How Kevin Lavelle Used Influencers, Shopify, and Cold Advertising To Pass 8-Figures | #BrandBuilderPodcast

Sometimes you want that big fish, you want that large density early on, but it would actually kill your business. If we'd had Nordstrom do that to us two years earlier, we might not be here. You might have never heard about Mizzen and Main, let alone hearing about it in a different capacity because we would not have been able to scale effectively. And we're not a tech company. Product companies are incredibly different in their scope of scaling. So when you think about your business and when you think about what you're trying to scale and those customers that you're going after, understand the consequences of getting that bigger customer. Welcome to the Brand Builder podcast presented.

By capitalism.com I'm Max Kerwick and I.

Advise physical product brands to find their story.

I'm Ryan Daniel Moran and I invest in physical products brands. A physical products brand is arguably the most predictable path to a seven figure business. And we advise them, build them, buy them and sell them.

The show goes behind them, tracks their success and hands you the keys to what's working.

Let's dive in. Welcome to the stage, the founder of mizzen in Maine, Mr. Kevin LaBelle.

Thank you for being here.

Glad to be here. Appreciate it. Thank you. Beautiful hair, really.

So I'm going to share my experience in building Mizzen in Maine and hopefully give you guys some key takeaways. Ultimately though, we will also share quite a bit of time at the end for Q and A. Ryan's going to join me up here because I think that's more important to get at the specific questions that you guys have. So please feel free to write any questions down along the way. I find a lot more value in that for the audience because a lot of people usually have the same types of questions. So we've got seven customers in here today about hopefully by the end of this, we leave with 500. We do have a trunk show in the back and we talk about the product. But let me give you a little bit of background about who we are, what is it that we do? What we do is make the best damn dress shirt. It's that simple. It's that clear, it's that concise. And it took us a while to get to this message because there's so many benefits to who we are as a product. And so one of the first things I want to share is if you can't clearly define exactly who you are, what makes you better, and why people should give you their hard earned dollars in a sentence you've already lost, if you're explaining you're losing. People have been talking about that for a long time and so we've grown over time and we've described our companies in different ways, but at the beginning of 2018, we looked at our customers, we did a deep inside analysis through Facebook, audience, Google Analytics customer surveys and came up with how do we describe what we do? We make the best damn dress shirt. It's a little bit edgy. It's not that edgy. We wanted to throw a different word in there, which you can probably imagine, and decided that was a bad idea. But it encapsulates all the things that make Mizzen and Main what we are. Our shirts are moisture wicking, they're wrinkle free. You don't have to iron them or dry clean them. They got a great fit, all of those things. It's really hard to convince someone to buy a shirt when you talk about it's moisture wicking, it's wrinkle free, four way stretch, no ironing, no dry cleaning, superior fit, etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. And I know that's a challenge a lot of us entrepreneurs face. There's so many benefits and things that we want to champion. And what I have found over the last few years is it is a pretty noisy marketplace. 500 people in the room. It's five minutes into the presentation. So I still have attention of about 200 of you. And that's because we've got email, we've got phone calls, we've got texts, we've got social media, we've got all these different things clamoring for our attention. So how do you cut through? And there are about seven customers. How many people have heard of Mizzen and Main before you came to this conference? Okay, about half. That's pretty good. A lot of you probably heard of us because of this, which was last year. So let me get to the next slide and then we'll dig into the company itself.

