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Get a DemoHow did two guys flipping “junk” build a brand that’s sold 14M pairs of underwear? Jens Nicolaysen and Chris White (Co-Founders, Shinesty) join Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela & Lomi) and Katy Mimiari (CEO, Caden Lane) to unpack how their eBay account grew into Shinesty. The secret isn’t strategy. It’s personality. They trace the jump from estate sales to beloved online retailer. One midnight email changed everything overnight. Fart blocking underwear and deviled egg prints became fan favorites. It’s proof that irreverent marketing keeps ecommerce customers opening every message. Shiphero https://9ops.co/shiphero-titans Richpanel https://9ops.co/richpanel SARAL https://www.getsaral.com/special-guided-walkthrough-for-operators https://calendly.com/maxx-getsaral/operators Shoplift https://shoplift.ai/operators AppLovin https://www.9operators.com/paid-growth https://applovin.com/9operators Chapters 00:00:00 Idiots Who Sold 14M Pairs 00:08:25 Nobody Does Email Better 00:18:23 Covid Changes Everything 00:27:36 Nine Figures on Meta 00:35:06 Fart-Blocking Underwear 00:42:25 Retirees Love Shinesty 00:47:28 The “After Dark” Toggle 00:56:35 A Custom Pair For Matt 01:02:03 Kohls Press Release Prank 01:12:42 Post Covid Hockey Stick 01:21:00 $4 Billion In One Room 01:27:17 The Titan 10 Questions
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Basically, we're idiots. It's a rambling, long story winding that takes us from buying things at estate sales and reselling them on the internet to selling 14 million pair of underwear.
Shinesty Hammock Underwear. Comfort, style, and support. Over 55,000 5-star reviews. It seems that a lot of folks agree.
These guys are incredibly close to like, you're basically a media company that just happens to like monetize media with the hardest product.
We are still a polarizing brand and there are people who are not gonna like it, but we're not writing for them.
And at their size, to be able to maintain that fluid kind of ability to take something and push it to the front of the line is a huge unlock and something I tell smaller companies, do not ever stop doing.
Literally, our hook is, I bought this because it's hilarious. And this is our number one review too. My husband loved them. Now the joke's on me because he's addicted to $30 underwear.
What is better than a gift that makes somebody laugh, right?
Do you feel like you're good at this now? You've been in business a while.
I think it's dangerous to think you're good at it because then you get punched in the face with something brand new.
We're big.
People have heard about us.
The people who apply apply because they're like, oh my God, I want to work there.
But I feel like we're leaving out like a very important part. Like, this isn't just normal underwear.
Which one of you can tell me the genius behind this idea?
Well, basically, we're idiots, and it's a rambling long story winding that takes us from buying things at estate sales and reselling them on the internet to selling 14 million pair of underwear.
And this guy, like, like, I don't know, 2 days into knowing him, we've like kind of become— decided to become business partners. We were like basically like business blind dated together. He's like, why don't you come check out some of the inventory that I've amassed?
And how did, how did this turn into Shinesty today? Like, what was the transition? Like, at what point did you figure out I should stop going to estate sales and buying random things?
Oh, like throughout the years? Yeah.
Well, how many years did you do this for?
Whoa.
Like, at least 2 years we were selling vintage clothing on the internet. Crazy.
I know. We were like, yeah, because we'd buy a bunch and then we'd put them up and we were like, oh, because at the time we were selling things for a lot of like theme parties, events. We'd buy like '80s ski onesies And we'd buy like retro Starter jackets for kids.
So it wasn't normal clothes. These were like, you wanted the extreme theme party.
It was like curated. And every time we'd like get a new batch of like 100 items that we'd like painstakingly, you know, collected, they'd like sell out instantly. We're like, damn, this is gonna be like really hard to scale. We like built out a network of buyers across the country who'd like go to their thrift stores.
And we're like, this is like gonna be really—
did people eventually find you guys? Is like, oh, these are the guys that'll buy all the weird crap.
Uh, yeah, yeah.
Because there's like, there's literally like, uh, they're like these wholesale—
yeah, middlemen, like wholesalers who will buy like tons of used—
couple guys in Vancouver actually. And they'd call us and be like, shocking.
And we would like, we basically like give them a lot, like a shopping list of like, we want all these items. And then they would just like, you know, they'd bring in these massive tons and tons of stuff and they'd pull out all the stuff for us and resend that to us. But it was still like painstaking to like launder the items, describe them, put them up. They'd sell out immediately and then we'd be like—
Were you guys the ones opening the boxes, like discovering this? Was it like Christmas morning every day? And then you would try it on and—
Yeah, we'd have parties with them first. We'd wear them to parties first and then sell them.
Well, our early photo shoots, our early photo shoots.
It was like used, used.
Yeah, we would like—
Used, used.
Used, used.
Yeah, it was used, used.
Yeah.
And we would like, yeah, we would bring them to like parties. Or we would have like our early photo shoots where basically like every single person we could like scrounge together of our friends. Yeah. And we would like feed them liquor and put them in all these clothes and shoot them.
So I'm assuming there was no consent forms or anything like that. It was just put my drunk ass in this.
Actually, our legal was really dialed in at that time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So when we hear you say things like, oh, apparel is such a hard category and so I'm like, well, you should try vintage clothing.
Bought at thrift stores.
Yeah, you should have vintage to live in.
Literally ones of everything, like one size.
Yeah, 'cause that's way harder.
One size, one print, that's it.
And so we eventually, we were like, we realized like, wow, this is quite hard. Uh, and so we said, oh, let's maybe sell things for theme parties and events that we can make more than one of.
Okay.
Or that we could find. So we were like buying like shipping containers from the '80s that hadn't been opened with like sunglasses in them.
No way.
And buying like deadstock sale hats that, you know, we'd find like an old container ship full of that some guy had on his land, you know.
I knew you guys were weird.
Or like, uh, we'd go to other brands and we'd like white label their product, like Western brands that had cool like American flag shirts, and we'd be like, all right, can we buy those and white label them? And they'd say yes. So we started to go like the stuff that we were finding, we'd find ways to like buy multiple of them before we started manufacturing.
And then, and then so that's like a step a little step better than vintage clothing, but costumes also still quite hard.
You like reinvent yourself like 6 or 8 times a year for like Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day.
Yeah, like all the big events is when you have to do it.
Derby, 4th of July, Christmas. And it's just like, yeah, yeah.
Were you both—
No stability.
Were you both doing like the marketing and the ops side, or did you kind of split responsibilities?
I don't know. We kind of both did Everything a little beginning, and then we eventually like split to where Jens does mostly the marketing and I do everything else.
Was one of you much better at the product? Like had better taste in the the weird costumes?
I definitely had better taste.
Or worse taste. I actually think it was a worse taste.
I mean, it still arguably might be worse taste.
Yeah, because but that's the actual brand and the advantage.
I'm going to defend my honor. I found some good.
Jens is good. He's not bad.
He's not bad.
But but you know.
I found some really stupid things.
Cool. Just lamb your meat here.
I think Jen's has some good images you need to see if you go back to like our MTV shoot.
I feel like now immediately we need those and show them, right?
Oh, we're going to cut in. We're going to cut in some B-roll.
Jen's in a hot dog Speedo. This like scene of Jen serving hot dogs in a hot dog Speedo in downtown Boulder.
I'm going to need you to send me that.
Okay. Yeah, absolutely.
You're, you're, you're—
no, you guys are going to need your huge production team to go rifle through the internet to find Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's no way I don't have that on my phone. So you guys are probably like, do you guys— does the brand and you guys have a reputation in Boulder then as like, oh, those are the weirdos that buy containers of things and sometimes serve hot dogs?
Definitely like used to. And, you know, like we got noticed by like, you know, we're very famous in Boulder. Like the coffee lady at the crappy diner would be like, oh, you guys are the MTV2 superstars.
But it was that kind of thing because Boulder's small. It's like 100,000 people. And when they brought this like MTV production crew in to shoot this show about us, like we'd be driving around and then there would be like 8 white minivans just like trailing. It looked like a presidential convoy.
They rented Chrysler Pacificas.
How many were there?
There's like 40 of them or something.
There was like, we have 40 production people.
We only had like 2 employees.
They would like take over a whole hotel for—
Oh, so the production team for the show was bigger than your company?
Yeah, yeah.
They lived in Boulder. They rented an office right next to our office.
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How many years were you guys buying other people, like other stuff?
I think like we probably did it for 3 years.
Okay.
Not exclusively. There was kind of some overlap there.
Yeah.
It was like a transition.
But was it always called Shinesty?
Always called Shinesty.
Huh.
Always had the same, like, and the brand is still the same. It's still humor-based.
Oh yeah.
We started to make our friends laugh. Yeah, basically. Yeah.
I introduce you guys like when I'm talking to other brand founders, I tell people like that you— nobody does better email than Shinesty.
Everybody that's listening need to immediately go sign up for their email and SMS list.
100%.
Like, I like— you don't know what you're sending, but I can't tell you how many times I screenshot it and send it to Jen's and I'm like, I am so jealous you get to say these things and make money doing it.
Yeah.
Like, to Chris's point, like, we kind of wanted to create this brand. We're like, we'll have as much fun creating this content as people will hopefully get out of reading it. And so like the brand is one of the few things that has changed about the business over time. It's like been the same kind of snarky, sarcastic, irreverent brand.
The copywriting. I mean, even if you scroll down on one of their emails at the very bottom, it's like, if you got this far, I feel sorry for you. Please don't unsubscribe. I mean, it's real. Every part of it is so on brand.
You better not be down here to click this.
Yeah, you better. You better not be down here to click on this link.
We used to write those at like, from between midnight and 3 AM on Thursday nights. We'd like—
Yeah.
Take some substances and we would like start the email. Like for the first time that it needed to go out, we'd send it out every Friday morning.
Friday morning.
Yeah.
And so we'd be like— So those were your best emails?
Yeah, we'd be like, oh, what are we gonna write the email about today? I don't know.
Pressure creates diamonds.
Yeah. Let's pull this vintage thing out of the— this is a great—
you know what?
Let's buy morph suits. I bet we can sell a lot of morph suits.
What's a morph suit?
Do you remember those like creepy—
No.
They're like these skin-tight onesies that go over your face too.
Your face and whole entire body.
And they like show everything.
Like a green screen, you know, like a green— like the people that wear big—
Oh, people wore those?
Yeah, we would just— we sold those. We were like a big retailer.
It left nothing for the imagination. Nothing.
It like shows all your— Everything.
