← The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
564: From $0 to $100,000 a Day Selling Neckties | Fameez Haroon
01:06:39
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- [00:00]
Fahmeez Haroun
It's surreal. It's like we came from nothing. We're not fashion dudes per se. Gone from literally zero customers to over 400,000 customers. It's been one the White House wanted big blockbuster movies.
- [00:09]
Nathan Chan
How many skus do you guys have?
- [00:11]
Fahmeez Haroun
Over 10,000 SKUs. Yeah, yeah, that's insane. But in saying that when we first started it was just about how do we pay the rent? And we used to calculate the rent and how many neckties we could sell.
- [00:21]
Nathan Chan
Fahmeez Haroun is the co founder of.
- [00:23]
Fahmeez Haroun
Ulta, a menswear brand that scaled to over $40 million in global sales. What began as a scrappy side hustle is now a cult favorite fashion label worn by celebrities pol competitions and even featured on hit TV shows like Better.
- [00:35]
Nathan Chan
Call Saul and Saturday Night Live.
- [00:37]
Fahmeez Haroun
We've had Fox News anchors say for the world's best highs on live television causing 30000 people to swarm the website at the same time. So there have just been some insane highs. I think there is a reality to bring a business which in equal parts is adventure, fun, exciting, but in also equal parts dread, terrifying. There's a lot of sleepless nights.
- [00:57]
Nathan Chan
What's the number one piece of advice you wish someone who told you at the start?
- [01:05]
Fahmeez Haroun
Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the founder podcast with Nathan Chan.
- [01:19]
Nathan Chan
So the first question that I wanted to ask you is you've scaled otar to, you know, from $2,000 from your, you know, your, your parents basement in your bedroom with your brother, from $2,000 to $40 million in sales just selling ties, you know, celebrities, you're telling me offline, all sorts of celebrities are wearing your ties. All sorts of, you know, politicians are wearing your ties, you know, generate over $40 million, $100,000 a day at peak. Like talk me through that. Like how did you get into this?
- [01:50]
Fahmeez Haroun
I like to say that we got, well, you know, the story was we were walking on the beach one day, we got inspired by some ocean blue like sea or something like that. But the truth is we're just flat broke. We needed to do whatever we could to pay the rent. And this is going back say 14 years ago. The situation for ourselves was actually incredibly difficult. My parents had migrated from Fiji Islands to Melbourne and we, we just do it where we could as a family to pretty much just survive. And so yeah, like Oda was born out of nothing that's been bootstrapped from the get go. So the origin story is like, you know, Myself and Shane got invited to a wedding. And basically we had worked out that instead of buying a brand new suit every single time you get invited to a wedding, it's actually cheaper if you just buy a brand new, like, necktie because it makes it look like a brand new outfit. So we walked into the department store together, and back then, there's such limited choices in, say, ties, and they were so expensive. Like, it'd be like $150 for like a big grandpa tie or like $98 for a shoestring tie. And it'd be placed next to like a bin that kind of smelled kind of funny. We're like, okay, we'll go with the, you know, the shoestring tie. And so the department store person would come over and. And there was just this level of pretentiousness and like, that was kind of seeped into the fashion industry. And the guy said to us, he's like, oh, you want that one? And we're like, yeah, we'll grab that one. And we walked out of that experience and we both looked at each other. It was almost like a Larry David Kirby enthusiasm moment. It was like, was this real that just happened? And then me and Shane looked at each other. Shane's my co founder and brother. Well, we can do better than this, like, surely. And so that's kind of where ota, like, the first spark of OTA was kind of born. Like, okay, like, we don't know anything about the fashion industry. We don't come from fashion. We've, you know, we've. We've never started a business. And so it was almost like, you know, should be thanking that guy who gave us, like, the cold shoulder. But that's kind of where it started, like, just in terms of getting it going.
- [04:06]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. And this isn't your first business. You, you guys and your brother tried other business ideas.
- [04:12]
Fahmeez Haroun
Oh, man.
- [04:12]
Nathan Chan
Like, tell us about that.
- [04:14]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, I think we again, to get ourselves out of, like, the situation, we tried anything and everything. Like, we, we were, we, we, we tried to source kitchenware and we bought that in and it was like 30 units and it cost like, say $300. And we try to sell them on ebay and we'd send them out and then it would break. And like, we tried anything and everything to just get ourselves out of the rut that we're in.
- [04:45]
Nathan Chan
Can you tell me more about that rut and that situation? So, like, where were you at?
- [04:49]
Fahmeez Haroun
Like, yeah, so we're working. I was working personally 13 hour night shifts, trying to just do what we can as a family to kind of just like pay the rent. We would pay the rent in cash. Like, I remember getting those red letters in the mail and we'd drive to the real estate agent to go pay it. So it was just tough. And then Shaheen, my brother and co founder, he was working at an architecture firm and we wanted to just do and try anything we could to pretty much get ourselves out of that situation. So, yeah, we were just used to failing. Like, it was like failing was just like a, like a regular thing because we never knew what success was. I remember we bought a book, how to start a business with like dummies. Like, that's how, that's. That's the nature of like our skill set in the industry. So we knew nothing, you know, but we just said, okay, well, we have to learn. We have. We're not going to be stuck here forever. We want. The show is going to be more to life than just this. So we opened the book, we started reading. We're like, okay, you got to register a company. You gotta, you gotta. This is how you start a website. This is how you do the thing. Just brick by brick. We learned. And then we, like I said with the nice dices that failed. Then we started selling, you know, iPhone covers and then just anything. But we learned, like, we learned skills, we learned that how to source, how to actually put things online, you know, and this is going back 14 years ago when we walked out of the department store and we're like, okay, we can, like, we can build something here that's better than this experience. And it was a lot more clear. It's like, because the fashion industry was extremely serious, it's like, okay, we can make a brand that doesn't take itself so seriously. Fashion industry generally, like, low quality. Like, okay, we can make something that's high quality something. Fashion industry had very bad customer service. Like, it's like, okay, hey, what was it look like? If we have great customer service and we actually like our customers and we don't hate them. So we, we use that as a formula and we just, we ran with that and 14 years later, you know, it's gone from so literally zero customers to over 400,000 customers. Like, we've had politicians been won the White House. We've been won in big blockbuster movies, the Boys Better Call Saul, Nick Cannon, Channel 7 News, Channel 9 News. Like, it's been surreal to see it everywhere, but it just started from like, nothing.