So for those of you who don't know who that is, which I would imagine there are some of you, that's Phil Mickelson, ranked one of the top 10 athletes in the world by ESPN last year. 43 major wins on tour, tournament wins, and not someone that you would expect to see doing that. We formed a partnership with him last year and ended up filming that video. It gained over one and a half billion media impressions over the course of about three weeks. It was wall to wall coverage on ESPN for three days, made it on Good Morning America, made it on cnn. All because, holy cow, that was awkward. And it was a lot of fun to watch. But what we did there was create a way to break through. And it also taught us a lot about kind of our marketing, our messaging, and hopefully I can unpack some of that for you as well. But let me go back now that I've made you guys laugh a little bit, tell you a little bit about the backstory for Mizzen and Maine to give context as well. I started Mizzen and Main in July of 2012 with the idea for a dry fit dress shirt. And that came to me from watching a guy run into a building soaked in sweat. We all live here in Dallas. It's freezing today, but we know that feeling of sweating through a dress shirt. It just looks awful. It feels awful. You just don't want to look like that. That's why guys oftentimes keep their jackets on at the end of the day. Everyone hates ironing and dry cleaning. I grew up playing golf and watched performance polos take over in the golf world. A very stodgy and traditional industry. Why couldn't you do the same thing with dress shirts? I watched a guy run into this building soaked in Sweat in D.C. about 15 years ago, and the idea stuck with me for years. But what did I know about fabrics? What did I know about textiles? Design, manufacturing, branding? Absolutely nothing. So I just kept shelving the idea. And after working for a few years, I decided I can't not pursue this. I have to try and bring this to life. So I approached it and broke it down into its simplest problems because it's such a complex thing to enter into an industry, to start a new company, to do something totally new. What are the basic things I need to do? Well, first I have to find if I can get the fabric that looks right, then I need to break it down into an actual dress shirt. Then I need to figure out if I have a product and then I can go forward because there's so many problems. There's things that you feel like you need to tackle. What am I going to do with the website? How am I going to market it? What am I going to do with a team? Where's my office going to be? Push all of that to the side and just start with the simplest problems. So had my first shirt made. It took about six months. Came home from work in my traditional looking dress shirt, except for it was a Mizzen and main shirt. It was the very first one. And the key point for me, the thing that said I can actually build this company, is I walked into My house and my wife looked at me. I looked at her. She knew what I was working on. And our dogs had knocked something over. And I just said, what do you think? She said, what do I think about you helping me? These are our dogs. Come on, let's go. Come help me. And I said, no, come on, what do you think? I'm really excited to show you. And she looked at me like I had three heads and wasn't a moron. And I kind of was. And that moment to me said, I can do this. If she didn't know it wasn't a traditional dress shirt and she knew exactly what I was working on and knew that I was picking it up, then this idea that I had for years could actually come to life. So with that started the process of answering all the next set of questions. How am I going to manufacture it? How am I going to build a website? What am I going to brand it? What am I going to. What am I going to do from a distribution perspective? All of those questions came later, but I had to get to that proof point, that minimum viable product, which a lot of people talk about in the startup world. Once I had that, then I could actually move forward and get the company off the ground. So that took about another six months. And in July of 2012, we launched our website and it was awesome. We sold a few thousand dollars of product on day one. It's really important if you're launching something and absolutely no one will buy it, it's probably a pretty good indicator. The problem for me came after a week when most of the people that I knew and bugged to buy a shirt, they had bought a shirt and we only had a single white dress shirt. Now what do I do? The oh shit moment of now, I actually have to go build a company, I have to build a brand. I have to get marketing out there. So from that point to where we are Today, it's about six and a half years today. We have 65 employees. We're carried in a little over 700 retail points of distribution across the United States. We have two of our own stores and we're producing hundreds of thousands of shirts at a time. Hopefully some of the things that I can share today again will actually be valuable for you guys. And I'll try and pick out key points with key lessons, but please write some questions down because that's again, so much more valuable for this audience. So when we look at that, that 715 retail doors, I'll just go through some of these stats Because I think there's some key learnings in there. The 715 retail doors. When we went to our first trade shows, I was so proud to go into these major trade shows. Project Market. Mr. And show the industry. Look at what I've done. You guys are going to love this. And we were absolutely laughed out of the building. It's an odd thing to go in there because plenty of these experts could have just walked by me and said nothing like that crazy guy. But they felt actually it was their duty to come up and tell me how bad my idea was, how bad our designs were, and that no one would ever wear anything other than 100% cotton. And here we were, just these groups of lunatics out there with synthetic dress shirts. They said no one would ever wear it. And I just kind of smiled because we were already selling shirts online. Not a lot, but people were interested. And at this point in time, I'd actually sold some to people who weren't just my friends and family. So we went to the first trade show and got no customers. We went to the second trade show and got two customers. We went to the third trade show and got 10 customers. And by customers, I'm talking about retail accounts carrying our product. And that was a really important step for us early on because I knew you needed to try this shirt on. It looks like a traditional dress shirt. It does not feel like one. It wears like a traditional dress shirt. But at the end of the day, you're not going to know there's a difference unless you actually try it on, because it's just sitting on a rack. You would never know. So I got some advice early on to actually get our product out there in the world. And I didn't want to go raise the capital or have the expertise to go build out a ton of stores. So from a distribution perspective, that was a critical step that we decided to do early on was get our product into stores with wholesalers who actually knew and had relationships with their customers. Customers would come in and say, hey, what do you have that's new? What do you like? And the stores, it was a great thing because at the end of the day, between Vineyard Vines, Brooks Brothers, Southern Tide, Peter Millar, they were all selling the exact same thing with maybe just a slightly different fit or a slightly different pattern. When we came along, we gave these wholesalers just a totally different thing to go sell to their customers, and they were amazing advocates. It took us about two and a half years to get to 100 retail doors. And in the last four years. We've grown to over 715. And the wholesale industry has actually been a really great partnership for us, which is interesting because in the e commerce world, which is what we are, we're a digitally native vertical brand. A lot of people look at wholesale distribution and E commerce as competitors that at the end of the day I just want to use them to get people to try on our shirts, but they'll come back to buy our shirts online. I don't really care where people buy the shirts. At the end of the day, I know that we will be bigger in time than any wholesale distribution could be. And I want every guy, I want every one of you guys to just try the shirt on and say, holy shit, this is the best damn dress shirt I've ever worn. In fact, this is the best damn shirt I've ever worn. Not even dress shirt. If I have a choice of what I'm going to wear in the day, I'm going to wear a mizzen and main shirt. That doesn't happen without getting people in the shirts. And I can't replicate that distribution and I also can't replicate same day delivery. I'm not Amazon. And so if you guys want a shirt and you're at one of the 700 stores, you can go in and buy it. Now no store carries every single thing that we carry. And so if you want something that they don't, then you have to come to us. And I look at that as a symbiotic relationship rather than a competitive one. And I think it's a big part of why we've been able to grow as much as we have. We're in 50 total states. As I mentioned, you got to be able to distill down exactly what you do. We are the best damn dress shirt. And when it comes to being in 50 total states, we're not a regional brand, we're not a northeast brand, we're not a southern brand, we're not a west coast brand, we're not a mountain brand. We're just a brand for guys who have jobs. We're a brand for guys who want to look great, that don't want to iron, that don't want to go to the dry cleaner, that don't want to have pit stains and don't want to have back sweat stains and want to look good. That's everybody in the country. And knowing that we've been very careful in how we've approached our marketing, we don't overly sexualize our marketing like a lot of menswear companies do because at the end of the day, 30% of men's menswear customers typically are women. And so I want everybody to love our branding and not be offended by it. At the end of the day, I want guys at every corner of the country to love and want to wear our product, not feel like that's a Cali brand, or I'm not a Northeast kind of guy, or I only do Southern things. We're just a great American clothing company customer. NPS 80 plus how many of you guys know what net promoter score is? Okay, handful of so I'll give you a brief background here. Net promoter score is on the average, is someone likely to speak positively about your product, be a advocate and get people to try your product or speak negatively? It's a simple question. On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product to a friend or colleague? Simple. It's a great survey because there's only one question and people don't mind taking it. Anything below a 7 is effectively useless. You've lost that person. They're not going to help you move forward. And as you think about how do you get more customers and how do you get more customers without spending more money? You want to have that viral coefficient. You want 1.1 rather than 0.9. You want each person who buys your product to tell one other person or several. So this NPS is a huge barometer. Apple is a company that has an 80 plus NPS. Your cable company, whoever they are, or your power company, whoever, whoever they are, usually has like a 10. And what that means is people don't speak positively. They're more likely to be a detractor and a net negative to your brand. We had to build a brand without a ton of money. We've raised money from investors, but not that much. I can't go compete with Blue Apron or ziprecruiter or others in podcasts, even though we've done that in Facebook, even though we've done that. It's more and more crowded and expensive to bring in customers. So the best way to do it is to find a way to get people to bring in others for you. Sometimes that's through paid efforts, through affiliates, or through referral programs. But the most important thing is just someone saying, like Ryan. And I don't remember where Ryan got his first shirt, but Ryan's probably told 50,000 people about Misen and Main, so I can't get tons of Ryan's. I don't think the world could handle tons of Ryan's. But I know that we want to get people who are that passionate about the business. Nordstrom. We're in all 120 Nordstrom doors. It took me three years to get into one Nordstrom door. You want to talk about persistence? The buyer who's no longer in that role, he came by our booth one day, said, love the product. It took me a long time to finally get him to come by our booth, but he said, love your product. Let's look at a test in the next couple months. Great. So follow up. No response. Follow up, no response. Follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up. It's not as if I'm just harassing him from a sales perspective. He said, let's put the product in the store, let's see how it does. And.

