Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores.

Summary

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Episode: Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty – How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic Grew to 80 Stores
Released: October 13, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, Guy Raz sits down with twin brothers Alex and Mike Faherty—co-founders of Faherty Brand, a lifestyle clothing label inspired by coastal vibes and Manhattan sophistication. Together, they recount their journey from childhood dreams on the Jersey Shore, through the lessons learned in finance and fashion, to building a $250 million business with over 80 retail stores across the U.S. The episode delves into their early inspiration, the unique blend of wholesale, DTC, and retail that set them apart, the hard realities of entrepreneurship, and the family dynamics that shaped their company’s trajectory.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Early Inspirations & Founding Vision

• Mike’s love for fashion and coastal life: Childhood spent on the Jersey Shore and later New York City instilled in Mike a love for both surf culture and urban style ([04:47]).
  • Notable moment: The brand concept dates to Mike’s high school college essay—"coast to curb," merging surf with city style ([06:04]-[06:40]).
• Family bond and early support: The twins always envisioned running a business together. Their relationship was fostered from day one—“even before we could walk, we ended up in each other's cribs every night” (Mike, [10:55]).

Education & Gaining Experience

• Mike at WashU: Studied fashion, was the only male in his sewing courses, balanced basketball, and fashion shows ([08:03]-[08:37]).
• Alex at Yale: Studied finance, dabbled in eBay sales, always considering how to build business acumen for their future venture ([11:39]-[12:03]).
• Deliberately delaying their launch: Spent over a decade prepping—Mike at Ralph Lauren (especially the RRL line), Alex in finance, saving up capital and learning the ropes ([03:57]-[04:47], [13:22]-[14:33]).

Launching Faherty Brand

• Leaving secure careers: Both faced skepticism—friends, mentors, and even their own father doubted the risk of leaving stable jobs for an uncertain startup ([21:10]-[23:30]).
  • Quote: “I had one mentor of mine, and… he looked at me in straight face and said, ‘That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.’” – Alex, [21:21]
• Product innovation: Mike’s textile engineering at Ralph Lauren paid off—first focus was on premium, recycled board shorts that could be worn both surfing and in the city ([19:18]-[26:12]).

Early Sales & Growth Tactics

• Resourceful launch: Raised a $1 million friends-and-family round (~44 investors, [33:04]-[33:30]), made their first run with help from Mike’s factory contacts.
• Breakthrough with the mobile beach house: Hit the road in a custom trailer/pop-up shop (designed with family and friends, [36:13]-[37:25]), creating organic brand buzz by taking the collection directly to consumers at festivals, stores, and on the literal roadside.
  • Memorable moment: "We sold $1,500 on the side of Pacific One by Big Sur. I'll never forget it." – Alex, [39:17]
• Inventory and cash flow challenges: Inventory management and retail logistics were far tougher than finance or business school could prepare them for ([34:29]-[35:21]).
  • Early revenue targets: $1,000/day; ended first year at ~$365k direct-to-consumer sales ([35:25]-[40:52]).

Distribution Model and Market Positioning

• Contrarian channel strategy: Rather than focusing solely on DTC like "smart" upstart brands, they blended wholesale, retail, and e-comm, inspired by legacy brands' balance ([03:09]-[03:48], [45:07]-[46:20]).
  • “This is how you build a brand...” – Alex, on segmenting business across wholesale and retail ([45:31])
• Early wins and setbacks: High-end specialty stores (Fred Segal, Journal Standard in Japan, etc.) fueled momentum; department stores were slower to adopt, requiring hustle and hands-on salesmanship ([44:23]-[50:59]).
  • Hustle tactic: Reorganizing their own products in department store racks to gain visibility (like Sara Blakely with Spanx) ([52:15]-[52:33]).

Marketing Experiments & Family Dynamics

• Print catalog gamble: In an era of digital everything, they saw success with print mailers, bucking the trend and differentiating from competitors ([53:34]-[54:45]).
• Family as foundation: Mom designed the stores; Alex’s wife became a co-founder; the tight family structure helped weather storms but also brought communication challenges ([76:09]-[78:02]).

Scaling and Surviving Challenges

• Breakthrough product: “Legend Sweater Shirt” became their ‘hero product’ in 2016, fueling DTC growth ([59:10]-[60:19]).
• Key investment: A low-key investor found them after buying shirts in Nantucket, providing crucial capital ([60:55]-[61:36]).
• Slow burn vs. rocket ships: Unlike some DTC "rocket ships," their growth was “the hard way”—steady, not viral—attributed to the grind, resilience, and patience ([62:00]-[64:01]).
  • “If you know, you know.” – Mike, on their cultish, under-the-radar brand loyalty ([62:36])
• Retail expansion and COVID pivot: Pre-COVID, seven stores; took the pandemic as an opportunity to sign longer leases cheaply, expanding from 13 to 40, then 80+ stores post-pandemic, aided by family teamwork and fast action ([69:06]-[71:17]).
  • “I had listened to your podcast… Panera Bread. In recessions, real estate’s cheaper…” – Alex, [68:40].

Current Outlook & Business Philosophy

• Navigating market turbulence: Tariffs, economic slowdowns, layoffs—all hit hard, but grinding through cycles, focusing on profitability, and remaining nimble with their global supply chain have kept them afloat ([73:15]-[74:52]).
• Staying independent: No immediate plans for acquisition; intend to keep Faherty a family-run, founder-led company, even as minority investments increase ([75:21]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On family dynamic:
  “My mom talks about… when we were zero years old and couldn’t walk or crawl, [but] we still ended up in each other's cribs.” – Mike, [10:55]
• On skepticism and self-doubt:
  “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Like, you’re joking, right?” – Alex, recalling a mentor’s reaction ([21:21])
• On grit and perseverance:
  “It’s the grind, Guy. It's the grind. And we've done it the hard way. Fashion's like a hamster wheel… every season something gets a little bit better.” – Mike, [78:16]
• On positive leadership:
  “If you’re just positive every day and you're like, we’re gonna figure this out…good vibes, positive energy. We can do it. Goes a really, really long way.” – Alex, [79:16]
• On business models:
  “When you do the financial model… [e-commerce] is not $1 profitable in a meaningful way. … Wholesale just naturally makes the most sense.” – Alex, [47:25]-[48:10]
• On the pivotal investment email:
  “He sent me an email to [e-mail]...‘Hey Alex, I bought some shirts in Nantucket. They’re great shirts. If you’re ever looking for money, let’s talk.’” – Alex, [60:55]
• On expansion philosophy:
  “I was like, this is going to be the best time ever for an up-and-coming clothing brand to get an amazing retail fleet.” – Alex, [69:21]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Founding Vision and Early Inspiration: [04:47]–[07:43]
• Inspiration for Fashion and Art: [05:04]–[06:40]
• Sibling Partnership and Family Dynamic: [10:07]–[11:08]
• Launching and Early Risk: [21:10]–[23:30]
• Innovating with Board Shorts: [19:18]–[26:28]
• First Mobile Pop-Up/Beach House: [36:13]–[39:17]
• Inventory Management & Cash Flow: [34:29]–[35:21]
• Multi-Channel Strategy: [45:07]–[46:20]
• Hustling Sales in Department Stores: [52:15]–[52:33]
• Print Catalog Gamble: [53:34]–[54:45]
• Breakthrough Product (“Legend Sweater Shirt”): [59:10]–[60:19]
• Key Investment Email Story: [60:55]–[61:36]
• COVID Pivot and Store Expansion: [66:50]–[71:17]
• Recent Layoffs, Market Realities: [71:43]–[73:15]
• Founders’ Reflection (Luck vs. Grind): [78:02]–[79:16]

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Summary Tone

The episode is candid, uplifting, and practical—showcasing the warmth and resilience of a close-knit family business that chose patience over hype, closeness over conglomerates, and creative contrarianism over following the DTC herd. Alex and Mike’s storytelling is humble, self-deprecating, and honest; Guy Raz maintains his signature warm curiosity throughout.

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For New Listeners

This episode is a masterclass in the value of long-term vision, leveraging industry experience, balancing channel strategies, and the realities of bootstrapping a brand—proving that enduring businesses often depend on patient experimentation, relentless hustle, and the support of those closest to you.

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Transcript

[Guy Raz]

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Did you have any fear about leaving Ralph Lauren to start something?

[Mike Faherty]

Sure, but I felt so comfortable when I could like take an original design concept and I know I could see the finished garment. So like if I found an antique piece of fabric from a quilt right from the 1920s, I could take that and visualize a cool shirt with these type of buttons and this type of wash and these type of seams and I just knew I could make it. And I'm like, if I can do it here, it's go time.

[Guy Raz]

Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how a college admissions essay grew into Faherty and a clothing brand that traveled the country in a mobile beach house before growing to a quarter of a billion dollars in sales.

Most entrepreneurs are taught to pick a.

Lane, go all in on wholesale or all in on direct to consumer or all in on retail. But today's guests, they didn't pick one. They picked all of the above. When Mike and Alex Faherty launched their clothing brand in 2013, investors were throwing money at direct to consumer companies. Low overhead, high margins, no middlemen. That was the quote, unquote, smart play. But the Faherty twins had something else in mind. A blend of wholesale brick and mortar and online sales. A strategy most people thought was outdated, maybe even doomed.

