Chris Riccobono – Founder of UNTUCKit on How He Built One of the Most Recognized Brands in Modern Retail

All right, welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today we are joined by a very special guest, Chris Riccobono, the founder of Untucket. Chris, thank you so much for coming to the show today.

Thanks for having me.

Of course, man. So, first off, I really do appreciate you taking the time today, and I'm so just fascinated by your story and what initially led you to launching Untuck It. You've been at this now for nearly 15 years, I believe, and not only just in Tuckett, but even, you know, the modern brands you've launched, such as Greatness Wins. And again, just to take us back here, one of the things that I loved when doing my research and diving into Untuck it is just the simple thought of, you know, like, why aren't shirts, you know, born to be not tucked in? Like, where did this initial problem and idea stem from? And I always love understanding, and I know my audience does as well, is like, when was that moment when you're like, wow, I think I should actually pursue this, or let me dive in more and learn more to see if I can actually turn this into something.

Yeah. You know, if you're young, you probably think it's a crazy idea, but when I. I'm 46. When I was in. In college, people wore their shirt, like when I would. Back then, 20, 25 years ago, everyone wore oversized clothing. You know, when I was in college, this is before you're born, probably, or when you're five, six years old. Yeah, I was born in Abercrombie. Yeah, it was. I was. That's when I. When I graduated in 01. And a lot. It was a lot of Abercrombie and Fitch stuff, oversized stuff. I graduated college, got into the real world. You know, clothing started to get a little more fitted, not like it is today. You know, we were always behind Europe, but it started to get a little more fitted. And every shirt, you know, was down to mid thigh. And I always thought about it, and people just kept wearing them. And in my mind, you know, this was before it was. I don't want to say easy. That's the wrong word. Before you were able to just launch a brand on your own because of E Commerce. Before then, you couldn't do it. You couldn't just go open up brick and mortar stores, pay for billboards was impossible. But it was always on my mind. And I'm like, I used to talk to a friend in fashion and say, there's got to be a reason why people aren't doing this. I mean, J. Crew would do it. Brooks Brothers would do it. It's so obvious. Every guy complains about it. You know, I had a J. Crew shirt that was out of spec. It was a small, I was a large. And I brought it to Las Vegas. I brought four shirts, and I wore the same pink shir all four nights. And I was like, this is crazy. Every other shirt was down to my knees or down to my mid thighs. So I started asking friends about it, and people's people would light up about it. It wasn't like casual, you know, I had so many dumb ideas over the years where right away they'd be like, stop, it's not going to work. Not going to work. They're like, oh, my gosh, it doesn't exist. So I went to Hoboken. I lived in Hoboken at the time. Went to the PATH train. I asked a hundred people an official survey. 95% said, It's a major problem. Not a minor problem, a major problem. So I was like, this is. There's something here. But I still was like, I have no fashion experience. Zero. I was like, how am I going to do it? So I took a shot. I went over to the fashion district, bought my one J. Crew shirt, walked around. It was literally like. There was a TV show on at the time called Made in America, which was about these guys launching these jeans in New York City. And it was doing really well. And I felt just like that. I mean, I was literally walking in. They're like, who are you? What do you. You know? I was like, I need you to make this shirt. I don't know how you do it. I don't know the process. Anyway, I learned and I, you know, the rest, you know, then I. I launched it. But that's. It was really a need I needed. They always say the best ideas is what you need. I used to lay up, lay awake and say, what do I need? What would be great? And it's all stupid. We've all had these thoughts, all of us. You know, everyone's an entrepreneur. Every. There's no one moves forward with it. This one, I was like, I need this. I have to find a way to solve it. That was it.

I love what you just said. Everyone's an entrepreneur. Just no one does it. Even prior to starting companies, everyone's saying, oh, that'd be a great idea. Oh, my God. What about everyone has an idea? Yeah, everyone has an idea. And one thing that you said there that sticks out to me is this idea of feedback. I think especially in today's era, getting feedback for an idea or running a survey. Especially with social media, you can get so much feedback quickly. And when you were first going out there to get feedback, like, would you have not done it if the feedback wasn't good or was that just. Were you seeking for that, for any other idea you had in terms of, like, really leaning into it?

I guess if the feedback wasn't there, I mean, I. This is one I knew. So I always said, if I have the problem, then there's gotta be other men with the problem. I mean, it can't be the only guy out there. I mean, this is a pretty big deal. You see these guys walking around, their shirts are down to their knees. Is that okay? Glad that wasn't me.

Sorry about that. Yeah, that was my fault. My bad. Wrong.

That's fine. All right, do you want to ask the question again or how do you want to just.

You can continue again and I can just pick up where you left off and I'll easily edit that out, no problem.

