Growing Revenue to $150M in 3 Years and Successfully Scaling Manufacturing, with Ryan Bartlett
In this interview, Ryan Bartlett, co‑founder of True Classic, walks through the full lifecycle of building the men’s apparel brand from a $26,000 first‑month launch to a $150 million business in three years. He explains the origin story – spotting a gap in men’s t‑shirt fit and price, assembling a founding team with complementary skills, and securing a first manufacturer on credit. He details product decisions (material blends, limited color palettes, narrow sizing) and early inventory strategy to avoid over‑stock. The conversation shifts to marketing: leveraging his SEO/Google background, heavy reliance on Facebook/Instagram ads, testing creative, discovering that simple flat‑lay images and later comedic video ads drove the highest ROAS. He describes the importance of break‑even ROAS, frequency, and click‑through metrics for scaling paid media, and the transition from agency‑driven creative to an 80 % in‑house team for speed and brand fidelity. Bartlett emphasizes a “warp‑speed” execution mindset—rapid iteration, learning from mistakes, and quick pivots (e.g., fixing an address‑validation bug that was killing international conversions). Hiring philosophy centers on headhunting ideal candidates via LinkedIn and building an executive team that imports corporate processes (e.g., quarterly reviews). He outlines supply‑chain scaling: diversifying manufacturers, hiring a head of sourcing to negotiate better rates, and maintaining redundancy for capacity spikes. International expansion was accelerated by partnering with Global‑e and Leap, outsourcing the complex logistics of taxes, 3PLs, and retail leases. Finally, he shares the brand’s mission‑driven vision: becoming a go‑to resource for humanitarian aid, scaling donations proportionally with revenue, and aiming to be a larger‑than‑Levi’s, purpose‑first apparel company. The interview blends candid storytelling, strategic insights, and a passionate, optimistic tone.
Chapters
Ryan, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, I appreciate you taking the time, and I always like to set the scene. True Classic, what is this company doing, Ryan?
Man, what aren't we doing? Well, we're selling apparel to men. We are putting a lot of goodness into the world in the form of donations. We're involved— we were just in Skid Row last week for the LA Mission event, handed out 15,000 shirts. We're doing a lot on that front. We're moving and shaking, man. There's a lot going on. We're on this crazy hiring spree that I was just telling you about.
Uh-huh.
We're developing tons of new products this year. It's been absolutely insane. We're rolling out— we just rolled out activewear as a whole new line, so we're really excited about that. That's performing pretty well. Actually, it's performing better than we expected. Then we have chinos rolling out. We have denim rolling out. In the next 2 months. So just a huge year for the product development team and just customer acquisition in general, but just so much happening here.
I love setting the scene with that because you never know what you're going to pick up from that that I haven't already seen in research where it's like, all right, let's see what they're doing and then we'll come back to the beginning. So I want to know the origin story. I know you have quite the journey you've had with this company. For people who aren't familiar, let's go to the very, very beginning. Why start this company in the first place, Ryan?
Yeah, I mean, I always knew I wanted to get into e-com. So I come from digital marketing background and I grew up a musician and a poker player, and those were kind of the ways I made money before digital marketing. Not so well though. If you know anything about a musician's life and a poker player's life, you're just basically broke forever. So it was a rough go of it most of my life, and then the digital marketing thing happened kind of organically because I worked for an SEO company as a developer, designer, and then I started like finding that SEO was just the way to go. And really what it was is that acquisition was the way to go, and that's where the real money is. So I started learning all that, started my own company eventually, did that for 11 years, and then I grew a lot of people's businesses. I learned a lot from that whole process, and then I just knew that whatever I got into, I was just gonna be more intentional. More thoughtful, and execute faster, and also just be way more creative than anyone in the space that I was competing with. So the way that the t-shirt thing came about was I was kind of looking at different options of things to sell, and this t-shirt thing just happened organically. I just kept noticing that I kept getting frustrated by the fact that I felt like the shirts on the market for men just weren't really built for our bodies. They were just kind of this standard default boxy style, and I didn't really understand why that was. And the more I dug, the more I realized that, you know, the premium market, everyone was just completely gouging their customers and massively overcharging. And when I looked at what it costs to make a shirt and what these guys were getting on a margin basis, I was just like, this is insane, these guys are charging these prices, you know. So, $60, $70, $80 for a premium shirt, like, there just has to be a gray area in here where we're not at the bottom and we're not at the top. We're somewhere right in that middle market. I went on this journey of just trying to figure out what I would really want out of a shirt and what I think people would really like and what that price point would be. I kind of went on this journey of creating the IP of True Classic. I created the website, did everything, got it ready, and had an idea of what I wanted out of the shirt and how I wanted it to fit. fit on the body. Before I was really able to launch, I thought I need a partner who knows apparel to where I can— because I wasn't really an apparel guy. I knew what I liked, but I didn't know how to really make it come to fruition. I hit up my buddy Matt, who's one of my co-founders, and he's more on the finance tech side of things. He was like, I got the perfect guy. It was Nick, who's my other co-founder, who comes from a strong apparel background. He knew exactly what I wanted when I told him. He was like, I can absolutely do that. The first prototypes were just like, they were perfect. Right out the bat, he knew exactly how to make and bring my dream to fruition. That really started it, man. I mean, it was just one phone call and I gave away so much equity on that one phone call. Looking back, it was the most expensive call I ever made in my entire life. Yeah, it really just started from that. Then, we started it with no money virtually. I mean, it was kind of a handshake deal, and we got our first manufacturer on a relationship. It was really just like, hey, can we get a credit line, a small credit line, nothing crazy? Then, do we have room to ramp up? It was a big manufacturer who just happened to have a relationship with Matt. And so, it just all aligned for us kind of perfectly. And since I had the digital marketing background, we didn't have to go in debt and hire a million people. I could do all the marketing head to toe for the first probably 7 or 8 months before we hired anybody. And then, Nick was doing like all the customer service and the product development and negotiating with the manufacturers. And Matt was kind of dealing with like the vendor contracts and just making sure that the finances were in order. And that was kind of the beginning.