We're like going over these stages, right? We're like, okay, vintage is like really hard to scale. We need to start like finding third-party product we can sell, white labeling stuff, finding shipping containers, which is really hard, like old stuff. Um, and we were reselling stuff.
Did nobody tell you what a manufacturer was?
We had started.
We started, but it was long. Like, you know, it was kind of hard. We were making stuff in LA and we were like, wow, this is brutal. And the other challenge and what makes apparel like the worst category on earth, sorry for anyone listening, if you're thinking about starting an apparel brand, like you have to have sizes, you have to have different product types. If you're in our business, you had to have all of those product types and sizes across different prints for every single holiday. And you just get this like massive SKU. proliferation.
Yeah.
And eventually though, we were like, we got to start like manufacturing some of like the best sellers and that will enable us to scale a lot more. But we still were getting this like, and it was going well. Like it was, the business was scaling really well with that model. Uh, it was still like really cyclical. I think at one point we were doing like 80% of our revenue in 6 weeks.
In Q4.
Oh man.
It's like almost like as bad as fireworks.
It was like fireworks. It's like between Halloween, 'cause we sold Halloween costumes. So like between Halloween and Christmas, we would do like 80% of our revenue.
Yeah, kind of wait around all year and you're like, oh, I hope we're gonna make it.
You literally like just push all the chips to the table in June when you're writing your POs, or April, May, whatever. You're like, well, here's all of our— this is everything we have here.
All right, cool.
We have no cash until holiday sales start picking up. Uh, please let us hit our numbers this year. And, you know, eventually like we were getting this feedback, people were like, we love the brand, we love like the products. I just like Don't need that many crazy Christmas suits. I don't need that many. I don't need to like more than one denim, uh, Speedo.
Yeah.
Not that word. Not that word. We're not allowed to say.
We can't say.
Get that word out.
Bleep that out. We can't say swim briefs. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have to say swim briefs.
Sorry, Speedo Corporation. So it was kind of—
so it was the understanding of realizing you can't have these single things and be dependent on someone else for inventory that kind of shifted you into the ball world? How did you completely—
No, no, no. It was a little different. We were getting this feedback, like people loved it. They're like, we just don't need that many. And so we kind of were like, we, we still kind of stumbled into underwear, but it was like, I think we knew at that time, like, we need something that we can sell like all year round. No, it was not used. But we have sold used underwear.
Oh, no.
That's a different story.
We created a used underwear marketplace for Earth Day.
Yep.
Worn Hub.
Is it? I have heard a rumor.
Sorry, what was it called?
It's called Worn Hub.
Worn Hub. Yeah, but I have heard a rumor that the first listing that you had on this resale was actually Jen's underwear from exercising on—
Post-Peloton.
Post-Peloton.
Yeah.
And I, and I do believe that the first image was like, it was, it was, it was the bestseller.
Yeah.
And didn't you have—
It was called like the Founder Special.
Didn't you? Yeah, but wasn't like picture, like picture 1 was like the sweaty underwear and picture 2 was The seat. Was the seat.
Oh, God.
Was the seat. And then picture 3 was you sweating on the Peloton with the underwear on. And how quick did it sell?
Immediately.
Oh, really?
Yeah, immediately.
Did you call the person that bought it or is that like a—
I wrote a note to them.
And we got taken— unfortunately, we got taken down by Treat. You know, Treat? Like the market. They were like, we are raising money and we don't want this to be one of our SaaSes.
Which was ironic because they like approach us like, oh my gosh, you guys would be so awesome.
Like, we'd love to help people like flip their ski onesies after them.
You know, we're like, no, we're gonna do a used underwear market. And it like went all the way up to their founders and executives and they're like, we really don't want you to do that.
Can you do anything else?
So go, go back to the transition. So like you figured out that people make things, lots of them.
Yeah.
But you're still, your choice is to stay in apparel.
Yeah.
Well, we didn't know anything else. So what else do you do?
That was like where we had traction.
Yeah.
So, okay.
You know, why not stick with it? And was it like just that the brand, like Shinesty, was like, we have to sell apparel is what people come here for? I don't think we were even that smart. Okay.
This wasn't like some well-thought-out strategic thing. We just kind of like kept it rolling. We're like, oh, A to B, B to C. What's next? I guess we should try making some stuff.
Maybe if we'd gone back in time, we should have been like, oh, we should put like funny brands. Maybe we should do that in supplements or ED or something. Or even just starting in underwear.
alone.
We're just underwear.
Wait, why has nobody built the shininess of ED?
Have you got—
let's go to that.
That's a great question. We actually talked—
cut that.
Yeah, we—
yeah, don't—
yeah, we got to cut that.
Yeah, we now need an NDA on this table.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no, look, Matt's just freshly basically retired. I was like, I went from millions of dollars to now you have a billion dollars.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh, no, we, we had conversations literally yesterday With some people at who manufacture supplements, and they're like, "We should start a business together," and and we were like, "We'll talk." I like this a lot.
Yeah.
I mean, my mind's just going immediately to what the marketing looks like for an ED pill from.
As long as Jens isn't in his underwear doing it, I'm like, "We're gonna crush." Jens is like, "She like." Katie's like, "I can't. I can't.
I can't even go there." This is brilliant.
So how many years until you actually sold like under— like we're making underwear?
Okay, maybe 4. Yeah.
Okay.
We were just like, that was like, we tried a bunch of stuff. It wasn't just underwear. We launched another great business, which was sports licensed products.
Oh no.
You know, really easy.
Only like, you know, dozens and dozens of teams.
You literally went down the list of dumb, hard things to do.
Yeah. It was called Telem and Chop.
Mullet and chop backwards.
I have the sign still in my office, like the, the neon sign.
We, we, well, because we were like, oh, we wanna, you know, do sports licensing with China Sea and all of the, like, you know, teams and, and colleges are like, no.
Yeah. You can't do this.
We're like, well, what if we create a different brand? And they're like, hmm, yeah, that gives me plausible deniability. Like the licensing director.
We'll take your money. Yeah, we'll take your money.
Yeah, sure.
Now we'll take your money.
Yeah, of course they will. Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the thing with licensing. So about 4 years in, you finally figured out we're going to do underwear. What led you, like, why underwear?
We, again, we tried like t-shirts, socks, hats. Underwear was just one of those things. It just felt like that's a good space. And it was not, and to be clear, that was not like a huge part of our business at all. It was small. It was probably sub-2%.
Oh, wow.
Originally, we were making like 300 pair of underwear at a time. So like very small.
But they said they sold out, like, but they kind of, you know, they showed promise pretty quickly. Like it, it grow, it grew really quickly, but for a while we were still like, how are we gonna sell more party outfits?
Yeah, we still were.
We wouldn't just sell these like, uh, oh, I know there's a huge massive TAM out here for underwear, but yeah, why would we do that? But it was kind of one of these things where you're like, I don't know, underwear could be fun. We making as it is.
Nobody else has the balls to sell this category the way we would. So yeah. Good canvas for art, right? So like, uh, oh yeah, for sure.
It just is a, for our sense of humor.
It's for fun. Yeah, it's just fun.
Fun. Yeah.
Yeah.
And you get a lot of permission to like do things on underwear because it's like not conspicuously consumed. It's kind of like the idea of like crazy socks, right?
Yeah.
People will wear things on socks that's very different than what they'd wear to work otherwise, right? Underwear gives you that permission too.
But it was not a big part of our business. And then the thing that everyone knows came along, which was COVID. And I remember like March, we normally, we would probably sell at that time of at that time in our history of the business, what, like $1 million of St. Patrick's Day stuff, probably in the month of March. And we sold like $25 grand March 2020. And so we were like, well, we're like, we're going to go out of business.
That's a solid fall off the cliff. I was like, that line didn't even have a—
Like what?
We have like a Some guys that did angel invested in the company, and one of them texted me and was like, "Oh, did you see this thing about Tom Hanks?" He's like, "How are how are we hanging on with sales?" And I was like, "Let me just send you a picture." And he was like, "What?" I was just like, "Huh." So yeah, and like, I mean, underwear was like a minority of the business, but it had still been growing pretty rapidly since this time.
But then COVID hits. all these other categories, you know, go to zero for the foreseeable future. It turns out not to be the case. And everyone's like, oh, I remember all the group chats like, oh, we're pulling back marketing, we're doing all this. And we did the complete opposite, which was I told all of the creative team, I'm like, shoot stuff at your home. We're a work-from-home underwear brand now. And we shot, it's like, you know, finally, oh, you're at home now, you can finally work from your underwear. And it was like, I don't know, maybe like, yeah, third week of February, like one week out, was it February or March?
March.
Yeah, like one week after the shutdown, we like started launching this like campaign about working from home in your underwear and it just went.
It's actually really smart. It's brilliant.
Yeah. Yeah.
I thought I was good during that time.
That's really good. We just like pushed all and then we like bought, we were just like, well, I don't know how much we had in the bank, maybe like half a million bucks or something. We just pushed it all into the center. We were like, all right, well, more underwear please. I bought all everything.
And was it all print? Did you start out with like prints on at that point too, or was it just a basic? It was Prince.
It was always Prince.
Yeah.
We didn't even do Basics probably for like the first couple of years. We did all Black.
What's up?
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Um, I think the original launch was, uh, a wolf on the crotch.
Wolf.
You're right.
An eagle on the crotch.
A camel.
Camel.
Spitting camel.
Uh, the panda.
The snake.
The snake.
The python thing. Yeah.
The purple panda.
Are one of you who thinks of these ideas, or do you hire graphic designers and part of the hiring process is, I need to see how—
What would you put on the crotch of a horse?
Yeah.
What would you— yeah, literally.
We've had some bad ideas too. Like some bad matching ideas.
What defines bad for you guys? Because, I mean, somebody listening to this is thinking it's all bad.
Oh yeah.
And I immediately want to know what's the best-selling print and what was the all-time worst-selling print?
I mean, you can look on our website like we have star orgies.
Yeah.
We have like—
Constellations.
Constellations. Yeah. We have like skeletons and Kamasutra position.
I've seen flowers that look like vaginas.
Oh, no, that's what I mean. Like, it all on paper, all of it sounds bad.
Yeah.
Yeah. So the brand is built around bad ideas.
But a lot of people out there have a sense of humor. And would they wear that on a t-shirt?
No.
But I know my partner is going to laugh hysterically after date night when I, you know, show them what I'm wearing. Like, yeah, people go for that.
On a first date, you pull out a grizzly bear.
On your crotch.
Things are going to go well.
Wow. You speak to women very well. Yeah.
Right?
Am I right?
Am I right? Wow.
Yeah. Both happily married guys.
