Jon Barretto from Fully Laced, Building Relationships & Stashing Your Cash – DBA Small Business Show 20

Greetings folks and welcome to DBA, the Small Business show, episode number 20 where we talk about and 2 small business and small business owners every week here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. How you doing, Dave?

I'm doing well, Shannon, things going well for you today over there in Northern California?

Things are great here in sunny Lafayette. Having a great time. We've got a great guest lined up here. We're sitting with John Barretto today from full. How you doing, John?

Hey guys, how you doing?

Doing really well. Thanks for joining us today.

Yep. I'm also in Northern California. Sunny Northern California. Go warriors, right?

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And you're in San Francisco, right, John?

Yes.

Awesome. And a little always cold out there in the summertime, which is kind of different from where we are, but only about 20 minutes away.

Oh, we have the, they call the Indian summer. Right. In October, November. We get our, we get our summer right on.

That's great. That's good. So, John, tell us and share with our listeners what fully laced does. I have a little background, but nobody else knows what you do that are listening. So give us some info on your company.

So this is actually our 10 year anniversary. We've been making shoelaces, believe it or not, for 10 years. That's a sustainable business. And we have a brick and mortar retail store in a local shopping mall here, Stonestown Galleria, right next to SF State University, where we stock streetwear and licensed sports brands.

That's great. Yeah, that's how I got it got my attention the first time when I was in a conference with John and I heard, well, this guy has a business selling shoelaces, man, he's got to be brilliant. I mean that's, that's awesome. I love it, you know, because like you guys, I often walk around, look at these companies goes, man, how do they make this work? You know, and so I was, I was impressed, you know. So you've been at it for 10 years.

Yeah, this is our 10, our 10th year making shoelaces. Sure.

That is great. You know, one of the. How did you get started? You mean, what was the impetus for, you know, how did the shoelace thing get started? That was your first product line.

You know, growing up, even through high school and college, I worked at Foot Locker, I worked at Nike Town. I've always been into sneakers. You know, I'm sitting in high school looking through the East Bay magazine of all the cool sports celebrities wearing the sneakers. You Want. I know about the sneaker culture. I know about prices. I know about trends. And after corporate America, actually, my last year in corporate America, I was starting getting. I started getting into the import export game, going over to China, visiting a couple of trade shows, and I stumbled across a shoelaces factory, and I said, hey, I can start making shoelaces. I know about the product, I know about the market, and just gotta funnel these out there and see how I can make it work.

That's great.

I have a question already. I'm. Bring us right off the rails, Shannon. John, you say that you make shoelaces, and it sounds like you do, but you also sell them, right?

Yeah. So we manufacture them in China, and then we have a. Both a wholesale and a retail market. So we sell it online, and then we sell them in our retail store, but we also wholesale them worldwide too.

Got it. All right. Very cool. That's. That's awesome.

Yeah.

And are they. Are they. I know you do some license, you know, a bunch of licensed sportswear and stuff. Are you doing that with the shoelaces as well?

You know, we're working on it right now. There's a lot of opportunities with licensing. We'd like to work with the Giants, we'd like to work with the warriors for, like, you know, like the special night giveaways. Yeah. So we're working on something like that with the Giants right now. But, you know, our primary product is just, you know, multicolored shoelaces or glow in the dark or they call it like, 3M reflective shoelaces. Those are really popular for us.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Like neon colors and that kind of stuff. Different.

Yeah, yeah. You know, when we first started 10 years ago, you know, this is where we found the biggest opportunity to start manufacturing the laces, was that the Nike dunk was the popular shoe back then, which it still is now. But they only came with one pair of shoelaces. And, you know, if it's like a red and gray shoe, it came with either like a white pair of laces or gray pair of laces, but the color that everyone wanted would be, like, the red one, you know, so they do what's called, like, a lace swap. So there's these purple shoes that came out that kind of kicked off our brand. They called them the purple pigeon dunks. You know, it's kind of a. Kind of. Kind of a funny name for them. But we came out with purple shoelaces that no one else could find anywhere else. And just organically, through word of mouth, Everyone knew to get those purple shoelaces from us, and it kind of just spread like wildfire. Pretty cool.