So, yeah, I mean, I knew that. I think if. I guess it was one of these things I knew people had. And by the way, I'm watching because the NCAA tournament's on. That's what. If you see my eyes go up. But I love it. I knew there was. This was one that I just would. I would talk to five friends. My partner, who I brought on from Columbia Business School, Aaron San Andreas. We were entrepreneurs. I would talk to him every week. I'd call him with an idea, he'd hang up. Bad idea. Chris, hang up the phone. This one within, he was in the airport in Boston and he goes, oh, my gosh, I'm in. I have this problem. So it was one of these things. And by the way, moving forward, when we launched, we were small, we had no money. I couldn't raise money. I'd go out to my father's friends because older people tend to have more money, especially back then, and they would look at me like I was insane. You know, they'd say, what are you talking about? Like a shorter shirt, you know, so we didn't raise much money. And when we launched, we didn't have a big following because we weren't spending marketing. But the people who did email us, whether it was a hundred people, it would be two paragraph emails. Number one, I wish I started this. I was always going to start this. And number two, you've saved my life. You have shirts now. The problem is our first two years of making shirts, the shirts shrunk in Half the buttons fell off. These were lessons learned. But the excitement, I mean, I'm talking excitement when people found out that we were doing this because everyone had this problem that needed to be solved.

So that's so cool to hear. And one thing that I. You mentioned just in terms of like pre. Like very much so. Like this rise of E commerce. Shopify. You've been at this, as mentioned like 15 years. What has been. Excuse me. What has been the biggest transformation when it comes to adapting with the times when it comes to social. When it comes to E commerce. I know you guys have dozens and dozens of physical locations and curious to know your thoughts around retail, E comm and how you've thought about that and how it's changed over the years. When it comes to just the early days to now.

What's funny, first of all, it feels like yesterday that I launched the brand. I mean, Covid made it this four year period of, you know, that's. I mean, I can't believe when you say 14, 15 years. Now, the first three, four years was more of a hobby. I was working full time and then it kind of took off in 15. But in 2011, at the time, it was Bonobos. Bonobos was the first brand. I mean we were. I think it was Bonobos. I don't have the exact. But maybe Warby Parker, maybe Casper, Casper Mattress. We were that. Looking back, I laugh sometimes because we were that early on in this. We were one of the first companies to do this. Now at the time, Bonobos was way ahead of us. They were the first. And they said that they were. Their founder was out there saying brick and mortar is dead. Everyone was saying brick and mortar's dead. At that time, because it was the. We were just starting and it made sense. I launched a site, you know, men don't have to go to the mall, right? How. How great is that? Free returns, right? And, and free returns. That was new. All this stuff we shipped to you. What ended up happening was Our demographic is 25 to 70 years old, evenly distributed. It's the massive demographic. It's no different than Polo was. There' other brands who have that big of a demographic. And older guys. When I say older, not older guys at the time, over 40, over 35. Back then, they still wanted to touch and feel the product. It's still annoying. And you know this, you get a package in the mail and yes, you can go on the site and put a mail, a label on it. That we're so busy. That's annoying. Like it's so easy. But it's still more than you want to do. You don't want to have to return something. So guys with 70% of guys emailed us and said we want to. We want to go to a store. So that's what started our stores. The other thing is we were early on with Facebook, like when we marketed on. I talked about this new brand, Greatness Wins, how hard it is to market now. Cost of customer acquisition cost has gone up. You know, there's 50,000 brands on Instagram. When we marketed on Facebook in 2012, 13, 14, it wasn't. There weren't that many competitors out there. You know, doing that. You have crazy ship. Yeah, it's. Everything's changed now. I will say post Covid. Everyone got all these brands. Guys had nothing to do. People are sitting at home for a year and so many brands were formed there. So now it's a whole nother world. But yeah, it's. It's been a roller coaster of you have to change, you have to adapt. You know, we're going into wholesale now. Heavily. We never went into wholesale. It's the first time.

Wow.

Which is once again very rare. Most companies start in wholesale or do e common wholesale at the same time. Even modern brands, right. They do. They have a large presence in wholesale. We did not want to go to wholesale. We didn't need to because our marketing was so. People reacted so positively to it. Now we're going in wholesale. Are we going to wholesale? Because customer acquisition costs, it's just. It's expensive. So we want to make sure we can acquire customers other ways. We have our stores, we have our wholesale. We recom. But yeah, you kind of have to move around the world in the last four years has become crazy, you know, and so it's a battle.

Yeah, absolutely. And even speaking on like, I think you have this unique perspective of like being in it and the OG early days, kind of the uprise of early Facebook and like those OG brands as you guys are. And now then you have this modern brand more recently, Greatness Wins. Curious to know like what. Excuse me. Curious to know what led to wanting to launch Greatness Wins and kind of finding that athletic brand and the sort of the gap in the market there and how you approached it differently, obviously with this industry experience. And I think a lot of founders that are out there, I'm sure can learn from this given the like just the adjacent experience of how you parlayed that into this new brand.

Yeah, well, if I knew I was going to have four Kids in four years, I would not have launched. Greatness wins for the record.

Oh, man.