You know, we grow up thinking this is— yeah, I sure hope he's wearing shiny sienna tonight.
I do. But like, does your whole company have the same sort of sense of humor and culture? Like, is it just in everybody you hire now?
For the most part.
Does it have—
it has to be.
Yeah. No, I mean, for sure.
On like the—
in the creative function.
Yes.
The ideas come from everywhere. You asked where the ideas come from. Like even sometimes accountant. We have a brainstorming channel and sometimes you'll get even a great idea out of an accountant.
It's the same story for the finance team.
Yeah.
You know, or HR.
Have you used, have you asked Claude for ideas yet? I feel like, like you just said, your AI probably already thinks.
It probably would do.
Yeah.
We, we've tried a little bit and it hasn't like been super groundbreaking.
It's not what AI is the best at.
Yeah.
It's just like not good at net new for us. Like iterations maybe, but nothing like net new really.
Why did you guys want to start the, start a company in the first place? Like, did you grow up in business owner families? Like entrepreneur? Like, I don't understand.
Yeah.
Like, it's just, it's, you started out with such a bad idea.
Yeah.
That like, does the entrepreneurial thing just like, it has to come from somewhere because, you know, it doesn't sound very calculated.
Yeah, it was not calculated. Yeah. Yeah, I like sold knives and t-shirts.
That's right, dude.
You were a penknife guy. Yeah. And so I was like, that was pretty entrepreneurial. And you're not like building the product, but like you're building your business door to door, right?
From scratch.
Oh, okay.
And so, and then I worked for SendGrid right after school.
Oh yeah.
Which was, um, I started there when there was like 30 people. And so it was like that company blew up. That was a rocket.
Yeah.
And super amazing product, incredibly boring. So, so I can't, I can't emphasize how bored I was.
There's like on the level of boring, there's not a lot below that.
Yeah.
The product, the product, like transactional email infrastructure.
It's like literally plumbing on the internet.
Incredibly amazing company. So boring for me personally. Made a lot of people rich on Border and who, who started that company, awesome people. But so I got to see that growth and that was just attractive.
Okay.
And so that was the idea. Vintage clothing seems—
yeah, same, same, right? And in the 48 hours it took you to go see all of his special things, what, what, what did you see that was like, oh, I'm so in on this?
Well, I'd, I'd come from a very entrepreneurial family. My, my family was in cattle and ranch, so had their own business for forever.
Okay.
My dad, like, bought an oil field in like 1990 before oil went to like $13 a barrel. But he was very entrepreneurial forever.
Okay.
I, uh, when I was in like 3rd grade, I started my first company selling like skateboard wax to skate shops around Arizona. I'd get my dad to like drive me around and be like, will you buy some of these? And I'm sure they just took pity on me and they're like, yeah, sure, here's like $7. Nice job, kid. Um, but yeah, I always knew I wanted to start something. I was doing consulting at the time and I was always like, kind of, it was great. You got to see like, you got to learn a lot and you got to see a lot of companies and how they operate, how brands are built. But I was always like, love to see where the rubber meets the road. You see, like at the end of the day, like pass off these recommendations or some big deck and then you're like, I hope you guys do something with that.
I feel like with your personalities too, like fun is at the core of this. Like you both genuinely love what you do and working together and working with your teams.
That's true.
And sometimes you can't get that right. Like you for sure.
It's hard to join a company and do that.
Yeah, it really is. And it has to come from the founders.
Yeah. It's like if you were to like most company cultures would look sort of like bell curve-ish, right? It's like most of them are in this curve and there's like you guys way over here, like the super fun side. And there's probably somebody on the other side that's like, this is the most boring place in the world. Yeah, right. But like most cultures would probably look very similar.
I think so.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's like what you did is you had to build something that was literally for you guys.
I'm—
at what point? So you guys have some outside money, some outside investment in the company. Was this during the shipping container years, like buying containers of weird crap, or was it once we figured out we should sell lots of the same thing?
It was like at the beginning. I mean, it was like, you know, $100,000.
Okay.
It wasn't like a lot of money.
Okay.
So yeah, I mean, those guys will, if we ever sell the company, we'll make a lot of money. Yeah, I'm kidding. Yeah, I think it's very cool. I think it was like $100,000 at a $500,000 valuation or something.
So then, wow, good for them.
Yeah, damn, it was like our friends.
Yeah, yeah, good for them.
Uh, then at what point did you figure out that the business was real? Like, you're like, okay, now we have something that works?
After 2015, probably. Yeah, I think after we'd had like a couple seasons of like, oh, you know, every category has grown year over year, and it's like, atrociously challenging business model. Oh yeah, this could be a thing.
We were really good at making products go viral.
So like, tell me about that. Like, how did you—
But that was before social media.
Yeah, I know. That's why I want to know, like, how did you guys make product go viral in like '15, '16, '17?
Like, it was social media. Do you remember like Bored Panda or like, um, these publications that would be on Facebook?
Yeah, yeah. It was like when Facebook had organic, like the Uproxx, like the BuzzFeed era.
Yeah, the BuzzFeed era. Exactly. So we were like, we would just kind of make them with that in mind, right? So like the denim swim brief, that's an outrageous, that's an outrageous product.
And like, who would ever wear that?
Denim was on the runway that year. Who would ever wear that?
Who would ever wear that? I mean, crazy. May or may not have him on a bowl wearing that with one hand in the air. May or may not.
That footage Okay, so you guys are good at the viral thing then, 'cause like, dude, I know you as like, you're a really great marketer. We talk ads all the time.
Yeah.
At what point did that come into the—
That was probably like 2015. It's really so soon. It really started like that. I remember telling Chris, I'm like, I think we should carve out like, you know, $7 to $10 a day just to see what our platform's like.
He's not kidding.
Yeah. And Chris was like, I don't know, man, if you think so, but let's keep a close eye on it.
That's like $300 a month.
Let's keep a close eye.
And, uh, so I started—
Now you spend tens of millions of dollars.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, yeah, we've come a long way. Um, we spent 9 figures on there now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um, but I was just like dabbling. I was like, you know, so interested in like, oh, segmentation and creative and like all these mixes. And obviously that platform has changed dramatically.
Do you remember those ads, those original ads?
Oh yeah, we were just like, where was Claude when we needed him? We were like, no, we're not designers. Yeah, we were terrible. Like, awful cutouts.
Like, just— it was just a guy in his underwear, or was it just underwear?
This was—
yeah, this was still pre-underwear. These were like costumes. And it was like we just would put white text next to like a front and a back shot of somebody in a suit and call it like, I got 99 problems, but a $99 party suit ain't one, or something like that.
Yeah.
Or $99 ain't one. Or it was a $99 party suit.
Yeah. Or honestly, it was just brilliant.
But It was that same time, like you talked about this where you're like, oh, well, I'll just see what happens if I spend $700 or $7 today, right? And you're like, whoa, we made like 3 sales.
Yeah, I wonder if that's good.
The good old days. Yeah, the golden age of Facebook ads was like '15 to '17 or '18.
Oh, you can't—
everybody that still does it is like, oh God, I wish I would have spent all of my money.
Exactly. Yeah, but then we're in an underwear company then, right? Like we would have been a very different business.
But the worst part is, and we talk about this a lot, like, because of— I know how Jen thinks, like, you really only probably scaled it from $10 to $20 and you were—
That day? Yeah. I mean, like, you know, we worked it up. We were pushing it, but I think we were both like, we don't know what's good. Is a $13 cost per purchase good? I don't know.
Yeah.
Turns out it was really good on like $120 AOV, but.
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You think about like the collective knowledge of consumer now. It's wild at how much, like even just like in our groups, how much everybody shares and how much we know. And I just think back to 2015. Like, I remember running ads thinking like, does anybody else do this? Like, does Facebook— does— do they have lots of advertisers, or is it like me and these 6 dipshits?
Yeah, but at that— and like, now if you started a business, like, there's so much literature about like, what are the metrics you should track? Well, you could, you know, go into forums and things and like get benchmarks. But at that time, you're like, like, obviously those numbers were incredible by any measure, and you're still like sitting there questioning like, should we keep spending? I don't know if this is right.
So taking you to then go forward to the COVID you know, we're launching, we're gonna go like, you know, all in. I'll buy as much underwear as this money can buy me. How quick was the ramp from there?
Very, very, very steep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very quick.
Like give us a sense, like you went from, you know, selling hundreds of pairs of underwear to at what point were you like, oh, we're gonna sell like millions of pairs of underwear?
By the end of that year, we were selling millions of pairs of underwear.
Holy hell.
Probably from like—
Like it was, you were almost vertical.
It was probably from like, That maybe in 20— early 2020 before COVID we were selling thousands a month. Yep. To selling multiple hundreds of thousands a month.
Wow.
How did you manage that kind of inventory bringing it in? Because that's hard. You just— I feel like—
Manage? I mean, it was just like, you know, you're looking at the number, you're like, I don't know how many we can get. How many can we get?
How fast?
Okay.
Yeah.
Put them all on an airplane. Like, do whatever it takes. Like, just get them.
Were you launching? Because right now your model is you guys launch new prints all the time and they're fantastic. Were you launching new prints or was it just you had this core 10?
We were launching new prints.
Yeah. So you were already into the future.
Because like, while it was still like a small overall part of the business, it had been growing rapidly before that. So we had started to like create product roadmaps and like what's going to launch every month, which is really fortunate because like we had novelty, you know, every month we were just like upping our POs left and right.
Yeah, because costumes is a part of our You know, history. Like we already were used to that seasonal cadence. We were like, we're gonna make a St. Patrick's Day print, and then an Easter print, and a Derby print, and a Fourth of July release.
Where's this one for underwear?
Similar to you guys, right?
Yeah.
Like you do the same thing.
Yeah. Same thing.
That's actually we're all very design drop.
Yeah.
Like every week is like design drop.
Yeah.
That's like why we all started. That's how we all were in these groups with all these like super simple categories with low SKU counts. You know, like everybody with the like.
We have one product catalog, and all of us are like we. hate you. But now it makes you feel better because everyone's trying to do product expansion. Yeah.
Right?
And you're like, it's no big deal.
It's so much more fun to do like fashion items compared to just like the same song.
Yeah.
If you're in it, it's fun. It's hard.
It's great.
But it's hard to like recreate the wheel over and over and over again and find the next thing and the next thing. And it's easy to be envious of people who like can sell the same thing for like a decade or more.
It's also, I think it's easier to make people like love, love your brand. compared to like selling just one unit, one utilitarian type thing. You know, I like the creatine that I take, but I don't love that brand, right?
