Lewis Howes and a partner built a Shopify store selling Buc-ee's merchandise without permission, using the first-sale doctrine to stay legal. They cold-emailed journalists at Southern Living and Eater, generating viral coverage that brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first month. The business scaled to millions annually over six years.
Chapters
This is one of those business ideas. I'm like, these guys, they're a billion-dollar company. They don't sell anything online. They have shirts, they have, they're like the redneck Disney. It's like a cult, cult following. It's mostly Texas or where is this? Yeah. Yeah. They started there, but now they're everywhere. Uh-huh. They're in Utah. They're, they're going to Washington, DC. They're all over. And so my business partner and I launched a store to get their attention and it worked. And it was just, what do you mean? Like an online store or what? We launched a Shopify store to get their attention with their stuff and sold their stuff. I went to their store with my 4 kids and wife. We bought one of everything. I hired a photographer. One of everything. One of everything. And I just started cold emailing reporters. I just did what anyone in the world could do. I used my Gmail account. I went to Southern Living, Eater, Texas Monthly, and I just found, oh, who wrote this? So-and-so at texasmonthly.com. And I started emailing, hey, I like Buc-ee's. I launched a store for 'em. I thought you would find this interesting. And they need stuff to write about. So they did. And it went mega viral. We did hundreds of thousands of dollars our first 30 days. Selling their products. Their products, just marking it up. Did they sue you for this? No, they just wanted us to make sure it wasn't confusing the customer. They didn't want us to look like them. It's called first sale doctrine. Any— like, I can go sell a Nike t-shirt, I just can't pretend to be Nike. Sure, right? Yeah, yeah, it's no different. So we did that, we started that 6 years ago, and it does millions of dollars a year today. Still? Still, yeah. And there we have a ton of competitors too. And you're selling their gear and you don't have a partnership with them, you just do it on their own? Correct.