But yeah, it was. It was just some downtime and, you know, I need to be busy all the time. It's my favorite thing to do is work. And I was with COVID Untuck It. Our stores were closed, we pull back. Marketing guys were moving into Athleisure and I just was thinking of another area I could disrupt. And it's same thing as Untuck It. Actually, the main thing was, aside from starting on Tuck it because it was a shorter shirt, the other real reason I started is because every shirt that I. So I bought that small shirt from J. Crew when it was a large. That happened all the time. If you order 10 shirts from any company, they're within this difference in tolerance. Companies didn't care about tolerance. When I launched on Tuck It, I'll never forget, I got the first bunch of shirts and I measured each one and they were a half inch out of spec. They call spec. You have your spec 28.75. That was my medium spec and it was a half inch out of spec. And I called my. I go, this. This is crazy. How. What happened? And he goes, are you. He goes, everyone has over an inch, inch and a half intolerance. Because if you think about it, if you tuck your shirt in, which is. Or you or those long shirts, no one cared. You didn't tell that a shirt was a little bigger Now. People didn't wear their shirts tight back then. Even 10 years ago. That's a new thing to be wearing real fitted clothing. It's not new in Europe, it's new in the us so no one cared about that. So I said, Bjorn, he was my production guy, said, if we are not within a quarter inch, I'll give a quarter inch, then our shirt will be too short or too long and we'll be like everyone else. So I would go in and I'd grab a huge group of shirts from. I'd go into Nordstrom's, I'd be there for two hours. People thought I was insane. I had a roll of a tape measure. Wow. In my pocket and I would go into the thing for an hour and I measure and I write them all down. And they were all hugely different. So I just. I knew that the same thing was going to be with athletic wear. And it was, you know, I bought a pair of. I don't want to name brands and attack brands, but there was a mate, one of the most known athletic brands in the world, one pair of shorts was 4 inches longer, one pair of shorts was 4 inches shorter. So you had this much difference. The other thing is for athletic wear, there was your athletic brands which were great, meant to be worn out performance, the fabrics, but they did not have a modern fit, they did not have a cool trendy fit. The joggers weren't tight fitting. Shorts weren't shorter like everyone likes to wear. They weren't trendy. Yeah, the athleisure brands looked great, but they weren't designed with performance in mind. So I was like, I want to make the first athletic brand that's designed with performance. Sorry, athletic brand design, performance in mind that you could wear to Starbucks and look as trendy as Athleisure. So, you know, I reached out to a few athletes and we launched and you know, it's going well.

I love that. That's awesome. And I just even too like the. Just the brand overall and the mission behind it. Your partners there like Jeter and I believe Misty Copeland, dancer. Right? Yeah. Love that. Something you said there. That is a little bit different topic. And we were talking about this a little bit before is just you had four kids in four years, four kids under seven right now, how is that? What have you learned over the years now of being a dad while running a business? I think we were talking before, but when I think about my future and getting married soon and my brother has a. A nine year old daughter, as this is approaching and getting closer to me in terms of this next phase of my life, I always love to ask this question. I think I would really appreciate just the point of view there, how things have changed for you since having kids.

Well, the first thing is I'm 46, so I think it makes it a little harder. You're a young man. The other thing is, what's so hard for me is the four kids are so close in age and the three of them are boys. So it's a battle. I mean, I don't even want to pretend it's easy. It's almost impossible. I always am very honest about it. It's not easy, but it's fun. Listen, with two brands I work round the clock, but I make sure to include my kids. I mean, they're young. The seven year old's starting to understand a little bit about what I do. But I think it's good. I think it's great for them to see someone who works hard. I think you always want that. It's fun because I do get some access to different things of athletes and Stuff that I think when your kids, you know, all kids like that stuff. But it's a battle, it's, it never stops. The key thing is to find time that you can put your phone down and hang out with the kids. And the good news as an entrepreneur, and you probably know this is even when you're working from morning to night, you have that flexibility. During the day you can kind of make your schedule. If I want to go to my son's seventh grade soccer, I can do that and I'll just stay up later and work. So. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur for that reason actually. That's the funny thing is when I came out of college I was actually going to go into finance, but I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur because I just didn't want, I never wanted to be the guy getting on the train at 6am, coming home at 7pm without any flexibility of what you can do, especially when you had a family. So that's really what drove me to be an entrepreneur was freedom. Flexibility. Yeah, freedom. I still work every night till, you know, on non Friday and Saturday till 10 o' clock, but I have that ability to take a break during the day and I can pick when I'm kind of working. So. But listen, it's, I can't say it's easy right now because of the, there's so much going on. But it's, it's. I'd rather be, I'd rather it this way than have not, you know, than, than, than have downtime for sure.

No, I, I appreciate you sharing that.

I will be 60. I will be 60 with a freshman, sophomore, junior and senior in high school though. That's going to be interesting.

You're gonna be, you're gonna be looking good and feeling good, man. I, I feel like genuinely like 60 is the new 40 nowadays with modern era and just all the stuff that's out there, that's what I view at least. But no, something that I'm curious about. Just prior to starting Untuck it and growing up, your upbringing, did you have any entrepreneurial mentors or was it your. I know you said you wanted to get into finance, but just to backtrack a little bit here, what were some of your ambitions when you were high school going to college? I know you talked about just all of us are entrepreneurs, some of us just don't do anything with the ideas. When was it that you started to really take this idea of starting a business seriously? And what were your other past and things you were thinking of? Because I asked this, because I get asked a lot from, you know, I feel like just four years ago I was the one that was coming out of high school and like this young guy now, I'm still extremely young now. I talk to a lot of, of course I just, I talk to a lot of young teenagers now and they're like, how do I make this decision? Like, do I go to college? Do I not? Like, this era is so unique. And I think.