There's a few things I want to go back to. One being on the differentiation side of things. You kind of saw what was in the market. You obviously knew there was an opportunity to get something different. That's why you started this company. Just say anything more of that and how you thought about it, how you thought how you wanted to pursue in terms of like what True Classic would be. Because a lot of entrepreneurs starting, they see something, they have an idea for something, but like they don't really think about positioning necessarily or how that everything. I'm curious about how you thought about that, Ryan, with True Classic.
One thing that I absolutely knew in whatever market that I wanted to tackle was that, like, people have to be able to pin you to something, right? Like, they have to be able to say that, oh, you're that brand that does that thing. So I knew right away that I wanted to go super narrow. I knew that I just wanted to do crewneck. I just wanted to do a few colors, and I just wanted the fit to be very specific so that people could really pin it down and go, Oh, that's the best crewneck, and that it's the best because of how it feels and the way that it fits, right? I didn't want to come out with like 10 different products because once you're the everything product, you're just Gap, essentially. You're not anything. You're just everything.
Right.
So, it's hard for people to really narrow it down. So, that's kind of how I think about it. And now, obviously, we've exploded into everything, but it's because we can bring that value. But originally, what I wanted to do was actually even more narrow. I wanted to just do black and white. I wanted to be like the best black and white ever. So, start with like a black shirt and a white shirt and just be the best black and white crewneck shirt that existed on the market. But I very quickly realized after talking to Nick, it was just like, yeah, but like most of the market's going to want more than black and white. Even though I had all these great ideas for creative and how the whole site would just be black and white and everything would look really cool, right?
You could really run with it, yeah.
Definitely, definitely stand out too because no one has really done Really gone that narrow. But once you get in it, you realize there's just like, you would be neglecting such a massive piece of the market by going that route. So that's kind of how I think about it.
So from that, there's a lot to go into obviously with the marketing side that we will in one second. But early manufacturing, obviously you said you had that relationship with a manufacturer, which is very helpful in any type of apparel company as well. But take me through more of the product then with them that you knew you wanted to develop. So you might have kind of mentioned the fit itself. Was there certain materials you wanted? Was there certain things around that like, okay, this is cheaper than that? Just anything more of that because the product itself is like everyone raves about it. I'm curious more about the product.
Yeah, for sure. Originally, I wanted to do bamboo. Once we started figuring out how difficult it was to manufacture and how costly it was, we killed that idea right off the bat. I had always loved bamboo shirts growing up. It was like even though they were a little expensive, I just loved them. I loved the way they felt. So, I was telling the manufacturer, I'm like, look, what's the equivalent? What percentage composition can you mix to get that bamboo feel? I don't know if you've ever tried bamboo sheets or bamboo anything, but it's insanely soft. It's just some of the best that you can— other than Egyptian cotton or cashmere.
Cotton, yeah.
It's just really a different level. So, what they came back with was it was a 60/40 blend. of polyester cotton, and it's a little bit more technical than that, obviously. You have to brush it. I don't know if you know anything about kind of—
No.
Manufacturing, but cotton has to be brushed in a certain way to get to a certain level of softness, and there's things that you have to do on the manufacturing side to really get the most out of the fabric and make sure that it stays constructed well and that it holds its color and all those important things. We worked really closely with them, and we had a bunch of Prototypes, and we did a bunch of iterations on the shirt to really get it perfectly. And then, once we were good to go, we just went to market with it, and that was really it.
When you went to market, I'm actually curious too with the quantities and everything, 'cause I've played with apparel though in a different way. We had a company that did ugly sweaters. Dealing with sizes and everything can be a nightmare. Take me through more of why you thought about the initial run you did with that manufacturer, and also, size and all of that, details that people don't think about, and until they're in it, they're like, oh, shit. This is actually— A lot to think. Just take me through that for you.