I remember emailing him and leaving him a voicemail that said, just tell me to leave you alone and I will never contact you ever again. But you said you wanted to put us in your store, so I'm going to keep calling you and emailing you until we find a way to do that. And he didn't respond, so I kept going. And then one day I found out he was no longer in the role. People turn over in those roles all the time and they have a very tough job. And Nordstrom walked up to our booth and said, let's write a two door test order. So in February of 2016 we did a two door. Excuse me, February of 2017, we did a two door test, Dallas and Houston. And by the end of that week we were asked to be in 11 doors. And then a month later it was 22. And then 30, 50, 80. And we rent all 120 Nordstrom doors in 16 months. That's the fastest Nordstrom to my knowledge has ever rolled a menswear brand out to all doors. As you can imagine, that is a challenge beyond all understanding of a growth company to take on one of the biggest people in the industry, one of the biggest entities in the industry, and meet their demand, manage their expectations, implement new systems, because you have to be on their systems, all of those things. So there's a lesson there that I'd like to highlight as well, which is sometimes you want that big fish, you want that large density early on, but it would actually kill your business. If we'd had Nordstrom do that to us two years earlier, we might not be here. You might have never heard about Mizzen Domain, let alone hearing about it in a different capacity, because we would not have been able to scale effectively. And we're not a tech company. Product companies are incredibly different in their scope and scale of challenging, of scaling. So when you think about your business and when you think about what you're trying to scale and those customers that you're going after, understand the consequences of getting that bigger customer. It might not be time yet. That said, we were investing a little bit ahead of that growth and that was the right decision at the time. And we got really lucky because if we hadn't been so persistent, if they hadn't walked by that booth, there was a lot of luck there too. We've aired two national commercials and it took us six years before we invested in our first television commercial. It's a complex, changing marketing world every single day. And it's cool to see your brand on tv, but it's also, for those of you who have ever spent money on television, it's almost impossible to get a really accurate measurement of how impactful that ad was. It's really kind of over time you try to control for some variables and you generally get a good sense. So again, from that timing perspective, there were things that we might have wanted to do earlier on, like we partnered with some other athletes before Phil, but we felt like it was the right time to actually make that jump. We have two of our own retail stores and these are two actual brick and mortar stores that we have long term leases with that are mizzen and main owned stores. Remember earlier, six years earlier, I wanted to get our product out there, but I knew it was not the right time for us to do that in terms of investing in it. And there's no way we could have scaled as quickly from how many doors that we went to. And we did nine or ten pop up shops along the way. A decade ago, pop up was a huge deal. Today basically everybody does it. And it's a good way to test your brand. It's a good way to learn what it takes to do retail and it's a great way to actually learn and get feedback from your customers. One of the big takeaways I'd share here is get out there and interact with your customers. Don't just get feedback from them online, get on the phone if you can't meet with them in person. But actually being in a retail store and engaging with customers directly and hearing their feedback is really inspiring in many ways and it's also really educational for what are the things that you really need to focus on to change? We have around 1000 pro athlete customers that Number is kind of hard to pin down at this point in time because of a really extraordinary turn of events. And the thing I'd like to highlight here is create additional opportunities. And it sounds really trite for me to say that, but we would not be where we are today as a company, but for a couple things that happened along the way. And one of the most important is sponsoring Tim Ferriss podcast. Most of what we're doing today is because we sponsored Tim in those early years. We got him as podcasts were really starting to rise and as he was really starting to rise on the podcast world. He was also already a great author, but with the pro athlete customers. I really can't believe how lucky I am. And. And this is one of those things from maintaining relationships and how you treat people and how you seize opportunities. I got followed by a pro baseball player, and Mizzen and Ming got followed by a pro baseball player in the same day. Turned out to be a guy I went to high school with. And I reached out to him and said, hey, how you doing? Haven't talked to you in forever. And I hadn't, even though I'd started a company where if I could have gotten him to help me out earlier, it might have been big for me, but I hadn't spoken to him in a decade. And I didn't want to be that guy that said, hey, remember me from high school? We haven't spoken in a very long time, and we weren't even really good friends back then. Can you help me out? I didn't do that. And I was pushed by some people on my team. Why I didn't earlier, and I just didn't feel right. And what happened was his mom had gotten him. His wife's mother had gotten him one for Christmas. And that led him to reaching out to me and saying, I'd really love to have you come do a trunk show at our locker room. National Stadium. It's to going guy's Ian Desmond. He played for the Rangers for a few years, and now he's with the Rockies. So we went in and we sold about $10,000 worth of product in an hour. At that point in time, a $10,000 day was just out of the realm of possibility. And what happened from there was baseball players get traded all the time. And so we had a couple guys on the Nationals who then got traded and carried the mizzen main product into the next locker room. And they said, yeah, come on over, come on over, come on over. So now we've done probably Over a hundred trunk shows across multiple sports leagues. And these guys love our product because it fits better, it wears better, it washes better, it travels better. And in a really exciting kind of turn of events for us, in the very beginning, I could not afford to give product away at all. Every single shirt I absolutely needed to get every dollar for, because in a product based business, I'm buying fabric, I'm shipping it to a manufacturer, and then I'm paying the manufacturer for product when it leaves their facility because they're paying hourly labor and they wouldn't give us terms. And then I'm going to try and spend money to get people to buy my product. My cash cycle was horrible. If you don't know, your cash cycle would highly recommend. There were some questions about who of you are great managers of people. I'd ask the room, how many of you feel like you're really great at managing + P&L or cash flow? Raise your hand. I think you're liars, but that's okay.