- [07:15]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. And talk me through, like, how much did it cost to do the first run of ties. How did you find your manufacturer? Like let's go to like real brass tack.
- [07:24]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yep. So, so to take you back then again has started a business for dummies. We, we didn't know anything about the fashion industry whatsoever. I think that naivety was probably a good thing. My brother Shaheen, I think is the world's best pretty much product developer and saucer. He literally, we said okay, we're going to do this seriously. We're going to act like a, going to put up big boy pants on and act like what, what, what is it going to take for us to enter this industry? So we, we looked at our bank accounts and we're like okay, We've got about 400 bucks in our bank account each. We can put together our money and we can buy a plane ticket to go to China. And so my brother and this is going back 14 years ago, literally totally naive to the situation. Never been in China, couldn't even get a visa. Booked a ticket, one way ticket there. And he just figured it out. This is like we did the hard way going back 14 years and he ends up this once he landed he just got to pretty much talking. He did a bit googling, kept the book with him. He just went through the first factory and we had partnered with them. But the first batch was really, really good. We managed to get the initial order through of say 30. It was actually bow ties and we had put them online and I remember the first day when we actually put the initial batch of bow ties online. We had launched, launched it and there was, we're waiting beta breath. Like this is going to be exciting. We're going to sell all this stock. Zero traffic, zero orders. Day one, Shopify. Shopify, yeah. And then day two, same thing. It's like, okay, we've pull our money in. How are we going to get rid of the stock?
- [09:26]
Nathan Chan
And how much did you put in?
- [09:28]
Fahmeez Haroun
So the initial order was from memory is going back quite a bit I think maybe, maybe like a thousand thousand dollars or $2,000. It was along those lines. That was everything to us. So we had to sell it.
- [09:41]
Nathan Chan
Yeah.
- [09:41]
Fahmeez Haroun
And so we did what we could just to bring traffic through. So we would. But we at the time we partook in like, like forums, like Reddit forums and anything to just bring traffic to dot com. If someone told me if I could speak to myself 14 years ago, like, you idiot, just run Facebook ads now. Cheap. It is like, but we didn't know like this is the thing, we just did not know like we could have, like, oh man, it's just, it's almost frustrating. Not so what you don't know cost you a lot of money. So we didn't, we just did not know. So we're doing things the hard way. Like, I'm sure it was an easier way than, you know, jumping in a plane and going to the suppliers. I'm sure it was an easier way to take the photos and put it online. I'm sure there's easy way. But this is the thing. We, we never entered the industry. We did not know. And it's starting any business is just a series of learning and, and you're just learning things over and over again and reinforcing that.
- [10:31]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. So talk me through. So you had, it was. You put in everything you had to start this thing. You launched a Shopify store a couple of days in, still no sales. What, like, how did you, like, how did you know, like, what happened next?
- [10:46]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, so the first big one was so we worked out we need to drive traffic and we weren't using Facebook ads at the time. We just didn't know. So the first thing we did was anything. So friends, families, fools, fanatics, we're just contacting anything and everyone. The first order we actually got was by partaking like forums, like Reddit forums and stuff. So when we got the first order through like a post that we did on Reddit that was like, oh, wow, this is success. We got something here. This is, this is awesome. To give her to sell the other stock. We started doing a string of like PR outreach. So we try to get anything that we could. And so we got a write up on the Huffington Post calling us the cheeky clothiers. And that kind of just like when we, when that article came out, that kind of just like got us initial traction and just sold out. Like the, the first batch of wool, like, you know, it was like $2,000 revenue for that period. Like, I think it was like, like a, like a, like a few days. I'm like, oh, okay, this is good. We sold out the, the initial batch. So yeah, it was just anything, Everything, man. There was no, there was no, like it was anything to drive any sort of traffic. And without the Facebook ads at the time, the long term strategy we ended up working out was more like doing YouTube tutorials on how to tie a tie. So we worked out there was a big arbitrage in like these like series on how you can actually tie a tie that would get like millions of views. So we'd produce our own series. And at the end it's like, go to odo.com and so that those things allowed us to build it a bit more long term in terms of actually getting traffic.
- [12:31]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. And so that's interesting. So when it comes to tying a tie, you guys would just do these YouTube tutorials. How did you work out how to rank? Like, how did you get millions of views? Like, talk me through that, because that's not easy. Right. There must be heaps of videos out there.
- [12:48]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, I think so. We bought this encyclopedia of, like, how to tie ties, and there's like 50 different ways to tie a tie. And so we're like, okay, we can do a YouTube version of every single one of these. And at the end of it, have a call tag. Go to oto.com. so, yeah, we got like a film crew. We got like a model. And even the model is like, dude, I've never tied any of these ties before. This is insane. And so his credit, he tied every single one on camera. And yeah, we. We end up putting them online and it ends up getting like, at the start, like it was like a trickle thousand views, 2,000 views, but now they've gotten millions and millions of views between all of them. And so that was just one of the things that we did to bring traffic into ODA.com so I think the lesson as well is like, there's no one way to build a business. I think there's a lot of ways you can do it. We went, you know, as I said, going back 14 years ago, if I could say to myself and Shaheen, my co founder, just use Facebook ads, so much easier. But we didn't know. So we did it a different way and we just built traction. One thing at a time, one step at a time. And so, yeah, it's just been a series of learning.
- [14:00]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. And when it comes to kind of the Facebook ads piece, there's also the. The dark side of that coin as well. Right. Where you're too reliant and if it's not working, it can. It can really fall in your face as well. Yeah. And so you. It sounds like you guys, you've had a content LED approach, which is probably a bit more foundational in many ways. Right. Because you're only good as your last ad with Facebook ads in many ways too. Right. You're only. Because you lost creative and. And creative dies out. It's. It's a machine where it sounds like you guys have built some really solid foundational content pillars and areas where you consistently drive Traffic like those YouTube videos, if they're still getting views that will still be driving sales every day, right?