It's insane. And the other big problem is that when you overbuy and then it doesn't sell through, you're screwed because, especially if you're starting out, you have to go really small. So, that's what we did. We only did, I think, 4 or 5 colors, and we only did crewneck. So, we didn't go to V-neck or long sleeve or anything yet. We just did crew, and we did, I think, no, maybe it was 6 colors. And we did very limited size run. We didn't even have 2XL at this point. We had small, medium, and large, and XL, and that was about all we could really get off the bat. And then, actually, 6 colors was quite a bit to start with. I remember thinking that we probably went too big on that because we still didn't even know if we had a viable product.
Yeah.
But yeah, it was a combination of things that made those decisions. But yeah, we started really narrow on them.
I know you said the black and white thing, and you mentioned, okay, that was the original idea, but then 6 colors. Just curious, 6 colors versus 8 colors versus 10 colors. I like the nitty-gritty details, so I'm curious on why that— just how you got to that point.
Well, honestly, we were still in such an early phase that we just didn't even know if this was the right product yet to even sell. I mean, it was all just a hunch, and I was looking at the market, and I'm just like, I'm looking at the guys that are doing it, and I'm just like, God, they're doing such a bad job on the marketing side. I just don't feel like they're being right to the customer. I just thought I could do this better than them. I had a lot of confidence, but I still didn't know what the market thought, right? Because if you get in your head about what's going to sell, all that matters is the market. It's all a human thing at the end of the day, right? You can't just work in a silo or a vacuum. You have to really think about that. We put out the 6 colors that I thought were the best colors. Mainly, it's like, what do guys normally wear? Earth tones, right?
Yeah.
So, like, your blacks, your grays, your white, your greens, your blues. It has to be kind of like natural, normal guy colors. So, we just came out with a very basic palette of colors, and it turns out we were right on all the colors. It was just all the stuff we would normally wear and what other guys would wear. So we got kind of lucky with that. We didn't, you know, and we've obviously missed on some colors with seasonal pushouts and things like that, but you live and learn, right? You, you, you know, it doesn't sell, you throw it on a fire sale to get rid of it, and then you just never come back to it.
So on to the next one. Exactly. I, I've read a lot about your story too, so I have a little context here. One of the things you mentioned, I think it was on LinkedIn post, uh, you did $26,000 in 651 orders in the first month. Your experience obviously is digital marketing. You have that background. Take me through how you thought about the initial marketing for True Classic. I'll go through the evolution, but I'm curious about the early days, initially 2019.
Man, it was brutal. I mean, looking back, our first creative was so bad. I'm a creative on the music level, but I am not a creative on the photo, photography, and modeling. That was all such a new world to me. So I was just putting together the most hideous collections of images. But it turns out, like, you really— you know what's weird about that now is we've come full circle, and, like, the stuff that ends up crushing on Facebook for us is, like, the stills, and not, like, the expensive-ass comedy videos that we spend so much time and energy making, but, like, literally a single picture of a shirt on the floor, like a flat lay, just crushing.
Wow.
So, like, I did a lot of basic still stuff in the beginning because we just had nothing else. We did one shoot. We just used that a million times over for the first 3 months. That's all we had. Luckily, it sold well enough to where it got into people's hands. Then what ended up happening was after the first initial orders went out, people started telling people about it and it just started to catch steam.
The reviews started rolling in and that's when we knew we Yeah, to get that initial traction, obviously you were testing in the beginning, and everyone who runs a business understands a lot of that's testing for sure. With that too, were you always— was it just Facebook ads? Was it other ads? Did you know you wanted to try different channels? I'm just curious on how you personally approached this, 'cause there's many ways to go about it.
100%. So my areas of expertise was Google. It was SEO, AdWords, and I had a lot of experience running media buying on Facebook. Other than that, I really didn't have a ton of experience. Turns out, actually, where most of the profitability comes from the business is the retention side. So I learned very quickly the power of email and SMS, and that really transformed the way I looked at business, and I realized that, like, the people that do retention internally in your company are quite possibly the most valuable people there. Originally, I knew I was covered on the SEO front, but SEO takes forever. I don't know if you know anything about SEO.
I do.
It's like a lifetime of energy to get where you need to be. I knew AdWords was going to be pretty fruitful for us, because it's such a different medium than Facebook. Facebook is like that first interaction, and you're really trying to convince them. Google is like, they're already searching for, where do I buy a t-shirt? So I knew it was going to work on that. Facebook, or sorry, on Google a little bit better than Facebook. And it's still to this day, it's a higher ROAS overall than Facebook. But, you know, we just started a very, very small budget. We started at $100 a day, and Google didn't ramp up as fast as Facebook. This is pre-iOS 14 too, before they took all the privacy permissions away. So, like, this is back, you know, we got lucky in the fact that we started in 2019 because We had a full year and a half of all that extra data that they lost. So we were targeting all the right people and just seeing tremendous success. And thankfully, we came up during that time period when it was the Wild West and everyone was giving away everything, no questions asked. But yeah, to answer your question, it was Google, it was Facebook.