Yeah, that is a great story. And, you know, we often talk here on the show about looking at an existing market and trying to find some opportunity or find some different problem to solve. So, I mean, that's a great example of looking at something and taking just a small piece of it and creating a whole business around it.

You know, like, it's funny because, like, I like calling it, like, grassroots, you know, marketing. And back then, it's social media was very, very different than what it is now. You know, now you have Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram and all these other avenues. But back then, for me, it was MySpace, it was newsgroups and it was forums and then word of mouth. And that's basically all the marketing that we use to. To start.

Yeah.

So you've always used social media even before it was what we called social media today.

Yeah. Isn't that funny?

And how long ago was this? This is fascinating to me. 10 years.

Okay, 10 years. You know, I'm not sure. I guess nowadays people call them forums more so than news groups, but back then we called it news groups. And, you know, there's news groups for, you know, cars, for sneakers. Back then. This is still called Nike Talk now, but Nike Talk was a big one for us. And, you know, this is a worldwide forum or news group where Nike enthusiasts would post messages and you can buy, sell, and trade on those, you know, message boards also. Yeah, right. Message. Yeah. Yeah.

That's fascinating, huh? So cool.

Yeah. And when you. When you were doing those kinds of things in the news groups and forums, I mean, I have some experienced that as well. Were you just up there commenting and connecting with people, or were you representing yourself as a business mean, like, hey, you know, we can. I can provide these purple laces to you or whatever. I mean, how did you phrase the conversation?

We did a little bit of both. It was actually other consumers posting and talking about the products before we even started getting involved in the forums ourselves. And that's as grassroots as you can get. You know, other people talking about your product even before you're able to talk about the product, which is pretty cool. So I did act as the brand ambassador, and it actually helped develop future products too, because you're actually listening to the voice of the consumer and tailoring your product according to what the community is looking for.

Yeah, and you're right. I think you hit the nail on the head when you can have other People in that forum or wherever it is that they're doing, you know, recommending or talking, and then you can step in as. I like that. You know, the brand ambassador, you're not just pitching because everybody hears it over and over. Buy this, buy this, buy this. But if you can get into the conversation flow as the brand ambassador, you know, and answering questions, that kind of thing, that's a great, A great way to position yourself.

Yeah, absolutely. Do you remember how difficult it was to upload pictures 10 years ago? Oh, yeah, I'm just thinking about that. What a pain that was.

Yeah. Everything is, you know, when you trying to talk. I mean, we started our company or one of my first businesses selling in the AOL classifieds and news groups. And the reason I asked about that, how you positioned yourself is when we started, you know, we ran into some difficulty being a commercial organization out there, trying to position ourselves as a resource to buy this product or buy this part, you know, and had to really kind of shift our whole positioning to here's the resource if you want it, here we are type thing. Instead of, you know, always being out there trying to sell something, maybe I.

Think it's positioning yourself more as customer service versus sales. You know what I mean?

Yep.

Well, we, we always say every business is the customer service business. Right. It doesn't matter what you do. If you're not serving customers, you're not.

In business and you're not making money. Right?

Well, that's. Yeah, that's right. So did you, did you have a scaling issue at any point in, in your, in your history here? I mean, it, you know, at some point you go from. Or did you just start with a big factory?

Oh, no. I mean, you know, when, whenever anyone ever talks about the import game, everyone always says, my factory, my factory. Yeah, but it's like you don't own the factory. It's a bunch of. It's a bunch of guys in whatever country they're manufacturing in that owns, that owns the factory. So I can say I work with 20 factories, but I don't own 20 factories. I don't own one factory. I just have an excellent relationship with, you know, a handful of factories. And I think that's what makes someone successful in the import game is the relationship you have with, with a foreign factory. And I think that's the biggest barrier to entry when you start doing import, because, wow, I'm doing a wire transfer of $10,000 to China. AM I going to get product? Can these guys communicate with me? How am I going to get this product through customs. And that's why there's domestic companies that handle logistics for everyone because a lot of people are intimidated by it. But we do everything ourselves, from all the way down to the customs clearance. Then we have a broker that does our customs clearance.