For sure, no, you know, I. Thing about me is I was, I was never the smartest guy. I worked hard. I wasn't. It wasn't like I was, but I just was never the smartest guy in the room ever. Like, I was. Wasn't good at public speaking, wasn't good at doing PowerPoints, wasn't good at Excel, wasn't good, you know, got nervous in those moments. So I knew. But I also knew that I would, I would outwork anyone like that. That's what I knew. You know, I played tennis in college. I think that taught me a lot. I say college. Growing up, I worked hard in athlete. As an athlete, I always knew that I could work hard. But it kind of frustrated me because I actually thought ahead that I'm going to be in trouble when I get to the real world. And you know, I used to. My dad was a doctor, you know, hardest working guy I've ever met, but very, very smart. And you know, he would worry about me because I would tell him that I said, I don't know what I'm going to do when I graduate, you know. You know, I don't. My first interview I ever did at Providence, the guy stopped the interview because he could hear my heart. He could actually hear it like the beating. And he said, we just got. Let's just pretend it's over and let's talk. And I remember calling my dad on that and I was like, I'm never getting a job. But I knew that. I knew that I was. I don't know what the word is. Is it street savvy, some people say, or is it non book smart? You know, I knew I, I could find a way to be successful. I could find a way. But you can't do that in corporate America. In corporate America, if you can't give that public speaking, if you can't know how to navigate and impress people if you're in finance yet, you know, because I wanted to go into finance, but I just, I couldn't keep up with the. If someone asked me an interview question, tell me about this option. And I couldn't do it. My whole mind went blank. You know, I need time. I need to operate in the real world. I can't operate under, you know, testing, let's say when testing. And so I knew that I had to find my own path. And it's funny, I look back and I was thoughting, I was thinking about that as a freshman, as a sophomore, as a junior. So I said, let me just. Let me go into pharmaceutical sale. I don't know, I forget that your original question, but I'll just finish my thought. Let me go into a job that I will have time during the day to work on other things and to try to figure it out. So I always tell entrepreneurs I plot. I just talked to one yesterday. I said, don't feel pressure, don't rush, but plot your life in advance. So I knew that I was going to go into pharmaceutical sales. I was going to pretend I knew that. What happens if I never can come up with an idea? You can't just be an entrepreneur. I always laugh when someone's like, I want to be an. I'm going to be an entrepreneur. That doesn't work that way. You know that you got to pursue your life like you're not going to be an entrepreneur through corporate America. And if you hit your. Your idea, then you leave corporate America. So I had a plan and then I was like, I'm going to go back to business school. I got into Columbia business school. I was the least smart guy to ever go to Columbia Business School. I did a good. I did well in the interview because I thought about how can I get into the school. And I think in that interview, I was, I was actually honest about it. Like that was my thing. I said, I'll work hard. And so I just planned it and then suddenly came up with the idea. I launched a video wine blog before Untuck it. It's. I mean, video wine blog.

No way. This. This was the series. Yes.

I remember lost friends who've watched it. It's. You know, it was. I would. It's looking once again, you go back. I would. Gary Vaynerchuk is a. Well, you know, Gary, I'm sure by.

Course I was gonna say wine library. Like wine.

So I shopped in wine library. At the time, Gary was the only guy in town. I did it. And looking back, I was the second guy to ever film wine stuff with a camera. But I didn't. Didn't go anywhere because it just is hard to monetize. I did some consulting, but what it did do was gave me the confidence to know how to build a Facebook, you know, site and a brand and to start to build a following. Even though it was six people watching it gave me the confidence to launch on Tuck It. Anyway, I went on a tangent there.

No, I love that. And I remember coming across that briefly and I think it's. I commend you for that because I think in this era where like social creators and being in front of the camera is so modern, there's still that people that are just getting started, like they can't take out a phone and talk to the video. There's the. It's hard. So. And to do like a series like that in that niche category before this whole creator era, like, that's the, like, wait.

You had to do one video, you had to set the video up and then you had to download it to your thing. It was like a three hour process. You had to find a way to, you know, it wasn't that, because it was. That was in 2009. No, no one was doing, you know, no one was doing video. Now it's such a, you know, every human being.

What, like, speaking of wine library, I. What led. What led to wanting to do that wine video series?

For the record, it is. What time is it? 6:28. Oh, yeah. For the viewers. Yeah. Sort of.

If you're watching, you know, you know what we're talking about.