- [14:50]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, I think so. The whole strategy really shifted when we wanted to like build a brand. And what does brand even mean? I think like when I think about it, the fashion industry as a whole, it really did take itself extremely seriously. And so when we came along and we wanted to invest these kind of high production, funny parody commercials, like we invested in a commercial that we shot in Hollywood that cost the brand like $50,000. People said we're insane for doing it. Like you can get, you know, much UGC you can get which is user generated content for that price. And we always said like it is impossible, like because it is impossible to tell the quality of the product online, you need to communicate the benefits of the product through positioning the content in a way. And so we, we triple down on just producing premium branded content with that's funny as well and humorous. And so the big commercial that we did had like an alien in it. He's like, he's dropping his iron and saying these ironings is like an ancient technology has shown non iron. And so we wanted to position it in a, in a bigger way. And I think that's allowed us to pretty much get our brand and position it in a more luxurious and premium manner, I think.
- [16:16]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. So what's the most that you've spent on a campaign?
- [16:21]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, I think the, we did a, like an adventure like Indiana Jones.
- [16:28]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I saw that one.
- [16:29]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, yeah, so that one was a big set. And again people said like, we, we, we got, we, we got advice from mentors like you saying like we always ask permission but it's like, is this a good idea from people who've done, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. Every single one of them said don't do it, you're an idiot for doing this. Just, just like please do not do this. Invest into, invest, invest into again UGC for thing. But my theory, my working theory is like I would rather invest into content that makes people laugh. And I think you always have to like, I think Mr. B said it. He's like, if everyone, if you're driving down the road and you just see regular cows, you're just going to keep driving. But if you see a pink cow, then you're going to stop and turn here. Like, did I just see a pink cow? I think we tried our approach by standing out with the funny sort of humorous content. And so I write, I help write all the scripts and we just parody like those sort of big sort of those funny tropes. Like whether it's like the Venture adventure thing where it's like the James Bond thing and we just do what we can to just make it funny.
- [17:40]
Nathan Chan
So how much was that? How much?
- [17:42]
Fahmeez Haroun
I'm sorry. Yeah, so that, so that one was about 30,000 USD, which obviously dollars. Was the dollar tanking? That's probably double. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, and like the sets are expensive and actors are expensive, but again, we just want to position them that way. But what's happened with that is every single time we get inbound because we've got lots of wholesalers contacting us, it's just positioned the brand in a more elevated way. It's allowed us to communicate the benefits of like, you know, sustainably made sort of ties made from recycled plastics or the luxurious shirts. That's the working period anyway, because you upload that YouTube video into the Facebook, the rise is like nothing. It's like less than 1. So again, like I can understand why the mentors say it and they're probably right. Like they're probably just trying to protect us from saying money. But we're very hell bent on building something last past us.
- [18:36]
Nathan Chan
You talk about brand. I think it's an interesting concept around everything when it comes to building an E commerce brand. Right. Like doubling down on it because more than ever, it's easier than ever to start an E commerce company and brand. Right. But with the introductory of AI, it makes things easier than ever to start. And it's all about those relationships that your customers have with your brand. Ota, you've still been able, even if you haven't been investing in brand along the way. Only it's a, it's a big push now. Like you've had like all sorts of politicians, celebrities, you know, a lot, as you said, a lot of movies now, you know, purchase odor product. Why is that? Why? Why? Like there's just plenty of places to buy ties. Like why, why? Why are people choosing you guys?
- [19:29]
Fahmeez Haroun
Good question, man. There's a bit of a maverickness that comes to people who wear ota. Again, I think those people align with just being a bit more, I guess, rebellious. But in terms of the content piece, yeah, I think the cost of content is going down to zero, especially with AI. And I think what we're going to see now is just like mass produced content. You can choose to do anything. So I think what happens here is like, like taste is going to be the defining skill and how you are able to create the taste for your brand and get it out there. Because it's an interesting time that we're living in where you can literally prompt it and get any image that you want and put that in like a Facebook ad. We did one recently and it was just a test where we use like an AI model. And we've been experimenting with this quite a bit. Like the guy wearing an odor shirt and it just looks photoreal. And in the past we'd have to get like a studio, you'd have to get the model and it costs, you know, like easily upwards of like 5 or $10,000, but now it's all within 20. The like a prompting engine. You see like H and M, they're talking about like using AI models and all that in all, like in all their shoots as well. So yeah, we're living in a really transitioning time, but I think you have to use the latest tools to help like, stay ahead. I think it's, it's interesting because the fashion industry is like, it's almost very slow moving, generally speaking. Um, so. But you have to, with E commerce, you always have to stay on top of the latest trends and, and hacks to almost just stay ahead.
- [21:13]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I agree. So what's working now for you guys? Like, how are you growing the brand?
- [21:19]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yep. So the biggest thing that's working for us, actually, I'll, I'll, I'll reframe it. Like, I, I remember listening to Mr. Beast again. It was actually a really good interview that kind of resonated. I got two things from him, but the thing that he said was like, if you're doing something, if you just get a mentor and, and ask them how they did what they did and whatever terrain that they're doing it in, like, you can just get essentially the cheat codes and implement it within your own business. So like, I remember listening to that and thinking, okay, that makes, that kind of makes sense. Like someone who's done it before, it might not apply exactly the same, but like, in theory that makes sense. So then I remember hearing about David Fogarty, who started this crazy e commerce business, has done hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and it was based in Australia. I used to think you couldn't even do that out of Australia. Like, how's that impossible? So I remember speaking again, Shane, a call. And I was like, man, we got to speak to this guy, like, and ask him how you, how he even did it. So I drafted an email up to him and I remember asking him, an email, like, I'll, like, I know Your time's busy, but if we can just have an hour meeting with you, we'll pay like $10,000. Like, like we didn't get any response initially and then he ended up. We, like, we end up connecting again through like there's some online booking link they had when you wanted to start teaching certain things. So we got on the meeting with him and I remember the thing that he said to me when we finally got on the phone call with him, I was really, really excited, nervous as well. Like, we paid a lot of money just to try and get him on the call. And I was saying, yeah, we're doing a bit of TikTok, we're doing Snapchat, we're doing Pinterest, and we're doing all these kind of things. And he looked at me and he's like, he's like, like, so what's your Facebook look like? I'm like, oh, we're doing a little bit of that. He's like, scrap everything. You guys just focus on Facebook. Really? Facebook. He's like, he's like, is the most efficient marketing machine in the history of humankind is exact words. This stuck my brain, like. And so that phone call, we end up switching off all the other platforms because they weren't returning. He looked at it straight away. So we got our money back from that one lesson. And yeah, so now we're really investing in building Facebook out and really growing that as a direct consumer thing because we've done, you know, the, you know, the Google, the SEO stuff and you know, over 14 years built a brand that's had a lot of word of mouth. That's the biggest thing for us. We get about 20% of sales from just referrals and word of mouth. Like, our reviews are like extremely strong because we focus on like, great product. But yeah, that one key lesson, man, it's just, it, it's like just focus and don't get distracted. I think that's, I think that could resonate with anyone.