[Mike Faherty]

And.

[Guy Raz]

And yet that contrarian move helped turn Faherty into a $250 million brand.

Now, if you're not familiar with it.

Faherty is a brand of clothing that takes its inspiration from surf culture. Today, the company has around 80 stores across the U.S. the roots of the story, though, go back more than a decade before launch, because Mike Faherti first dreamed of starting a clothing brand as a teenager. And instead of rushing into it, he and his Brother Alex spent 12 years getting ready. Mike studied fashion in college and then worked at Ralph Lauren. Alex built a career in finance to learn business and to save money. It was a long first step, but that patience and that all of the above business model, it paid off. And for Mike and Alex, it was the culmination of a childhood dream of working together. The twins are the youngest of seven children. They grew up in a small town.

On the Jersey shore, where they both.

Learned to surf, and all the clothing.

They wore was bought at the local surf shop.

In middle school, the family moved to New York City, and Mike remembers noticing different fashion styles around him, starting with the clothes his dad wore to work.

[Mike Faherty]

My dad had a pretty good style, so he, you know, I always looked up to him like he was. His first gig after college was on Wall street in the 70s. So, like, you can imagine dressing the part was a big part of it. So he had, like, naturally good style. Like, I always remember, like, as a kid going through his tie closet and, like, looking at the color combinations of the paisleys and being like, wow, that's interesting. And then, like, feeling his T shirts, because they were, like, better than my quicksilver T shirts. And then all of a sudden, I'm in New York City, and my dad took me to Bergdorf Goodman, and I remember feeling a cashmere sweater for the first time and being like, what is that? And I was like, there's something. I'm into this. I'm into walking into Bloomingdale's by myself after school and going to the Ralph Lauren store. And then you get to high school, and you're, like, trying to create My own style and the surf stuff didn't feel like where I wanted to go anymore. So I started, like, started buying some other pieces to play with the surf stuff. And so junior year, right, you got to start thinking about going to college. You got to sit down and write an essay. And one of the questions that. Whatever. The prompter was like, you know, what do you want to do when you get older? And I sat there, and I started writing about starting a clothing company. I started writing about this line called coast to Curb. And it was my life. The things that worked on the coast came to the city, the quality of the things I saw in the city, the vibe of the things I saw on the coast, and this line of clothing that I could create.

[Guy Raz]

I'm wondering, Mike, in high school, did.

You ever, I don't know, feel like you kind of had to hide, you know, your interest in fashion and design? Like, because, you know, high school people.

Can be weird about that stuff. Was that something that you didn't really talk about much?

[Alex Faherty]

No.

[Mike Faherty]

No. Because some of the gift of moving to New York City was like, art's cool.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, that's true.

[Mike Faherty]

Like, being an artist is cool where you live in a small suburban town. Like, being a surfer is cool.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Mike Faherty]

And, you know, I had some great mentor, like, teachers that I was like, this guy's really cool, and he's like, you know, a professional ceramicist. And so probably the combo of my parents, like, my mom is creative and always pushed me to be more, like, take a lot of art classes. Like, I started getting comfortable with, like, I'm actually going to be an artist. I can actually have a real job being a fashion designer. And then my dad is, like, the ultimate optimist. And, like, anything's possible, guys, like, whatever. Who cares what people say? Just go do it.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

I should also mention that both of.

You guys, Both of you were really.

Good at sports, I think.

Alex, you played football in high school.

And then in college.

[Alex Faherty]

Yes.

[Guy Raz]

And, Mike, you played basketball at wash.

U in St. Louis. And I also read that you majored in fashion design there.

[Alex Faherty]

Correct.

[Guy Raz]

And you took a sewing class in college.

[Mike Faherty]

I had multiple years of sewing as a curriculum.

[Guy Raz]

Okay. But on the team, like, I'm just trying to imagine these guys like, dude, you're doing what? You're.

You're majoring in fashion design. You're taking sewing.

Like, did you get grief?

[Mike Faherty]

Totally. I mean, my coach. My coach was beyond, you know, because he's like, this old Midwestern guy.

[Guy Raz]

Incongruous.

[Mike Faherty]

Absolutely. And, you know, let Alone. To have an art school kid on the basketball team. Like, to have a fashion designer, you know, I had fashion shows guys. So, like, the guys would come to the shows, you know, and I was, like, using them as models.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Mike Faherty]

We would fly to games, come home. Sunday night. I'd have to go right to the studio to finish a sewing project. I'd be sewing all night. I'd be so tired. I'd sew seams backwards and then, like, stay up another two hours to seam, rip it, and start again. And, you know, I was the only male student in the program. I had no previous experience sewing, but there was just something about it that I like, even when it was hard. And I was like, there was. I had that. Just stick with it. Learn the craft. Keep going. Step one on your journey.

[Guy Raz]

Alex, when you were in high school, right, you're playing football.

[Alex Faherty]

Yep. Yep.

[Guy Raz]

And you saw your brother's interest in art. I'm sure you remember him talking already in high school about one day wanting to start a clothing business. When he started to talk about that, did you already, at that point, see you having a role in doing that with him?

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

When he wrote his college essay. Can't remember if it was exactly right after he wrote the essay, but the dots that we connect is I met my wife. She tells the story of when we kind of first met and started hanging out, that I told her I was gonna start a clothing company with my brother.

[Guy Raz]

When you first met her in college, you said freshman year? Yeah, freshman year when I graduated, I'm gonna start a clothing company with my brother.

[Alex Faherty]

Yep. And so I think that our friends, our world, like, it was just. We kept. We said it, so we put it out in the world. I think we were always like, we gotta do something together. Like, whatever our job is in the future, like, it needs to be together. Because what could be better than us working together one day?

[Guy Raz]

I just.

I'm curious, and you may not have.

The answer to this, because maybe I'd have to ask your mom or, I don't know, other people, but what did your parents do to cultivate the relationship that you guys have? Because, you know, like, my sisters are best friends. Absolutely. Best friends. And my children are really close. My boys are, and I hope they will be forever. But, like, you guys are grown men with families, and you're so tight. What do they do to cultivate that and help you guys become not only brothers, but, like, best friends?

[Alex Faherty]

I think some of it is we were the. You know, we were the last two, so we were the youngest, we just could easily be with each other. And so whether that's a twin thing or that's a brother thing, it's just like. It's even hard to describe. It just was like a natural thing that we experienced from the day we were born.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah, I mean, my mom talks about, like, when we're zero years old and couldn't walk or crawl, we still ended up in each other's cribs. She'd be like, I don't even know how. You guys can't even move. And, like, you end up in each other's cribs every night.

[Guy Raz]

I mean, it's very rare. And you're extremely lucky that already at a young age, you had this vision of what you wanted to do. Mike, you knew you wanted to start a business in fashion, a fashion brand. Alex, you knew you wanted to work with your brother. And so, I mean, it sounds like, and just correct me if I'm wrong, that you both went into college studying these things so then you could get jobs to help you learn more in order to help you get to the place where you could then leave and start a business. Is that more or less true?

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah. Bingo.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, that's true. And I. Even in starting my sophomore year in college, ebay was just coming up. And I used to. In free time, I used to go to, like, the local Marshalls and TJ Maxx's in, like, the New Haven area. And I would buy things and resell them on ebay. Like, I got into, you know, whatever merchandising or whatever you want to call it. And so I think for me, a lot of it was, I gotta learn. I gotta figure out what am I gonna bring to the business.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so you graduate from Yale, you. You go to New York, Alex, to work finance. Not with the intention of, like, making partner and buying a house in the Hamptons and, you know, taking a helicopter there one day on the weekends, but. But just to make enough money so you could leave and start your. This fashion business. Like from the time you got to the. Your first job after college.

[Alex Faherty]

Yep, it was make as much money as I can and learn as much as I can. And, you know, I found myself always wanting to work on the consumer side projects that. Investments that we were looking at where I could learn more about specific things within consumer or apparel. So I always gravitated towards, okay, if I'm going to do this, what can I work on? How do I work on this team to. To get me a little bit more exposure?

[Guy Raz]

And Carrie who was your girlfriend in college? Who factors in because you would go on marry each other, and she would join the company that you guys have started as a co founder. She went to law school at this time, right? She went to California.

Yep.

All right, Mike, you graduate from WashU in 2005. And again, like, you and your brother are just. You've got this vision, but the vision is I'm going to start a clothing company. But I'm 22, 23. There's no way I can do this now. I better go find a job in a bigger company. And you got a job with Ralph Lauren?

[Mike Faherty]

Oh, yeah.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Mike Faherty]

So I worked in about a year in kids, and then I got picked to move into men's design at Ralph Lauren. And that was just, you know, that was incredible.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so you. You would spend, I think, seven or eight years at Ralph Lauren.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah, yeah. Eight, Eight and change.