Yeah, this is about 2 o'. Clock. No, I got. I just loved wine. That was my passion, you know, collecting wine. And even though I didn't have money, I still overspent because I got so into it. I read about it, I studied it and I said, why? Just like the shirt that I needed. I thought, if I'm not going to try this wine thing, then I'm never going to try an entrepreneurial idea. Listen, I said this. It's so important. The only difference between every American and me and you is we did it. Like, we did it. You know, everyone solves how many times. I have the best idea, the best. No one does it. So in the old days, it was impossible to do because you needed so much money because you didn't have an Internet. You didn't have that. Now it's easier to do. It's still challenging. Pardon? That vine. It just was the only my. I had one passion. I was, I was wasting all this time reading about wine and studying it. I'm like, why not do it? You know, what's the. At least I'll. First of all, it made Me put me in a spot where I was uncomfortable. I mean, it was embarrassing. I do these videos, I get my best friends. Just, you know, make fun of me. Everyone make fun. It was, you know, I'm talking about, you know, but it gave me. It was that first step to kind of putting myself out there.

I think there's. There's such a beauty in that, right. Of I'm on. You know, this is. I was telling you before, like, hundreds of interviews on the show, and I'll cringe when I look at my first interview. I'm 17. Oh, and talking into my phone, literally walking in a circle, and I'm saying like, like every other word. And it's just like the, you know, the process of growth and being able to look back on it is some, like, what people never start, right? Like the cliche quote, you know, it's the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today. And just people don't get. It's hard for people, I should say. I don't say they don't. But to get started is just the. The whole first step is so important. And I. I've learned that over the years from different technology ventures or media or like, doing this podcast. Not only just getting started, but then just being consistent, even in. Even when there's a million reasons telling you why you shouldn't be doing this. Right? I mean, that's the greatness perspective of, like, doing it when no one cares, when no one's watching. And I'm curious to know how you think about that in terms of, you know, blending this athletic mentality, athletic wear, brand, menswear brands. How do you think about, like, during the dark days in business, right, During COVID the stores shut down. What drives you during the hard times, by the way?

One more thing. Wait till you get to my age and you look back and you see all these years of pain with your eyes. I always look at me a bit when I'm doing those Partner Vine. I was like, I had no worries. Now I have these bags under my eyes of just, you know, being an entrepreneur for 15, 18 years now or whatever, however long it's been. But that brings me to that. Listen, you. This period of time with COVID I'm not saying we won't see it again. We've never seen it before. And I just have a feeling we'll never see it again because we weren't ready for it. Now, at least we'd have a plan. When I. I was about to sell the business in 2020 for a lot of money. That was before COVID February 27, 2020. That was, I don't know, week, month. I get confused now. Before COVID hit and we had to shut down the process.

Wow, man.

During that pitch, in January or December. January. I remember being asked, like, guys, what's the worst thing that could happen? I want to prepare the downside. What's the worst thing that could happen to your business? And of course, it was a simple answer back then, a recession. That's all you knew, a recession. But if a recession happened, maybe we'll drop 5, 10%. Guys wear our shirts to work anyway. You know, recessions last short periods of time. Our shirts weren't incredibly expensive. So it's not like buying a $500 shirt or an $800 suit. It was, at the time, $79 shirt. So it wouldn't be that bad. You didn't even know that the worst thing had never happened and ended up happening. So you fast forward three months after us selling the business for a very, very big number, and we were almost bankrupt. That type of change, so. And bankruptcy means you own nothing. I didn't understand any of that stuff at the time until I asked the question, what happens? Well, not only do, you know, own nothing, but you don't make a. You don't get paid. You kind of leave. You're not part of the company. So that was. I mean, looking back, I don't even know how I survived it, but, wow, I did. And then that's fine. But then we have to take on debt, obviously, like, you know, many companies are in that period of time now. Interest rates go from 7 to 14%. Well, that's another massive problem. So all of these things have made the last five years incredibly challenging. Now, our brand was so strong and is so strong that our repeats and our loyal customers kept us alive. And it's allowed us to now solve our financial problem and start to really grow. And a lot of excitement ahead. We're opening 80 stores. We just got into wholesale, having great results. But there's no way to explain the. Because an entrepreneur, you're also, you know, you know this. You're kind of. You live a. I don't. Lonely life is not the right word, but it is the right word in a way. You're kind of, you know, Now I have a partner, a great partner, luckily. And I always advise entrepreneurs to get a great partner because you need it. You need. And there's only one person who can relate to you. You can't really talk to your friends. They don't, you know, unless you're in that, you're not going to understand it. So to have a great partner. We talked for hours on, you know, I can't believe this. We're not going to own the brand. We're not. How are we going to, you know, so. But I don't know how to explain. It's a crazy. It's great because usually if a brand doesn't succeed, it's because the brand did something wrong or the brand lost, you know, whatever reason is not. Not important anymore. In our case, we did everything right and many other cases, not just Nantucket. And we still sat there with. You couldn't do anything. There was nothing you could do. Like people were not going out, so they were buying hoodies, they weren't buying shirts. And you had to wait it out and it was never ending.

Yeah, that was such a weird.