Got it? Yeah. Well, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Somebody.

Somebody to grease the skids.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, and those connections did you make primarily by when you say you're visiting China or do you make some of them online? You know, you know, it's.

It's a lot of trial and error. You know, fortunately, I haven't been really burned, you know, to any, anything, any crazy amount. But, you know, with the power of Alibaba, Alibaba is the. Is it the largest worldwide corporation or something like that?

Or it's something like that.

I don't want to give statistic here, but I know it's probably the biggest company in China, but Alibaba is growing faster than I feel like any, any domestic company. And that's a source that I use whenever I'm looking for new factories.

Yeah, that's great. That's a great resource. I agree. And you can, you know, make that connection and even use the, you know, their escrow service and things that they.

Have, you know, and it's funny, I remember using Alibaba even 10 years ago and it was almost like the secret source that no one wanted to talk about. No one wanted to get there. Baba away. And then now, now it's, you know, it's getting to be a household name. I feel like anyone who's done any kind of import from any country, I feel like, has to know about Alibaba now. Just like anyone who searched for any. Anything on online, it has to know about Google. I think it's almost to the same scale as that.

That's fascinating. So, yeah. So you just, you just went and did this without being afraid of doing it?

Yeah, no. I was still working corporate America at the time. Out of college. I worked for Nintendo for a year. I did marketing, merchandising, and then I did the whole dot com thing for about two and a half years after Nintendo and. And then for my last year at my last company, it was called Ecast, I started dabbling in the whole import export game. I went over to China for. It's twice a year. It's called the Canton Fair, I think it's in August. But every single factory in China is there and you get to meet them face to face, build a relationship, take a whole lot of paperwork and then bring it back home and figure out what you want to do.

Yeah, that's awesome. I want to go back a little bit and talk about that transition because I think that is a very important thing to share with our listeners because I think there's a lot of people out there that struggle making that transition from corporate or the safety net of I'm going to get a paycheck every couple weeks to jumping into something that you're passionate about and turning into something you can make a living at. So how long were you, you know, still in the corporate world and running, you know, the shoelace business before you finally pulled the plug and went full bore?

You know, I'd say it'd be about six, six to eight months. And even then that seems a little bit short. And I probably left corporate America sooner than most smart businessmen and businesswomen would do. I only had $6,000 in my bank account and, you know, $6,000, $6,000. But I was like, you know what? I've been selling for this company for two and a half years and if I even apply half of my energy towards a product that I can sell myself, then I think I'll be okay. And sure, over the past 10 years, there's been some, you know, some months or that yet that you sweat it out a little bit, but it's like, hey, I got to get off my butt and, and really put some extra time in. And then that's, that's the, that's the beauty of being an entrepreneur. It's that you see the, the fruits of your labor right away. You know what I mean?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and like, I think, you know, the point you're making too is when you left, you know, maybe you're not, you know, hitting things out of the ballpark right away, but you're doing it and it's all flowing to you. And that's a whole different experience than, you know, doing your job and, you know, getting your check and not seeing any much difference unless you're a commission salesperson, of course. But even then. Yeah, yeah, even then, you're right.

There's no filter. There's no filter. When you're an entrepreneur. It goes from the customer right into your pocket.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Or from your pocket right out to the supplier. I mean, you know, it's, it's a double edged sword, but yeah, oh yeah.

It'S, it's the most liberating and the most terrifying thing at the same time. Right.