So knowing the challenges that we had there, I knew I couldn't give product away. And so when some of these guys would reach out or their agents would reach out and say, hey, can you send my guy some products? And he'll send out a tweet for you, that's not really worth a lot, especially to a really small company, because how many times are those athletes tweeting about whatever else they might have gotten from for free? And so I just said, no, I can't, but I'm happy to come do a trunk show. And shockingly, they said, great, how about next week? And so all of a sudden we just started getting invited to all these trunk shows. And the way that we conducted ourselves there, not asking for autographs or pictures and not broadcasting that these guys were wearing our product, got us invited to more trunk shows and more trunk shows and more trunk shows. And then we started building relationships with agents and athletes. And that's how we started to do some really cool partnerships, some of which you've seen before. And guys like Phil and then Phil1 Phil Mickelson. I love that part of the infographic. We have one Phil. This was just an absolute chance of a lifetime. And it came from challenging ourselves from a marketing perspective, which was how with a regular dress shirt that looks no different from any other dress shirt, how do you distinguish yourselves in a very crowded marketplace? Because we are so vastly different from everybody else. And we've worked with a lot of pro athletes. J.J. watt is another one of them. But JJ's never going to wear the product on the football field. I've asked and he said no. His agent said no, and the Texan said no. But that's never going. We're never going to get our product out there in the way that is going to highlight the performance capabilities. So I was talking with one of our investors and he said, what if you, what if you got a golfer to play around in your shirt just one time just for fun? But that would be. You wouldn't forget that. And as it turns out, the nuances of the golf world, most of these guys are locked up in clothing contracts for years. So I started talking with people because we'd made some contacts in the agency world and we'd done some big work with other guys. So there was interest. But they said, look, you know, this guy's up in 2020, this guy's up at the beginning of 19, this guy's up in 2021. That wasn't really going to cut it for us. And I also wasn't really interested in signing a multi year contract because golf polos really weren't the cor our business. It was dress shirts. And a friend of mine in the agency world said, well, would you want to work with Mickelson? Yes. And so we sent him a shirt and he loved it so much he wore it playing with Tiger woods in a practice round at Augusta for the Masters. It was Tiger's first time playing back in five years and it was the only thing the golf world could talk about, literally number one throughout the whole day, even above Tiger woods return. So much so that in Tiger woods press conference in his first time back at Augusta, which for those of you who don't play golf, that's the holy grail of golf.

They said, so what do you think about Phil's dress shirt? That was the thing they asked Tiger woods in his first time back and he chuckled and said, you know, I asked him where his tie was and.

We weren't quite sure what the partnership was going to look like. And Phil kind of did that on a flyer. But he had so much fun. And Phil's a unique guy and there's so much attention that was put on him. He said, I love it. Let's do a multi year partnership. I'll wear your dress shirts a lot. And we've just recently launched his line of polos, but he's worn them nonstop. He wore them at the British Open, he wore them at the players. For those of you who saw when that happened, when we announced that we were working together and he was wearing our dress shirt. At the Players, he played absolutely terribly, which was not our fault. He's missed the cut five of the last six years, but we definitely got some flack for that. But he loves the product. He's a great ambassador, and, man, it really does highlight what our shirt's capable of. If Phil Mickelson can wear our dress shirt playing golf at the highest level, then it's definitely a better dress shirt for you than anything else that you have in your closet. He's been a lot of fun to work with, and we're just getting started. So distribution. This is a little bit about that distribution map that I was talking earlier, that we're in 700 plus locations across the country. You can find us in almost every A, B and C tier city. And that's huge because it is so important to actually try the shirt on. Once a guy tries a shirt on, as Ryan said, they tend to buy several. Our average order value is a multiple on our website of a single dress shirt because so many guys come back and buy three. We do a three pack on our website, and that really helps us move forward. Because I don't want guys wearing just having one Mizzen and Main shirt in their closet, because where is it in the rotation? I want them having at least three, four, or five. So they're wearing it all the time. So they're more likely to talk to other people about it. We have two of our own retail locations. One here in Dallas in West Village, and one in Fort Worth. We really, really, really, really took our time because the commitment to do this right is so significant. Not just from a capital perspective, but if you walk into a retail store somewhere around the country and Misen in Maine isn't really displayed that well, you know that it's not. That's that single wholesale entity. It's not necessarily us. But when you walk into our own store, it better be perfect and you better have a phenomenal customer experience. And if you're a super fan of the brand, which we have a lot. A couple years ago, we had our top 200 customers, which Mr. Moran is in. Our top 200 customers had spent over a million dollars on Mizzen and Main's product. That's way too many dress shirts for any single person to own for their actual needs. But it's because people love the product that much. So these stores are a chance for us to build on that. And we're actually rolling out several more next year. Touched on the Nordstrom Partnership. And the thing I'd love to just really hit home here for you guys is invest in those absolutely critical relationships and not just from, I hope I sell a lot of product here. But the better we do for Nordstrom, the better our sales will be there. And most importantly, the more well known our brand will be. We've driven a ton of traffic into Nordstrom and it's a part of why they love working with us. But they've also been a great, great distribution partner for us, for people to go and find our brand. So I highlight these pictures here because over the course of 2017, we did, I think, five athlete appearances where we paid professional athletes to go to Nordstrom to talk about our product and take pictures and do all of those things. A lot of people would say, why wouldn't you just do it for yourself? Why wouldn't you do it to sell products yourself? You're going to make more money, you're going to have more dollars. As I mentioned, I'm not the best at P and L and cash flow management. And I was also trying to take a longer term view which was if I can get into all Nordstrom doors, if I can be one of their top brands, the dividends that that will pay back over time are worth every penny. So we launched in Houston for those of you who don't watch football, J.J. watt plays for the Texans and he's one of the most popular football players. We launched in Houston during the super bowl with an appearance by J.J. watt. That is the super bowl of super bowl appearances is all that I can say about what we were able to bring to Nordstrom. And they said, this is a brand who's serious about making us successful, we want to invest in them and it's paid dividends for us.