Have you seen, I mean, now that you have all this data, if you were to look at like underwear as a category, do you guys have like a much higher retention just because of the way that you've built the brand? Like relative to like other underwear brands?
Oh yeah, I mean, and we have a subscription business where like people They've been on our— some people, people have, what, 100 pair?
I think there's a couple of people who are like in the hundreds.
Yeah.
Okay. So I feel like we're missing a very big aspect of this because these aren't just normal underwear that you can buy anywhere. Like there's something that really differentiates Shinesty underwear from other underwear brands, right?
There's a couple of things. Yeah.
And actually we have, we have some. So let's—
Oh yeah.
Okay.
I like visuals. I do like visuals.
Yeah.
We brought some gifts for you guys.
Yeah.
So I do think we don't bring enough product on this show, but this is, you know, in general, this is a good way to start it out.
You know, in general, like our, our product is super premium. So we use fun, crazy artwork that can sell in a lot of different places with a lot of different people.
So it's the materials that get you apart.
The materials are super premium. The materials are really, really high end.
Okay.
A lot of people like will come in because they'll see the print, right? And they'll be like, that's ridiculous. I've never seen that on a pair of underwear. And then they'll get down there and they're like, Oh my God. Like, I've never felt underwear like that. The men's have a ball hammock pouch on the inside, which is spacious and supportive. Feels really great. So it's like underwear that's like funny at first glance and then people are like, oh my God, I can wear this. I want to wear this underwear every day.
So we brought you guys some of our new product. Both of you, actually. This is for Katie.
Wait, so you make women's too?
We do.
Yeah.
So we brought you guys both.
What kind of special features do we have?
Well, this one has a lot of special features. feature. I'll just let you read the card, and this one's for you, Matt.
Oh.
Oh my God.
You seem like the, you know, a chili dog kind of guy.
Oh my God.
And here's—
I have so many questions right now.
This is actually— Is that the Wienerschnitzel collab? No, this is fart blocking underwear.
No, mine is fart blocking underwear.
Yep.
Well, how does that work?
So we didn't invent this.
What magic science is this?
We partnered with this Swiss fabric Of course they're Swiss. Developers, they're hilarious.
Oh my God. Like, really, guys?
I don't understand.
Yep, yep.
I mean.
You can wear them on the airplane.
Watch out.
No problem.
Yeah.
There's a user manual for this?
There's a user manual, yeah. It says you gotta make sure, you know, you gotta make sure it works.
Oh wait, look, it says, so you can't stand and fart.
You can, you just don't want to. Smash it through, right? It has to sit on the fabric for a little bit. So the slower you release.
But you can sit on a chair and casually fart it out.
Yeah, I've been farting this whole time.
We had a few drinks last night, so.
I've actually seen that happen.
We also have non-fart blocking for anyone who's like, oh, I didn't know they only came in fart blocking underwear.
But how do they know if this is in their drawer and they have all these different kinds of Shinesty underwear, how do they know they're pulling out the fart blocking ones?
We make specific prints that are like related to fart blocking.
Because how embarrassing If Matt wears his non-fart-blocking underwear.
And I think I'm protected.
And then he's here interviewing these guys, Titans.
That would be bad.
Yeah.
This one's for you too.
Oh, it's like a— it's like a buffet.
Deviled eggs.
Deviled eggs. It's deviled egg fart-blocking underwear.
The sulfur is here. Yeah. Okay.
Is this a new product or has this like been around a long time?
Very new. Yeah.
Those are just released. Yeah, we met these guys. at a fabric fair and they were, they've been trying to sell this product to like athletic brands. And we were like, well, we have a different idea.
Tell me that you had a focus group though. Like, is there like—
No focus groups.
There's literally like these guys, these Swiss guys in a lab being like, then they called us and they're like, we're so excited to share the results with you.
We have a 98% efficiency rate. It is working.
Wait, and then did you get a box and you And you had gins. And you had gins. Like, how did you discover you— it doesn't work if you're standing.
We're like literally driving in a car. I'm driving us like down to Denver for like some dinner or something. And he's like, do you smell that? And I was like, no. And he's like, I think it's really good.
It's working.
I'm wearing the fire popping underwear.
I'm like, God, I still hate that.
So you two were the focus group to make sure.
We sat in the car.
You sat in the car.
Ate a lot of cabbage.
Like hotboxed each other basically, and then ate cabbage and then discovered.
A lot of, a lot of employees torture tested them.
Yeah.
Like in your office? Like you just, and did you ever do, like, did you really ever test it and like give some people non-fart blocking underwear and some people?
Like double blind.
Yeah.
Double blind. Like really?
No, we didn't do that.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
But like, you know, the ultimate test I think is like you're in bed with your wife and you're like, huh?
Still reading your book.
And just so everybody who's listening, you guys are parents, right? Like you were raising children.
Correct.
Like the next generation is going up.
Yes, yes.
Between us, we have 7 kids.
Yeah.
So yeah.
Jen's just had his 4th.
Jen's has 7.
Yeah.
Jen's has 7. I'll see you around.
I have one.
He has 6.
Yeah.
So, you know.
No, I have 4. He has 3.
All boys?
One girl. I have a daughter. I have 4 boys.
Yeah.
Poor girl.
She's so quiet.
I know.
Our house is so calm.
Yeah.
I got to— so how do you decide what's the process creatively in the company to decide what goes on? Like, where do all the ideas come from? Because I think, I think this is like the volume that you put out.
Yeah.
Is mental.
Yeah.
How does that happen?
I think it comes up from— it comes from everyone, right? Like we just have— Yeah.
Do you have a Slack channel? Do you do a— is there like a, like a writer's room every week? Like, what's the process?
Yes, it's, it's all of those things.
All of it.
I mean, like the Slack, like, you know, does the accounting team sit in the writer's room? No, but like we have channels where great ideas can come from anywhere. And like the people who wanna work at China Sea are there generally because they absolutely love the culture. They love the product. They love the mission of forcing the world to take itself less seriously. And so it doesn't matter what your background or what your function is, like those ideas come from all over the place. And then yes, there's like, you know, the product team and the marketing team, they're probably over-indexing these ideas and—
Yeah.
Writers room for both product and for marketing.
There is.
Separately.
Okay.
But, and those do cross over too.
Like—
I was gonna say, cuz like, you know, you make something like this, then the marketing team, you're just making marketing's job easier.
Exactly.
Yeah. I picture their culture being, remember the show The Office?
Yeah. Like, I just feel like that's exactly Yeah, like meets, meets like a Hollywood, like, you know, like a comedic— you ever watch them like write a, like Seinfeld or something?
Like they just like—
South Park.
Yeah, they just, yeah. Or like South Park guys just sit around a table and they just think of ridiculous things.
And they're like, we should put air fresheners on women's underwear.
Is there, have you ever had an idea that was like, oh yeah, we definitely can't do that?
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Like, is there a line?
There for sure is lines. Yeah, we don't, we don't like make jokes about like Race, religion.
Yep.
We used to make a ton of jokes about politics. Now we don't.
And it was just like, it didn't matter. It was just like lose-lose.
Yeah.
So you walked the line of being canceled.
Yeah. We will make any joke about sex or about farts or literally anything. It's literally just religion. Religion and race we never made jokes about just because there's— that's a lose-lose. We're a clothing brand. So at the end of the day, we're not South Park.
Yeah.
And then, yeah, politics because of the last 5 years, things just got so polarized. Polarizing.
And that doesn't work algorithmically.
Yeah, we'll take a joke on the—
Like algo-wise, like that didn't work. I would think that the ad algos would love that. Like Facebook would just be like, yeah, I'm in.
We thought the exact same thing.
And it was not.
And you tried it. You put it.
Yeah, we like, I forget what election, but we had like, like all of the, you know, primary candidates. Tongs. Like we had underwear with every primary candidate.
Yeah.
And people were like, they'd be like, hahaha, yeah, you put Trump on it. That's funny. And sometimes I'll never buy from you ever again.
Oh, like, oh, so it was so polarizing.
It was so polarizing.
There's enough people that didn't like you.
Yeah, exactly.
And who— tell me about the customer for the brand. Like, is it just like 25-year-old dudes?
Is it—
You'd think.
Is it?
But you'd be wrong.
I would think it would be grandparents. Like my, like my mom and dad live in a retirement, like golf course community and outside of Phoenix. I'm like, I just think it's all of those people.
I think it's the women. I would absolutely buy these underwear for my husband.
But as gifts?
Yeah.
Or just for—
Oh my God. What is better than a gift that makes somebody laugh? Right?
That's, that's literally our hook and our pitch is like the— it is women for sure. It's majority of women. They're like in their 30s and 40s.
Yeah.
They're buying for their husbands, boyfriends, brothers, fathers, whatever. And then literally our hook is, I bought this because it's hilarious. And this is our number one review too. It gets repeated every single week. Bought this because it's hilarious. My husband loved them. Now the joke's on me because he's addicted to $30 underwear.
Yeah.
And so he comes back and buys black and blue and gray.
And a lot of guys buy them. A lot of guys do buy them for themselves, but it's like shockingly broad audience. It's male, it's female. It's, you know, from 25 to 65. Yeah, it's crazy.
Is that why you expanded into women's underwear? Because I know my, you know, my CFO is one of your best customers. She literally lives in your underwear, specifically the fart-blocking ones.
And she's very proud of that.
And she's very proud of it. She wants to be an official tester.
Yeah, we had like, we started with men's underwear, but we had so many people being like, these are so soft and comfortable. Why don't you make women's? Or why don't you make ones that match? And matching is like a huge business for us.
Like we've got tens of thousands of matching subscribers. Yeah, I don't, I mean, if I, yeah, I totally get it. And it would be, what a fun like wedding gift too, to a couple. Like matching underwear for their honeymoon.
And for sure.
So do you guys have a massive Q4 then because of the gifting element?
We do. We do have a much bigger Q4. Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's like peaks, right? Father's Day, Valentine's Day.
These gifting holidays. Yeah.
People where people buy underwear as gifts for—
Do you do an exclusive Black Friday drop?
We do exclusive drops a lot, like more than just Black Friday. But yeah, and on Black Friday we actually don't— we've never done sales, so we always do gift with purchase, but we do like a stacking gift with purchase. So like if you spend $400 or $350, you get up to 7 gifts, which has, which has like crazy, crazy value.
Like almost like I think we've gone up to like $380, like in free stuff.
What's the craziest promotion you guys have ever run? Because I feel like you have the humor and the brand has the humor that you could literally—
I might say the One Minute Man.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Oh, I remember this campaign.