Yeah. But, but I always. I'm of the belief that if we, if one day I do sell the business, which I think I will, the story will be just that much better. You know, that's what you got to tell yourself. You got to tell yourself that, that, that the outcome will be that you'll learn so much more because let's just pretend I sold the business in 20 for this crazy number. And I owned a lot of the company. Who knows what I would have done? Where would I be? Maybe I wouldn't be working and my kids wouldn't get the cease. Like there's a lot of. This all works, but it's crazy. It's been a crazy four years and it doesn't seem to be getting any less crazy.

Absolutely. I appreciate you sharing that, Chris. I think it's obviously the level of transparency and the depth there. I really do appreciate it and I'm sure the audience does as well. You know, when it, when you think about the future of E commerce and just like, you know, the rise of people launching brands, as you said in 2020, in the years to come, a lot of other brands popped up in your opinion, like what creates. I don't want to just say customer loyalty, but just now you have this new brand. Greatness wins. And I'm just curious to know, like, so many brands, excuse me, so many founders, I think, always have one idea, like, oh, one day we want to start a clothing brand. Of course, that's just like a lot of young entrepreneurs think about that. I did that when I was 16. But then the reality of creating a brand, finding the core product and like really creating that loyal customer and like those mega fans, as you mentioned. In terms of, like, what kept you guys going? What do you think creates that, like, great customer experience and like the brand loyalty?

Well, you need a, you need an idea. Like, I, I've had so many people come to me and say, I want to tell you my idea. And my idea is I'm going to make, you know, the next. I'm going to make a great sweatshirt. It's going to be the softest sweatshirt ever. I'm going to make a tie. It's going to be, make all these colors and the quality is going to be great. You need a hook. It's, it's. You need even more now. You need. So you need multiple hooks now I'll tell. You know, so for Untuck it, obviously, listen, shirts designed. We want to untuck. We're not even. People who invest in us don't even invest in us because we're a clothing brand. They invest in us because we're a marketing brand, you know, a marketing engine to a degree. We have a story. We have a reason. We solved the problem and we. Even though all these other companies have come out with shirts meant to be wore untucked, if you still measure them, because I still do, they're all over the place. There's. They're not the spec that I did my survey on what they should be. You have to spend so much money on the shirt in order to make sure they hit that. There's a cost to making sure they hit that spec every time. A lot of companies don't do that. You know, I'm happy about that. But the. Also the untuck it name. The Untuck it name. The greatest thing I've ever done in ever, you know, was naming it Untuck It. Because when people walk now and have an untucked shirt on, when it's not an untuck it, they call it an untuck it. It's like Kleenex. It's like Xerox. That is huge. So you need. So then with Greatness Wins, I was like, I named it Greatness Wins. Derek Jeter was like, I'm not, I'm not doing it. I just, I can't give. I don't. It's not a name. You can't name your company. Greatness Wins. He loves it. Now every. The marketing guys with Derek and the ex Nike guys, I, I want to change the name. I said, I'm not changing the name. I said, you got one thing I'm not doing is changing this name because I want it to be a weird name. I want people to say greatness wins. What is that? Let me go Google it. Or you're at a cocktail party and say, oh, did you hear about greatness wins? Greatness win. You never forget it. And also it has a meaning. So then I was like, okay, what else can I. I can't just name the company grants. I can't just make great product that hasn't been made because I have my story now. Let me bring an athlete on. It was like I wanted like 15 different things because it's too competitive of market. You have to have multiple differentiators to survive. And you know that because if you scroll on, if you go to greatness wins tonight or untuck it, you're going to be hit with 90 apparel companies and they're all going to look great. They all have great content. Now they didn't three, ten years ago they didn't have great product. Now everyone has great product. Five years ago they didn't have great content. Now everyone has great content. They, you know, so you have to be able to still stick out. Right? How are you going to stick out in this massively competitive world? So, you know, on tuck it I love. Because we can open stores. All kind of just give me thinking about, like, how do you acquire customers? Or we can open another 80 stores. There'll be 180 stores. Most companies can't do that because they don't open them up efficiently. They don't open up small, they don't pay back quickly. We can do that now. That means I can acquire customers a whole nother way that others can't acquire customers, which is just through. We used to do that with marketing. Marketing. Everyone was marketing on Facebook and Instagram. That's it. We were in. We were the first apparel company to go into airline magazines. It was only watches and fragrances. We went into airline magazines. People thought we were crazy. It turned into. I can't tell you the amount of people who saw us in airline magazines because you have a captive audience now. Airline magazines don't even exist anymore because of COVID And then we would go on radio and they say, you can't do a fat. You can't. You have to see the clothing. You don't buy clothing on radio. But we were concept shirts designed to be worn untucked. So we would did radio. We wanted to make sure we could go back and forth between paid social and these other forms of marketing. I remember Gary Gary V would be yelling newspapers are dead. Mark and I met him one, I saw him one time. I was like we, we're in newspapers, we're in magazines. Does the returns incredible. Because you kind of have to do anyway it's, it's. You just have to do things differently because if you do things the same as everyone else, it's too competitive out there.