- [24:31]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. So are you able to share like how much you're spending on ads right now?
- [24:36]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, so we, we spend, we spend upwards in pretty much like the hundreds of thousands dollars per month. It depends on, you know, it depends on, you know, the, the month that we're in or the, the season because it's a neckties and shirts is pre. Seasonal depending on like the country that we're trying to go for. But yeah, like a lot of it. Again, to communicate this, like, it's hard. Like, you know, a lot of times you Put an add up and it's, you know, 0.5 return on ad spend. Like it's, it's just a series of just getting hit in the face over and over again. I think there's, I think E commerce is glamorized. Like even me showing ecosystem my success story, man, it's hard. Like it's, it's, it's getting like, it's like getting punched in the face over and over again. Waking up with a smile, like, it's not, it's not easy, dude. Um, and I think everyone who runs a business can understand that. I think we glamorize E Comm quite a bit and any business for that matter. Um, but yeah, there's a lot of sleepless nights. There's a lot of working out how to navigate the ads. And then, you know, once you start building a team, you get to want to, want to make sure you can take care of them. And, and when, when we first started it was just about how do we pay the rent? And we used to calculate the rent and how many neckties we could sell. And then as you know, when you're going, you know, year five, it's like, okay, well how do you build a team? And then, and then, and how do you build a brand? It's not like we had this big crazy thing of, you know, from the start, you know, we're going to take on the world. The goals were simple at the start and kind of just evolved.
- [26:17]
Nathan Chan
Was it worth it? Has it been worth it for you?
- [26:20]
Fahmeez Haroun
100% it's been worth it. I think there's obviously a naivety when you start the business. You don't know what you're getting into. And it's allowed us, you know, time freedom, location freedom. But then when I say time freedom, is it really freedom? I mean you're, you're always on else at all times. Yeah, I just, I think, I think there's a, like a glamorous aspect to people who found businesses that get painted. But yeah, I think it's good to talk about the reality as well. It isn't all sunshine and rainbows. I think a lot of that we do, we load it up. Like I said, we lose. Like even when we did the big alien Hollywood commercial when we're launching into luxury non iron shirts, people said, no, don't do that. And for us to go against them, it's like, okay. And then, and we're hoping it was going to perform well as a Facebook ad. It didn't, but it worked well as a YouTube ad and a brand piece. And it's learning. It's just. It's always a constant cycle of learning, man. But yeah, it's, It's. It's. I think that. I think there is a reality to running a business which in equal parts is adventure, fun, exciting, but in also equal parts dread, terrifying. And I think a part of business is just stepping up to the plate and learning and having that ability to learn from people like yourself, people who I could speak to. Like, I remember telling people that I was just doing whatever I could to contact. People have gone ahead of me in the E Commerce game because I do treat. I do treat business and life in general just like. Like it is. There's a game aspect. Like if we've been doing for 14 years and say someone like, like. Like another mentor of ours is Casey Holiday, who's started amazing ring brand, sort of Quailo, and like hundreds of millions of dollars, if they've done it before and you can get in contact with them and learn from them and shortcut your pitfalls, I think there's a lot, a lot of value to that.
- [28:35]
Nathan Chan
So you talked about the highs and also the lows. Can you take me back to a time where you ever felt like giving up you and your brother, where it was just like, we're flying really close to the sun. Too close?
- [28:58]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, all the time. I think that's part of it. But. So I think when we initially started, I think the initial traction is the hardest part for any business. Starting, like, just when we first sold the first batch of stock. It's like, it's exciting. Well, we did it. It's like. But then the next step is like, okay, we put all that money back into buying more stock and then starting over and over again. I think the most difficult time as well for ODA.com would have been Covid for us. And this is for every business. So it's not like some sob story, because I almost feel bad even saying it, because every business struggled that I spoke to. I've got friends who run cafes. I got, like, friends who run, you know, gift stores. Like, it was like, for us, the difficult part was like, there was no weddings. There was no events. You know, there's no, like, there's no one wanted to wear shirts and ties during that time. People were wearing pajamas, you know, working from home and zoom calls. So at that point, it's like, okay, this is happening to us. What can we do to control this? Like, it's like, okay, we can use this as A lesson to shrink down costs. What are the variables that we can control? Because it's all about, like, it's well, all well and good to say what you can't do, but there's things that you can always can control. And so we try to shoot down costs. We try to keep our staff. We did what we could to sell and get us through. But on the flip side, when Covid had ended and weddings came back, there was a massive push. Then all of a sudden, everyone's getting married. Those weddings on Monday to Friday and like, I got invited to wedding on a Wednesday. So there's a flip side to that darkness as well. And just holding on. So, yeah, it's me. Me and my brother Shaheen, like, every day we speak to each other and we're equally optimistic some days. And some days it's just like, oh, man, it's. This is tough. Like, we pull this work into a big product launch and it didn't work. Yeah, it's. It's.
- [31:06]
Nathan Chan
It's.
- [31:08]
Fahmeez Haroun
I think it's common. Yeah.
- [31:11]
Nathan Chan
What about your highest moment where you.