I know this story. You have to tell this. It's amazing.
The One Minute Man sale is the whole site is, uh, whole site is 50% off for 1 minute. That's as long as we could last.
Which is long enough, right?
Look, debatable.
You guys, a lot of people were really pleased with this sale.
A lot of people.
There was a lot of satisfaction.
Yeah.
5 stars.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of satisfaction.
Was that the email afterwards? like satisfaction.
Did your numbers rebound quickly after?
No, no, we've got like a 6-month refractory period.
That's awful.
It's just gonna be an entire like interview of laughing.
I'm learning a lot. It's great. This is great. People are gonna love this. It's actually like, this is an episode. No, but is it gonna be like, well, I've learned nothing at all.
Honestly, this is—
it's the most extreme version of marketing. I think it's great. Like, I'm actually learning a lot, so I hope people are. So I want to know though, does anything actually surprise you guys?
Wait, can I go back? Because I think there's something like to say to make it a little bit more applicable to the audience here, which is like entertainment for us is the reason like people will continue to like tune in and pay attention. And it helps differentiate us in a way from like no one else. And like, for us, that's like deep comedy in everything from the tags in our underwear to the sales that we run. But I think any brand can benefit from having some angle that gives people like an emotional connection with the brand and keeps them coming back for more.
Yeah.
Because you can only push like so many promotions and so many products on somebody before they're like, I don't need more right now. I— this promotion, it looks a lot like the last promotion. I You know, you got to up the ante for me. And so having like something about your brand that keeps people tuning in, which for us is comedy and entertainment.
It doesn't have to be humor.
It doesn't have to be humor, but it's got to be something.
It's the emotion. It's attaching emotion.
Yeah, humor is such a powerful one.
To a product.
I think it's either emotion or value. Like value could be not just the product, but the value, like educational value, right? Or emotional connection could be like, you know, maybe you give back or maybe people just love your cause or maybe people love your sense of humor. But there's a lot of ways that you can like have an angle for your brand that like is seeded into everything that you do that gives you an edge of—
Oh yeah, for sure. I think that's actually, that is definitely the big like brand building takeaway. I think I'm actually, as you're speaking, I'm thinking Pela, we started as cause and then I think what we figured out was we're really good at like the docu-style storytelling. It's like we'll find stuff through history and then we'll just tie it back to us at some point. It's like we'll make 1-minute, 2-minute, 5-minute videos of like Let us teach you about this part of the world in like 1920s. Right.
So people are just like, oh my God, these guys are storytellers.
I love what they stand for.
I love their content. They're not always trying to get me to buy another case, right? Yeah.
And it's the— what we found too is that ads that do this, like, so ads that entertain first or, or like teach them first, they're the best ads, right? Like the ad platforms love it. Like Meta wants people to stay on ad platform. They don't want them coming off. Like that's their inventory. They'd like you to not take it from them. So as advertisers, that's the big battle we're all in. And when you go out and you make something really funny, Meta's super happy because like that particular piece of creative is doing what they want creative to do.
Yeah.
Which is like, share, like all the viral mechanisms that are built into the platform.
And to like, I mean, we have tried stuff where at some point we had this like hypothesis where like maybe we're too polarizing, maybe we're like too funny and, you know, maybe we're turning off some would-be buyers. And so we made some tamer creative for Meta. Sucked. Terrible. It was like, compared to our other stuff that was just like pushing every line that we could, like people weren't engaging with it. It wasn't standing out. Meta wasn't pushing in the algorithm. It wasn't converting as well. Like it didn't have a reason. It wasn't unique from a brand perspective. And it wasn't like doing those levers that are important to Meta if they're gonna like push the reach on something.
But I do feel you're the brand that could take it like all the way to the extreme of that and just do like a boring day where the whole site is black and white and you have no idea what you're buying.
Good idea.
I like that. That'd be fire too. Right?
Like there's like the, that's the, that's the shininessy version of we're like a, like every other underwear company today.
We've always actually thought about it like in the inverse, which is we want, we had this idea at one point, like what if there was a toggle on the site that was like the after dark mode? Like we had to push the toggle and like a little warning box would come up like, are you sure? 'Cause the jokes we make in this mode are like a lot crazier.
Honestly, I think that's brilliant. I would click it. Yeah, that's like—
yeah, vibe code that.
Yeah.
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I wanna— I'd love to hear more. Like, I mean, so you went from costumes to underwear. Is there more? I mean, I know you lean into print, but is there new products on the horizon? Like Would— have you considered going into shirts? And—
Yeah, we, like, we thought about that over the last, I guess, 2 years, and we've been kind of like doing the shift with the brand. So like the tagline used to be Stay Weird and Shine On. Stay Weird is definitely still like our culture, everything we do. But from a product standpoint, we're going dangerously comfortable. And so like, what are the other products that we can make that are dangerously comfortable? next to skin probably, but that we can use as canvases for art. Yeah. So socks, we launched socks and—
Oh yeah, it's natural.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Has it done great?
Uh, it's amazing. Same, we use the same yarn, right? So it's a super premium yarn.
Like we've that micro, which is really hard to do. Like basically no other sock brands can put Micro Modal into socks, but it gives you kind of like a similar hand feel to the underwear.
Yeah.
This is, that's a good, it's really important to call this out so that people don't miss it. You also have a really good product.
Yeah.
100%. Like, you keep talking about material. It's like, it's not just like cheeky and funny. Like, it's actually really freaking good. Yeah.
'Cause like, I mean, you can market people and get them to buy something novelty.
Yeah.
But like, I think it's really hard to build a business off of one-time novelty.
Yes.
And you need to have a product that people wanna keep coming back for over and over and over again and like collect dozens, if not hundreds in some cases of.
Subscribe to it.
Or subscribe to it.
Yeah. Right?
Like, you wouldn't subscribe to a product that you genuinely don't care about.
Which I think would be really interesting to talk about. But also, don't you still, kind of sell like costumes, right? Don't you have suit sets still?
We still do, but it's like really small.
Like the ski— you guys still do onesie ski suits?
We do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I had a, I had friends of mine that it's a couple and they come on some of our like cat and heli trips and they showed up one day in this like crazy ass, like matching onesie.
Did you know it was Shinesty? No.
And then I'm like, where the hell did you buy that? And he's like, oh, there's these ridiculous company in Boulder, in Colorado.
Yeah.
And he starts telling me like, I know that. Yeah. Like, oh, I've met him.
And then he skis away and it's gins naked on the back of it.
This makes lots of sense to me now. Yeah. So I actually did not know that you guys did that until I saw it on this trip. And then the funny thing is, is like, it was people. I believe people from that trip went and bought some, like, not that set. Yeah, but they were showing people your site like, this is where we bought these things.
I just remember seeing the Derby ones and they were like, Incredible.
Yeah. Oh, at the Derby. If you watch the Derby, you'll see our seats every year.
Every year.
Front row, owners' wear.
What would you say is the— what, like, it's gonna be hard to answer, but like, if you were to think percentage of time in the company spent just on coming up with ideas, what is that number?
Man, for us or for the whole team?
For you guys. Well, like, for the whole team. Like, if you were to just look at the company, like, there's How many employees do you guys have?
We have like 30 kind of like office.
Yeah, like office. So like all those 30 people, like how much of their week is just spent on like, what's the next greatest idea?
What's the next thing?
If we're just talking about like marketing and product, like there are people who that's all they do.
That's all they do.
Yeah.
But the total deal, I think it's actually less than you think, 'cause I think there are a lot of, it's like kind of an endless well of ideas. I think actually more of the time is on bringing the ideas to life. Yeah. Well, in the actual production.
Oh, tell me more about that. What do you mean? Like the, the, like the boring parts, like the supply chain, the production, or?
I'm talking about more on like the actual like marketing creative. Like, I don't, I don't know that maybe, yes, there are people like, or graphic designers that spend all of their time designing great products. That's a lot of time for sure. I think on the marketing team we have like so many ideas and more of the time is spent like, how do we actually go out and shoot and produce this?
That's what came to mind. Have you seen their product photography?
Oh yeah.
I mean, which now has gotta be a lot easier for you guys. Because you can think of extravagant, like the best part is somebody—
Yeah, we're unbounded by producing now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is like, that leans into your superpowers, right?
Totally.
Like, yeah, I find like, I meet, I do find in marketing you meet one of, it's like extremes, like anything else in life. There's people like you guys where ideas just, you could sit here for a day and like come out with 500 of them and it's no problem. And then there's people who are like, this is the hardest thing I could ever do is to come up with something original. And there really like, there's nobody in between.
Yeah, but coming up with something original and then what Jens is talking about and actually executing it and it's hard just taking it halfway is probably one of the hardest parts, especially for brands with frequent launches and multiple product types. Like it is an underrated—
And we failed at that. Yeah, the execution part of it.
You have to fail. I mean, it's taken us years and years and years to execute really like some kind of process.
Oh, weekly launches. I showed— I don't know if I ever showed you this. I think I've shown you, but like the, my team built a, like literally we step by stepped out what it takes to take an idea up to like we're selling it. And that spreadsheet is like 126.
It's crazy.
Different jobs that have to be done. And there's like names beside each one and like roles and like who has to do what. And it's crazy at how much work goes into like, this looks simple. It's like, that's a print. on a pair of underwear, you're like, oh, it's always the same pair of underwear, same shape, same sizes. But the, the work, the like actual production line is probably like— we're probably similar there. I know.
For sure.
Yeah. What do you guys do if you see like a trend online? Like say there's something that you could really lean into, right? Do you fast track it? Like take it outside of your normal process and like push it to the front of the line so you can get a PO placed and Airship it in just to capture it.
We normally do like 6 months at a time of design, and that's like kind of your foundational layer. And then we're saving capacity both with our manufacturer and with our design team to like do these quick drops, which we can do in like 30 days. Like, it's not bad.
It's really— I mean, and at their size, to be able to maintain that fluid kind of ability to take something and push it to the front of the line is a huge unlock and something I tell smaller companies, do not ever stop doing. Do you have a surprise?
Well, speaking of, you were talking about like fast fashion and being able to, you know, react to trends quickly.
Yeah.
So we, we like started studying.
Wait, I feel like— are you about—
is this for Matt Morgan?
This is for Matt. Sorry, I feel like you gave me a little bit of insight to this, but I'm a visual person, so I might need to see this product.
Actually, we were fast following, like studying his Instagram.
Yeah.
And his Facebook photos.
There's no— oh my God, they're actually bringing like Nobody else has brought such a trendsetter.
Like, we just need to be doing what Matt's doing.