You Know, even as an entrepreneur, it's kind of funny. Like, during some of the slow months, I was. But this is before, I guess, some of the turning points in our company. But I had some resumes out, and I was like, you know what? Maybe I should just go back to corporate America for a little bit and get a job and. And do both at the same time just so I can stack some more to put into my next business. And then two times I got hired at other places, and two times I turned down the job that I applied for, which is funny.

That's great.

That's awesome. So is it. Go ahead. No, go ahead.

So we do this. This traveling sneaker show. We. I mean, we started traveling with them nine years ago. It's called Dunk Exchange dxe, and it's a buy, sell and trade sneaker show. And they go nationwide to all the metropolitan cities. They rent out like a, you know, like a. Like. Like a hall or a club or something like that, and they work with all the local stores and sneaker collectors to set up tables. So that was an integral part of our. Of our business when we first started. Now, and the reason why I'm bringing that up is because I applied for a job at United so I can get a companion pass so I can travel around for free. You know what I mean?

Nice.

And then they offered me something, you know, something like. Like 13 or 14 bucks an hour. And they really asked if I wanted the job because I was overqualified for the job, having a degree and whatnot. And then after I did, I did the drug test, I did the lift test, I did all the background checks, and then when I had the paper in front of me to sign, I couldn't do it. I couldn't pick up the pen. I couldn't do it. And I said, thank you for your offer. I will have to decline.

Yeah, well, good for you, man. That. That's, you know, that's that confidence that you need to take the. To take the risk and. And keep, you know, keep moving forward, for sure.

Right. You know, and it's actually just this week. This weekend is going to be another one of the Dunk Exchange shows. I still work really close with the guys, and we're. We're one of the sponsors, and. And that actually helps our business quite a bit, too, for. For local marketing. Since the sneaker shows in San Francisco, we're able to bring a lot of foot traffic into our store, too.

No.

No pun intended. With foot traffic there.

Foot traffic. There you go.

That's right.

Well, the thing I keep hearing you say in one form or another is all the connections that you've made along the way, whether it's, you know, reliable connections from the factories in China, you know, kind of partners, you know, with the. The sneaker show. Even though, you know, it could have gone sideways or somebody could have got upset where you said, hey, you know, I'm not going to come work for you, but you still kept that relationship going. And you know, that. That's. That's powerful and very, very important, I think.

Yeah. I mean, you hear all kinds of the saying, like, don't burn your bridges. Treat others like you want to be treated. All that kind of stuff. I mean, all that stuff always resonates with me. I mean, it's. It's pretty good stuff. It's not like. It's not who you know, it's not what you know, it's who you know. But you still gotta. You gotta be smart. You still gotta have a educational foundation, you know.

Yeah. I actually had written down almost the same thing, Shannon, that, you know, you're building relationships is all you do. I mean, it's not all you do.

You. But.

But it's. It's the foundation of what you do, including the relationships with your customers.

That's, you know, that's like, you know, you, you know, being the boss of the company, owning the company. With, with my wife, we have a team of about like 10 to 12 employees right now. And I don't, like nowadays, I only work on the stuff that I want to work on, and I only do the things that I enjoy doing. And, you know, 50, 60% of the things that I do on a daily basis is. Is a. Networking is. Is. Is working with people and building relationships. That's. I love doing that. I enjoy doing that.

Yeah, it's. And it sounds like, you know, you're good at it and that. That's kind of the reward. And, you know, if somebody's out there listening, they're, you know, kind of getting started and trying to do whatever, you know, that longevity is. It's awesome when you get to that point where you've got some really good, reliable people that you've brought up over, you know, time and have been with you for years, probably. It frees you up to, you know, use what skill set you have the best, and whether it's relationships or this, that and the other. And it's a big positive when you've been around for, you know, as long as you guys have.

Yeah, absolutely. You Know, that's one of the challenges that we have now. Actually, you talk about with a lot of our employees being with us for years is that, you know, we're in a very young industry. The whole I call the streetwear industry, the sneaker market and whatnot is a young industry. And a lot of our employees have been with us since they were in college. And now that they graduated college, it's like their, their parents are pushing them to get a career, but they love working for us so much that, that they want to stick with us. And my challenge as, as the employer is to empower them to do things outside of the box so we can validate paying them more money. You know what I mean?