Yeah.
I wasn't savvy enough to test TikTok or Snap yet, and we weren't doing too much on email in the beginning or SMS, and that was really it. I would say if I had to pin it down to one thing, it really was Facebook. Their AI is just— there's just nothing better out there.
Yeah, there's no better targeting. Was that, just to be clear, is it Facebook itself or actually Facebook, Instagram?
Obviously, they own— it's Meta. Yeah, it's Facebook. Instagram together. I would say Instagram obviously lends itself better to fashion-related products, but I mean, I couldn't have done it without them. I mean, honestly, Facebook was such a game changer, and I watched so many people in these private— like, I was a part of a lot of e-com groups, like, what do you call them, like Facebook groups?
Facebook groups.
And I learned so much from those guys. I mean, I was watching people in third-world countries scale to the moon with dropshipping only on the backbone of Facebook. Like, literally zero marketing, and all they would do is make a website, make a product, throw it in Facebook, and it would either win or die, right? And the ones that would win, they would just scale to the moon, and I'm sitting here like, these guys who have no education on this stuff are able to scale to $100K a month, $200K a month, And they're changing people's lives around them in these third-world countries. They're going from huts to building houses for their families and their villages. It's just unbelievable stories. It was just so inspiring to me, and I just thought, this Facebook thing is unbelievable what I'm witnessing. That just gave me a lot of confidence that if I put some time and energy into it and learned it, and then eventually bring on experts that know how to run media buying, That the sky is kind of the limit.
Yeah, it's funny. Looking back too, I was running Facebook ads, everything for e-commerce company back in 2016 and 2018. Like the glory, not glory days, but definitely better than what they are today. And the prices and seeing the prices progressively get higher, you're like, shit, like this is, this is wild. The progression of that. It's, yeah, you always trip on that.
And like businesses, like we're friends with a lot of big businesses and like they're just They're losing it. They're laying off 20%, 30% of people. They got crushed by this update. Thank God we're in a large enough TAM to where we didn't really feel it at all because we're such a broad product. But man, if you're selling golden roses or something where it was insanely niche, you're done. You're just finished and you had to completely pivot to only Google, basically.
Yeah. Yeah.
So it's rough out there.
One of the things you mentioned with that too, you mentioned how just even like a single kind of basic image ad does really well for you at this point, but you obviously spent money and created these very funny video ads as well. Let's go through the inception of those ads and how those came about and just tell me a little bit more about those.
Yeah. So originally, we just didn't know what would work, right? So we're big proponents of testing, obviously. And I was trying— we kept just hiring these agencies who would do very lackluster content, and it would get us by, but we were never really that impressed, and we just kept trying, and trying, and trying, and failing at creative, but it was working on some level. Obviously, we were able to grow the business, but it was more about the product than it was the marketing in the beginning, because the marketing wasn't that great. Because we just didn't have that talent to come in here and do the shoots the right way. So eventually, what happened was, you know, I kept thinking like, how can I make— because I started making these ads that were very informative and educational, and I thought, okay, we're very intentional when it comes to the product and the way you develop it. We need to be more intentional about the ads we're creating. We need to educate people on why this is so much better. And then what I started thinking was, What if we just started making people laugh and that's all we did, and it wasn't even about selling the product anymore? I bet you that would bring them more value because then they would feel better, they would laugh maybe, and they would make an emotional connection, and it just played so much into the theme of our business, which is just intentionality. So like, when we created our first comedic ad, It was like this light bulb just went off when I uploaded it to Facebook. And the next day when I saw that ROAS climb to numbers I had never seen before, and I started reading through the comments and people were saying, I literally am going to buy this just because of this ad made me laugh. It was just like a light bulb went off and I was like, oh, this is it. Like, I'm only doing content from my company from here on out.
Really?
And then it also made me realize, like, how great is it if you can just create content to make people's day better and you're not even selling the product really, you're just there to make them laugh.
Yeah.
Like, to me, that's the best thing you could be doing, right? So even though we still do a lot of content around shoots and kind of the traditional media, the comedy just works so well for us and we're still growing into it. We're using a lot of new people. Obviously, GregTube has been a huge hit for us. Those are the 2 guys from Philly that do most of our ads. They're kind of like the face of the brand now. But there's just— there's so much room for improvement, and I just see comedy as such a great way to build that connection with people and just kind of make their day a little bit better. Plus, how annoying are ads for the most part? They're usually really lame. They don't get the product value props across whatsoever. They always miss.
Yeah.
And then I'm like, I just want to be the guy that just makes people laugh and makes it better than everybody, what they're doing. I mean, you really only remember the ads that make you laugh anyway, right? So why not fall into that bucket?
