because I know we’re going to change minds here regardless of what we cover, Kevin.

[00:04:35] Kevin: I appreciate that very much. Thank you.

[00:04:37] Brad: Yeah. And one other thing here at the frontend and we’ll get into this a little bit, Kevin, because I want to dig into it but you’ve done something really cool. My buddy over at American Dream U, Phil, you collaborated with him and every single person that puts in the AmericanDreamU code on the website when they buy Mizzen+Main not only are they going to get free shipping but you’re going to donate $25 to charity, to Phil’s charity, American Dream U, which supports veterans and helps them transition into the workforce.

[00:05:04] Kevin: Absolutely.

[00:05:04] Brad: You haven’t even hardly said a word and you’re already crushing it on the podcast today.

[00:05:08] Kevin: This is my favorite podcast I’ve ever done. There we go. We’ll just call it a wrap. How can it get any better from here?

[00:05:14] Brad: So, let’s dig into the show today. So, we’re going to get into a little bit of how you’ve scaled very quickly, how you’ve basically created a new, really a new fashion. I don’t even know what you call it. It’s almost like a new version of fashion in business dress but I’ve got to ask you at the front-end, where did the name Mizzen+Main come from?

[00:05:35] Kevin: The short answer is every sailboat has a main sail and then the second one is a mizzen so those are sails on a sailboat and even if you’ve never been sailing, everyone has this view of what sailing is. It’s just almost you think about JFK kind of sailing off of Hyannis Port and it’s something that fits so well into marrying classic tradition with advanced performance fabrics. We didn’t want it to be some advanced kind of tech-like name that people would think about athletic apparel. We wanted it to be something where people thought about this is a brand that’s been around forever. So, we thought through a lot of different types of names and ultimately Steven Dewitt who was an early creative team member for Mizzen+Main came up with that name amongst several others and as soon as I saw it, I said, “That’s it. That’s our name.”

[00:06:26] Brad: Very cool. And so really a new category is the word I was looking for earlier. Performance men’s wear is really what you call it. I was doing a little bit of research here for the show. You have a very cool story back as a 19-year-old in 2005 where kind of this whole concept came from. Can you share that with the audience here today?

[00:06:43] Kevin: Yeah. I was working on Capitol Hill as just an intern in college, classic college internship and watched a guy run into a building soaked in sweat and just thought why not make a dress shirt out of performance fabrics? The same thing had just taken over the world of golf over the previous five years where at first it was almost unacceptable to wear a golf polo out of synthetic fabrics and then it became mainstream. And everywhere from Augusta to Pinehurst, their signature logo polos were synthetics so why not make a dress shirt out of that type of fabric? I was 19 at the time so what do I know about anything to do with manufacturing design, branding, anything in that realm? And the answer is nothing. So, the idea stuck with me for a long time and then after working in a number of different fields after school and really feeling like I was learning a lot, I said, “You know what, I got to give this a shot.”

So, I spent about a year in product development. I was joking with someone earlier today that I was dumb enough to ask all the wrong questions which turned out to be a lot of the right questions. I just didn’t approach it from a traditional industry perspective and that’s where I think we were able to push things forward. So, the response has been obviously overwhelmingly positive with the growth that we’ve had, exciting for us. We just got into Nordstrom this year and we are rolling out very rapidly with them. We had a two-door test in February and it went so well that they rolled us out to another nine in March and we’re going to continue that rollout over the course of the year. And that’s something five years in or almost 5 years in, it’s been a really extraordinary validation of the business that we built and the fact that when it comes to this new category a couple of years ago people were kind of laughing us out of the building that performance synthetic fabrics in traditional menswear, who would ever want to wear that? It turns out hundreds of thousands of guys want to wear that and probably millions once they actually hear about the product category.

[00:08:32] Kevin: And now almost every brand in the traditional menswear world is starting to incorporate some level of synthetic even if it’s only a couple of percentage points in very traditional garments because guys want fabrics that breathe, fabrics that stretch, that you don’t have to iron or dry clean and waste the time and money to deal with that headache. And then for guys that travel and have to be presentable to not look like a disheveled mess when you get off your flight to go meet with clients or to go meet with your team after you’ve been out on the road and one of the early feedback I heard was guys want that starched cotton look. That’s great and that starched cotton look last for about five minutes in the morning before you get in the car or you get in the Metro or you get on the bus, whatever it might be, it doesn’t last long. And our shirts when you put them on in the morning, they look the exact same that night but it just also happens to be the most comfortable dress shirt in the world.