Oh, yeah, we talk about that here a lot. About what career path can you get these people on? Because if there is no career path, then they usually wind up leaving, right?

And then it's time to move on. You know, I feel like it's my obligation and my duty as their employer and also their friend to put them on the right career path. And, you know, we have very little turnover in our company, but for a lot of the employees that have moved on, we've assisted them in finding a career path that, you know, helping them follow their dreams, basically.

Yeah. And that's great. And that, that's very rewarding as well. You know, we, you know, with my business, we try to always embrace, hey, somebody's going on. Let's, you know, hey, let's have a barbecue and thank him for everything I've done here. Wish them well. I mean, that's, that's a really important thing, coming back full circle to these relationships that you have that you, you keep them going in a positive way. You just never know where things are going to lead. You know, you make that person may come back.

And that goes back to the whole relationships thing, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I want to go back. You know, earlier you, you mentioned you've got a wholesale division and a retail. So a couple questions. When did you guys open up your. Your first retail store? And then how do you market to. I understand the retail side of it, I think, but how do you market to the wholesale side of. Of the business?

So we've had our retail store for. I think this is gonna be our sixth or seventh Christmas now, I think about six years. But for our wholesale side, we actually signed with a sales agency in Southern California. So we pay them a monthly. They call it like a showroom fee. And then they take 10% of all the wholesale business that they bring to us. So we had wholesale accounts before that we built on our own. And we go to quarterly trade shows. It's called either the magic trade show or the agenda trade show. In either Vegas or Long beach is one in New York also where, you know, you set up, set up a 10 by 10 booth, you show your line and you either pre book where your customers will pre order items for the next season, or it's called at once merchandise where you can ship it right away. And you know, we did the whole trade show thing for a couple years and we find more value in just outsourcing it to a company that specializes in it and letting them do that. And they just send us pos and we ship it out.

Yeah, that's interesting. So that's a great way for someone that maybe doesn't have the manpower or the infrastructure to visit these shows and that kind of thing to. To contract with someone else to represent them.

Yeah, absolutely. I find a lot of value in sales agencies. Absolutely. Because I mean they have their network of buyers that they work with, they've worked with for years. So just let them do it what they do best.

And how'd you find these guys? Did you do something online and.

Oh no, just, you know, the, it's funny, the streetwear industry is, is both big and small at the same time. If you, if you're within a network of the proper brands, positive individuals, it's just through referrals. You see these guys at the trade shows all the time. You see them at the streetwear events, you see them at the sneaker shows. And it's just a matter of doing business together.

I got it. That makes sense. Yeah, I think that's a great resource, I think. And connecting with an organization like that can really help you out.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

That's good. And so what percentage do you think of your overall business is wholesale versus retail?

You know, online retail for. I guess we're just talking about the shoelaces here. Online retail I'd say would still be about, wow, about 50%. And then in store is maybe, you know, 25%. Wholesale is 25%. That's a pretty good estimate. I mean we started off as an online retailer and that's still 50% of our business. And as much as I can make that percentage increase, the better because there's less overhead costs for, for online business.

Sure. You're not paying the fees and that kind of thing. And now, and we met at, you know, an ebay conference and you do some business in Marketplaces like ebay and Amazon as well.

Yeah, well, we sell a lot of leases on ebay. You know, we. It's funny. We met at an ebay conference, which is, you know, Amazon's number one competitor and vice versa. And I just started using Amazon after the ebay conference.

I'm sure we talked about it at the.

Yeah, we're at the ebay conference, and everyone was whispering to me, wow, you're not on Amazon yet. You should. So we did that right away. And here comes another revenue stream. So thanks to. Thanks to all the guys on our ebay team that inspired me to work with Amazon.