Okay, so what did you see that was missing in his Instagram feed?
We just saw a certain, like, desire for, like, a level of sexiness that he had not yet achieved.
If you look at his earlier posts, he was, like, really repressed, clearly. And then, like, as you get to his later stuff, he was, like, blossoming like a flower.
You could just see it in his eyes that he desired it, you know?
No, that's called darkness. So you designed a product just to help Matt step into some level.
We did.
A 1.
And we did it fast. We used the capacity that we had for a quick turn. Brilliant.
Yeah.
All right. So what did, what did, what did we design?
So, we brought it. It's a very special Shinesty product. It, you know, has the front, of course, Matt, but, and it also has a nice back. Are we getting this?
I changed my mind on him modeling it. So.
We're definitely not modeling this today, guys.
I gotta be honest.
Is this an actual thing that you make though? Like, you make this and sell this?
Not yet.
I feel like with AI, we could probably get Matt's face though on one of the model photos.
I think definitely. Yeah, definitely.
We'll have to make that happen.
We'll have to make it happen. Can you send me one so I can send it in some of our brand?
Yeah.
I feel like just, you know, updating the operators.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
The operators merch is gonna be—
Yeah.
This is good.
This is operators merch, Aaron.
We should do that.
If we made a line of operators merch.
I'm looking at our CEO over there.
He's gonna—
we're gonna make this happen.
Jason will be here later. I bet he could try them on.
He'll put them on. We'll get Jason to try these on.
Small, right?
Yeah, I'm sure that'll go well with, uh, whatever.
He said it's an extra small.
Extra small, perfect.
We're gonna be like, does this company make a real pair of underwear? I don't believe that anybody wants to wear this underwear.
Yeah.
Trust us, we've sold like over 14 million pairs.
Do you make extra small men's underwear? Is there men that actually like— I feel like if I wore an extra small, I would still just buy a medium make myself feel better.
So you don't muffin top really hard or something?
Yeah, I don't know.
We make— That's what I do.
We make—
I only make extra large. We have, we have 2 different sizes of crotch.
Do you really?
Yeah.
So it's not just waistband. You actually have to have different—
Oh, you actually added another layer to it.
We added another layer to it.
That's a difficulty.
Just because you didn't— you liked inventory so much.
We loved inventory so much.
I love that they don't discriminate. I mean, it's amazing.
Let's do long, short.
Brief.
Now a thong.
Now a thong.
Yeah.
And that's just on the men's side.
Oh, okay.
I have a question. Magnum pouch, standard pouch, and then the women's side.
How many SKUs do you have at any one time for sale?
We have like roughly 12,000.
Wow.
Yeah.
So many.
And that's all in inventory?
Like, so fun. All in inventory.
It's so fun.
It's all in our warehouse. Yeah. Inventory and demand. Wait, you do your own fulfillment?
We do, yeah.
All our own fulfillment.
Did we ever talk about this? Like, how come you guys never went into like what we did, which is go like, just go completely vertical, like own the factory, put it in your backyard so you can basically go from like, you can trend jack. Like day off.
Yeah.
It's super hot. How do I just do this tomorrow?
I think as soon as sewing is robotic and you can do that, we probably would try it and maybe we could start a factory together, you know? Yeah. Because, um, it's just sewing is done by hand and that skill definitely doesn't exist in Colorado for sewing places.
I'll give you another one. Socks. You can buy the machines.
That's a good point. Yeah.
Socks are definitely good. Yeah.
Yeah.
They used to— it used to be the toe box had to be hand-stitched. And I'm pretty sure now there's machines that do the—
Yeah, you get the Lanati machine.
Yep.
Yeah, from Italy.
I feel like you could even import in blanks almost.
And we've tried that. Yeah, we have tried that.
We have.
There's like a— that's like part of the, the product quality dance because you can sublimate on top of polyester, but we don't use polyester.
But to make the pouch a really joyous, spacious place, like we gather extra material there and like you can't You know, you can't print on that little rough one.
It does feel very joyous and spacious to me. Yeah.
It's a joyous place to be.
This is, I, I, I would do wanna call it, what was the machine you called it?
The Lanati.
Yeah. So this is, uh, he and I were talking about, uh, t-shirts yesterday.
Mm-hmm.
And I think this is like unique amongst consumer people, but they know a weird amount about how things are made.
Yeah.
Right. Like we were talking suriyami machines. He's like, oh, I know what those are.
Yeah.
And I'm like, who the hell knows what those are? Like I went down a rabbit hole. He's like, oh yeah, there's like 3 of those in the world.
Yeah. When we were making socks, we like lived in Asia for me and our designer, like stayed there for 3 weeks just iterating every day.
Okay.
To try to get it right.
I love how in the weeds they are.
Yeah.
And still to this day, like if I talk to Jens about marketing and ads, I mean, he's probably one of the smartest marketers I know.
Oh yeah.
Hands down.
Shucks.
Thanks, Katie. You just have to deal with a couple of jokes.
Tell me more about myself.
I love this. Okay, so as a brand then, has there ever been a customer story or something that like actually surprises you guys? I feel like surprise is not high on the list of emotions that you feel in a week, given, given that what you do, you're the one surprising people.
Because it's constant.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what you do. It's like literally like you're in almost a shock business.
Yeah.
I mean, we piss people off all the time.
That's what I mean.
Oh, I remember one. This was like April Fools'. Like, he knows this is 20, like 17 or 18. And, you know, again, it's like Thursday at like 10 p.m. and I'm sitting there with our, our copywriter, now our creative director, awesome guy.
And we're like, wow, what are we going to do?
What are we going to do?
And we're like, let's do a press release that we've been acquired by Kohl's.
I know this story.
And so we wrote this like very like tongue-in-cheek plain text email. We didn't have any time. Maybe it was like midnight already. We're not, we're not designing, we're just writing like an actual press release style email. And it's like very snarky, very sarcastic. We're probably like, you're probably, you know, concerned if you're gonna be able to use your Kohl's Cash on Shinesty now. And don't worry, the answer is yes.
With no Kohl's Cash.
All this stuff that we thought was so tongue in cheek and obviously sarcastic. And we sent that email, woke up the next morning, and it was like, I don't know that I've ever— I don't think we've ever received maybe more emails than this. Oh, except for catalogs.
That's what I was gonna say.
Yeah, we got another one then. Waking up to just like a wall of like literally thousands of replies, like broke our CX team.
Upset people or happy people?
A mix.
Like, but I would say like, they're mostly like, you traitors. Yeah, 30%, 30% people are like, oh my God, you guys have worked so hard. I've followed you from the beginning. Congrats on the amazing success. And other people are like, You fucking sellout. Sellout. Okay, we thought you were an authentic brand, costume brand that we liked. Yeah.
No. Did you reply again?
It was just like, oh, and we replied to every single one. Like, no way. Chris, our copyright, because we didn't have a big team at that time. We didn't have like a huge CX team, a bunch of offshore people we could scale up. We just sat there for like 3 days and just like—
Were you screenshotting like best replies and sending them to each other? Like, look what I got.
Yeah.
Yeah. Or you were just trying to get out of them.
That was a good one. But you should tell—
Tell the catalog one. Oh, man. We've gotten, like, throughout the years, every single year we send out a catalog for the holidays, like between 1 and 2 million, you know, holiday catalogs. It's honestly one of the best pieces of, like, creative that we put out ever.
Okay.
Yeah.
And every year. And so, you know, it has things in it that are, like, funny and slightly inappropriate.
And also it's underwear.
Wait, like, give an example. What do you mean by things?
Because Like, uh, you know, one year when the Karen thing was trending, we wrote a piece, an op-ed piece that was like, how to tame your Karen, how to seduce a Karen.
Yeah.
How to tame and sleep with a Karen. Basically, it was like the— and it was things like, you know, give her 2 glasses of Pinot Grigio, never 3. Don't feed her after midnight.
Don't feed her? Yeah.
It was like, make sure you're careful because her claws can come out, right? Like, So things like that.
And this is a whole 2-page spread in your catalog.
Yeah.
Like, which makes it not cheap.
Like, when you print catalogs, it's about how many pages you have. And you had— you dedicated a whole 2-page spread to how to tame—
Yeah.
You guys should find—
I think the PDFs are on there. Of course we're going to have this.
We're going to find it.
Yeah.
It was like, you know, had actually a picture of my brother who still works for us. He's got a long mullet and he's holding like this glass crystal ball. It says '69.
You know, it's just With the How to Tame a—
Yeah.
A camel.
Or like, it was like we had him telling you as a character how to do it.
Yeah.
Yeah. Or we had one year we had like this outrageous Thanksgiving scene when somebody's like, like fisted the turkey and like holding it in the air in this like, you know, raucous like dinner scene. And like the number of people who were like, you meat eaters, I can't believe you meat eaters. Something like that.
People will complain about everything.
But the thing that was the most surprising, like we do, we put like funny content in there that people absolutely love. It's far and away the best piece of content that we like put out for the whole year.
I mean, it's—
And it's profitable. I don't even know.
I can't even—
Like it's a profitable thing for you.
It's an amazing, it is an amazing, it was an amazing acquisition channel for a very long time. It's also now an amazing retention channel. We pour our hearts and souls into that. Like the first couple of years, well, still the number of people who will go out of their way to mail you back their catalog is astounding. Like handwritten with handwritten notes.
Like, take me off your list, you savages.
No, that's surprising.
Yeah, that's surprising.
I know.
Sign it.
Or the other one that was like hilarious was like, I don't like the waste of paper and carbon regard, like sending paper mail. And they sent it back to us.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm like, don't you have a little self-respect for your time? Don't you just like do what everyone does is stand in front of your trash can and go, no, no, no, no, no.
But some part of you anticipates this. Like, you guys definitely are aware of like, oh, this is going to make a little segment mad.
But you must be—
We are.
Yeah, we use that.
That's 100%. We are.
Well, we know.
I think we are writing for our customers. We know how they want to be entertained and we're trying to live up to that every time. And yes, there are people like, we are still a polarizing brand and there are, we know that there are people who are not gonna like it, but we're not writing for them.
Yeah.
Do you think it holds you guys back? Do you think that the polarization holds you back from scale?
Um, that's a good question. I mean, yeah, probably to some extent, but also like, I think it's like, that's not why we exist.
Yeah.
We're never gonna be groomed.
Oh, I am certainly not suggesting you change it. I'm just like, I'm wondering if you've thought through that. Is there any downside?
I think like, I do think there's a potential. And like I was saying before, like, dude, we've tested like, you know, more moderate stuff and it just doesn't like click. It doesn't have the efficiency. It doesn't have the like uniqueness that makes other companies so well positioned.