[00:09:22] Brad: Hey. I’ve got a new marketing angle for you that just made me think of. You forgot when my one-year-old spits up on my shoulder, it’s much easier to just take a washcloth since it’s kind of the moisture licking material. So, you’ve got that corner of the market covered as well.

[00:09:37] Kevin: Working on it. I like that.

[00:09:39] Brad: So, you hit a few things there. What’s interesting I want to go back to is you said you asked all the wrong questions early on and what made me think of I actually had Joe Duran who’s a massive RIA and massive asset manager, he’s going to be coming up but I was listening to an interview with him and he says, “In business, a lot of the mistakes that are made is because people ask business questions when they’re starting to build a company as opposed to client-centric questions.” And so, I’d love to go back, what were some of the questions that you’re asking and how they hunched that it had a lot to do with what clients actually want as opposed to what businesses want to produce from a shirt’s perspective?

[00:10:17] Kevin: Yeah. I think this is a little bit misattributed. I don’t think Henry Ford ever said this, people say that he did, “If I’d ask customers what they want, they would have said faster horses.” I’m not comparing myself in any capacity to that level of innovation and changing the world in the way that he did but everyone in the industry thought you couldn’t use synthetics because polyesters had a bad name from the 70s and that guys only wanted that traditional starched cotton look. And the most fundamental question was, well, why don’t you try? Why don’t you see if this is better? And that led down to a series of other questions which is, well, what are the different variations that you can use? The notion of synthetics it’s like saying food. It’s there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, you’ve got millions of variations. It’s no secret. You can look in our care tag, this fabric that makes up our most popular dress shirt category, the Leeward dress shirt, is 85% polyester 15% spandex.

We’ve worked with a couple of dozen mills and looked at all of their varieties of 85-15 blends and they’re not the same. It’s very hard to replicate a fabric. So, the notion of synthetics not being in traditional menswear, well what if it was a 98% cotton, 2% poly? Started going down that route and then 100% synthetic and all the different variations. I went through hundreds and hundreds of swatches when I got started and eventually found one that as I draped it over my body you walk in and you say, “Does this look like a normal fabric?” And the answer is, “No. That looks like a synthetic.” You don’t want it to look shiny. You don’t want it to look like the negative perceptions. So, you just kind of keep going and you keep saying, “Why can’t I find something that’s softer or more firm or more structured or less structured?” That process, you just need to keep pushing forward and there’s someone who said, “Ask why five times.” I think that’s an old production kind of maxim to always make sure that you’re doing things as they should be.

[00:12:17] Kevin: It wasn’t an existential question for me. I knew that I could find a way to make it work once we have that first dress shirt, that first prototype back in 2011. And then it was showing up at a tradeshow and having no idea how that works but just starting to talk to vendors who would carry our products and I got, as I said, almost laughed out of the room and some of the guys that’s saying, “I know my customers will never buy this.” I remember one story in particular because of the guy – you see all the same people at the same trade shows every six months and I just remembered this one guy who’s impeccably dressed. He has a very, very well-known men’s store in the Midwest and he just said, “My customers will never buy that,” and I just kind of smiled and said, “Okay. Well yeah. See you next trade show.” And he didn’t really need to tell me that. Thank you for your feedback. And in January of this year, they wrote their first order on the most recent tradeshow. And it was just not being afraid to show up and push the preconceived notions aside, not being afraid to look foolish and that’s both asking questions and showing up in a nontraditional way.

[00:13:23] Brad: I think there’s a massive lesson there to also you and your market. You’re a young active guy just like I am and the dress shirt market I felt like I was a 65-year-old man every time I put a dress shirt on and it’s funny because when you know your market its – I’m not going to say it’s easy because obviously, you went through many different iterations.

[00:13:42] Kevin: Sure.