- [31:13]
Fahmeez Haroun
Just like, oh, yeah, this is fun. So many. Yeah. This is why we always stay in the E Commerce game, man. It's like it. It's like going to the casino. Yeah. It's so many high moments, dude. When I see. When I see orders and come from, like, big TV shows that are going to wear out of, like, Better Call Saul, the boys OTA being tagged on Instagram. Like, we've had like, Nick Cannon, Target, we send parcels to the White House. We've had Robert F. Kennedy wearing odor ties. We've had OTA ties being parodied on Saturday Night Live. So my brother and Shane have designed, like, these animal ties that have, like, turtles on them and RFK wears them. And then Alec Baldwin decided to parody those ties and they're parodying the odor design ties. So that, I mean, it's surreal. It's like we, again, we came. Came from nothing. We're not, you know, we're not fashion dudes, per se. So when you see it parody on a national life stage, that's cool. We've had, you know, Fox News anchors say we've got the world's best ties on live television, causing 30,000 people to swarm the website at the same time. So there've just been some insane highs, and that's why we're in it. And we. And honestly, the biggest high as well is I know that those are like the vanity ones, but I don't know, just taking care of the team. Like when you hire people you want to like you. When you, when you're fortunate enough to just have staff and they invite you to the wedding and just take care of people locally and internationally who depend on OTA as well. Those are again, I think there's a lot of highs there as well. Isn't just about those big sort of bad anything. Those are cool. But yeah, I think just taking care of those things and, and being able to provide for the, for that as well has been really, really cool as well. But there's been some. Yeah, been. Been some amazing highs voter as well.
- [33:33]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I saw your face light up. It can be someone addictive. Right. Chasing that, that big dopamine. Here's crazy because I'm thinking about me and Shane.
- [33:50]
Fahmeez Haroun
We love playing poker and I think a lot of business is. There's a lot of gambling attributes that come to running a business and anyone tells you otherwise is lying to you. Like for example, if you put like me and Shane refer to like things as bets. It's like, okay, well that commercial is like a $30,000 bet. That's a $10,000 bet. Employees their bets. So you're hoping that if you hire somebody and they're going to bring you value for the company, you're betting on them to hopefully work out. And sometimes most bets go to zero. But when you do place a bet and you put it on the roulette table, for example, with E Commerce, there can be outsized returns. And so if $10,000 bet on a piece of content can go to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's why we keep playing the game of ecom. And so yeah, there's a lot of things that correlate between poker and business. The hand that you're dealt, like, you know, the hand that we're dealt is, you know, we start from nothing, you know, like there's no money in our accounts. That was the hand over dealt. We didn't come from money. But at the same time I was like, I'm grateful for that because we had to work out the skills how to start a business for dummies. Read that book, you know, go, go to China. Work out how to market, how to build a brand and. And then the flop comes out, you know, and it's like, okay, well that car pays with that card. Okay, I've got a, I got a winning hand, a losing hand I can do. I throw this away. Do I fold and give up on the business or keep going? And the beautiful thing about business is he like as long as you're willing to tolerate pain. And I think it's equal parts pain and reward. If you, your ability to tolerate pain and be able to last as long as you can allows you to keep saving up on the plate and getting those outsized returns. I think Jess Basil said that, that it's like you're able to step up onto the plate and hit the baseball as many times as you can. But then if you like with business you can get outsized returns by hitting home runs over and over again and getting that those outside returns. If that makes sense.
- [36:16]
Nathan Chan
The success of your business big determining factor is how much pain you're willing to go through. 100% like and your tolerance, your pain tolerance and that threshold. You agree with that?
- [36:31]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, 100 man. I think you have to, I think you can do it with a smile and like be optimistic. But your ability to tolerate pain because you're trying to grow. And I think if you're, you know, whether you're lifting weights or you're building a business, your ability to tolerate pain allows you to grow. And there's so many things that we don't know. And you know the pain of not knowing. I go I would go back to 14 years ago if I knew if I could just whisper one message, you know, just Facebook ads, come on man. It's the cheap back then. But it's just not knowing is a, is a thing that that can cost and yeah I believe the ability to tolerate pain is a requisite for growth as well.
- [37:22]
Nathan Chan
You talked about outsize returns referring to business as poker. What's been your biggest outsized return thus far in the odor journey?
- [37:37]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yep. I think that my bet on investing into big branded commercials and the brand in general and also great quality products like if you Google reviews, they're all like it's 4.8, 4.9, 15,000 five star reviews. Yeah, the, the outsize returns comes from like doing things consistently over a long time horizon that compound into of itself that give you compound returns. We've been doing for 14 years. When we tell people where like we start as neckties, they almost kind of like laugh as I just neckties like and then we when we say we've been doing it for 14 years and it's grown. Yeah the. I think the biggest outside return comes from building the brand and great customer product over long term. I think that's the equation because E commerce I think is pretty simple. You know, you've got product, you got price, you've got your website which is Your funnel and. And then how you do those things and execute on each of those levels in equal measure dictate your success.
- [39:02]
Nathan Chan
So when it comes to, I guess, retail, you talked a lot about online. Talk to me about retail. What's been your play there from a branding perspective?