I've never been more certain that they need to go into EDE ever.
It's just so obvious.
It is so— the marketing alone.
Honor the Shiness DNA.
A picture that you can put it in the catalog that you're sending, like you can cross-market these things. Like, I just—
I actually have a guy for you. Like, not the tester, but like a, like a person that you can talk to on how to build this. I got you guys. We'll talk after.
How do—
how do you have approvals for creative? I'm just still obsessed with the creative process. Like, when somebody has an idea, does somebody in the company get like the ultimate we can't do that vote? Or is there any kind of approval process?
There, I don't think it's like formal, um, necessarily, but probably me and Jens both have like the, all right, we can't do that.
But I would say like, when is that? I'd say like 1% of things, like less than 1% of things, like we really need a tiebreak on this. We've got a great, like senior creatives that are like, that get it and can make those decisions. And if something's really contentious at that level, they might like ask us.
There's, there's been a couple things that have gotten passed that we would certainly we would have like shut down probably.
You'd like to take those back?
Just because they were like, it was like graphic art I'm thinking of that was on one of the prints. You know what I'm talking about?
No, but now you definitely have to tell all of us because—
I thought you approved that one.
I did not approve it. It got through. I approved it with a change. I don't think I can say it on camera.
I don't think so either.
I think we gotta— I'll say it, but you might have to cut it.
Maybe just give like an idea of it and don't be specific.
I'll say it.
Use my bleep it out. You might have to cut it. 'Cause it is like vulgar as fuck.
It was like, like we tried to like, I think we tried to be like, okay, it's gonna be bad. We tried to like do clever and innuendo and this one was just like, okay, so there was no innuendo.
You know, like Olympics uses a lot of condoms.
Yeah.
The Olympics uses a lot of condoms?
Yeah. So like athletes, Olympic Village is like the STD, uh, I did not know that.
They're known for just, you know, they've all been working out and then you got all these hot bodies in the same place.
You get a whole bunch of hot, hot 20-year-olds competing in the Olympics.
All they do is have sex. Olympic Village. Yeah, this is a well-known thing.
Yeah, I don't know.
That's why they incinerate the mattresses.
Yeah, it's like 600,000 or something. Oh, it's like the average of like 7 or 8 condoms per athlete is used.
Like, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a, every Olympics it's like this.
So did you make an Olympics rings out of condoms?
And we did, but not just that, they were also like—
This is—
I'm glad you're saying this. Yeah, I mean, I was just like, and I said like, oh, this is a funny concept, guys, but you got to cut that part. So like just the condoms with the rings.
And generally we tell our creative team like, go far. It's better to like go a little far and like have to cut back a little bit and not go far enough.
It was the rings as condoms.
Correct.
With dripping.
Correct.
Yes. Uh, and we were like, you got to cut that part out. Just the condoms is funny. And they did not— they accidentally sent it to production.
Accidentally.
This is the amazing thing. It's like, how do you run a company where the point is to be ridiculous? So like, how do you have any discipline in the business?
Yeah, I know.
When you go to somebody, you're like, okay, look, we have to talk. I'm like, how do you even have a serious conversation with someone? Because it's their job.
Yeah, it's a good question. We're having like serious debates about like Halloween prints. We, we got this one Halloween print, we licensed it from this awesome, like, illustrator. It's like with a, with a sheath.
What was it?
And me and Jen, scythe. And me and Jen are both like, guys, I don't think we should do this.
Do you have an HR or is there no way?
You can't.
Where's Jen's HR?
What is HR?
Yeah.
You're HR.
Well, Allie and Karen. Oh yeah.
Kind of. We have like, we have like consultant Who helps us?
Oh, that person.
We make everyone sign. I mean, like, we have had very little problem with this.
Very. Yeah.
Hey, we're very upfront, and everybody knows what they're getting in for.
And I think even our employee back there, it's like, hey, due to the nature of like our brand, our product, like there are things that like you will be like exposed to that you might not run into in the course of other ordinary business. But you understand by working here, like we sell underwear, we make. you know, jokes.
Yeah, you're, you're, you're—
But yeah, we've had like—
You guys are incredibly close to like you're basically a media company that just happens to like monetize media with—
The hardest product category.
Yeah. Yeah.
You should. Yeah, well, we're going to figure that out.
To me, it's just the best example of brand at its core.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Like there is personality behind that brand, you know what I mean? Like there's just— you can describe it like I can describe the person That I can describe your customer like exactly.
Yeah. You know who it is in your head.
I know exactly who it is. Yeah.
Well, you're looking at them.
Yeah.
Like they're their customer.
They might be a little better looking.
Yeah.
Oh, thanks, Katie. Jeez.
Has it been ever since that sort of like big hockey stick up from COVID 4. Was it a pretty smooth ride? Did you guys hit like any bumps along the way on this?
Like the last 5, 6 years? No, we've had like years in there that were like—
You don't think it's just been a perfect, beautiful—
No, no. That's why I like, I don't get like a lot of people and a lot of people in media, you know, everyone, everything's always like great, great. It's always really, yeah. I'm like, that's not true. Like it's in reality, like, yeah, we all have like flat years. If you're, if you have a business for long enough, you're gonna have a flat year. You're gonna have a down year.
Oh, for sure.
And so we've experienced that, uh, and over the last, I guess probably 2021, '22, and '23 were great. And then 2024.
'24 was hard.
Was harder.
'25 was, some people had, was hard.
Yeah.
Um, and we're seeing growth again now, which is, feels awesome.
And, um, It's like the best growth we've had in like, yeah, since the early 20s. What changed?
Like what, what, how do you get it back? Like when, when you go flat for a bit or down, like I think, what did you guys, how did you think about that? What'd you do?
I think we, you, you like tend, tend to like freak out a little bit obviously, 'cause you're, you've never experienced that before and you're like, oh, maybe. I think one of the things we did, which is a mistake, was what Jen said where we were like, oh, maybe we're, we're too immature for our audience. Remember our audience is outgrowing.
Mm-hmm.
Which is wrong. Like, no, straight up wrong. That was a bad conclusion. And so like some of the products that we made at that time just didn't have the Shinesty ethos or like brand behind them.
They were comfortable, they were good products, but they didn't have that like Shinesty twist on them.
But it's a learning experience.
And they took a lot of time to build. They took a lot of time to market and test, which, you know, takes your eye off of like the big category that does work.
We wanted to uplevel the brand's aesthetic so that it kind of has this like high-low, like martinis with French fries, martinis and cigarettes, you know?
Yeah.
A long dirty heater and a beautiful elegant—
Like, they can't just stop. It has to go, you know, there's a line. Yeah, yeah. It's like where their whole thing is over the line.
I think we didn't communicate that properly and our team heard, oh, we're trying to back it down a bit. We're trying to back down the craziness. And really what we were saying is we just want the production value to look better. but to still have those elements of kind of oddity.
We want it to be beautifully composed with irreverent elements and copy is what we wanted. And what they heard was like, tone it all down.
That's how I would describe your brand today.
Yeah.
Like when I was talking about the product photography, I mean, it's truly—
Yeah. If you want a good example of this, if you're listening or watching, go to their— even just like your hero creative on chinasy.com.
Like, it's like elevated humor.
Yeah. The— I saw one my wife sent it to me. Jimmy, the, your, the, when you guys got into bras, that campaign was freaking genius, man. Like all of her friends were sharing it. They're like, this is just, this is the way you sell it.
And they're like, those are, those are also super comfortable. Those are great. I would know.
Yeah, it stinks.
No, I think we like wanted this. We wanted to make this change with the brand because we're like, the product is so much more, it's expensive. Most people aren't accustomed to spending $30 on a pair of underwear, right? Or $20 even if you're subscribing.
Yeah.
And we wanted like the premium of the brand and the visuals to— and site and everything to match the premium of the product.
And the team just kind of like— I think it was our problem. Yeah, we communicated wrong.
Oh dude, yeah. When you're like the CEO of a company, your job is—
yeah, yeah.
Great communication is largely just great comprehension.
Yeah.
You know, like you might be— you might think you're speaking really clearly, But if somebody's not getting it, it's like, yeah, that's a you problem.
Yeah.
I just, I picture you two like being like grandpas in rocking chairs on a patio, like still creating these, like, you know, you can just—
Jess is like, I'm so— I hope that's not true.
I hope that's not true. But I just see so much joy and like you two clearly love working together, which is probably part of the magic behind all of it too, right? Like you're a great partnership.
Do you guys ever get—
My second marriage.
Yeah.
Do you guys ever get into like, like heat, like disagreements? Like, do you have moments where you're like, oh, we get at it all the time?
Yeah, a lot.
Like about what?
I feel like the examples—
Where do you not, where are you not aligned?
Yeah.
Oh, we always get aligned.
We all get aligned. It's, yeah, it's usually like we both are convicted in something and it's like, well, let's have like constructive, healthy debate to see which position is stronger. And then I think we know there's a time to debate and then there's a time to make a decision and then everyone gets on the bus after that.
We let our team see that too. That's one of our core values.
Healthy debate is great.
You wanna see the disagreement. You wanna see the—
You can challenge anyone. We do it respectfully. We're not like, but you know, I say that only because we're working together.
I'm on like 10 that we're gonna have to take out of this.
No, it's fine.
It's actually great.
that somebody cusses more than I do. It's perfect.
Is there a year, if you guys look back, forget the ads years because those are always easy, but is there a year in the business journey where you'd love to go back and just like do more of something?
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, just don't say spend Facebook ads.
That's too easy. No, right when we started the company, we should have like—
Let's be clear.
Let's go back to that.
I've heard, I've heard a lot of, I've heard a lot of your advice.
Uh, and your advice about like, and some, some of the people you've interviewed about like knowing your unit economics down pat.
Oh yeah.
Right from the start. I think maybe it was the Groon's guy.
Yeah.
Oh yeah. Which is so smart. I mean, that's such good advice. We were selling vintage clothes.
Chad, Chad. But yeah, like the problem, every time somebody refers to Chad from Groon's, the problem is you have to remember like Chad's genetically engineered.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's built in the lab. Yeah.
He's totally built in the lab to like do that business.
Yeah.
Like it's not a fair—
Yeah.
I think 99% of consumer brands founders are just like you guys. Yeah.
Minus—
Not built to last.
Not as funny.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're just like you, but not as funny.
They're the garbage that got taken out of the lab.
Yeah.
Yeah. In a dumpster trash can with a bottle of Jack in her hands.