Yeah, absolutely. And love that perspective. And speaking of something you guys did recently on that I saw with great, with Greatness Wins is the, that collaboration on the golf side of stuff with Palm Tree Grill and I want to like Palm Golf. Yeah, I think that's what it's called. Um, how do you think about collaborations like that? And I, I as someone that like I grew up golfing, I, I saw the other day and I'm curious if you saw this. Like the good, good Golf guys just raised like $45 million round like media golf media lifestyle brand and one I'm curious to know how you think about collaborations but additionally when it comes to just like the, the creator era of creator partnerships, creator led brands given you know, the partners you work with and kind of what you've seen overall in this space.

Yeah. I mean some brands are just purely you think about these TikTok brands and these you know, collaborator brands and content brands that it's really not even about the product, it's about their following. That's never been one of my things and I'm jealous of them to be honest with you. Now untuck it's for good reason. We have an older generation. We have a, you know, 25 to 70 years old that's not going to be ever that type of brand. Now we do some great collaborations. We're actually coming out with flip flops with Harry Mary. Yeah and they're going to be might be doing something with Birkenstocks and there'll be, there'll be many more once now that we're going again here after you know the, the pandemic and, and the interest rate issues. But for Greatness Wins it's you know we're gonna, we have a few partnerships, some some of them big that we'll be launching soon now athletic brands. It's a little easier to do that. It's a younger generation. It's kind of a cooler you know industry than button down shirts. Collaborations are really important and the main reason you do them is so you can take advantage of the other person's following and they vice versa. So I think it's listen the influencer world it makes my head spin because you hire one influencer, they have a million followers, they post five times and you get one sale. You hire another influencer, they have 200,000 followers, they post and you get 300 sales and you're like, what are we, what are you supposed to do? Because. And then now it's getting more expensive. It's so expensive. You get a guy, you see a guy, 400,000 followers, he wants 20,000 for a post. 80% of the time he posts, no one's watching or I guess, right. You know, I don't even know. You know, it's, it's a, it's an impossible, I don't know why the numbers don't come down. I guess because certain brands maybe have unlimited money. You know, some of these ones that work because it doesn't, you can't, you're going to run out of money if you just, you know, if you, it doesn't work long term. But when you find the right one, then you're like, wait a second, it does. But then they, they, they post and then they become saturated because so it's, it's hard. The influencer thing has, has made this to me even harder because you're not, if you don't do it, you feel like you're missing out almost others are doing it. And when you do do it, you spend 150 grand in a week and you' what happened? But then you hit the big one. I'm amazed when you have a million. I literally had an example where one same day, a million followers, we got one sale and this other person had like 200,000 followers and we had like 125 sales within an hour.

Wow.

And I'm like, you know, what's going on here? Are they, are they fake? I mean, I don't know enough about this stuff, but are they?

So anyway, yeah, I think it's, so it's interesting. Like my last, my last company was a company called mediakits.com we started in 2021 and it was a relatively quick journey. We got acquired actually in 2022 by a company in Toronto called Viral Nation. And it was a company called mediakits.com, the easiest way for creators to sort of aggregate all their cross platform data to share it with the brand. So you know, Chris, if you wanted to see all my social stats in one easy place and it updates in real time and it's verified data, that's what mediakits.com was. And we, we noticed and I think so to this day, like when, when creator marketing goes right, it's incredible. But then there's this like empty area of waste and non, like can't track it as well. And one of my buddies who I've actually had on the podcast before is Arthur. He was the former president of Cameo. He has this new company called Agentio and I don't know if you've heard of it, but pretty much making like YouTube ad sales direct to creator, like the most trackable performance based marketing for YouTube specific like creator campaigns. And I think just like the trackability and like the measurement of success there is the sort of the white space that's happening so to this day, right? And I think you, you see the, the professionalism slash the cultural adoption of people like Mr. Beast doing deals with Netflix and kind of seeing like, okay, this creative thing is here to stay, but figuring it out is what's happening right now is like how do you actually do this successfully and make it repeatable, right. Versus kind of gambling at the end of the day in terms of what's going to work or what's not. Right.

The other thing that's just as interesting is brand ambassadors, athletes, where I look at some of these young brands and they spend this crazy amount of money on bringing in an athlete and you realize men don't care that much. To be honest with you, if Brad Pitt was wearing a Brad Pitt, I'll just use like a George Clooney was wearing an Untuck It Tomorrow and posted about it. You know, now if Kim Kardashian does it, every girl runs and buys those earrings or so when you hire these, when you bring these athletes on, it doesn't do that much. And by the. One of the reasons everyone's doing it. So what we do as consumers now is we say, okay, Gronk is a part of Untuck It Now. Okay, great. He's. Yesterday he was a part of some other company and tomorrow, you know, it's, it's just now desensitized Derek and great with Derek and greatness wins this a little. He's a founder. He's an active, everyday founder. But the ambassador, which by the way, I still do it with Untuck it because I do it just because content, purely content. I want something to talk about. It's not going to move the needle. Meaning it's not, you know, people aren't rushing to the site. It's just content. So I'll only pay a certain amount. I won't pay a huge amount. Like a lot of young entrepreneurs who own a company. Think these guys, oh, if I bring on, you know, this guy, it's going to, it doesn't work that way anymore. We're hit with too many, you know, and it's the same thing with influencers. I have a prediction, I could be totally wrong, that in two, three years this is going to be all done. I mean, no one's going to be paying for it. You know why they're doing it? They're getting paid by a company. They don't like the leggings that they're wearing. They don't, they might like them, they might not like them. They, they, they tried on 75 and told you they liked in the last week and they made $100,000. Like why are we lit? I don't know how you know, it's. Anyway, it's crazy world.