[00:13:43] Brad: You at least knew what you were shooting for. Here’s the finish line that I’m trying for. Now it’s how do I get the right process to get that right product in their hand? So, obviously, we’re doing a show here for financial advisors and so besides being your target market, people that like to spend money on nice clothes and presenting themselves well, all of them are entrepreneurs and I think there’s a ton of entrepreneurial lessons. So, let’s go back to the beginning of the story. So you’re 19. You have the idea. You see a really sweaty guy like a man who probably could have a better option for a dress shirt and then from my understanding, you went really kind of the corporate route. You were doing a lot of traveling overseas and you kind of put this dream on hold. Can you work through what was the mental process that you went through? When was the timing right to quit I’m sure a good job you were doing well at and start from scratch as an entrepreneur? Can you kind of go through the methodology or the steps that you took to take that leap?

[00:14:35] Kevin: Yeah. Well, there’s definitely never a right time to quit a good corporate job and risk it all but the process for me was I wouldn’t say that I had a dream of starting my own company in 19. I had this idea that I just could never shake and I had no idea where to start and, again, I was 19. I didn’t know anything about the very traditional aspects of manufacturing and design but also how to start my own company. I just – it wasn’t at 19 I said, “I will start a performance fabric shirting company someday,” and I think that’s probably a good thing because if I tried to start it earlier, I don’t necessarily think I would have the intellectual toolkit or the network to do so but I did go to corporate route. I worked in management and consulting which when you don’t know what you want to do, it’s a great way to go start a career and expose yourself to a lot of different industries and learn a lot from some very, very bright people.

And so, I think the main lesson for my first couple of years of managing and consulting and then I worked in an energy investment group was learning as much as humanly possible from very bright people around me, the partners of consulting firm, the industry experts that we worked with, people at the companies that we were consulting for and then at the energy company, very, very, very bright people. And it’s not that I felt like I needed to absorb every lesson possible from the energy industry but more so how do these people approach problems, how do these people talk to customers, how do they talk to their supply chain, how do they motivate team members, how do they compensate people, how do they structure an organization. And I felt like those first kind of four to five years in my career I was just this sponge and took in everything that I could, again, not thinking I’m going to start my own company someday. Just I’m going to learn everything I possibly can. And what really changed the game for me was a professor of mine from school, we had stayed in touch. He was a very successful entrepreneur and he taught some classes as an adjunct just because he enjoyed that process. He reached out and he had an idea.

[00:16:31] Kevin: I won’t go into all that but we talked about starting a company together and it really kind of lit this fire and passion within me to say, “You know what, I want to start a company,” and I didn’t know what company I wanted to start. We decided that wasn’t the right time and we moved on from that but I kept coming back to this idea that had just been percolating for years of why don’t you make a dress shirt out of performance fabrics? And eventually I said, “You know what, I’ve got to give this a shot,” and it wasn’t at that moment I decided, “If I don’t quit today, I’ll never get there,” because I think there are some misalignment of advice that if you want to go start a company, you got to quit because you’re always going to be distracted. I think you need to make sure that you have the right fundamental pieces in place before you go do so. Some people can take that a little too far and feel like it’s never the right time but I needed a prototype. I needed to understand how we were going to position ourselves. I needed to understand post-prototype what was our name going to be, what was our logo going to be like there were a lot of pieces that had to be put in place for my industry specifically.

And then once some of those are in place, I actually went to my bosses and ended up saying, “I’m going to go start a company,” and usually when people leave – I worked for Hunt. When people leave Hunt, they go start a competing energy company and so they’re usually politely shown the door that day because they’re going to go be competitors and when I told them that it was a dress shirt company, I think they almost fell out of their chair because it was just not what they had expected to hear at all. And so we worked out a timeline for my departure and I made sure that I wrap everything up appropriately. The path for me from the time I said, “I need to give this a shot,” to the time that Mizzen+Main was launched, it was about 18 months and that was because there were things I knew that I needed to address an answer. It wasn’t that I needed to have a certain amount of money set aside or I needed a perfect business plan or I needed all the right investors and all the right contacts and the right distribution. I needed to check some boxes to know that this has a chance to exist.