Yeah. So people, it's memorable, way more memorable to know who True Classic is. And obviously then you know your product inherently. I want to go through more of the scaling upside because obviously there's a level of, okay, getting started, very tough, figuring out the right products, Manufacturing, all of that initial kind of feedback, but you got feedback initially was great. You're growing. This is lovely. But going from zero to like $150 million is— that doesn't just happen overnight. It happened very quickly in this case being 3 years or so. But just take me through more of that in terms of scaling, especially let's talk about more of the marketing side of that first and how that happened. And we can get into more of the people building, all that sort of thing in a second. But I wanna know more about the marketing as you scaled and what kind of helped you in that regard.
I mean, we just— really, what it all came down to was understanding— so if you're living and dying by Facebook, for example, the most important metric that means anything to the business is what's called your break-even ROAS, right? So what Facebook takes into consideration, which is great, is the conversion value of what you're selling, so that when you see that ROAS number, you know that you spent $1 and made $1.50, right? So you made 50 cents profit. Now, but what's even more tricky is you have to take into account your OpEx, right? Like your expenses, your overhead, everything else that takes that $1.50. So actually, your breakeven is not $1. It's $1.75. So even if you're making $1.50, you're still losing 25 cents, right? Which is deceiving 'cause you think you're making money, but when you run your P&L, you're like, oh shit, we actually lost this month, right? It's a lot of money. That metric, to me, especially when you're starting out as a business, is so insanely crucial to understand what your breakeven ROAS is before you can do anything, because that's kind of your holy grail metric that you can just continue to scale, because as long as you just keep upping those budgets and you're not saturating your creative, you have to just kind of live and die by that metric, and that's what we did. Now, as you scale, you run into this, what they call frequency problem, which is when you start hitting the same people with the same ads, right? Even though the pool of targeting is so big, you have to scale your creative accordingly. So, what we did is we just started working with everybody all the time, and we just kind of like started overloading ourselves with working with all these agencies, and we didn't have the in-house crew that we have now, and so now we can handle it, and we know, like, we're not like scaling infinitely like we were on the paid media. We're kind of like leveling off on the spend, because it's kind of a sweet spot for us, but we are kind of incrementally going up on that. But now we can handle it and it's predictable, so we know how many assets we need per month. But in the beginning, you just don't know.
Yeah.
So you have to watch that frequency metric. You also have to be very mindful of what your click-through looks like. So click-through rate and frequency are your 2 kind of metrics that we look at, and especially in the beginning. as to like, do I need to do more creative or not? You know, and so you have to kind of stay ahead of it, but we also didn't know like how fast we could scale it.
Mm-hmm.
So like, it was always this game of like, are we doing enough? We have to catch up. We have to catch up. We have to catch up. So like, if anything, we probably did too much content, which is also a good thing to have because you can just pick the best of it. You know, it's like a musician who makes an album. They do, like, 100 songs, and then they actually only end up doing 10 of the best songs for their album. It's the same thing with us. We just did this huge library, and then we were like, okay, let's just take the best stuff, and, like, reiterate on it, and put it out there, and see what happens. But it's really hard, because creative takes so much time, and if you're scaling fast, like we were, like, it takes weeks to get assets. Right? So, like, we would do a shoot, and then we would be like, so, we're gonna have it next day, right? And they would be like, bro, it's gonna take us 2 weeks to get you assets. And we would be like, no, no, no, that's not happening. There's no way. We move at lightning speed, and you don't understand. Like, we just don't have anything to put out. Like, we have to have content. So, it was a struggle in the beginning, but eventually, you know, we hired the right people, and we figured it out, but it was tough.
One of the things I'm curious about with that, what you mentioned there, you said you now have some in-house capabilities to be able to do that. I imagine that's for speed's sake, Reading one of your posts too, you mentioned that being one of the things you like to do, like make decisions quickly, which I want to get into. But from the evolution of agency versus in-house, how have you thought about that timing on when to bring it in-house? Because I know people run into this issue all the time. It's like, do we outsource this? Do we hire in-house? It's always this conundrum. I'm just curious on for you, Ryan, and True Classic, how you've gone about that.
I'm such a proponent of always bringing everything in-house. I think that's always the way to go ultimately. The problem with that though is that you do lose outside perspective, and I think it's so valuable to have this diversity of ideas that you're constantly bringing in. And that's even outside of LA. People in LA tend to shoot relatively the same. It's like, I just noticed by using so many different photographers out here, they use the same spots. They all do the downtown area. They all use the same spots, right?
Yeah.
You have to start using, like, people in St. Louis and people in Dallas, and, like, you just gotta kind of branch out and get new perspectives and new ideas. We even, like, did some stuff in Chicago, and, you know, I think there's a healthy balance ultimately. Like, you just can't do everything in-house.
Yeah.
Especially for the sake of diversity, you know, because everyone kind of gets into a mode of, like, what they think everything should look like, and sometimes you just gotta, like, break down the walls and start over and go, okay, this guy's got a brand new idea.