Hey, real quick, I'm doing a test in my business right now that I think you'll be interested in. We have a training called Million Dollar Brands and it helps business owners and entrepreneurs get clear on those first three to five products that they're going to build that will get to 25 sales a day at 25 to $30 and thus be a million dollar business. And we sell that for $297. And I recently had the idea of what if at the end of that training when somebody completed it and they filled out a form saying they know what their three products are going to be, they know how they're going to launch the products, let's refund them the cost of the training, let's incentivize the Action of actually making some decisions in your business and getting clear on your business. And I did this because someone challenged me with the thought of what would I change in my business if I only cared about my customers results and I didn't care about profitability. And I immediately said let's incentivize action. And then I said, well, would I really spend however many thousands of dollars a month I spent on Facebook ads or would I take some of that money and put it into a scholarship fund and then fund some of the cool ideas that came from my training? And it was like this whole world of creativity opened up for me. So this is a test right now that we're running. If you are starting a new business or you are still under that million dollar threshold or even that 25 sales a day threshold, then we have this training called Million dollar brands. That's $297 and it's refunded to you when you complete the training. And I figure if you walk out of that training, you're going to leave with such a clear business plan that you're going to want to work with us ongoing. So you can find this@capitalism.com brands and depending on when you sign up, we're also opening up strategic windows where you can qualify for a scholarship and have your business funded. So this is all an experiment. If I lose my rear end on it, we'll probably shut it down. But for now you can find it at capitalism.com brands.

Trade shows as I mentioned, we were the laughing stock of our first trade shows. Don't give up on the things that you feel like might actually be important for the growth of your business. We were this teeny little booth way off in the corner. We paid to be there so they had to let us in. But we were this teeny booth way off in the corner, kind of laughing stock of the industry with a single banner stand at our first trade show. This is from one of our shows last year. We invested in a really expensive booth and we bought one of the premier locations and we did all of those things, not again, just so we could have people write bigger orders, but because we're establishing our presence in the industry and it's a tough industry to break into. It doesn't mean that you have to go to every conference. It doesn't mean that you have to write big sponsorship checks for all of those things, but figure out where those places are that you really need to be and be consistently presently seen to establish that credibility because credibility is absolutely huge today. One of the things that I've noticed in the Last kind of 18 months is Instagram has kind of become a QVC of startup clothing and product brands. It's not hard to start a brand online and just start buying Instagram ads. And so from my world, the credibility factor of being in 715 locations and having this big following and working with these big pro athletes, when people come to check us out, these are legit, as opposed to it's this random brand. Maybe they have 200,000 followers on Instagram, but anybody can do that these days. That's not really a sign of success or credibility. We've gotten to work with some really cool people, and I'll call out here. Just sponsoring athletes or influencers or whoever might be relevant in your industry or what you're trying to do is not a solution. In fact, they can often create more problems, especially from what you're paying them and what you're asking them to do, and also from a reputational risk, because athletes are humans, and sometimes they make a big set of mistakes. Thankfully, all the guys we've worked with have been phenomenal. But we decided early on that partnering with athletes would be a way that we could cut through the clutter and demonstrate the effectiveness of our product and our brand. It's really important for us to establish that credibility and leapfrog kind of who all the other competitors thought we were. And as of today, it's definitely paid off, but it was done very carefully in how we deploy those assets. What do we do with them? How do we think about appearances? How do we think about paid media? How do we think about paid posts? It's really, really difficult to get this right, and a lot of brands get it very wrong. Look at the number of brands, alcohol brands started by celebrities that just go under in a heartbeat. You would think that that would be really simple. They've got the reach, they've got the dollars. They've got everything they need. Why can't you just instantly pop up overnight? And it's because it's all the other things that really end up mattering over time. Last slide. And then, Ryan, if you want to come up, we'd love to switch over to Q and A. I've been talking far more than I like to the press that Mizzen and Maine has gotten over the last seven years, six and a half years has been absolutely core to our success. Again, we did not raise a lot of dollars, and at the end of the day, we have to cut through an incredibly crowded market, a Great thing in terms of setting the stage for the challenge that we have is Nike owns about 9 to 12% of the global athletic apparel market. That's Nike single digits. When I think about how many different dress shirt brands there are, there are 500 people in here. Let's say there are maybe 300 guys. There's probably 200 brands of dress shirts in here, maybe 150. And it's because it's just a scattered marketplace. What we needed to do was cut through the clutter. And we did it in some clever marketing ways. We did it with a breakthrough product, but we made sure to tell our story. And press is hard to get. However many emails you guys get in a day, multiply it by probably 100, and that's what press gets. But we found a way to tell our story in a way that gave these authors, gave these writers, gave these bloggers, gave these TV personalities something different, just like we did with our wholesale accounts. They're always looking for something to say. They're always looking for something new and different. So we told that story for them as best as possible. We did it in a consistent and persistent way, and it made their jobs easier, so it made them more likely to end up writing about us. With that, I'll flip over to questions because that's going to be far more entertaining.