[00:18:32] Kevin: And then once that was there then things started to happen pretty rapidly and from the prototype to launch was about seven months and it was about almost a year of trying to figure out where do I source fabrics from? How do I even make a shirt? Who do I talk to? And this was before some of the resources that exist today in American manufacturing so there was a lot of phone calls, it was a lot of Internet research and not many fabric mills or manufacturers are SEO kind of optimized and you just type in American manufacturers and you get this list. And so, there’s a lot of cold calling and talking to people who either I didn’t know how to talk to. This again comes back to asking the wrong questions. Some of them even though they’re American manufacturers didn’t really speak English and so kind of cross some of those hurdles but ultimately launched in July of 2012 and we’ve just been on a roller coaster since then.

[00:19:24] Brad: So, let’s speak to the scaling because you guys – one thing that I’ve been very impressed and I’m going to want to get into some of your marketing stuff you do a little later on because I feel like you have this really cool kind of underground angle going even though you’re not really underground anymore but let’s speak to scaling first because that’s a big challenge for a lot of listeners is how do I build a team successfully? We’re dealing with the top-performing financial advisors in the country so I’m sure there are some pain points that overlap here. So, can you speak to 2012 founded? Literally right before we went live here, you just moved into a 14,000-foot new office from 4,000 feet so obviously massive growth there that I’m sure you’re probably going to outgrow that one pretty quick too. So, what have you got to plan after this one going?

[00:20:08] Kevin: Yes.

[00:20:09] Brad: Can you just, I guess, give us a little timeline? From 2012 basically being an idea and having a shirt, a prototype, what did that look like as far as growth, as far as employees, revenue and things like that?

[00:20:21] Kevin: Yeah. So, one thing we don’t disclose our financials just from a confidentiality perspective but there’s plenty of other kind of points that I can hit. Really for the first two, two-and-a-half years it was kind of a solo ship. I had some folks that worked part-time with me from the outside and try to help us get off the ground but packed and shipped every box out of our house when I would travel for business meetings. My wife would have to come home and pack and ship in my absence. They included a handwritten note in every box. We learned a lot of lessons about customer service and connecting with people when you do that. And for the first three, three-and-a-half, four years, we grew at about 4X every year and that was both exciting and excruciating without kind of a full team around and we didn’t really raise money for quite a while and then it was just kind of friends and family money and then we – until most recently, we’ve not had any institutional capital invested into Mizzen+Main. Actually, I’m not sure when this is going to go live but very shortly we’ll be announcing our first major institutional capital raise that just came in.

But at the beginning, we couldn’t afford to hire anyone because we were putting every dollar we had into buying more product. We didn’t have a marketing budget. We didn’t spend anything for the first several years on marketing. It was just working with social media and trying to meet people wherever I could. I went to things like that Dallas Marathon and a bike race instead of the expos because I thought these athletes love a performance fabric dress shirt and it was met with almost as much skepticism at the Dallas Marathon as it was at the traditional men’s trade shows. They were like, “Why are you selling dress shirts here?” and like, “Well you know the synthetics and the performance and this is exactly what you’d like,” and they just could not wrap their mind around buying a dress shirt at a Marathon Expo but I would do anything I could to get in front of people. So, we hired our first employee three years ago in April, May of 2014 and then hired a couple more, a couple more.

[00:22:20] Kevin: We closed 2014 with I want to say five or six people and then we closed 2015 with I want to say 10 or 11 and now here we are end of Q1 2017 and we’re at 21 people and we look to bring on probably six or seven over the course of the rest of the year. The other kind of key thing to kind of give a sense of scale and perspective is wholesale for the last couple of years has been about 20% of our business, 20% to 25% depending on the month where we sell our product into other retail accounts and they then resell it. At the end of 2014 we were in about 30 to 40 retail doors and kicking off 2017 we’re in now at the end of Q1 well over 300 retail doors and that now will accelerate even more rapidly. We just got picked up by Nordstrom which is a very big kind of credibility boost and a great partner to have. That’s exactly who our customer is in so many ways so we were in two retail doors at Nordstrom in February. We actually kicked off the partnership with a J. J. Watt appearance at the Super Bowl in Houston. With J. J.  it was, as you can imagine, just absolute chaos outside when people heard that he was at the Nordstrom. So, it was a lot of fun although…

[00:23:38] Brad: Probably sold some shirts for you.