[Guy Raz]

And most of the time, I read that you were working on their, like, their Double RL line, which is their, like, outdoor western.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah, it's kind of like super premium, but rugged and very vintage inspired. It's sort of, like, focused on denim and American workwear and. And sort of the heritage of American clothing and trying to sort of replicate that style. And then what really clicked for me was when I started going overseas to the factories and fabric mills, and that just was like.

[Guy Raz]

That was just like, they sent you to. They sent you to Asia to, like, Hong Kong.

[Mike Faherty]

I was 23 years old, and I was in Hong Kong four times a year, going from Hong Kong to Chennai, India, to Taipei to Japan to Tokyo. And, you know, working on that line, RRL was a gift because, you know, the dream for Ralph was like, to replicate a garment from the 1930s. So, like.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Mike Faherty]

And how do you do that in 2015 or 2016? Like, you gotta dissect every element of that fabric, from the yarn size to how the yarn's finished to the finishing of the fabric, to how densely it's woven to then when it's sewn, like, what kind of stitching do you do to have it be, like, super durable or crinkle in certain ways? And then how do you wash it to break it in? And so, like, I just started becoming an engineer. Really. You become a garment engineer at that point. And that was like, took my passion to another level.

[Guy Raz]

Did you guys see. I mean, did you see each other a lot in New York City when you were both. Cause you were based. Both of you were based in New York City, right?

[Alex Faherty]

So we lived together until Carrie And I moved in together in 2010. Okay. So for, like, the first five years, we lived together.

[Guy Raz]

So you guys are roommates in the city?

[Mike Faherty]

Yep.

[Guy Raz]

And, Alex, you would be going to your finance job. And, Mike, you'd go to Ralph Lauren every day to the office. Okay.

[Mike Faherty]

And I, you know, I had a great discount at Ralph Lawrence. I got the dress. Alex, for his Wall street part, you know.

[Guy Raz]

All right. How often were you guys talking about the contours of what your. Your company would. Would be like? Like, how.

When? As early as.

I don't know, a year, two years after graduating or. Or even before. Like, take me into those, like, conversations you guys were having.

[Alex Faherty]

I think the first thing for me was, like, when. It's like, seeing Mike in the Ralph Lauren world, like, he would have me come by the showroom sometimes and kind of, like, we would go to the mansion. You know, I was going from this, like, you know, stodgy Wall street office, you know, barren, to just, like, this amazing world that Mike was living in. And when Mike would get up in the morning, he would dress a unit, like a costume. You know, some. They looked like a 1980s preppy guy to a 1940s lumberjack. Like, they just. The costumes that he wore, it was cool. Like, it was just fun to experience. He was living in this creative world, you know, and I'm living in this, like, spreadsheet world. And I wanted a little bit of what he had. I started feeling that, you know, probably four or five years in, and we started, like, it was, like, once a month, we would sort of get together on, like, a Sunday for a couple hours, and we would start talking about it. What do we want to do? Where do we want to go? What products do we want to make? What's the brand going to be? What's the brand slogan going to be? What's the name of the brand? We spent years, two years probably, trying to think about what the name of the brand's going to be. We didn't get anywhere with that. So settled on our last name.

[Guy Raz]

What was the point, Mike, where you felt like, okay, I'm ready to leave Ralph Lauren. Like, I mean, that's a huge platform, right? And a huge launching pad. Like, I'm sure you could have worked for any number of other fashion brands and had an incredible career, right? Maybe become the fashion director or the creative director of a couture house or something like that, but clearly that was not part of your plan. So at what point did you start to say, okay, I'm ready to kind of do this thing.

[Mike Faherty]

Yep. I started feeling that way when I felt so comfortable, when I could, like, take an original design concept and, like, I know I could see the finished garment. So, like, if it started with, like, a fabric swatch that was this big, like, if I found an antique piece of fabric from a quilt right from the 1920s, I could take that and visualize a cool shirt with these type of buttons and this type of wash and these type of seams, and I just knew I could make it. And I'm like, if I can do it here, it's go time.

[Guy Raz]

Did you have any fear about leaving Ralph Lauren to start something? Sure.

[Mike Faherty]

But again, when you have the identical twin brother who's like, when you're ready, dawg. When you're ready.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. So, all right, so in 2012, you officially quit Ralph Lauren. Yep. And we'll get to that in a sec. But before you do that, in high school already, you had this brand coast to Curb.

[Mike Faherty]

Coast to Curb. Yep.

[Guy Raz]

Okay. That was not gonna be the name, but the concept was basically the same. It was gonna be a surf and meet streetwear brand.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah, more probably more like surf meets New York fashion.

[Guy Raz]

And what did that mean? Like, if somebody said, okay, Mike, tell me. All right, big shot. You, Mr. Big Shot, who's a designer? Ralph Lauren. What do you think you're gonna do that's gonna be so interesting? You know, you're like, 27, 28 or 30 maybe. And so some. Come on, kid. What are you gonna do that's gonna be better than all these things out there?

[Alex Faherty]

I would have said.

[Mike Faherty]

Remember how big the surf brands were in the 90s? Like, Pacsun was in every mall.

[Alex Faherty]

Right.

[Mike Faherty]

Billion dollar companies.

[Guy Raz]

Quicksilver. Yeah.

[Mike Faherty]

That was like, a three billion dollar.

[Alex Faherty]

Company at one point. Yeah.

[Mike Faherty]

You name it, Rusty. Like, they're these huge brands.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Mike Faherty]

And they sold to a subset at a quality and a price point. But there was fervor around that world. And, like, what if I took all of my experience in, like, luxury American fashion and implemented that into, like, the surface coastal style that I grew up with? People love vacation. People love the beach. People love that outdoor lifestyle. And what if it went toe to toe with premium fashion?

[Guy Raz]

Got it.

[Mike Faherty]

So how could I, like, take board shorts, for example? That was, like, the first product I designed for Ferty. And how could I take board shorts? And instead of them being, like, really long, kind of like monochromatic, you know, print's sort of not that interesting.

[Guy Raz]

Board shorts for surfing. For surfing.

[Mike Faherty]

Exactly.

[Guy Raz]

For surfing. Board shorts. Were they Were traditionally, they were long, and you wouldn't wear them on the street because you would look like a weirdo. Yeah, I mean, not a weird. Unless you were in. On the Jersey Shore.

[Alex Faherty]

Totally.

[Guy Raz]

But if you were in, like, you know, I don't know, Chicago in a. In a bar, wearing.

But.

But you would want to make it so people could wear it, like, walking around the street of a city.

[Mike Faherty]

Exactly. And at the same time, do you remember the line Vilbiquin? Villibaquin?

[Guy Raz]

Yes, of course. From France.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah. It, like, it, like, exploded, starting. So it was huge. And all of a sudden, people are like, ah, 250 bucks for a bathing suit.

[Guy Raz]

Sure, bathing suit.

Yeah.

[Mike Faherty]

And then before, it was, like, 69 bucks. Quicksilver. Right. So, like.

[Guy Raz]

Right.

[Mike Faherty]

So all of a sudden I was like, oh, there's somewhere in the middle for me, there's a playing ground of, like, taking surf and starting to put a luxury element to it.

[Guy Raz]

Meantime, Alex, it sounds like you were just waiting for your brother to make this move because you were waiting to jump ship as well and help him. But here's the question I have for you. I mean, you're pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars. You're a young guy making a ton of money in New York City because that's what they pay you.

Did anybody.

I don't know, parents, friends, say you're making, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars? Like, what are you doing?

You want to quit this and start this fashion brand?

Like, what?

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, people I worked with. I remember I had one. One mentor of mine, and I was like, I'm gonna start a clothing company with my brother. I'm thinking about leaving. And he looked at me in straight face and said, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Like, you're joking, right? And I remember, like, that was the first time I really said it to someone besides, like, a friend of mine. And I was like, oh, wait. I definitely had a moment before I was leaving where I was like, do. Maybe I just finance Mike. You know, I can keep my job.

[Guy Raz]

Because you had the cash, you had the money that you were saving.

[Alex Faherty]

I had the cash. So I was bankrolling kind of like the early developments. You know, Mike was. Mike was. Once he left Raffalorian. He was out of a job, so I'm sort of bankrolling it, moving it along. And I remember, like, one day came home from, like, business trip overseas, and I was exhausted. Carrie and I were. She was home, and I was like, should I do this? Like, you've Known me for so long. Should I do this? And she was like, you gotta do this.

[Guy Raz]

Alex, I read that your dad, who I know he's not. He's no longer around, he was not super psyched that you were leaving finance.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

Before he passed, you know, it was like 2008, 2009, I would. You know, we would get together and I would tell him that, you know, we're starting to work on this and get his advice. And he. He kind of took the stance of, you know, just keep doing what you're doing. Build your career. You know, you can finance Mike. You guys can do it together on the side. And I think he had an experience in his career where he had some ups and downs. And I think he saw what that did to his relationship with my mom and the family. When you have money and then you don't. And I think he's like. He kind of looked back and was like, if I would have just kept that first job I had in that one firm and moved my way up, you know, life would have maybe been easier. And so I think that was his experience. So I definitely always had that in.

[Guy Raz]

The back of my mind, which is understandable. Well, he cared about you. Right? I mean. I mean, wouldn't you agree?