First of all, give it up for Kevin Lebel, everybody.

Thank you.

So there's. There's a couple. There's a couple nuggets that I want to pull out of this, because knowing kind of the pulse on the room and where a lot of you are, a couple themes come up. For example, first of all, you entered a really crowded space. And so one thing that comes up is, what do we do when competition creeps in? Or I'm entering a competitive market, is it even worth going into a competitive market? Number two, you worked with faces, you worked with influencers, people who had reach, people who had audiences. And so there's questions over how did you structure that? How did you persuade them to get involved? And number three, there's the question of profit. You're entering a crowded market. You didn't raise a lot of capital. You're spending a lot on advertising. You're obviously paying your influencers in some capacity. I know you have a big team, so how do you stay profitable? So take that fire hose Lavelle.

Okay, in 30 seconds or less, 10 words or less, this is like the presidential debates. How will you address ISIS? You have 30 seconds. Yeah, so I'll just try and hit on a couple of those. We've taken a long term view on building the business. And so some months were profitable and some months were not. The way that we view what we're trying to do is a land grab over the years ahead and not in one. That revenue and profits never matter. It's just about users. And one day we'll figure it out. We know that we need to make money and we're constantly trying to balance that. When we're in triple digit year over year growth, there is that balance to strike. And so there's no right way to approach profitability. If you can be profitable, you always should be. But with the caveat that what does next year look like, what does the year after that look like? Because you might be perfectly profitable for a year and then competition can come in and just drown you out. As it comes to the influencers that we've worked with, we've structured really unique deals. And some of it we just paid someone to show up for an hour. And some of it was like with JJ and Phil, there were financial components, but also equity. They are owners in the business, they've invested in the business, we've given them equity. There's some royalty structures associated with it. And that came from a long term relationship that I had with some of their agents or team members and their belief of doing something differently. And then perhaps most importantly in how we structured it was a very low ask. And so a guy like Phil, for example, Phil has two logos on his body and he has the KPMG logo on his hat. Our agreement, he's not wearing a logo on course. And so that changes the nature of the cost of the total arrangement. And it was kind of pulling on each of those levers to figure out what do we really want. And it's, we want that affiliation with him. We want him to kind of tell that story and wear our shirt. Having a logo isn't as important. And so it's knowing which levers really matter for some of these guys. With JJ for example, we weren't buying television ads with him, we weren't buying print ads and we weren't buying billboards. So from an exposure perspective, relative to the other endorsements he's done, it really was not that significant of an ask. And our photo shoots with a really light team were very small. We did our photo shoots in an hour. So it was really easy for him to kind of find a way to do so.

Would you talk a little bit about the ramp up process when you first got Started because I'm pretty sure this is not what happened. But the way I like to think it happened was when our mutual friend Nathan Lotka tells the story, he says, I met Kevin Leavell in a hot tub and somewhere. And so I picture Kevin Lovell spaced.

Out going, I have an idea for a shirt. Yes.

Yeah. So I just imagine that's exactly how it happened. Exactly. And one, two, skip a few. Now you have a big company. What was the ramp up process from idea to launch?

As I mentioned, idea was I watched this guy run into a building soaked in sweat and actual launch of the company was seven, eight years later. And it wasn't as if I was working on it the whole time. It just stayed with me. And eventually I got to a point where I said, I have to go do this. I spent about a year in product development, figuring out where to buy fabrics, figuring out the production process, figuring out what we would name the company and buying the website. And that process took about a year. Starting the actual company in July of 2012, I mean, it was as simple as hitting publish on the website. It wasn't, you know, there was no grand fanfare.

So there was no like buzz buildup or there was no audience building. There was. You had an inventory order and you made it ready for sale.

Yeah. Based on our. And there are plenty of times where you should build that level of excitement. I didn't have anything to lean on to build that credibility. There was no one, I didn't have press contacts, I wasn't from the industry. I was trying to get people to even understand what the concept was. So the notion of building a landing page to drive traffic was. I think I had a landing page for a week and it was my friends who just gave me their email addresses. But for us it was much more. I have to get out there and start selling my product and I will just figure it out once I start getting feedback.

What did you figure out? Where did you start driving momentum?

I figured out that it was going to take a really long time and it's unbelievably difficult to get people's attention for something totally new. And there are examples of companies that have done it in a really radical and transformative way. Allbirds and Away, I think are two of the best examples in at least the consumer goods space in the last few years. And I can't point to any one thing that they did right. They just managed to catch on in a way that was really effective. And I don't know their specific strategies, but for Me, it was. I needed to get out there. I needed. I did everything. I handed out water bottles on Katy Trail with our company name and talked to people who were crazy enough to stop and talk to me on Katy Trail about the company. I went to Marathon Expos, I went to Hotter Than Hell Bike Expo, and I was just literally getting people to try on the product and, and taking advantage of any opportunity I could. I think it was about a year and a half in when I got that call from the baseball player, and it was. Anything that I could pull on from a strategic opportunity, I just grabbed it and I was drowning for a while. You are early on. But eventually some of those things really started to take hold and then I was able to hire my first employee and kind of push forward.

You spend a lot of attention on what I call modern day marketing strategies. You work with influencers, you sponsor podcasts. I see a ton of retargeting ads. So can you point to any channels that have performed particularly well or any that give you more upside than others?