- [39:14]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yep. From. From a retail perspective, we've been fortunate that, like, because we've built up ODA.com, the REIT, we've had a lot of good inbound. And again, this is the bet on. So generally, you speak to ecom person, they always tell you almost like a. Almost like they treat it like crypto. It's like, I just. You get a thousand pieces of UGC and you can bet on this and it'll grow. Our inverse was like, okay, build a cool brand, invest into product and quality, and then they'll come to you. It's a very inverse approach. But you're also hoping that they do come to you in the long term. And so we've been stocked in and we've had contacts from, say, the big hotel chains, like, who now stock ota and. But yeah, in terms of. Also in terms of the retail position, we did the trade shows as well, going back just before COVID And yeah, it's. It's a big financial outlay as well to do those trade shows. I don't have you ever done one before, but, man, it's tough. Like, I was on the ground there, and you set up a booth and you kind of hoping that people kind of come towards you. I remember standing there for like 12 hours, like a day with. With my wife who was helping me, and my friend Nick, and he was working with OTA at the time before COVID and you're just waiting for people to come to you. And like, I remember one trade show we did in Denmark, and we set up, and it costs like $20,000, and we had zero people walk through, and we all got, like. I remember we all got in. We all used to meet up at the coffee shop after, and everyone was just depressed or just like, oh, and then I'm the business owner. I'm being Mr. Optimistic. My look, it's all learning. We. We can figure it out when we get back. And, you know, and. And, like, don't worry. Like, it's. We can. We can figure this out. And. But yeah, it's that like, like, and this back to my point, business is hard. Like, that's another bet we just lost. Like, we just. It's. We're so used to just losing in those things. But the Retail aspect again, I'm like, okay, we're thinking about this. What's the best digital approach? Because my skill set tends to go to digital first. It's like, okay, I love storytelling, I love building fun parody content. I love writing scripts. Okay, let's just invest into the brand and maybe they'll come to us. We, it's not like. And because, and so we started tripling down on that because it's not like if we started contacting, you know, this, you know, people in the White House or politicians or you know, these big TV shows, Hollywood shows to wear ota and they're not going to, they're not answering our emails, they don't care about us. But if you build a brand that's cool enough, they'll come to you. So that's been the working theory and that bet has definitely paid off. But yeah, on the flip side, we've like lost a lot doing those trade shows. But you have to learn. This is what my what I mean, you just got to keep going and learning and, and this is the non glamorous side of running a business. Like we went like that day when we did the Denmark trade show. At the end of it, just like I feel like game over again. It's like, oh, this is never like, where's the win? Like, because you hear about all these guys getting thousands of retailers and like, oh, this would be easy, you know, it's cool. But no, it's. Sometimes you do something, it doesn't work and then you just have to step up supply to.
- [43:04]
Nathan Chan
You talked about kind of returns, losses, bets. What can founders do? From your experience been, you know, building business for a while now, what can they do to really make sure that they're making like they're getting more wins, like they're making less mistakes. Like, because it's really about the decisions that you make. Like, and, and how do you, how do you increase your, your likelihood of making the right decision? What, what have you learned? What are you doing there?
- [43:34]
Fahmeez Haroun
I think we live in the best time ever to start a business. And I think this is going to sound simple or trite, but you could just YouTube shit. You could just Google things. You can ask ChatGPT, like if you've got determination and willingness, you can just work it out. I would say I wouldn't follow what I did because I think also like, like if I'm mentoring somebody, hey, the Miz, you know, I want to do a big commercial like you guys, I'm putting, I'm banning the house on it and remortgaging. Like don't do that. I'll be telling them, I'll be telling them what the mentors told me. Like you an idiot. Like don't do that. It's not a good idea. Because everyone's success is individual. You can't copy anyone's blueprint. Like it's everyone's individual and anyone who tells you otherwise is just lying to you. Like there's, there's no one formula to do it. I think, I think start small. That's more like if you can be commerce. It's a beautiful business where you can, it's the easiest business to start. It's also the hardest business to get real customers to part with their hard earned cash to give you money. I think people take it for granted like this big numbers, 1 million, 10 million, $40 million. These are real people. Like there's not just numbers. It's, it's, it's real, it's real people. So the advice I would give is yeah, that's small. Figure out the farm, have conviction, think long term, take care of the customers. You know, as I said when we found this brand is built on the premise that, you know, the fashion industry generally just hates people. If you walked into a store and there's this level of pretentiousness that's there. We had an answer to that and it was again, it's a nebulous flaw. It was, how do you answer that digitally? How can you take care of customers digitally properly? But that was that, that was the idea behind that. So just simple ideas execute well and think long term. Like we've been doing for 14 years. 14 years, long time. And like I've seen businesses, you know, come and go like after one year, five years and you know of three months and they've done crazy revenue numbers than we do in a month. But we're here for, you know, I'll exit the business when I'm dead. Like I'll be doing this for the next 30, 40, 50 years. I think that's, that's the long term view that we've got.
- [46:01]
Nathan Chan
You said something interesting around. Kind of we live in a time where you can use chat, GBT, Google, etc. Etc. YouTube videos. However, the flip side of that was you shared, you know, you talked about Davey Fogarty. You know, we've interviewed him, really super successful Ecom founder here in Adelaide. And that's yeah great guy. You will to pay him $10,000. When should people know when to make those investments? Like I've probably spent well over a million dollars personally.
- [46:33]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah.
- [46:34]
Nathan Chan
In my own personal growth. Like at least, at least like coaches, mentors, you know, you and I were talking about Shopify versus Big Commerce. The founder of Big Comm, one of the founders of Big Commerce, he was a mentor of mine. He was a coach as well. I was paying him $5,000 a month.
- [46:52]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah.
- [46:52]
Nathan Chan
For many years to learn. So, you know, that's. You chalk that up. It's 180, probably costed $200,000 right there over a few years. So I've spent like well over a million dollars in my own investment. So I'm curious to hear when did, when should people know when to invest in themselves, when to double down with a mentor or coach or, you know.
- [47:14]
Fahmeez Haroun
So it's a really good question. I think it's entirely like first you need to be self aware of what you're good at and what you're not and what actual help that you need. And I think that is the secret to life as well. Being able to articulate the question that you need. When we had the. When I did what I could to send David Foggy an email to me with him for $10,000 like the, the business was doing the revenue to justify it. So one decision within the business would save us tens of thousands. And it did. So that scale made sense. But going into the meeting, it wasn't. I didn't just rock up and, and be like, hey man, you come and grow my business. It didn't work that way. I was like, I prepared for that interview. I'm like, one hour, $10,000. Okay, I'm going to prepare for this. Like I'm preparing for like a job interview. I wrote down all the things about ota, what I think the things are and I'm like, can be able to articulate the right question. I'm like, if you're me, how would you grow the business by 10%. It wasn't. It's like if you ever go to a personal trainer and you ask him, hey, can you. How do you make me healthy? It's a very nebulous broad term. I suppose you say, hey, I've got a wedding in six weeks time. How do I lose a few kilos? It's like, okay, well you can, you know, go in a calorie deficit, do this. So in terms of at what point to contact people and when I think one be self aware, you don't know any everything and like being humble to understand that, well, that's the other thing as well. You have to, I think, like, if you, if you do speak to someone who is ahead of you, be able to take on their advice and not be like, oh, you're wrong, you're an idiot. Like, blah, blah, blah. Because I know people who've done these mentor calls before and they're like, they pretty much just flip out. And then its ability to be coachable is probably a skill set as well. I'm still to this day just trying to learn every single day and grow it. Yeah, I think it definitely depends on where you, where you're at.