[Alex Faherty]

I would totally agree.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

Maybe even advice I would give to my own kid. But I think I've learned that you can get two forms of advice, and they're both right.

[Guy Raz]

Totally.

[Alex Faherty]

And so you gotta pick what's best for you.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

But I honestly, when I made the decision that I was gonna do this, I just was convinced it was gonna work.

[Guy Raz]

Mike, did you have that confidence when you left Ralph Lauren? Were you absolutely sure this was gonna work?

[Mike Faherty]

I was just thinking about the fabric I was gonna design first. You know, I'm such, like, a methodical engineer, like, that.

[Guy Raz]

You're like, step by step.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah. It was like, all right. First, it's like, what's the product? Okay. I took a trip around the world, and I went and sat with my favorite factory owners, and I said, here's what I'm doing. What do you think?

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, but. And you could do that.

Cause you already knew them, right? From your time at Ralph Lauren.

[Mike Faherty]

That's what I'm saying. It was such a gift.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Mike Faherty]

You know, you go. When you do these business trips, like, especially in other cultures, like, every night is dinner, and you meet the families, and you're just like. You're so interconnected. So, like, I was very close friends. I mean, I'm. I'm still to this day, one of one of the owners of the factory, India, I call a very close friend, and he was one of the first guys to give us money when we started the brand. So building product is so hard. They just knew I wasn't the typical employee who just came and clocked in and clocked out. I was always there too late. I was always telling one engineer, like, what if we change this? Like, what if we did that? You know? And so, like, they saw the opportunity in me, right? Because you have to sell yourself. And a lot of it was, you know, we started from scratch from, like, the yarn, right? Because a lot of the synergy of Faraday, right, was like, we were going to do it. We were going to do, like, what I did at Ralph Lauren from a quality craftsmanship, but we were going to do it from a Patagonia material perspective. It started with, like, what was the recycled fiber to make the board shorts with?

[Guy Raz]

What did you need it to do? What was going to make. The board shorts are probably, like, the traditional surf shorts are probably made from polyester nylon.

[Mike Faherty]

Yep, exactly. So I'll geek out with you a little bit. So you need the synthetic to keep it. So it's hydrophobic, right. So it doesn't absorb all the water.

[Alex Faherty]

Right.

[Mike Faherty]

So we knew we needed.

[Guy Raz]

Because cotton wouldn't work.

[Mike Faherty]

Cotton wouldn't work. A little cotton, I found out, could work fine. And what. So what I did was it was like, all right, first you gotta find what's the best version of the recycled filament yarn. And that's from a company in South Carolina called Unify. They're like, they just make the best version of the recycled polyester from, you know, plastic bottles and stuff. So I was like, all right. No one's really doing this mix of, like. I still like the way cotton feel like a feel to it that feels, like, softer, a little less sticky, let's just say, on your body. So I kind of just kept working and working, working. It was like trial number six, right? If I only had 17% cotton. With the recycled polyester, it didn't change the quick dry mentality of it. But when you touched it, you thought it was a regular fabric. You didn't think it was a board short.

[Guy Raz]

And, Alex, how much money did you have to. Or did you. Were you. Did you make available to do this? Like, you had some saved cash, probably living as, you know, frugally as possible. But how much money were you able to put in?

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, the first inventory. I remember when we did our first inventory, buy of the, of the board shorts that Mike developed, the initial deposit was like $150,000. And for the year that Mike was, after he left Ralph Lauren, he rented a little studio and he set up shop there. And he sort of set up his concept wall, you know, some of the branding, the fabrics that he was working on. He was there seven days a week all the time. And I would go over there on the weekends to catch up with him, brainstorming about the business. And so that kind of went on and on for months and months and months. And I loved it. I freaking loved it. And I was just feeling like I wasn't really enjoying my job that much anymore. I felt like my dad was in my head still. But I had to make the decision. It was getting closer. And I just had a couple sleepless nights and just like woke up in the middle of the night, turned to Carrie and was like, I gotta do this.

[Guy Raz]

When we come back after a quick break, how a cross country road trip, an old fashioned catalog in a boutique clothing store in Japan all help the Faraday brand get on its feet.

Stay with us.

I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to.

How I Built this.

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I'm Guy raz.

So it's February 2013, and Alex Feherty quits his finance job to go all in on a new fashion brand with his twin brother, Mike. They're looking to raise some seed money. They order their first run of clothing, and they're planning to launch their website.

Site in the spring, and I Remember.

[Mike Faherty]

We launched the website. Alex and I were like, if we're going to launch this brand, we have to be on a surf trip. So we went to Puerto Rico at a friend of a friend's apartment in San Juan that had good wi fi. We were with our buddy who was helping us with the final back end of the website, like making sure everything was linking, etc. And at one minute it was like the website was live and there's nothing we can do. And we went surfing and like, you know, we got some good press hits out the gate. And then, you know, it's like, all.

[Guy Raz]

Right, we're selling stuff and just board.

Shorts, that's the only thing available.

Men's board shorts and women's bikinis and women.

Okay, got it.

[Alex Faherty]

So it's just Swimwear was the first product that we made. And I had started sort of six months before. You know, we started reaching out to people that we knew, kind of friends and family and people that we had relationships with. And so I started during that time period, you know, trying to raise our first kind of angel round.

[Guy Raz]

How much were you looking to raise?

[Alex Faherty]

$1 million.

[Guy Raz]

And you did it, you got it?

[Alex Faherty]

We got it.

[Guy Raz]

I mean, I'm assuming that given your backgrounds and your track record, it wasn't. It probably wasn't easy, but like. Yeah, I mean, you guys are smart guys. You had all this experience in finance. Your brother had all this experience in fashion and design. I guess you get checks ranging from what, 5,000 to.

[Alex Faherty]

I think our biggest one was 100,000. So I think we had 44 investors.

[Guy Raz]

In first round and pretty much all connections. People you knew are loose ties.

[Alex Faherty]

Absolutely.

[Guy Raz]

People, friends of friends.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, we did a couple smaller add on rounds to that because I think what we figured out quickly is that inventory eats up capital really fast. At some point in the first year, we needed to figure out how to make clothes because we were moving from bathing suits into a full clothing line. And so we needed to find somewhere to make the line because we were going to only order 50 units, 75 units, 100, like small quantities. And so this one factory owner, who's one of Mike's close friends, who's an amazing guy, we met with him, talked to him about the business, and he said he invested and then opened up his factory to us for that first production run.

[Guy Raz]

All right, I want to talk. Just talk business for a sec with you, Alex, because you had experience in working in, in private equity and investment banks, but not necessarily with like inventory management.

Right.

Like you could a Financial projections. You could build a P and L. But like, this is different. Retail, especially apparel, is a different kind of beast because one misstep can really put set you back. Too much stuff hanging around that you got to eventually throw away. You're dealing also with like different sizes. You don't want too much excess. You know, you're going to throw stuff away. Like it's a restaurant, right. At the end of the day, the restaurant's got to throw away food. So how hard was that learning curve for you? Like, was it pretty steep?

[Alex Faherty]

It was incredibly steep. I'm still 12 years later, still trying to learn it. And I think that if I look back at what was one thing that I did not anticipate or understand going into this was how complicated and difficult inventory management was going to be. And we learned it right away because we have to sell this amount of clothes in order to survive.

[Guy Raz]

What was the amount that you had to sell in order to survive that first year?

[Alex Faherty]

We had in our mind that we needed to sell $1,000 a day.

[Guy Raz]

That's an ambitious goal. Right. Especially when you're an unknown brand. First of all, how did you get people to be aware of the website? Were you doing Facebook ads? Like, what were you doing?

[Alex Faherty]

We weren't doing Facebook ads. You know, we had an Instagram account and we got some press right when we launch. So we had like a nice initial launch in April for the first couple weeks, you know, friends or telling about friends, we're emailing everyone we know. And so we're like got, you know, couple thousand dollars days, $5,000 a day, like, wow, this is great. And then all of a sudden it's like crickets.

[Mike Faherty]

There's nothing.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

So.

So clearly sales are slowing down. But I read that by the summer.

Of 2013, you guys come up with kind of an unusual idea, which is.

You basically take the clothes on a.

Tour of the country. Like almost like you were a band or something. Like a red that you built kind of like a. A mobile pop up store. Can, can you tell me about that?

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

So.

[Mike Faherty]

So Alex told you I had this little studio in Union Square 2012, right. Food trucks, they're everywhere. And I was like, why don't we just have a food truck store and we can travel and just get a.

[Guy Raz]

Food truck and just have your stuff in on hangers in the store.

[Mike Faherty]

Absolutely. But you know, I'm not a plug and play kind of guy. So I had to design a custom trailer with hydraulics that looked like, you know, a 1940s cape, you know, And I had my mom, who's an interior decorator help me with it. Another friend who's an architect in San Francisco, just tell me like, a couple things. And we built this basically trailer that was completely clad in reclaimed wood. And you opened it up and it was birch wood on the inside with photography and cool fixtures and racks. And the two sides of the trailer completely opened on hydraulics onto a sort of porch on both sides. And so we could basically pull it on a pickup truck, go anywhere, and sort of create a clothing store.