[00:23:40] Kevin: He sold a lot and it was awesome. Some woman actually bought a shirt just to have him sign it and that was probably the most expensive thing that’s ever been signed. Usually, it’s a football or a jersey. So, those are some kind of the touch points and if you count living out of our home and packing and shipping there as an office, this is our sixth office in five years.

[00:24:03] Brad: So, let’s speak to some of the challenges of scaling. If you go back the last five years approximately, what’s the lesson you take away that you’re like, “Man, if I could do that different, I would’ve done it differently?” Well I’m guessing you might have one or two, right?

[00:24:17] Kevin: Yeah. It’s hard when it’s all your own money and you’ve put basically everything you have and it’s something it’s really hard to hire people and you’re not paying yourself and you’re still putting money into the company but I think I would’ve hired a little bit sooner. There was a time when I would float between 1,500 and 2,500 emails in my inbox because I was answering every customer service ticket. I was handling every production order. I was handling every, every, everything, ordering boxes and shipping labels and stickers and I was doing everything and there’s a certain point where you can’t do that and grow. You stop things from growing and it wasn’t that I said, “No one else can do this,” like some people can’t delegate. It’s about finding someone, giving them a shot, putting your faith in them and giving them guidelines to operate in and saying, “I need to focus on other things too. I can’t just be all consumed every day by the day-to-day.”

So, I think I would’ve hired a little bit sooner. Everyone says hire slowly, fire quickly and I think that is usually said by people who don’t do the hiring and firing every day anymore. I think it’s people that they’ve hired and fired hundreds of thousands of people over the course of their career. When you’re very early on, you need some help. You need some people on your team. So, one would be hire a little sooner. Another would be, understand that especially as an entrepreneur, you are always the most optimistic person in the room. You think it’s going to take four weeks and $10,000 and it’s going to take eight weeks and $20,000 but you think that it will get done. I think a great example of that is Elon Musk kind of making announcements on stage that they’ll hit this target by this time and you can see the panic look from his staff and team members in the room like, “That’s not physically possible.” That goes back to Steve Jobs reality distortion field that he would just be so optimistic and just push people so much further than they ever thought possible.

[00:26:16] Kevin: But there are some repercussions to that. There are missed deadlines. There are things that go wrong and people have to scramble, people have to pick up where mistakes were made because of pushing too hard. I think those would be two of the biggest ones. Another I think that it’s not a huge mistake that I’ve made. I think it’s more I’ve been open to asking the wrong questions and maybe looking foolish. Asking people for advice from who have done it before whether they’re your investors, your partners, mentors, friends, you’d be surprised how much great advice is out there. Don’t be afraid to ask for it and sometimes I was a little bit reticent to go out and see what information I could get. But mostly, I think I’ve just been so comfortable with the uncomfortable for so long that I’m fine to just ask the dumb questions, maybe look like I don’t quite know what I’m doing because I’m a former management consultant engineering student who started a men’s clothing line. I’m not claiming to be an expert. It’s okay to be wrong and then it’s okay to not necessarily look like you know what you’re doing all the time.

[00:27:21] Brad: That’s awesome advice. You made me think as you’re talking through hiring sooner that very common pain points in financial services and I’ll never forget the quote that I heard in a mastermind one time that an A player is always free. And as long as you’re hiring high-caliber people, just going back to when I think you said you had 2,500 unread emails or something which I think we can all relate to that a little bit. But you look at the hourly wage to get somebody to take that off your plate where you as the CEO and the founder is making big-time moves that are going to open up opportunities like Nordstrom. You’re never going to get to those if you’re sitting there hacking out emails all day long.

[00:28:01] Kevin: Absolutely.

[00:28:02] Brad: I’ll never forget the A players are always free because they free your time up to go do the big things that your hourly wage actually deserves to be doing.

[00:28:10] Kevin: I will also say and I get it when you’re not making any money and you’re putting everything you have into getting something off the ground, it’s tough to write someone else a check but know that your time needs to be – it’s not that your time is more valuable. Your time needs to be on the most productive things that you can be doing and at first, yes, and for a while, you need to be janitor, customer service, financial expert. You need to do the product. You need to do the planning, all of those things, but at a certain point, you should not be doing most things because you should be doing things that you are best at to add the most value to your business.