- [49:39]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I agree. Situational stage advice is very, very, very key. Like, you can look at someone, David, you look at someone like him and you know he's doing all this content now, he's building his personal brand. But when you're just starting out, that might not make sense for you. Right. So it depends on what situation you're in and what stage you're in in your business. That makes sense. But there is an argument to make that if you had have, you know, worked with him earlier, you could have actually made a lot more money getting onto Facebook ads.
- [50:18]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yep.
- [50:19]
Nathan Chan
It just depends.
- [50:20]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, I think a lot of businesses breaking beliefs as well and believing what's actually possible out there, I just didn't think for the longest time you can grow like a massive E comm business in Australia. It's just so wrong. And so once you break that belief, it's like, okay, well what are the series of steps and actions it's going to take to actually get you to grow the business by double or triple or further and further and further? I think breaking beliefs is a big part of growing any business.
- [50:52]
Nathan Chan
I'd love to delve a little bit more deeper on that. We'll work towards wrapping up. Why do you believe that it wasn't possible to build a big business online? Ecom business from Australia. You're selling online?
- [51:06]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yep.
- [51:07]
Nathan Chan
So you're selling to the world like, so it wasn't just like it was. You were capped out around the Australian geography.
- [51:13]
Fahmeez Haroun
It's.
- [51:14]
Nathan Chan
It, it would, I would understand if you were just selling to Australia and you were capping out and going, okay, there's only man, I wish people. I'm just curious to explore that.
- [51:23]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, I wish I spoke to you earlier, dude. I think like, I think growing up, my family came from a background of like, we ran a milk bar. You know, my parents migrated from Fiji Islands and so we used to sell $2 Mars bars. You know, it used to be 9 years old selling like cigarettes, like you know, this is in the 90s, like so the scale of, you know, of a business then, you know, but milk or collect, you know, a 500 bucks a day just. And then you like unconsciously adopt like a limiting belief. It's like, this is as far as I go. So when we started like e commerce business, although we're selling online and internationally and doing the thing, it's like I'm like, okay, well a good day is, you know, a couple grand. There's awesome. You know, so 300,000. I'm sorry, couple grand. $600,000 business per year. That's amazing. That's, that's as far as we go. But then you hear other founders who, you know, go 50 million, 100 million, 200 million, 500, you know, beyond this breaks the belief system. So I think this is. And back to questioning your own sort of self limiting beliefs and where you unconsciously pick them up from or consciously like you don't want to pick up desires as well. I think um, because like my definition of like happiness is simple. I like, I love building a business. I love hiring people of trying to take, take care of them. I love taking care of the customers. And we've kind of purposely kind of kept it small in a way. We do our own fulfillment. We've had advice, people telling us you should do multiple free pls all around the globe and do it this way. But yeah, we've kind of purposely almost slowed the growth down to hopefully remain profitable. Like sometimes it's some, some months are definitely not profitable. Again, this is the reality of any, any ecom business or any business in general. And like, and some months are wildly profitable as well. And this is back, back to the outside sort of bets. But yeah, and it just comes from, yeah, how we grew up and, and, and just breaking those beliefs is critical, I think.
- [53:48]
Nathan Chan
How did you identify them?
- [53:51]
Fahmeez Haroun
Identify them? Yeah, I think, I think when you just hear stories, man, I think that, I think that's why the podcast is so interesting. And you know, even the founder, for example, when you just pops up on my YouTube and you see a thumbnail, you're like, whoa, this person's done what, $80 million, $100 million, like what's their story like? And you just hear that again and again and again you're like, okay, well if they could do it, like what are the series of things that they did to grow their business? Yeah, I think just reinforcing the stories. It's so important. I think it's, I think it's, I Think it's the most important thing that you could do if you want to grow and if you don't want to grow, that's fine. That's also just as okay as well. I think there's, you don't. You can have a business that does the same amount of revenue, you know, a year and you're on end and that's okay, that's what you want to do. I think like it depends what you want to get out of life.
- [54:50]
Nathan Chan
Comparison is a dangerous thing, right?
- [54:53]
Fahmeez Haroun
100%. Yeah, don't do that. Don't compare your story to mine. Like myself and Shane, like we've had again sleepless nights, anxiety we've had, you know, we, you know, we thought during COVID the business is gone, what we're going to do after. So do not compare stories. It's just pointless. And if anyone who just hops on about all the successes and don't tell you the reality of it, they're just lying to you. Like I'm telling you, I run a business. I speak to real business owners who, you know, like, who do way more money than me but then they're also losing money but then they're doing other things to get. It's just, it's, it's hard like and this is the reality of it. So. And I can be open and transparent like you know, like I said, some months are good, some months are bad, like, but that's okay. That's all part of business and growth.
- [55:47]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. So we have to work towards wrapping up. I'd love to just kind of talk about the SKUs and some of the manufacturing side of things. Like how many SKUs do you guys have?
- [55:58]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, so we've got over 10,000 SKUs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've managed to build close. Well definitely Australia's largest necktie sort of range and yeah in terms of managing that again. So I've got a degree in logistics, supply chain management. I missed a course on SKU management. Clearly I missed the uni class on that. I could have probably used that one. But again, there's a strategy behind the madness. The reason behind that is because when people get married there's a certain shade of purple they want to match to the bridesmaid dress. Guess what? We've got that color purple. If you, and if you want a certain sort of tie color, we've got it. If you want the best non iron shirts, we've got it. And it takes range to get there. And we're here, we're here for the Long term as well. But in saying that again, the flip side of the lesson is if we were to explore, you know, setting up another warehouse in a different country, we'd just pick the top selling SKUs like that. It's like praise principle. 80% of revenue comes from 20% of stock. Like we start doing analysis, it's like ah, we're the same, you know, like it's. And so again we, we, we haven't done everything perfectly and clear execution. But this is why it's a series of learnings as well. But in terms of a customer perspective it's really good because they can find what they want and we, we always are able to almost guide them to the, to the right product. And we always, we always definitely have it.