Yeah.
He lives in Boston and he wants to do this. So, like, I would say 80% of what we do is in-house. The other 20%, we cycle between different agencies, and we're giving a lot of new agencies chances all the time. Like, we're testing, you know, the Tube Sciences of the world and the VaynerMedias and all these other companies to, like, see Like, what they can come out with us, and we just wanna have net new ideas, and that's the only way you can really do it outside of in-house.
You mentioned you prefer in-house, though, typically. Why is that?
Because I feel like nobody really gets the brand like the people that are in-house and living it all day, every day. I just feel like the people that breathe us, like Nicholas, our video guy here, just showed me our Chino ad, and it was just so on-brand and so perfect for us, and I just thought to myself, like, there's no way you would get this on the first take with an agency.
Yeah.
We would've had to go through 7 back and forths and iterations to get what we wanted out of an agency. In-house, they just get it. They just know who we are, what we want to look like, and what it should sound and feel like. So it just tends to be faster when you do it in-house because of that.
All right. I want to dive deeper on that speed thing. As you mentioned, executing at warp speed being one of the things you learned about, cared about, obviously, with your company. What does that mean for True Classic in terms of executing at warp speed and how did that come about for you?
So, for whatever reason, the 3 of us always just moved at lightning speed, and I don't think we were really that conscious of it at the time. Looking back, everyone says how crazy it is, but when you're doing it, we were just— we're 3 entrepreneurs, and we're just trying to do the best we can, and we made so many mistakes along the way. I mean, I could do an hour just on mistakes. I mean, just, we failed at everything originally. But we weren't scared to fail, I think, is kind of the punchline. And when you're moving that fast, you're gonna stumble, you're gonna break things, and we were just okay with that. We were just like, you know what? We were not in the analysis paralysis mode at all. And I just, like, we were just like, let's just move and see what happens, and we'll figure it out along the way. And then we'll, like, take that data, and then we'll learn from it, and we'll move accordingly. For better or worse, I think it's the best way to run a business in the beginning, because you just can't button everything up, and you kinda gotta learn the hard way as to what works and what doesn't. So, that's really what it came from. It really was not an intentional thing. We just have no other way of operating. We're just used to, like, flying through things, and then going, oh, shit, we just lost— Like, here's a crazy one. This just happened, literally a day ago, we figured this out. So, you know, we launched international, right? This is, like, maddening to think about, looking back now. You know how, in other countries, they have, like, little marks above the letter?
Yeah.
Like, little apostrophes and things like that, in different parts of the world, like, it's very common, right? So we have this app that validates the address, and what the app was doing Was not allowing anybody a little comma or anything above a letter to add their address in, which means the conversion rate was like 90% worse than what it should have been.
Oh, Ryan.
So we literally turned that app off. I'm not kidding you. We turned that app off. France went from a 0.3% conversion to a 3% conversion overnight. And we were like, oh my God, how much money did we just lose over the last 2 weeks of rolling? I mean, thank God we didn't let it run for a month. We only lost conversion data for 2 weeks, but imagine if I let that run for a month and a half. Again, this goes back to the speed thing. We just couldn't have foreseen that, and the only reason we found out is 'cause a customer told us. We would've let that just run, right? Like that's just so—
that's frustrating.
You break things and you figure it out the hard way. That's the punchline.
One of the other things about scaling, which we haven't talked about yet, is the manufacturing side of it. So getting in with that first manufacturer, huge. That's a huge part of any e-commerce brand for sure. But as you're looking at scaling, their capacity obviously limited in some ways, everything like that. I think you said you have like 10 plants across different countries. How has the manufacturing side scaling that, figuring out who to work with? Tell me more of that side of the business too.
Yeah, so we worked with our one manufacturer for, I want to say, a year and a half or so, which was bad. I mean, you really do not want to be beholden to one manufacturer.
One person. Yeah, one breaking point.
So many things. Yeah, I mean, so many things can go wrong, right? Not only that, At any point, they know they can just charge you more, and what are you going to do? You have zero leverage to negotiate, right?
Yeah.
I think what changed was we started understanding we needed to diversify. We need to keep them competitive, our manufacturers, and it safeguards the business. We brought in a head of sourcing, and that was a game changer because she came in with so much experience. Knew all the manufacturers all over the world, knew how to talk to them, knew how to negotiate with them, and manage them, and get the best out of them, and QC the product, and do all the things that we were bad at. She came in and got us way lower rates. We went from paying 50% more to just getting it down to 50 cents less per shirt or whatever it was, and still having the same quality. Sourcing, having somebody just focused on sourcing full-time, insanely important to your margins, to diversifying, making sure you don't have a single source of failure. Just so important. And it's just made our life so much better. And, you know, with the capacity issue, you know, you can only do so much, right?
Yeah.