[00:28:49] Brad: No doubt. No doubt. So, let’s go into your marketing because if there’s one thing that all financial advisors when I say marketing like, all of a sudden, they just turn the volume up. So, you’ve done some really cool stuff and I was actually trying to think back. I think the first time I heard of Mizzen+Main was as a Tim Ferriss podcast promo on the frontend where Tim obviously does the reads so you’ve got that credibility. And he just does a really good job. He only endorses products that he really believes in. So, I’m curious because there are a few lessons I think we can take but how did that connection all come about or are you just connecting with Ferriss’ team and, “Hey, I want to pay you some money to promote Mizzen+Main,” or can you share a little bit of that story?

[00:29:27] Kevin: Yeah. Absolutely. So, it came on the heels of our first major marketing investment which was buying a full-page ad in Esquire. One of our investors built his clothing business. A big part of it, he said was buying remnant-grade ads in fine menswear magazines and he said he just saw great returns and ultimately that was the mid-2000s and it was a different world. We gave it a shot. We bombed. Did nothing for us. So, I was kind of licking my wounds from that and about what…

[00:29:56] Brad: About what time or year was this?

[00:29:58] Kevin: This was in late 2014.

[00:30:01] Brad: Late, okay.

[00:30:02] Kevin: Time is blurring together for me at this point.

[00:30:03] Brad: I get it.

[00:30:04] Kevin: This is late 2014. So, in beginning of 2015, I saw a tweet from Tim and it said, “Interested in being a 2015 sponsor. I have a view open spots left.” So, I sent a note in and one of the things that I said and I think this is a valuable lesson for everyone is I knew someone that knew Tim but I didn’t want to say to that person, “Can you do me a favor and introduce me?” and really kind of extend yourself to someone that probably gets these requests all the time. That individual was Kelly Starrett. He runs Mobility|WOD and do CrossFit or live in that world. He’s a very well-known guy. Kelly has a ton of our product and loves it. So, all I simply said was, “Mizzen+Main performance fabric dress shirts. I think you’ll love it,” and Kelly Starrett is a big fan of our product. I wasn’t doing an official endorsement. I just mentioned that’s what he knew, liked the product and so Tim on his own in vetting asked Kelly if he liked the product and he said, “Yeah Love it.”

So, you always want to be careful when you ask people for those favors because it can be tough. You only get so many cards especially with a guy like Tim. How many people want to use Kelly to get to Tim. And so that direct connection was a validation for Tim that this was real. This wasn’t some fly by the night thing. Tim’s a very busy guy. He doesn’t have time to vet everything but Kelly and I had corresponded. We kind of knew each other and he liked the product. So, that was a big hurdle to clear in that process and we sent Tim the product and he actually called me. I will never forget getting a phone call from him especially as he’s someone who’s like never make phone calls, that’s your time. He’s little engaged as possible and I think he knew how small we were at the time and so he gave them the cost of the sponsorship, just wanted to be genuine and sincere and he’s a very nice guy.

[00:32:03] Kevin: And basically said, “Look, if this is make or break money for you like if these are your last dollars, I don’t want your money. That said, if it’s not, I think that given how much I really like your product and my engagement with my listeners, I think this could be a homerun. I think we could really do big things for you guys.” So, I said, “All right. Let’s do it,” and wired him the money upfront for three episodes. It was more money than we spent on anything ever and we were sitting there. He did the read himself. He asked me for some talking points but he does his own reads and it’s his own voice and I think that’s part of why his ads are so powerful is people genuinely believed him because he’s not just selling himself all the time.

So, he did the read. We weren’t sure when it was going to air and we were sitting there. It was like 9 o’clock in the morning and it was like at the time a good day we’d have maybe four or five sales by 9 AM and it was like ping, ping, ping-ping-ping, ping-ping and we couldn’t figure out what it was and it was right around the time that Mark Cuban wore one of our shirts in a television commercial. Not endorsing us in any capacity. He was just wearing one of our shirts in an ad and my wife and I looked at each other and said, “There’s no way that that’s from Mark’s ad,” like it just can’t be. And we were correct it was not from his ad. Tim’s first podcast had hit. So, within five days of the first podcast, all three