[Guy Raz]

And then what, you would have a plan to drive around the country or.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah, so it first started with. Yeah, we basically took the trailer and we started, like, just plotting out where we would go. We did a mix of, like, individual clothing retailers who we, like, reached out to. And we were like, hey, we could do an event in your parking lot. Or we reached out to, like, concerts, like festivals. And we're like, hey, like, we did this festival in Charleston where we just, like, plotted it next to like, all the food trucks. And we're like, we're selling bathing suits.

[Guy Raz]

Also, like, the founders are there, like, every time I've gone to like, a crafts fair or. Cause that's the kind of thing you guys might have been doing, right? Like, you go there and you're like, oh, this is the. And you meet the guy who's making the leather pouches and.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

And you're like, wow, these are really cool.

[Mike Faherty]

Exactly.

[Guy Raz]

And you're like, okay, it's a little expensive. 90 bucks.

But you know what the guys here.

And I'm going to buy this. It's not made in, like, you know, some giant factory and by some faceless person. Like, this is the guy that's making it.

[Alex Faherty]

And especially when you're outside of big cities, people like events, they like something different. You know, there's not a lot going as much going on in Charlotte, North Carolina as there is it's going on in New York City or L. A.

[Guy Raz]

So it was a. It was a cross country trip through the southeast.

[Mike Faherty]

Yep.

[Alex Faherty]

We did a U. A U of the country.

[Guy Raz]

Oh, my God.

How long did that take?

[Mike Faherty]

About five days.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. I mean, how long were you guys driving per day? Like eight, ten hours.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

So you guys are doing like, days in and like, fast food and whatever he had to do.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah, a couple, you know, flat tire in Shreveport, lost the keys in the trailer somewhere in la. The funniest story is, like, when we're on the PCH in Big Sur and we just park on the water. And like, a dozen people pull up and buy stuff from us.

[Guy Raz]

You open up the store on the side of the road.

[Mike Faherty]

Yep. Right when there's a curve and there's a big, like. And 12 people showed up, had never seen this stuff. This is kind of good. I'll buy it. I'll buy something from it.

[Alex Faherty]

We sold $1,500 on the side of the Pacific one by Big Sur. I'll never forget it.

[Guy Raz]

It's a great idea because it's, like, a great way to at least get your brand in front of people. But meantime, like, you're running the business, right? So you guys are driving this truck. And then, like, you had to deal with the suppliers, and they were probably, like, calls you had to be on.

And.

And you, Mike, you still were, like, had to be working on. Do you work in CAD to design clothing? Yeah.

[Mike Faherty]

You work in cad. You know, it's just a lot of back and forth with your partners at. At the factory, you know, your partner engineer partners on the Garmin side of things. So this was maybe.

[Guy Raz]

Okay.

[Mike Faherty]

All of the trade shows for spring 14 start in July.

[Guy Raz]

Okay.

[Mike Faherty]

So I needed all my samples July 1st, let's just say then once we got back and we started the trade show circuit, where it was like, Faraday's launching a collection, the trailer became our trade show booth. And it was like, oh, my goodness. This is amazing.

[Guy Raz]

You took the trailer to the trade shows?

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah.

[Mike Faherty]

So we.

[Guy Raz]

Floor of the trade show.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah. So the New York trade show, they let us park out front, the front door. So we're actually on Mercer street in Soho and we're out front. Granted, it was 100 degrees that week still. Every. Every buyer who walked in saw this cool thing, and then we went to Vegas. And I think that helped just, like, as buyers come through, like, oh, this is something different. This is something that feels bigger than maybe it is.

[Guy Raz]

How much did you. Your goal was 400 grand that first year. What'd you do in that first year?

[Alex Faherty]

So what ended up happening that first year was we ended up doing, like, 365, 350 in direct to consumer sales. And, you know, this sort of experience on the road showed me the power of these small specialty retailers across the country, because we didn't have to spend any money on marketing. We just had to get the beach house there. And so when Mike designed that first line, there's momentum. There's like, these stores are interested in this brand online. No one was interested in us in person. People were interested in us. And then Now I found these buyers from these sort of clothing stores that were interested in what we're doing. And I'm like, this is gonna be what gets us going.

[Guy Raz]

At what point did you start to offer other items besides board shorts and bikinis?

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah, so that was the collection, that first collection spring that we showed in 13.

[Guy Raz]

In that fashion show.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah, in that trade show.

[Guy Raz]

And that included just give me roughly.

[Mike Faherty]

Like tees, T shirts and polos, short sleeve printed button downs, you know, long sleeve flannels, you know, wash sweatshirts, chino shorts, board shorts, couple jackets. It was like a full, you know, full collection.

[Guy Raz]

What was it that, like, how were you able to. To differentiate it in your mind? I mean, it's a sort of a kind of like laid back, coastal vibe. Like, what made it, in your view, different from any competitors?

[Mike Faherty]

The type of stores we were going at were more of a luxury fashion retailers. So we were going after Barney's, we were going after Japanese retailers, we were going after Stag in Austin, this awesome store there. And so these stores kind of had this. Let's just talk about the American market, right? They had this whole of like, all right, we either have suiting, dressy, haberdashery, suiting, or we have Ralph Lauren, or.

[Alex Faherty]

We have like golf brands.

[Mike Faherty]

They sort of were like, we're kind of missing a rugged, casual take on American. You know, that's got some coastal vibes. You know, at that point, Tommy Bahama was kind of out of fashion in that world. They just came and they were like, we've just been missing this. The price point was a. Was higher end, the quality was higher end, but the vibe was just like, so chill.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

And then you had. In the landscape at the time, you know, you had a store in LA called Fred Siegel, which was sort of like famous. And they, you know, a lot of it's like, who takes a run at this brand and gives it a chance early. And so the buyer at Fred Siegel really identify with the brand. I think Mike, coming from rrl, which is a very well regarded line in clothing, saw the potential and so he gave us some real space at Fred Siegel in la, in Santa Monica. And one of the other things was all of a sudden we get this random email in Japanese from a store called Journal Standard, which is a very well known, kind of cool specialty boutique in Japan. And we're like, oh, my God, Journal Standard Japan. Like, this is amazing. And then the woman who was with Journal Standard is sort of like an agent. She helps other Japanese brands. And then all of A sudden it was like Journal Standard. And then there's another store called United Arrows, there's another store called Isitan. They all wanted to come see the line. And that was really when the business went from, you know, $350,000 e comm mobile beach house business to in one year, once we ship this product, you know, we're going to be in some.

[Guy Raz]

Of the best stores in the world was the idea. Because you know, we've done so many direct to consumer brands. Warby Parker and Harry's Razors and you know, all these brands that really kind of blew up in this time period.

Was the idea to be a direct.

To consumer brand, like to be a web based business where the vast majority of your stuff was being sold online. Or were you already thinking, no, we want to be a wholesaler, we want to be in Nordstrom's and Bloomingdale's and we want to do both or we want, you know, because the margins on.

Direct to consumer are higher, they're better.

So what was the idea that you had?

[Alex Faherty]

When I was working on the business plan, I was studying 10K's annual reports of Ralph Lauren coach, Louis Vuitton, you know, whatever brands I could get my hands on that were public that I felt were like the best, most valuable brands.

[Guy Raz]

That's by the way, it's really interesting. You were looking at their annual reports of these companies who you aspire to be one day.

[Alex Faherty]

Exactly. And when you read about these brands, you know, they do segment breakouts. Wholesale, retail. At that time there wasn't really splitting up E Comm and retail yet. But it was always like wholesale was half the business, retail E. Com was half the business. So I was like, this is how you build a brand. So we have our initial business plan. Mike and I were looking at it before and in year six in the business plan it said that retail would be 45% of the business, online would be 35% of the business and wholesale would be the rest. And so wholesale was always a part of the plan. But what happened was wholesale got going first. So year two of the business, wholesale, 75% of our business. Because that's really what took off.

[Guy Raz]

And that was. Cause the trade shows, you went to the trade shows and you got all these orders.

[Alex Faherty]

Exactly. And so we had a, you know, Nordstrom picked us up the first season. Barney's picked up nationally.

[Guy Raz]

Was, was Nordstrom national or just.

[Alex Faherty]

No, it was 10 store, you know, 10 stores. Barney's was, you know, four stores. And then Japan was probably 40% of that first year's wholesale business.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. I mean, again, it proved to be the right decision. But, like, already, I'm just curious how you thought about this, because in 2014, you could start to see that people were not going to department stores as much. And again, even today, it's a mixed bag. If you go to San Francisco, to Union Square, nobody's in the department stores. But if you go to the Westfield shopping center in La Jolla, which is a beautiful outdoor mall, it's packed with people. Or you go to a suburban shopping center in Palo Alto, or I'm sure there's some on the east coast around where you guys are.

They're busy.

But there was an argument to be made at the time that like, oh, this is, this is not going to work.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah. I think it was also just a function of the capital that we had. And so when you think about the Warby's at the time, in some of.