Like, you grow out of manufacturers. They can only handle 100,000 units a month or whatever it is. So you have to, like, be moving in parallel to figure out, like, okay, this one over here can handle the load. Like, what do we do if we're in an emergency situation? Who can get us something on a fast boat, or who can fly it in, or whatever it is? So, like, especially with, like, Black Friday, when you underbuy, and then all of a sudden you're about to tap out, and you realize, oh shit, we're 2 weeks away from being zero. So you have to, like, have these emergency levers that you can get a manufacturer in Mexico to— you have to pay double the COGS, but you will get it in 2 weeks, and it'll be flown up, and you're gonna be paying an arm and a leg, but it just is what it is to get products.
Going back to your sourcer you mentioned, how did you find her? Curious.
We recruited her. She was working for, I think, American Eagle, or American Apparel, I think it was. And we found her on LinkedIn, just like everybody. We find everyone on LinkedIn. So Nick, my co-founder, is an unbelievable headhunter, and he gets the best of the best, and he just literally uses like InMail credits and like just messages people.
Oh yeah.
And that's it. Like, there's no— you know, the whole like— I learned a lot about hiring too, you know, even though I had an agency for a long time. What I was doing was just putting a job posting out and seeing who would show up, Terrible way to hire. The way you hire is you go after the people you want. You seek them out, you make them an offer, and, you know, it's open market. People can do whatever they want. They have free will, right? If they're happy, they'll just say no. If not, they'll move. So that's what we do. We go after the people we really want, and that's it.
How do you decide that in terms of, like, how do you figure out who those people are? Like, what, you know, like, okay, we want someone who's been at a big brand, so they'll have that experience. Take me through more of the thinking behind that, 'cause I know people hear that, they're gonna be like, oh yeah, of course, but how do I find the person then to even go after it?
So we have a lot of seasoned people in this organization in the executive department. So basically what we'll do is we will say, okay, we know we need this role. What does that JD look like? Like, what's the job description for that? And then we'll list out all the qualities and then we'll say, okay, this is like our ideal candidate. This is kind of what we want. This is the salary range, like we're willing to pay for this position.
Yeah.
And then, so we'll all strategize on that as a group. And, you know, now that we have, like, these high-level executives that come from these big companies, they know, like, what it's supposed to look like, and they also know, like, really who we need for each department. So, it's just really a combination. When you start hiring those high-level execs, they come with so much corporate knowledge that they just know what, like, we had no, like, before Ben came on, Ben is my Chief Business Officer, He worked at Meta for 4 years. He was head of the Disruptors Program, and we didn't even have an org chart when he came aboard, and he was coming on like, okay, he's used to all these systems and everything being in place at Facebook, and he came on, and he's like, where's the org chart? And we're like, we don't have one. And it was like, all right, well, we gotta start from zero then. And he came in and implemented all these amazing processes that he took from Facebook and implemented here. And it just transformed the way the employees communicated with each other, how they were, you know, we did a lot better at like setting goals for them and doing quarterly reviews and all these like little things that corporate does that we were a mom-and-pop business, we're a startup, we just didn't know that you had to do quarterly reviews or whatever. So yeah, but to your question specifically, You just gotta spend a lot of time with people that know what they're doing and what they're looking for, and then you just gotta start really scouring LinkedIn and just trying to find out, you know, who's in those positions, what is it exactly that they're doing, and then you can also just jump on the phone with them and kinda flush it out, right? Like, what's your day-to-day look like? And then they'll tell you, and then you can take that back and go, guys, this is not actually what we thought we needed.
Mm-hmm.
They're only doing this kind of stuff. Let's tailor that JD and go back and reevaluate. So that's kind of how we think about it.
Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. And one of the things that you mentioned earlier around this, like expansion, the chaos that happened when you realize you have the wrong, whatever, you can't do a tilde or whatever thing on top of a letter. Take me through the expansion outside of US and how you even decided when the right time was for that, when you were ready to be like, all right, let's go, let's expand outside, let's go broader. I'm curious about that.
So we knew eventually international was in the cards for us, but it is such a monster to take on. We had no idea. I mean, it's just, you know, we think the US is like the whole world. It's like the world is the world.
Yeah.
It is so much bigger than us. When we're here, we all think it's about us, but it's so much bigger. And, you know, the taxes, the tariffs, the 3PLs, the translation, the— I mean, you just can't imagine how many pieces to international that there really are before you can turn that switch on, and we were completely overwhelmed with it. So what happened was we figured out there is a company out there called Global-e, and essentially they already have it all figured out for you. So you pay them a percentage of revenue, they dial you in, they do all the work, and then you just give them a piece of the pie.
Right.
and they take over. And for us, you know, we move at lightning speed, it was perfect.
Yeah.