Yeah. So part of the reason that Facebook is worth so much money is Facebook works really, really well. It's declining in effectiveness every day. It's more expensive and more challenging. And the scandals that have engulfed Facebook over the last year, they really haven't changed a lot of what was at the root of those scandals, other than turning off data to some of its advertisers, which is not the root of the actual problem that they are supposed to address. They've just made it harder for us to actually target people. And I have to say, if you're upset about the information that Facebook has and provides to advertisers, you have no idea what people really know about you. From credit cards to cell phones to all of this information, Facebook. The fact that Facebook knows My favorite movie is Gladiator is irrelevant to the information that's out there and credit agencies and all of that. Facebook is, day in, day out, the most effective place to put dollars from a I spend a dollar and I know what I get in return. Podcasting is one of those where it can be an absolute home run or you could just literally be lighting money on fire. And so it's really important when you start to test some of these that you put in tracking mechanisms, put in sub domains, put in unique URLs to be able to actually track how much traffic you're driving. We created a subdomain last year when we did a fun marketing campaign and our creative director came up with it. And it's got mizzenandmain.com and if that's too hard to remember, our shirts are the most comfortable dress shirts in the world. So go to www.confortable.af because our shirts are comfortable as. And then it cut away. And that little kind of jingle, to me, it's the equivalent of a jingle, actually, was its own fun marketing campaign. And then we could track how much traffic was going to that subdomain. Great.

We have about 10 minutes if you want to grab a mic and ask any questions for Kevin. But before we just go up, just go up to the mics. But before we do that, I want to ask, when funding became part of the process, at what point did you know you had something that you knew you could scale and you needed to get some outside help?

Yeah, it was about 18 months in. I took a small, very small convertible note just to buy some more inventory. But it was about 18 months in that it was clear I needed some dollars to be able to invest in some basic things. And that wasn't even really yet hiring. And we raised about $250,000. And this information is public. We raised about $250,000, and then about 18 months later, we raised about a million. And then a year later, we raised $3 million. And those were. We didn't do any institutional investors. It was friends and family. It was amazing angels. It was angel networks. It was introductions from those original investors. And actually we had three or four people that just cold emailed into us and said, if you're ever taking capital, I'd love to invest.

Miraculously, those turned out to be real introductions, and all of them ended up investing.

I've actually sent one of those emails, but it was a little bit later.

It was a little bit later. Yes. Yes. We were past that point in time.

Cool. Thanks for sharing. All right, go ahead.

Hi there. Thank you for the presentation. Really informative, very inspiring.

My question pertains to building a team, and I'm curious to hear about how you went about building your team. And if you were to go back and do it all over again and you had one position to hire, what position would that be? And also, who is the most important team member on your team right now? The most important team members are the ones who are in the back with the trunk show. That was a joke. They are absolutely extraordinary team members. I can't point to the single most important team member. I think we're at 45, 47 in our headquarters, and then another kind of 15 or so in our stores. There's no one person. Because each fills such a critical need in different ways. At those early days and those leadership levels, I think the thing that I can actually probably dive in and be most helpful in is in the early, early days when I had hardly any money, hiring was one of the first things I did with a little bit of that capital because I hadn't paid myself in a few years. The early days, you need somebody who will work their tail off and believes in what you're doing together. If it's just someone who wants a paycheck or you feel like you need to pay them a lot of money relative to where they are, they're probably not going to be the right fit in those early days. Because the early days, while they're a lot of fun and very memorable, they really suck. It's really, really hard. There's a lot of dejection. There's a lot of negative feedback loops. There's a lot of challenges that are just miserable. It's also a lot of fun. And so you want those people who are going to believe in what you're doing, they're going to believe in your vision, and they want to be there. And those were the first few people that I hired. The first few hires that I made are almost all still with us. There were some rocky days in the middle where it wasn't the right culture fit, it wasn't the right alignment. But we hired today on. We literally plotted out how aligned are you from the skill set perspective and how aligned are you with our values and who we are as a company. And this is something that Charles Koch talks about about in Good Profit. You want everybody to be top, right? So highly talented and highly virtuous and aligned with who you are as a company. And the most dangerous person is highly talented and not virtuous. He kind of nicknames them the evil geniuses. And he says, you'd be surprised what a very talented person who is not aligned to who you are as a company. You'd be surprised at how quickly they can do extraordinary damage to your culture. So when you think about hiring, it's who's going to be able to fill generally the needs early on. You don't need unless you're looking for a technical coder or something along those lines. You just need somebody who's going to work their tail off with you and have fun doing it. And then as you start to grow, that's when you need to hire those technical skill sets and just make sure that they're the right fit. The biggest Mistake I made, and this is probably more valuable to your point, is not hiring the right technical folks early on. Perfect example, and I've talked about this before, is we didn't hire a retail planner until about a year ago, and I didn't really feel like I needed one because we were selling out of everything we're making. Everything was perfect. As it turns out, a few wrong guesses can be near catastrophic. Thankfully, we didn't have anything truly catastrophic. But that skill set is not just someone who's smart and knows Excel. There's history there, there's, there's actual capabilities that you need to fulfill in that role. So that would be my advice there.

So when you say technical, you mean with a specialized skill set in the area that you need them to be an ex, that you need them to specialize in.

And for retail, it's. We needed a planner and we needed a production manager and people with very specific skill sets to tackle problems that have serious consequences as opposed to, and I'm not to say that sales and marketing don't have skill sets, but you can kind of work through that and you can apply those skills that you have from an EQ perspective. There are some roles that require hardcore IQ perspective. And if you don't have that, the consequences can be catastrophic.