[Guy Raz]

These, they raised a lot of capital.

[Alex Faherty]

They raised a bunch of money. Because when you think like when you do the financial model of spending money on marketing, on e Commerce, first customer acquisition, LTV, like it's not $1 profitable in a meaningful way. And so when I'm like, I only have this amount of Runway, I only have this little amount of money. The wholesale business made sense for me because there's been an industry that's been set up called the factoring business, where there's these specialty finance companies that once you get an order from a retailer like a Nordstrom, you can give that order to the specialty finance company and they will first give you what's called PO financing. So for some interest rate, they will finance, give you an advance on.

[Guy Raz]

It's a high interest rate.

[Alex Faherty]

It's a high interest rate.

[Guy Raz]

10 or 12% or more.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, it's a high interest rate, but it's capital. And then once you ship the product, you send your invoice and they'll advance you the money. So when I was thinking about the float of this business and how do you make the business to scale without raising a lot of money wholesale just naturally makes the most sense.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. I mean, so because you didn't, you didn't have, you weren't venture backed, you didn't have hundreds of millions of dollars behind you, you actually were forced to do this.

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

So we, you know, we didn't make any money our first bunch years, but we didn't. We were losing like $500,000 a year or $400,000 a year. We weren't losing 10 million?

[Guy Raz]

Not 20 million?

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah. Or $20 million a year. So we had to. There was no alternative. We couldn't just lose a lot of money.

[Guy Raz]

But the other challenge going wholesale is your stuff has to sell. And if you. And if me or anybody walks into a Bloomingdale's and I just need a pair of trousers, and I'm like, I've got 15 minutes. And this has happened to me, by the way, it's a true story. I'll go into a Bloomingdale's, like, in some city, because I've got to do a live show or some appearance. And I'm like, I spilled something on my trousers and there's like an oil stain on it. And I know that, like, rag and bone size 32 fits me perfectly. I don't even have time to try it on. I'm going. And I'm just grabbing it and leaving the store. So how.

And you're in an unknown brand.

How are you able to compete in those?

It must have been hard at times.

To get attention in those places.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, the department stores were tough. It took much longer to get the business moving. In the department store world, where we saw the initial success was in these sort of smaller specialty stores where, you know, think of this story. It's an owner who buys the product. He's the number one salesman. He knows all the customers, so he's gotta sell what he buys. And so my job was to try and accumulate as many of these specialty clothing store customers as possible. And they would give us a shot, you know, a couple thousand dollars order, you know, 40 pieces, 30 pieces. But in those type of environments, those buyers are also the sellers. They had. They got to sell it. So we found that those were the stores that could really move the product versus the big department stores. So we had very little luck. Even though we got some of these small orders from Nordstrom's in the first bunch of years, it wasn't much. It was really small.

[Guy Raz]

But I guess it was enough to generate some interest or buzz or knowledge or awareness.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, you just stick around with those department stores.

[Mike Faherty]

You know, that was like a lot of just being frustrated. Like, I wish the business was bigger. I wish the business was bigger. And then, like, you know, X amount of years in when, like, Faraday's got more notoriety, it works.

[Alex Faherty]

And you also. I think there's a product. You sort of gotta figure out the product that to your point, you come in, you know, your rag and bone pants size, like, what's the product? If you walked into Nordstrom that would sell itself.

[Guy Raz]

And what was that?

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, for us, it was plaid shirts.

[Guy Raz]

Plaid shirts.

[Alex Faherty]

So I think Mike designed shirts at Ralph Lauren. And if you go back to this world we were living in in 2014, 15, 16, it was like very contemporary clothing was like solid black and white or very preppy. Like Vineyard Vines was kind of a big, a big brand at the time.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

And there just wasn't a classic great sun faded plaid shirt that you could buy. And so Nordstrom, you know, a lot of west coast stores, a lot of stores in the Pacific Northwest, they didn't have this sort of like premium high end plaid flannel shirt. And that was the first shirt at Nordstrom that we really saw velocity with.

[Guy Raz]

Were you able to do anything to increase visibility at the Nordstrom's and Bloomingdale's? There's a famous story, and we had this on our show. Sarah Blakely was actually Our first guest 10 years ago when we launched the show. And true story, that she would go into the Neiman Marcus's and she would like make sure to put the Spanx by the register when no one was looking. And she would front face them and make sure that she positioned them better. Because it was just a few Neiman Marcus stores. But now you're like shipping your stuff to these department stores. And are you just kind of crossing your fingers and hoping that people notice it?

What?

[Alex Faherty]

That first year when we shipped to Nordstrom, I visited every single one. It was 10 different Nordstrom's across the country. And I did a version of what Sarah did. Moving someone else to another rack, moving our stuff.

[Mike Faherty]

But the most.

[Guy Raz]

Without asking permission.

[Alex Faherty]

Oh, yeah, you don't ask permission. You just do it.

[Mike Faherty]

We still do it, but the.

[Alex Faherty]

We still do it. Like, I went to Bloomingdale's yesterday and I, I moved our stuff and like moved something out. But, you know, the biggest thing I found successful was like, it was me walking into the store telling a salesperson, hey, you know, this is my brand. Here's my story, here's why the product's good. I just found that those interactions to the salespeople were, were like paid dividends and dividends and dividends because they're the ones who sell it every day. And that human connection, I can't do that at scale in a department store. I can't talk to everyone like that walks in and looking for a pair of pants because I got to go home. I'm about to have a family. But what I can do is I can get the salespeople to Be on our side.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

How did you.

You guys opened your first store. You actually started with a pop up, right in Greenwich Village.

[Alex Faherty]

Yep. On Thompson street between Princeton, Spring and.

[Guy Raz]

Then that became a permanent store.

[Alex Faherty]

It was sort of a pop up for about three. Three years.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

And that was kind of the first time Mike and my mom designed a little store. It was about a 200 square foot little storefront on Thompson Street.

[Guy Raz]

One of the things that I think is really interesting that you did in the first, maybe year and a half was you sent out a print catalog, which you would think is counterintuitive. Like, wait, a print catalog? Because I get print catalogs.

I don't look at them, but I'm.

Not necessarily the target. Like, I do think that probably a.

Lot more people look at them than.

I would assume, because it worked like.

People were literally dialing a 1, 800 number to order.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, I remember there was a article and there was some news in the industry in 2000, early 2015, that J. Crew stopped doing their catalog and just went online.

[Mike Faherty]

It was like a big thing.

[Alex Faherty]

You know, J.

[Mike Faherty]

Crew.

[Alex Faherty]

Everyone got catalog for J. Crew for so many years. And then one day they just decided to stop doing their catalog. And I was like, that's interesting. Remember, as kids, we'd always got catalogs. I'm like, there's just not catalogs coming. And I don't know, I was. I think we were like, we got to do some type of marketing. And I was like, why don't we just try a catalog? And so that was our first paid media that we ever did in holiday 2015.

[Guy Raz]

It's just interesting how you chose to spend your money. Because again, it's counterintuitive. It's like some brands take out radio ads. It's counterintuitive.

But those things still do work.

[Mike Faherty]

The American classics were almost started by catalogs. Like old pennies catalogs from the 40s, and Sears catalogs. Like, so I think just the idea of we were just selling product that needed to be shown in a way that was interesting. So I think there was like, when a customer picks this up, no different than the person who walked into the specialty store and was like, this clothing looks kind of interesting. Ferrety.

[Alex Faherty]

I don't even know how to say.

[Mike Faherty]

It, but this stuff's interesting. I'm gonna just keep. I'm gonna take a look.

[Guy Raz]

Meantime, you are. You did raise a little bit more money from your existing investors. Right. Cause you had cash coming in. But this is an expensive proposition. You've got. You Got to order stuff, you got to pay probably pretty quickly, and then you're not getting the money in for 30, 45, sometimes 60 days, maybe longer.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, we, we were constantly running out of money. And that's because of the inventory cycle of the business. And it's just a constant playing your payables, trying to get as much extent on the payables, trying to make the cash flow of this business work. But it was really, really stressful for me because, you know, I felt like the whole business, the financial, like it was just kind of on my shoulders to make this business, to make this business work and be successful. So it was like, as I said, I just got obsessed with how do we sell, sell the product as much as possible. Nothing. You know, the wholesale business sort of hit the first year and a half and then it kind of stopped.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

And the e commerce business, just until we did that catalog, I didn't really see any customers coming in, in, in droves because we had spent the money on the marketing.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

And then the retail store was doing, you know, $250,000 a year or $300,000 a year. It's not, you know, a million millions of dollar store. And so we're like, what's the next thing we need to do to, like, keep scaling it?

[Guy Raz]

When we come back after the break, just as the money starts to run out, an angel who also happens to be an investor appears from Nantucket with an offer.

Stay with us.

I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built this. The holidays are upon us, and businesses are hiring for seasonal roles. Everything from haunted corn maze workers to snowplow drivers. This means that people with certain skills, experience, or even a special license are in high demand and not easy to find. Whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, the best way to find the perfect match for your role is on ZipRecruiter. And right now you can try it for [e-mail] Bilt ZipRecruiter's matching technology works fast to find top talent so you don't waste time or money. You can find out right away how many job seekers in your area are qualified for your role. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now you can try it for [e-mail] BILT Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com BILT the smartest way to hire. We all have moments when we could have done better. Like cutting your own hair. Yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn [e-mail] hey, welcome back to How I Built this.