So we were like, you know what, screw it. Why waste 9 months, have to hire 8 people to manage this, when we can just go globally, and then turn it on? And that's not to say we haven't still had hiccups and bumps in the road, but it expedited our go-to-market to international by literally 8 or 9 months. I mean, it's amazing. And that goes for retail too. Like, we hired this company called Leap, who does the same thing that Global-e does for international. They expedite the entire process. They make it so that you can scale retail up, because if we were to do it in-house, it would take us 9 months to a year to get to market and really do it right. They have it all figured out. They have a product. They take care of all the OpEx. They take care of the hiring, the staffing, the designing. They already have the leases in place. Like, it's just seamless. We just, like, look at the location and say, go. And those type of businesses are so important to a growth company like ours so that we don't have to think about it, and we're just happy to pay a percentage of revenue. Now, eventually, maybe we take it in-house long-term, but right now, we're happy with just speed.
Okay. One of the last things I'm curious about, there's a lot of things, but we'll never get to them all, which is fine. One of the last things though is just with everything you're doing, you mentioned the speed, Everything you're going after. What do you want True Classic to become? I'm curious because there's so many things you're from this interview. I already have an idea of where you're going, but like, what's the end game, man? What do you want?
Well, there's two things that I really think a lot about. I think you know number one mission and impact is probably the biggest for me. I want to be the brand that people come to when they need something, even outside of clothing. Just like when natural disasters happen, I want to be the first. first one there with toiletries and the things that people really need when bad shit happens.
Yeah.
I just think there's not enough businesses using their resources in the right way for the right reasons. I think so much about— but again, it all goes back to being intentional, right? I just feel like it would be a bad move for me to not be just always thinking about humans first and even outside of selling clothing. Because there's just so much more going on in the world than that. That's kind of where I see it going, is just being that brand where people can reach out to us and go, hey, this organization needs your help. This person over here needs your help. This family needs your help. In LA, we already are that brand. Just like I said, the Skid Row thing, LA Missions hit us up a week before the event and were like, can we get some pallets? We're like, absolutely, and we'll be there to hand them out as well.
That's awesome.
We'll do as much as we can for you. So, like, people are already kind of doing that here in LA, but I want it to really go nationwide. And then on the business side, you know, I see us being bigger than Levi's. Like, I really see us as— because, you know, Levi's is an unbelievable brand, and they're very classic like us, and they're, you know, they're very all-American like us, but I really just see us being way more intentional and just being, you know, over-indexing on that and just being way more thoughtful about everything product and advertising and marketing and people and customer service and everything that it takes to really run a good business. So, I just, you know, the problem with these large companies is they get so big that they start to lose what actually got them there and they lose that human piece of it, right?
Yeah.
They just— it's natural. Like, it's just a natural progression of where corporate ends up heading. That's what I never want to lose. That's why I think if we can stick to that motif and really use this look good, feel good mantra all the way up to the billions, that's where I want it to go, and that's where I think we're headed.
With one of those things you mentioned there, obviously helping out and giving back a bit as well, you mentioned, I think, somewhere 15,000 shirts a month or something. How do you factor that in? How do you decide on those things? Obviously, you're running a company, but then there's the impact piece too. I'm just curious on how you look at that.
Yeah. So, we're donating about $40,000 a month now. It started out $1,000 a month, $5,000 a month, and it just slowly— as we sell more, we give more. And that's really what's so great about building a big business, as your impact just increases. We don't really have, like, a set number. I just always wanted the impact to scale with the business. Like, I know a lot of people say, like, you know, they give a percentage of sales or whatever it is, but I just like the thought of not setting a limit and just, like, let's just keep it moving up as the business goes, and, you know, we don't feel it at all, so it's just like, why not just give and give and give? You know, we're doing such tremendous revenue that, like, donating $40,000 is a drop in the bucket for us. So, like, why not, right?
Right, yeah.
So, and then the other things that we do, like, you know, building the houses and things like that, it really is just a function of, like, what comes to me and what people, like, let me know they need. It's a lot of that. It's a lot of me also, like, my dad is involved in this tiny house project in Savannah, so, like, I'm pretty well connected into that, but I'm looking a lot now at organizations that need help outside of shirts, and I just love to be involved in other things that aren't just clothing-related necessarily.
Yeah.
If there's people even listening to this that know of an organization that needs help, I'm all ears. I really do want to be the voice on Twitter of people that just go, oh, this is perfect for True Classic to jump on it and be a part of. But to answer your question, there's not like— I don't overthink it. I really just let things happen as they happen and I keep things really dynamic. I want people to— I'm just really busy, so I want people to reach out and help us help them.
Of course. To that point, where is the best place for people to reach out to you and also learn more about True Classic?
The best place to learn is definitely the website. You can reach out through the website. It'll definitely get to If you say in the message, like, I'm interested in Ryan helping out, there is a path to me for sure. I'm not, like, in this ivory tower. Like, I'm very much a man of the people. Twitter's an easy way to get to me. Like, reaching out through customer service, they'll literally send me a message within seconds, and I'm hearing about it on Slack. So we're very tight-knit.
Awesome. Ryan, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for the time today. I appreciate it.
Yeah, man. Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.