I think you're right in terms of the founder dynamic. Right. And the most successful creator brands aren't brands that creators talk about once or it's like the primes with Logan Paul. It's like the founder led creator brands are obviously a much different approach than just influencer marketing as a whole. So totally agree with you on that front. A couple more questions before we wrap up here, Chris. One is, you know, when you think about the future of Untuck it, greatness wins. What excites you the most when it comes to what you're building? The industry, the product, the team, just everything overall.

Well, listen, what excites me Untuck it First is exactly the same thing that excited me, you know, when we had all this Momentum starting in 15 is to be the next great American brand, which is what Kleiner Perkins, who invested in US in 2016, said about US. And I believe we can be that because of our demographic. You know, we have grandfathers, fathers and sons wearing our product. They send in pictures all the time. That's very rare you have that large of a demographic. We have 90 stores, soon to be 180. We're expanding, you know, into other countries in the next two to three years. So I want this brand to be around forever. Like literally forever. When I say forever, I mean, I mean, you know, one of these, you know, Brooks Brothers, J Cruise and I think we can. And I want to follow that through. I've been beaten up, you know, me and Aaron have been beaten up our company because of COVID and then because of high interest rates and all this. But we're now there, we survived and we're seeing some great results. You know, this will be a significant growth year. So I want to get back to what my original plan was, is to build this company up, sell the company, but have a company that's there for forever. Yeah, greatness wins is. You know, it's a whole new ball game. It's a totally different industry. We're actually, funny. We ended up pivoting a little, not pivoting, because we're still doing the athletic brand, but we're having a lot of success in golf and in greengrass. So, you know, I just want to, you know, grow that brand like I did on Tuck It. So it's a battle for both. The industry's tough, the environment's hard. We can't remember. We are in a tough retail environment. I went to Newark the other day and bought a $10.50 large Starbucks latte. If you're spending $10.50, it's hard to buy a shirt for $89. I think all that's going to get better, and it should be an exciting few years.

I love that. I appreciate you sharing that. And last but not least, I know we've talked a little bit about just the early journey, the trials and tribulations. If you were to give a piece of advice to young founders, but also just your younger self starting today, what would your biggest piece of advice be?

Looking back, you know, I say this. I've said it before on other podcasts, but it's more about if I. If there's some. I don't mean to be negative. There's so much pain in growth when you're growing a business. Like, you have to be ready for it. I have this book now. I don't know where it is, but I write down. Now, at the end of the day, when you feel like you have this, you can't really pinpoint it, but you feel like a pain in your chest. You know, I mean, you're like. You're so. I'm like, okay, what is it? And then I write down, it's like, seven things. And if you look down in my last three years, it's crazy. And you look back, you're like, oh, my gosh, how did we survive that? How do we survive that? How do we survive that? And stuff that's insane. Like, stuff that you would never think could happen.

Yeah.

And it's every day there's bad news. Is every. So now I don't. Even if I get really bad news, it doesn't bother me that much because it's happening. When I say bad news, I mean, Things going wrong in running a business. I know in apparel, it's known, but I know also just being an entrepreneur, it's known. It's probably across the board in even other industries. You know, I haven't spent enough time in these other industries. But that's. You can't be. You can't get down. You can't get. You're going to be worried, naturally, but I think that's it. And you just gotta. I always say, two steps back, one step forward. That's the world of being an entrepreneur. And that's what I would say is just don't realize it's gonna be hard, especially if you're gonna be an entrepreneur. Understand you're gonna have a lot of painful nights. You're gonna be weird worries. I also try to tell people to keep a job because if me and Aaron didn't have a job, we wouldn't be here today because we would have had to pay our salaries when we launched the business and we wouldn't have had the Runway. But not having to pay our. Pay our salaries for three years, we had that cash to reinvest into the business.

Yeah, I know that. I love that and I appreciate you sharing that perspective here, Chris. And before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you so much for vulnerability, for diving into the story, and congratulations on everything. You know, it's. It's really cool to just. I've seen untucked everywhere, and I just think that hearing the founding story, hearing what you guys have been through, it's really inspiring. So appreciate you so much for taking the time today and looking forward to just continuing to follow along. And before we wrap up, where's the best place for all the listeners to follow you to learn more about the brand and to check it out if they haven't already?

It's untuckit.com and we have 90 stores. I'm sure we have one in everyone almost. I think we're in 42 states. So we're working on North Dakota and South Dakota soon. So.

Love it. Love it. Well, thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks for your time.