Yeah, that is great. And again, come back to that collaboration and. And the, you know, relationships and opening, being open to those kinds of things. You know, I always say, you know, business having your own business is like throwing out this big net, and if, you know, the wider you can make it, you make these connections and you just. You don't know where they'll take you.

Right? Absolutely.

No, that's cool. So we always ask. We have a couple questions. We always ask. And, you know, we're big fans of making mistakes and learning from and moving on. If you could pick, you know, I always ask, what's the best mistake? And then what I mean by that is, you know, what really taught you the most? You think over the last 10 years that you kind of come back to, you know, on a regular basis.

So I don't know if you're familiar with a company called Karmaloop. We call them the Walmart of Streetwear, the number one and largest online retailer for streetwear. And if we talk about the turning points in Fully laced, working with Karmaloop was absolutely the biggest turning point in our company because you're working with the number one retailer. So we started working with them maybe three or four years into our business, and our business just soared. It was insane, because you have a reach of 1 million unique visitors a day or something like that. Something really crazy like that. And that actually funded our retail store and my wedding. We had a really nice wedding in Hawaii. Thanks. Thanks to Karmaloop. But then you talk about one of the mistakes that you've made. And so that company, Karmaloop, went bankrupt in March, and they had over $100 million in accounts payable. And fortunately, fortunately, fortunately and unfortunately, they were able to walk away from us with only about $15,000 in accounts payable. And you know what? That's a lot of money. That's a decent used BMW or something.

Ye.

You know, and I'M still kind of sour about it, but we, our company was stronger and we grew stronger when we realized that they were going down that, down that road. So our company as fully laced that used to rely on Karma Loop's check every month, which accounted for almost 30, 40% of our monthly revenue, which is a lot. Once we saw them going down the road of bankruptcy and late payments and whatnot, we scaled back quite a bit. I mean, I have some friends that are owed over $100,000 from Karma Lube and that's enough to put a company out of business.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah.

A lot of these guys are young too. A lot of these guys, I'm 34. Some guys are in their mid to late 20s and this is all they got. And they put all their eggs in one basket. And next thing you know, they, they, they claim bankruptcy. And it's really twisted. They're still in business now. They got there, they were owned by the bank and then, you know, all that debt just disappears. Same name, right company, same employees, same looking website and they owe over a hundred million dollars that they're never gonna have to pay again. Yeah, isn't that wild?

We've seen it. I've seen it happen. You know, our, one of my businesses represents websites and sells their ads for them. And a lot of websites out there will use just Google Ads. And the problem is at any point in time, Google can decide your website is no longer eligible to receive ads. And because this criteria has existed in the past, we're not going to pay you what, you know, the ads you serve because it was against our rules to begin with. And I've seen this. And so Google hasn't even gone out of business. It's just their terms of service say, oh no, your site was never eligible. So all the money we owe you and certainly nothing in the future will ever be paid. And that's it. And, and now that's it. That's. And, and you know, a lot of sites out there rep, that's 90 of their income, not even 30 or 40. Right. You know, and then it's like, what do you do? So, yeah, yeah, man, putting, putting all your eggs in one basket can hurt. Yep.

Yeah, it's like you said, it's enticing because it's, it can be a powerful way to ramp up your business. But you really have to have that, you know, plan B, which is, you know, it sounds like you were, you had the foresight to going on and the ability to, you know, make your change and Shift, you know, shift over.

I've always.

And so that's our best, that's our best mistake. You know, it was we, I feel like we maximized every penny we could from karma loop over the past, you know, six, six or seven years and walking away with only a $15,000 loss. That's still a plus.

Yep.

That we, we. I think we did okay.

Yeah. It sounds like I've always said if you're, if you think you're in business for yourself, but you only have one big client or one big source of revenue, and if that were to dry up, you'd be done, you're not in, you're not in business for yourself.