I had really good advice given to me, my best friend Mark, who's been on the stage before, I was contemplating between two hires for a position and he took me to the ringer on my thought process. And as a result, I'll never forget this. And kind of the takeaway was one person was a generalist and like knowing this part of the job and knowing this part of the job and this part of the job. And I was thinking this great, they can take over that department and build that. The other person was a specialist. They were good at one thing and they knew exactly what to do and they knew exactly how to build out that one channel. And in past I would have hired the generalist to build out the department. And he said this to me, I'll never forget. He said it's way easier to build off the success of one platform than to try and build out an entire department. And so when you say that the technical expert, that's, that's how I interpret that because it's a lot easier to leverage that success into another area.

The other thing I'd follow up on is someone who does really well at a job, it does not mean they will be a good manager and it doesn't mean that they can't grow in their career and create new opportunities and be rewarded for it. You don't have to be a manager necessarily to make more money. I would say compensate that person for the value that they provide. And just being a manager doesn't necessarily mean you're providing more value. And whoever your managers are, it doesn't necessarily mean that they will be great at the next level up, which is a manager of managers. They're very, very, very different skill sets. And we're programmed in business and life to think that everything is just linear. You do really well at this job for a while and then you're promoted and then you're managing people who were doing your job and then you're promoted and you're managing the people who are managing the people. And it's okay that that's not a skill set that everybody has. Right. It's really important to understand that someone who is good at numbers may be terrible at people and vice versa. Thanks for the question. A lot of valuable feedback. Thank you. Got it. All right.

We're actually going to do a lightning round here. We're going to try and answer in 60 seconds or less.

Done.

We'll take just those of you who are in line and then we'll wrap.

Hammer it. Yeah. My question has to do with pricing. So. So when you first launched versus where you are today, how many iterations on pricing and how did you come to those conclusions? Good question. Yeah, great question. I don't have a scientific answer as to why I started where I started. Again, I knew nothing about the industry, but we've changed prices. One time we started at I think $105 and now our shirts are 125. And as we've grown and our product line is differentiated, we've added some kind of variants of that. Why I came to 125, very tactically was most of the kind of undifferentiated competition was 90 to $100. And the luxury market started at 175 up. I felt like 125 was a luxury price point, just below luxury price point. But premium set us apart. We can grow profitably as a business and ultimately was the right fit for the customer. Because I've heard lots of people say, why does it cost so much and why isn't it more expensive? So we must be doing something right. Thanks. Hello. My question is about Nordstrom. You said two years earlier it would have killed your business if you went into it. What changed in those two years that allowed you to handle it? The shortest answer in lightning round format would be getting a few more people and having broken a lot of other things along the way, we made a lot of mistakes and survived some things that went wrong getting to that point. And so at a greater scale, we were able to survive the shocks to the system that that provided. So it was some of those kind of technical specialist skill set roles that we had hired. And then also.

The example that I can give here is I have a two year old son and he gets sick a lot. And I was talking to the pediatrician, he said it's exactly what you need to do as a two year old is get sick a lot because you build, you make deposits into that immunity bank. If you don't get sick, you'll never have that immunity. And so along the way, making those mistakes, getting crushed, having problems happen, make you more able to withstand those greater shocks to the system that come with time. Thank you. Thanks. We're going to finish it out. It's good. Hello. My question is about your approach to content.

I saw a shift in your Instagram.

Content from mid-2015 and ongoing. It looked more structured and enticing, at least to me. Would you outsource this to an agency or would you keep this in house?

Apparently people are watching.

That's awesome. It's good. We've certainly evolved some of the content and the tone and the things as our brand has evolved. We will never outsource content as a brand because it's one of our core capabilities and differentiators. For some folks, it makes all the sense in the world because they're much better at other parts of the business. We will only be valuable over time and we will only be defensible against a very crowded and competitive market because of our brand. Six years ago, everyone laughed us out of trade shows because we were using synthetic fabrics in a dress shirt. Today, virtually every brand in the industry and tons of startups are doing things very similar to us. While I still think, and I'm biased to say that we have a superior product, over time, it's really important for us to make sure that that brand is absolutely core and central. And so we still do the content ourselves. Thank you. Thanks. Essentially, how did you protect and guard your idea? I have a very similar concept. That's a niche saturated apparel market. But did you do anything outside of patenting or trademarking that allowed for you not to get swallowed up early and even now?

Great. Final question. I was very, very scared that someone was going to swoop my idea away and just take away everything that I thought I could build in the future. It turns out there's a few things. One, plenty of people had thought about this before. Nike and Gap and VF and pvh, they've all thought about it. I thought I had this unique breakthrough idea. They all thought about it. They just thought it was a bad idea. So it wasn't as if I was telling them something they didn't know. I just needed to go prove it. Two, most people are far too busy with their own stuff to come in and take anything from you. And then three, figure out what really is defensible. Because a moisture wicking dress shirt cannot be patented in any capacity. It's a widely used fabric and a widely used application. Most applications of unique fabrics into something have been rejected by the patent office. In a prior life I'd done a lot of work in patents and so I was able to kind of understand it's not worth doing. The other thing to consider is you need to go build your brand and go get customers who will pay you and grow. If you are fighting the bigger guys to protect yourself, you're dead because you'll run out of money long before they care. So those would be a couple points. Hope that was helpful. Thank you Kevin.

Thank you for being here. Give it up for Kevin LaBelle, everybody, please. There are two kinds of people in this world. There are members and non members. If you are enjoying this stuff, you have got to join us inside the 1%. 1% members get access to our courses on building businesses and investing the profits. They get access to experts who are bringing in lessons on a regular basis, some of the best in the world and they're joining regular calls with myself or members of my team to keep the community growing. The 1% is a community of entrepreneurs who are actively building businesses and investing the profits. And every month you get a community newsletter to see what's going on in your community and what the opportunities are to create the change that you want to see in your world. Join us at capitalism.com the number one that's capitalism.com one hey brand builders.

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