I'm Guy raz.

So around 2015, Alex and Mike are talking two years into building their fashion brand. They're selling across multiple channels. The Faherty website, wholesale, and one retail store in New York. But managing cash flow is a constant challenge, and they're still not making a profit.

[Alex Faherty]

And so I actually went back to my investment firm for two months as a consultant because I ran out of money. So everything.

[Guy Raz]

You were stressed?

[Alex Faherty]

Everything was stressed. And one of the guys I used to work with was like, you know, I got coffee with him just to catch up, and he's. And I was like, I needed money. I had no money left.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Mike Faherty]

And the whole time, right, Guy, We're. We're telling all of our factories, like, give us another month to pay. We're basically like, you know, 60 days becomes 90 days becomes 120 days. So half of our email traffic was just deflecting payment. And, you know, you always, you know, we had a couple employees at that point, but you gotta be like, just so positive, right? Like, and just like, everything's awesome. Like, the brand's so cool and amazing and like, so, you know, in many ways, like, I'm sort of like, end up being the energy a lot around the positivity of the brand, as Alex sort of burdens a lot of the stress of the brand. But kind of in that year, we sort of started playing with what would become like, probably our first hero product, which is the legend sweater shirt, which is sort of like our take on a flannel shirt meets kind of a sweater. And that was in, like about 2015. I started working on it, and then we launched it in 2016. And it was the first product where we put it in the store and it like, evaporated. Everyone who touched it bought it. And that product really helped us be like, all right, this is how we have to be a direct to consumer brand.

[Guy Raz]

You guys had a. Basically like the story I've read is that around 2016, you kind of like get cold contact protected from a guy in Nantucket or who saw the shirt of Nantucket and He wanted to invest and he became, I guess to this day is your sole outside non family member, friend investor. Is this. And this person is like private. They don't want to be known. They're not a public name. Yeah. It's just an individual and a significant investment. Made a significant investment.

[Alex Faherty]

Made a significant investment. He sent me an email to helloritybrand.com like to our customer service email.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

And it said, hey Alex, I bought some shirts in Nantucket. They're great shirts. If you're ever looking for money, let's talk. And you know, we're a couple million dollar fashion brand. Two years in three years. You know, we're not getting, we're not getting many emails like this.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, we're looking, we're looking for some money.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah. I definitely told them, you know, we're not a high flyer. Warby Parker raising money and venture capital. You know, we're selling the wholesale. Who wants to invest in the business that is doing wholesale? And we spent some time with him and I think he really saw us and, and the vision of what we were doing and, and he became our first, you know, meaningful outside investor and he gave us the capital that we sort of needed to kind of like take this next step.

[Guy Raz]

You know, we've had brands on that are just like rocket ships, you know, year one, 2 million, year two, 10 million, year three, 50 million. Year four, 100 million. You're just like, what? How does. You know? And sometimes it's luck. Sometimes there's a lot of cash that's come in. There's a bunch of different reasons. Sometimes it's really just, you know, you just hit the zeitgeist. Like Crumbl Cookies, right? Just Crumbl Cookies just went crazy.

This.

It took you guys, you know, a bunch of years before you were going to hit 20, 25 million which is still super impressive. I think five, six years in, you're at $25 million. I'm curious.

You're in New York.

There's a lot of hype and some of these brands were on how I built this and I'm happy. They're great brands. The Warby Parkers of the world and the, you know, the Toms shoes and the Casper mattresses. And were you guys ever like looking at some of these brands including competitors and just thinking like what's going on?

Like why aren't we there?

[Mike Faherty]

Absolutely. But at the same time there was always this thing where Alex and I loved the fact that, that our brand was always one of those things where if you know, you know, and like, I don't know, we just were like, yeah, I wish it would have gone faster, it would have been easier. But when you kind of know there's no out, if you know what I mean? Like, the end is maybe never. It changes how you think of the world around you.

[Alex Faherty]

And I think I had, I had known, you know, I came from private equity, and so I knew that sort of like going the venture capital, private equity route was something we wouldn't do because of what we wanted to do with the brand, how we wanted to do this forever. We didn't really want to sell it. You know, this is like, this was Mike and I's thing. And I knew some of the founders. I went on a ski trip in 2016 with a bunch of these founders of some of the brands you mentioned, and they liked our clothes. And I think they had given me feedback that they were like, it's so cool that you don't have to do what we have to do and how fast we have to grow and how big the companies need to be like that. You get to kind of just do this with your brother. And there was perspective that if I didn't meet these guys and have this ski trip with them, that I may have looked from afar, but they were very excited about how we were building it and jealous of us in a way.

[Guy Raz]

Meantime, you guys are expanding, right? I think by 2018, you had seven stores, stores in Boston, Nantucket, you had a store in New York and then you had Malibu. Here's my question about those stores. Were you at all nervous about signing a 10 year lease in Malibu or in Boston, you know, and even in New York City? Like, that's a lot of pressure. You've got to perform to make sure that, you know, those don't drain your resources.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, some of it was, was timing. And in the Malibu store, Mike and I knew as these two kids that grew up on the beach in New Jersey, Malibu, California was like, we gotta.

[Guy Raz]

Like, that's the mecca for surfing.

[Alex Faherty]

If we're gonna have this flagship story we've always talked about, it's gotta be at this amazing shopping center called the Malibu Country Mart. And that was, I think we signed a five year lease to start. That was the first time where we now had a real lease. We were gonna put some real money into the store. And there's so much anticipation when you open up that first real store, you know, is it gonna work? Oh, my God. Like, this is our, one of our, one of our big moves. We've ever made. And I'll never forget when we went out there for opening weekend. We had a little party that Saturday, and the location was just amazing. It's like, right where all the traffic is. And the music was great in the store. It just was amazing energy. And people walked in and it was busy, and we sold clothes and it was like, this is gonna work. And it did.

[Guy Raz]

All right. So I want to get. I want to fast forward a little bit to Covid because Covid, I mean, it was a scary time. But for a lot of retail brands, and especially e commerce focused brands, it turned out to be an incredible opportunity because people are stuck in front of their computers now. Some apparel brands, it was a disaster. Right. Especially if you're selling stuff for the office. But for more casual brands and things like that, it was actually a great year. Tell me what happened to you guys during that Covid year.

[Alex Faherty]

So we had a couple really great things that were going into that year of 2020. Our Nordstrom business was finally starting to work. So stores were, you know, between wholesale and stores, it was about 70% of our business, and only about 30% of our business is e commerce. So when it first shut down, 70% of our business is basically dead. And it was really tough. And, you know, we had to do furloughs for a bunch of the team, and we had to figure out how to survive. And then at some point in May, you know, we're like, all right, e commerce is better than we thought. We had comfortable product. It was great for stay at home. Like, it's performing better. Like, let's start spending more on marketing.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

And we started seeing our E commerce business in May, just started multiplying. And then year over year, we started seeing like 100% growth year over year. And what was the best thing that happened to us, which we thought was the worst thing, was we had all this inventory that we bought for our wholesale and our retail channels that all of a sudden we could actually hit the demand for our e commerce business. And, you know, if we would have sold that. That product at wholesale, you know, we would have made a significantly less gross margin.

[Guy Raz]

Sure.

[Alex Faherty]

But we had the e commerce business now at a much higher gross margin. So all of a sudden, the business starts making money. You know, we became, you know, meaningfully profitable starting in the summer of 2020. And the other thing that happened was what's going to happen with our stores? You know, at that time, we had 12 stores. Six of the 12 were in kind of resort beach destinations. Nantucket Martha's Vineyard, Sag Harbor.

[Mike Faherty]

Which is Hamptons.

[Alex Faherty]

Exactly. And they're closed. So we're like, what's going to happen? And then when things got lifted, you know, somewhere in some places in June, some places July 4th weekend, business was insane in these places.

[Guy Raz]

So not in the cities, but in the resort towns.

[Mike Faherty]

No.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah, no business in New York, but in the resort towns, same thing. Business was up like 60%, 100% year over year. And so when we got to Q3, businesses making money and I had a bunch of people who were, who are smart, who are like, I think, you know, you only got 11 stores, like, why don't you close all your non beach stores, you know, close all your New York City stores, all your Boston stores and just like walk away. And I had listened to your podcast. I had heard the episode on the guy who started Panera Bread.

[Guy Raz]

Ron Shake Ron. Great episode.

[Alex Faherty]

It's a great episode. And I'll never forget he has a part where he talks about during the Great Recession where he said, you know, could be an amazing opportunity because in, in recessions, you know, real estate's cheaper, construction's cheaper, landlords want you. And I was like, what do we do? We got this 11 store retail fleet. It's small, it's not at scale. Maybe this is an amazing time for us to really scale our retail business.

[Guy Raz]

Listen to Ron Shaikh story. And just to. He had Panera bread and in 2009, during the financial crisis, he was like, well, let's just expand because we can get good terms for leases, we can get good locations. People are shutting down. Let's, let's go in, let's go big.