Yeah. You know, here's this. Not a funny story. It's unfortunate but fortunate. So we used to work, there's this, there's a show in Vegas called the ASD AMD Show. And I, and I learned about the show early on when I was sourcing because it's a, it's all closeouts. So, you know, like Marshalls and Ross and TJ Maxx and some of these, a lot of these discount retailers, dollar stores and all that, this is where they go to, to find product. And I came across this one wholesaler that had about, you know, 20,000 San Francisco Giants rolling bags. And what happened was that they, they had the Giants license, they manufactured these bags for Walmart and all the tags still had the Walmart bag on them and the Walmart, all the bags had the Walmart tag on them. And Walmart placed this po with this, with this company and then they canceled the order. And that's, and that was enough to put that guy out of business. So that, and that. It's crazy, right? That's putting all your eggs in one basket, you know, getting, getting excited for a client like, like Walmart. But then in the fine print, they can cancel at any time. Right. And then all that product went to a closeout company and you're able to buy that for pennies on the dollar. And so we bought it. We bought it, we sold it, you know, but, you know, fortunate and unfortunate, you know.

Yeah. Well, it, I've heard this said before. You know, the, the day you, you get in business with Walmart, it's the best day and the worst day of your life. Right. And I could see how that certainly, you know, could happen in that case. Yeah. That's wild. Hey, so it's been great having you here. I love it. We, you know, one of the other, the last things we always ask, you know, is if you could go back when you were starting about 10 years ago and, or even before that and give yourself one piece of advice that, you know, now having done this for a decade, you know, what, what, what tip would you give yourself that you can share with our listeners that you would have helped you out?

You know, owning your own company, it's a hundred percent about cash flow. When the money's good, stash it for when the money is bad. And you know, it's, it's like, it's a, it's like a, like, like, like a bell curve. The ups and downs as your business is not always going to be great and you have to save the money for when the business isn't so great. And we learned that firsthand. And you know, over the past couple years there's been some really great months, some really great years. Especially when like, you know, all the, all the Bay Area sports teams are winning championships. Those are always great and that affects our business directly. So when the sports teams are doing so great, you know, then, then you have that, that money stashed to keep operations going and everyone paid and everyone and food on the table. Right?

Yeah, that's some great advice. Stash your cash.

A friend of mine who's a jeweler said his dad gave him the same advice. You know, when it rains, fill your buckets.

Yeah, I like that. That's totally cool. That's good. Yeah. So John, how do people find you? What's the best way to get in touch with your company?

You can go to fullylaced.com, you can follow us on social mediaullylaced on Twitter and Instagram or our store, Instagram is ulylaced SF and yeah, stop by our store in Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco, right next to Estes State University. You can come by and I'm there at some point throughout the day, but I rarely work shifts over there. But stop on by and say hi and we have a great staff that'll take care of you too.

Yeah, that's great. One thing I want to say I love, I'm looking at your website and a picture of your staff and everything. I think that's you in the back. And I love how, you know, you just mixed in there with everybody else, you know, not having to take front and center. I think that says a lot about your team.

Yeah, that's cool. We're all, everyone, we have such a close knit team and your company's only as strong as your team, I feel like. And they help run all the day to day stuff and. And without them, we would have a lot of trouble.

No, that's awesome. So, listening out, if you'd like to get ahold of John, you can also contact us@feedbackbapodcast.com and we'll be glad to forward. Anything else? Dave, you have anything else for John?

No, man. Thanks so much. You've been a great interview and I'm sure our listeners are going to enjoy it. So thank you so much for hanging out with us for this little bit of time here and sharing all your great stories.

It.

It's. You've been a blast to. To chat with and listen to my friend.

Cool. Thanks for having me.

Yeah.

My daughter was so stoked to learn this is the first time that, you know, we've ever interviewed somebody from a company that she actually knows so that she was.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Really cool.

Yep.

All right.

She's 15. She and her friends knew all about fully laced, so there you go, man.

Oh, that's great. I'll make sure to send you guys a little care package.

Very, very cool. That's great. Well, thanks again, John, and we will, we will keep in touch.

All right, have a good one, guys.

Thanks, folks. We'll see you next time.