But we're all just like figuring it out as we go, right? Like, you can't look back and wish you understood what the units of—
I don't know.
You know what I mean? Like, I didn't even— we were so far in before we even knew what Um, like the acronyms were for things, which I, I'm just, I'm certain y'all were the same way.
Yeah.
I think if I go, I would go back, it would be to like that timeframe, you know, '27, 2018, where we were kind of like, things were still working in these like now what we would call our like legacy categories. But it was like such a, you know, it felt like such a big business at the time, really small by comparison to where we are now. I wish we'd thought more about like the TAM and the opportunity and the like strategic value of like underwear and basics and leaned into that like way more heavily. But at the time it was kind of like, well, why would you take your eye off of the like $10 million category to focus on the million-dollar category?
Like you're saying, you weren't even really thinking about an LTV of a customer. You were just trying to acquire customers.
We were just like, yeah, we were like ripping out new— I mean, The products that we launched were absurd and ridiculous and some really stupid.
Like, so yeah, like stupid, but just for like a very small audience for a very specific time of the year, like always gonna— it was gonna be hard to like get scale and maintain. So yeah, and like, I wish we'd like zoomed out and been like, wow, this underwear thing's actually like, okay, it's small today, but like strategically it checks like a bunch of boxes. And I wish we'd been like, we should lean way more heavily into that and not You know, not that we like, we, we did, we like grew with it and then, you know, we really ran with it in COVID. But had we started that like 2 years earlier back in the good old days that I'm not supposed to talk about apparently when we could spend money on Facebook, like—
That was gonna be my answer too. Same as you.
Yeah.
Is, uh, do you feel like you're good at this now? Like you've been at it a long time, like just running the company and like all these things you're talking about, like the numbers and the, the category, thinking about categories and which ones do we lean into and where are we not? Do you guys feel like you're getting good at it? You've been in business a while.
I think it's dangerous to think you're good at it because then you get punched in the face with something brand new. So, I mean, no, I'm like, Jen's the same way. We always are just like learning, trying to get what we can from other people, listening, learning, asking questions.
But do you feel more resilient?
Definitely more resilient.
Oh yeah.
You've taken, taken a lot of air.
So for people listening, we had an event at Katie's lake house. There's 30 people. There's probably, I don't know, I didn't say this, but there's probably more than $4 billion in GMV.
Yeah.
Between 30 people. So it's like a pretty good room. And at the end of the day when we were all talking, you see how many people were taking notes?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
And I'm like, these are all killers. And I'm like, look at them all. Like they're just writing down stuff.
And I'm like, this is badass.
And it just shows you that like some of them do almost $1 billion.
Yeah.
Like there's a couple I'm like, and they're still sitting there like scribbling things down.
Because there's still just all these cool ways you can win.
The guy who does more than $1 billion takes the most voracious notes I've ever seen.
Yeah, right. Yeah. So like when you think about like your own expertise, was there— when in the company did you hire somebody where you realized there's people like you could bring someone in who was really freaking good at something? You're like, oh, I'm the dumbest person in the room now at this.
Yeah.
Who was that first hire?
Honestly, probably our first designer who's still with us and she's our chief creative officer now. Like, um, we hired her 2015, mid, like about a year in, about a year in, we like poached her from the only other apparel brand in Boulder. They like, they were like falling on hard times. And so they like canceled their office and we were like, you can work out of our office for free. Oh, that's dirty.
Ultimate. Yeah, the ultimate poach move.
Yeah, I like that. And then she like slowly was like, oh, I like these guys. And we're like, you should work for us.
Yeah. So, so does she manage designers under her or is she just—
okay.
Yeah.
But like everything visual from like product to graphic design. And, and so she's like the one where we're like, oh, this is like what we're looking for. She's a real talent.
She's a savant at that. Like she can do it all.
She can do anything.
She can tell you if that shoulder should move. She can tell you if that pixel should be pushed. She can tell you if that UX is gonna be clean.
Like she's— And then probably like the other time would be like when we hired COO.
Yeah.
We hired her from Otter— she was at OtterBox.
Oh yeah.
Great, great Colorado company.
OtterBox before.
And just like amazing supply chain experience.
Have you guys found it easier to hire people over time? Like just as the brand got built, the culture got better. Like, I feel like if you're—
Well, also people know about you. Like at first, at first when you're like this kind of tiny startup with this really like irreverent angle to the brand, people are like, I don't know if I want to get on that ship.
Yeah, that's a little, that's a little weird.
And you're all in office, right?
We are not in office. Oh, okay.
It's a hybrid.
It's a hybrid.
Yeah.
I would love to all be in office. Like COVID kind of messed that up cuz we started hiring people over that and it's, we'll see. We, we might, I don't know.
But now like the people that we get now that, you know, we're, we're big, people have heard about us. Like, yeah, the people who apply, apply cuz they're like, oh my God, I wanna work there. That's the type of culture I wanna be a part of. So that, that it's, it's gotten—
Every one of our job listings says art director with a sense of humor. Everything's with a sense of humor.
With a sense of humor.
Control warehouse fulfillment.
Controller with a sense of humor.
You know, '15, '16, like you guys are riding the organic Facebook, BuzzFeed, like really good content. You discovered paid.
Yep.
How, what else has like really turned on over the years? Like new, like new places to spend money, anything that surprised you that worked really well, anything you're like, why doesn't this work for us?
I think direct mail was like a real immediate success and surprise and like a little scary because like the expense is So high.
A lot of cash up front.
Yeah.
You think about like spending $60 or 60 cents, 60 cents for one person to receive something like that feels like a huge gamble, but that did really well. And like the ability to tell a big story, um, did really well.
Did you guys never do YouTube? Like organic? Like, I feel like just set up an office, like a camera in your office.
It's interesting. I feel like, I feel like, um, like organic, like storytelling stuff like that we didn't end up doing on YouTube, which is interesting. I think At least I always thought like our ads have this balance of being like very educational on the product and very entertaining that they somehow like satisfy like both brand building and driving conversion. Like maybe I, I do think there's a time when like we should lean into like other content strategies like that, but I feel like we've been able to get a lot of mileage by having that kind of hybrid approach to advertising.
Yeah.
We do this kind of storytelling like on TikTok organic. Yeah. TikTok. Uh, like the behind the scenes kind of like the office style. And so we've had some really good success with them. We have half a million followers on TikTok. Whoa.
Wow.
It's making like—
Which as a brand is like pretty exceptional because people don't like to follow brands.
They like to follow people.
Totally. And so, yeah, like that's—
Do y'all lean into creators and influencers? Like, especially with TikTok, we talked a lot about that this week.
We're getting back on that. That is one that I think has surprised me. Like, finding influencers for us, like that works for like everybody. And that has never really like worked as a big strategy for us. Like free, free like gift funnels and things like that. And I think we've kind of figured it out. Yeah, you're probably shocked, right? Why?
Do you know what? I'm shocked right now because like we're, we're seeing the re-rise of actual comedians.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And like, I don't know anybody who does brand deals with comedians. Like outside of the extremely big ones. Like, you know, Hexclad did the, what's his face?
Pete, whatever that guy is. Pete Davidson.
That guy.
Yeah.
You just don't see it. Like, you, like most stage performing comedians, there's nobody doing that. Maybe we haven't.
I think like when you get to like that tier, that's like something we haven't actually tested really well yet. I'm talking about like a lot of people I think use micro influencers at that level and do huge funnels on that. And that actually doesn't surprise me that that doesn't work. We've tried that a lot and I think we finally figured out why. And it's like, while there are a lot of people who have, you know, rabid followings, create great content, The number of them that are willing to do that in an intimate category, if that's not like what their channel is all about.
Also with your sense of humor.
With our sense of humor, it like really shrinks the base of people.
But every up-and-coming comedian would 100% do it. That's their job. Their job is to do exactly what you guys do, except they go up and embarrass themselves.
Yeah. And slightly offend, like.
And be very offensive.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, man. Every time I go to a— I love stand-up comedy.
I feel like female or male comedians, would really lean into.
Oh yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah. Plus you're giving them something to have content about.
Yeah.
Yeah. They all need it. Okay. So we usually end these things, we do this thing called the Titan 10, uh, questions. We'd like you to answer them as fast as you can. Gut feel.
But stay on brand, please, because I feel like it might be—
They don't need to be serious. You can do whatever, whatever you guys feel is the right answer.
Okay.
And you can each answer if you want, unless you agree and you can just go with the answer.
Okay.
So first one, I'm going to drop you guys on a desert island. You get nothing but a piece of paper. On the piece of paper is 3 numbers. You have to run the business just with those 3 numbers.
What are the 3 numbers? That's a good one. I probably should have read these questions before, huh?
Yeah.
Well, I'm really surprised. So yeah, 3 metrics. Damn. Can't even be like 3 dashboards?
No, 3 numbers, gents.
On paper.
Jen's a scorecard type.
He wants 3 dashboards. Jen's the guy with 3 scorecards that are 150 KPIs.
I know.
I really like my data.
For me, new customers, returning customers, and CAC, probably. Because if the CAC's at the level, then you're going to know.
I really like this one that is, I just call it marketing contribution margin, but it's like your basically net revenue minus your Yep. Ad spend, because I think like sometimes when you look at like CPA or ROAS and then you have to like, it normalizes spend and efficiency. So, you know, if like, are you scaling and actually like holding, you know, this like simplified version of contribution margin? I like that as just like a quick signal of how is spend versus revenue tracking.
It's a health check.
Yeah.
Yeah, I actually, I only look at contribution dollars daily. It's the only number I will look at daily is total contribution dollars.
Well, I would've said, Mark, I would've said contribution dollars, except I think if you want It's not as actionable if you don't— unless you get the full breakdown.
That's true.
Yeah.
You need to see though.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Okay. So you also get to take a book, but the book can't be about business or music if you want to bring it, like something just to like entertain you.
Okay.
That's easy. I'm going to bring the fattest, thickest Tom Clancy book I can find because it's also the only way I can like go to sleep at night and turn off my brain from kids and work.
I've never read fiction since like, and I didn't read much in school. I'm sure you can, I'm sure you can see that.
Yeah.
So he's still a little illiterate today.
Yeah.
Sometimes he asks me like, how do you pronounce this word? And I'm like, the?
Oklahoma school system, man. Got good basketball team, nice people, but school leaves something to be desired. Just kidding, Oklahoma. Unless I cut it. Still in my heart.
Mike's gonna be like, no.
Mike knows.
Mike knows.
Did he answer the question yet?
Well, that's what I was saying. I didn't read any, like, fiction books.
So he's not bringing them up.