- [57:48]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, that's crazy. 10,000 different SKUs. And what's really interesting is that stock, like it doesn't age. You could, you could have the one.
- [57:59]
Fahmeez Haroun
Set of times joke about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I think we're like, we can meet grandpas and our great grandkids can wear one of these neckties. Yeah, dude, it doesn't age. It's still good. There's no expiry date on it. Well, funny story about that. So trends come in cycles as well. So one year green's popular and all of a sudden we're selling our green ties. The next year blue's popular and also blue ties and then pink's popular for a year and so it comes in cycles. And so the stock that's been sitting there for like a few years, all of a sudden it's roaring back into success and it's because we've got sells. So there's a, there's a, there's a method to the madness. It is all just madness. But yeah, we, in terms of the growth of it because we've learned and I advise people don't do what we did and like don't just spray and pray and get a bunch of SKUs. The, the apparel business is much more methodical. It's like everything that we do is well, like it's more well thought out, it's more expensive. The apparel business as well, you've got to factor in returns and you know, but like this is why spending money on quality so they can keep it and they can keep forever and like that's the goal behind it. Like that's the better bet. And this is why, I mean the long term, the long term principles as opposed to like a quick drop shipping type business that you know, comes and goes I think that's kind of what we're trying to sort of bet on.
- [59:43]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. And I think what's clever, obviously you started with the neckties, then you went to the bow ties. Ties, and then now you got into the apparel side. Adding that in obviously increases your average order value.
- [59:58]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yep.
- [59:59]
Nathan Chan
Higher average order value, the, you know, the higher likelihood of being able to make ads work because you can spend more to acquire a customer and.
- [60:07]
Fahmeez Haroun
Damn, you know, you know it all, dude. Exactly. You just articulated better than I could. Speaking of advice from you. That's perfect.
- [60:14]
Nathan Chan
I speak to a lot of people.
- [60:15]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, man, You've just hit the nail on the head. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Yeah. So this is an ODA polo. So anyone who thinks why this guy didn't wear like a necktie in the interview or a shirt in it. Yeah. To this point. Like this ODA polo here with that embroidered anchor. Like, if you buy a shirt and a tie and a polo increases the average order value, it increases our ability to acquire customers. So this is where almost it becomes boring how simple it is. But if you break down E commerce, it's like your ability to. To acquire customer, which is customer acquisition cost. It's just pretty much very simply how much it costs to buy a customer. At the end of it, what the average order value is the cost of fulfillment, you know, your customer acquisition cost, you put all into the equation. And what you left is, you know, your. Your profit. That's it. And so because of the large skew range and the insanity to our method and madness, we're able to drive up the average order values. And when we started, the average order value was 30 bucks. You know, it's one time, you know, but then, you know, year two went to 40 bucks because we introduced pocket squares year five, and now the average order value is upwards of 150 bucks. Sometimes it's like 200 bucks.
- [61:30]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, that's fantastic.
- [61:31]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah. Because we want people to, you know. Yeah. Buy the range of shirts and ties, which we really invest heavily on. Yeah, yeah.
- [61:43]
Nathan Chan
Awesome. Well, dude, we could talk all day, but we have to work towards wrapping up. I've got one final question for you. We're going very topical. Trump tariffs. You know, we're doing this interview where they're up there down. What's happening? How's it affecting you and your business right now?
- [62:03]
Fahmeez Haroun
Yeah, I think it's impacted every business on the planet globally, in terms of how it's impacting us. Yeah, we're just working out what the next moves Are, it's, we've done small production runs in Australia to make the ties in Australia because fortunately making ties aren't complicated, but exploring that as an option. We're also exploring, you know, local 3pls there. But yeah, it's just a, it's a, it's a, it's a really interesting and tricky one to navigate as well. Globally, I think we're just waiting to see where it all settles. I don't think anyone's got the perfect formula. You're talking about the biggest brands on the planet. Planet. They're like most people had moved their manufacturing from say, China to Vietnam to blah, blah, to try and hedge against it, but the whole wealth is being sort of tariffed. So I think we're just, we're personally just waiting to see where it all kind of lands and then make the best possible decision. That's all we can do. Because we can't, you know, we're just a small, you know, shirt and tie brand in Melbourne, Australia. So all we, you know, we're, you know, although our ties are worn in the White House, which is crazy, you know, it's. At the end of the day, we can only focus on what we can control. So we're just waiting to see what kind of ends up happening and then make a good long term decision. But getting a bit of whiplash like decisions. 10% tariffs in Australia, 100% tariffs on China, 200%. It's like, okay, let's just wait and then hopefully we can hang on.
- [63:54]
Nathan Chan
Last question. For entrepreneurs listening who are in the early stages, struggling to get traction, what's the number one piece of advice you wish someone had told you at the start? And then we'll wrap there.
- [64:10]
Fahmeez Haroun
Just stay consistent, stay at it. Think long term, don't think short term. It takes time. It's not an overnight thing. You know, we've been at it for 14 years plus be optimistic as well. There are definitely dark days, but then the light definitely outshines the dark and it's all worth it. And it's adventure as well. Have fun. It's building business is fun. Like it affords the opportunity to, you know, build teams, meet people. Like it is the most rewarding thing you can do. It's the best personal development exercise on the planet. Building any business from the ground up.
- [65:05]
Nathan Chan
Well for me, thank you so much for coming down, man, sharing your story.
- [65:08]
Fahmeez Haroun
Thank you.
- [65:08]
Nathan Chan
All right, so if you love this episode, make sure to check out my interview with Alex Hormozi on how he scales companies from zero straight to $2 million a month in less than a year.
- [65:20]
Fahmeez Haroun
You were like, how do you achieve it? Like, there's five years of my life that disappeared. In fact, I lost all the money, which I talk about in the book. I had all the gyms, I did the turnarounds, and then I had $00 five years later because of mistakes that I made. But the things that I was gaining was not the money. It was the skills. It was the character traits and the beliefs.