[Alex Faherty]

That's what we should do. I was like, this is going to be the best time ever for an up and coming clothing brand to get an amazing retail fleet. So we went.

[Guy Raz]

So how did you. Yeah, keep going. Yes, sorry.

[Alex Faherty]

So we went. I had this amazing real estate advisor who was working with me before COVID and we started going out to landlords and saying, you know, here's all the places we want to be. And I made the decision with my real estate advisor. Like the one thing we need to make sure we do is get as much term, you know, make the leases as long as possible because this is going to be the cheapest we can ever get rent ever. And that's what we did. And we signed over the course of 2020 and 2140 leases over the next for the, for stores that would open over the next three years.

[Guy Raz]

Wow, that's crazy.

How are you going to finance this?

That.

[Mike Faherty]

A little bit of it's my.

[Alex Faherty]

My mentality of, you know, you'll figure it out. And at the time, too, with COVID which helped a lot, was, you know, landlords were giving a lot of tenant allowance, so it actually wasn't, you know, the amount of capital we had to put in in a lot of these locations was relatively minimal. Also, you know, clothing brands that have dressing rooms and really nice spaces were just walking out of stores. So you didn't have to come in and do a ton of construction. These stores were sort of ready for move in. We just had to build the fixtures.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Alex Faherty]

And we, at the time, you know, we only had 11 stores. But my mom, who had been working with us since the beginning, she, at this point was running our. Our store design and construction part of the business. She was an interior decorator. And so we had this warehouse in New Jersey where we actually had two people on staff who were building fixtures for us. And we were able to build kind of our fixtures and also the interiors for good prices.

[Guy Raz]

So all of a sudden, in this.

Very short period of time, you go from 13 stores to 40 stores.

[Alex Faherty]

Yes. So by the end of 2022, we had. We had approximately 40 stores.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

And I think today you've got 70 retail stores.

Is that right?

[Alex Faherty]

We have 80. 81 retail stores today.

[Guy Raz]

81.

Okay.

So again, like somebody might have said to you, like, very wanting to give you good advice, hey, Mike, you know, Alex, this is not the way to go. Like, you're going to expand too quickly. You're going to get over. You're going to get over your skis, and you're going to see that all of a sudden you're saddled with all these costs, overhead, employees. You did have to do some layoffs. I mean, there have.

And this is normal in any business, cyclical.

But you have. Was that. Do you think that was connected to this expansion?

[Alex Faherty]

Absolutely. If I go back to, you know, we got through Covid, we saw this huge increase in business, and I definitely became more. More focused on revenue growth than profit margin. And, you know, my survival mode went from how am I going to sell enough things to survive? To, you know, how am I going to grow this business, you know, even faster because we got this great momentum finally. And, you know, I got to build an executive team, I got to build an organization so it can really stand the test of time because we've now gotten the business to this level of sales that is, you know, bigger. And then all of A sudden, you know, in 2022, when the COVID you know, wind in our backs kind of slowed down.

[Guy Raz]

You got a ton of people.

[Alex Faherty]

We had a ton of people. And so in 2023, we really had to rejig and retweak and really figure out what we want out of this business.

[Guy Raz]

So you had to let people go, obviously.

[Alex Faherty]

Yep. And that's hard. Especially hard as a. As a family business. You've built close relationships with people. So, yeah, we had to. Fifty people, I think, was our. Was the layoff that we had to do.

[Guy Raz]

Wow. So that was at least 10%.

[Alex Faherty]

More than 10%. Yeah. It was really hard.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

The hardest. Hardest. Definitely the hardest thing we ever had to do.

[Guy Raz]

This is a. I think it's fair to say, a tough time for retail and apparel in general. From everyone I'm hearing, big brands have been on the show. It's a tough time. Obviously, tariffs make it even more complex because a lot of these products are manufactured in Asia. How are you guys navigating this economic moment? I mean, it's. I think probably you're doing much more direct to consumer sales now, given that you've got 80 stores and probably a lot less wholesale than you used to. But on the other hand, you know, I have to assume, like, for everyone, it's been. Things have slowed down.

[Mike Faherty]

Yeah.

[Alex Faherty]

I mean, it. We've just been dealing with different versions of economic issues in some way, shape or form. So I think to Mike and I, like, we pay attention to it, obviously, but shit's gonna happen. Bad things are gonna happen, good things are gonna happen. So as long as we keep doing our thing, we'll be okay. But we've had to create a profitability model that gives us that margin of safety.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Mike Faherty]

And the other thing that it's really done. You mentioned the tariffs is. And I'm thinking from a supply chain perspective, it's been wild, Right. To sort of watch.

[Alex Faherty]

Yeah.

[Mike Faherty]

Our supply chain now is so global because it has to be. So I have an amazing partner on the supply chain. And so we are. We're, like, able to. With tariffs, like, just be ready to move. We own the fabric recipe. Right. We own the yarn materialization of it, the customization of our products, so the makers become less important for us because we own, like, the true recipe of all the garments so we can have that flexibility.

[Guy Raz]

You mentioned a few times that this was started as a family business and that, you know, you don't have the same pressures that, you know, the other E Commerce or DTC brands Started around the same time do. Because you don't have really have many outside investors. But I have to imagine that at some point there is some exit or something. I mean, is there a world where.

You would want to be acquired by.

You know, a WHP or one of these conglomerates?

[Alex Faherty]

There's not a world, if we had it in our own control that we would sell the business. So Mike and I want to do this until we can't work anymore. I think we both made that decision. We feel really confident about that decision. We've already sold some of the business, you know, a minority of the business to. To some different investors. So, you know, we'll have to figure out ways to, you know, be good partners to them. But Mike and I, you know, no different than Ralph Lawrence still owns a meaningful stake in his business. Like, I think there's people who've done this before us create, you know, kept the integrity, kept running it until they were older, you know, and whether the family joins the business or not, I don't think we're thinking about, you know, that far. But there's people who've been able to do it and so why can't we?

[Guy Raz]

We didn't get too much into this, but I think it's worth just noting, like your wife is part of this business, Alex. And then you, Alex and Mike, your mom is a big part of this business. And I mean, there have to be moments where that dynamic does create. I'm not trying to like create conflict. I'm just curious, like. Cause I'm more interested in how these conflicts are resolved. Not like how the conflicts happen, but there must be conflict at times that have to be resolved.

[Mike Faherty]

Certainly. But I think it goes back to the beginning of our talk, which is like two twin brothers in race car beds. You know, I'm getting emotional about like that type of feeling of like we have each other. So like, even though there's important people around us who matter, it still is like we have to always be here because this is like still, you know, a couple 12 year olds.

[Guy Raz]

Dream race car beds was real. You guys really did have twin race car beds in your bedroom. Yeah. So how do you, Alex, how do you guys. I mean, when you have conflicts, the four of you, because you're family, it's a fan. This is a family business.

[Alex Faherty]

That's a good question. I think we probably like a lot of families, we're not as good as communicating as we should be. But that's, you know, if that's a wrinkle that we Added to an already hard thing to do, which is start a brand. You know, adding. Adding a family dynamic into all of it. But at the same time, you know, when you're just getting started out and you don't have many people and you got, you know, four people, that whole livelihood depends on making this thing successful. You know, that goes a long way. And each one of us brings something else to the business, and it adds a lot of value.

[Guy Raz]

Mike, when you think about the journey that you guys took and how long it took and I mean, how much of that journey do you attribute and where you are now to hard work and the grind and how much do you think had to do with luck where you are now?

[Mike Faherty]

It's the grind, guy. It's the grind. And as you talked about it, like, we've done it the hard way. And fashion's like a hamster wheel. It's like Groundhog Day. I mean, in a way, it's like you live Groundhog Day every year because it's like, all right, we got fall coming up. All right, Then we got winter, then we got spring, then we got summer.

[Alex Faherty]

All right, right, let's do it again.

[Mike Faherty]

And you just sort of keep going and going, and every season something gets a little bit better. And people are like, wow, I want more of that.

[Guy Raz]

Alex, what do you think?

[Alex Faherty]

I mean, I attribute it for the most part to the grind. I think it's an attitude that we have that no matter what happens, we're going to figure it out. The power of positivity. And so I think in a business like ours that so many things can go wrong and you're starting up if you're just positive every day and you're like, we're gonna figure this out. We're gonna get on the other end of it. We're gonna motivate our people to be like this. Good vibes, positive energy. We can figure this out. We can do it. Goes a really, really, really, really long way.

[Guy Raz]

That's Alex and Mike Faherty, founders of Faherty Brand Clothing. By the way, remember their Beach House.

On Wheels, the mobile pop up store.

That they drove across the country in the early days? Well, they continue to take it to events and concerts over the years, but sadly, this past summer, it was destroyed in a fire. Nobody was hurt, thankfully, and a replacement Beach House on Wheels is now in the works. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter on substack [e-mail] this episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Nour Gill. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Christmas Eve, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, Kathryn Cipher, Romel Wood, Andrea Bruce, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built this.

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