Bombas: David Heath and Randy Goldberg

David Heath and Randy Goldberg saw an opportunity to disrupt a long dormant—and arguably boring sector...socks. They met at a startup in their 20s, each already had their own side hustles before they hatched a plan to launch a business together. Randy and David didn’t initially intend to get into the sock business, but in 2011, David read that socks are the most requested clothing item at homeless shelters. That led them to start a company they called Bombas based on a promise: for each pair of socks a customer bought, another would be donated to the homeless. Within about ten years, their one-for-one start-up turned into a quarter of a billion dollar business that has expanded into sweatshirts, underwear, and t-shirts. Listen to The Great Creators https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-great-creators-with-guy-raz/id1640546593 launching September 20th See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get The US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card.

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  Now you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer.

• 2:58Guy Raz?

  For the first time ever, new Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card members can earn two Delta Comfort round trip flights for travel within the 48 contiguous US states, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands. Plus, you can earn 50,000 bonus miles towards your next getaway. And who doesn't appreciate an elevated airport experience? Delta SkyMiles Reserve Card members get access to the Delta Sky Club, your pre-flight oasis to recharge with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value.

• 3:40Guy Raz?

  Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the card that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day.

• 4:23Guy Raz?

  And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary.

• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobili fuels.com for details. Hey, it's Guy here with a very exciting announcement. I have a brand new podcast. It's called The Great Creators and it launches on September 20. And each week, I'll be interviewing some of your favorite actors, comedians, and musicians about their lives, their work, and where they find creativity. So please check out The Great Creators. It's available wherever you find your podcasts. And please do subscribe so you won't miss any of the episodes. And our first episode is with Stephen Colbert. So check out The Great Creators wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll include a link in the show notes to this episode, too. Thanks. Now enjoy How I Built This.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  When I showed up talking about building a sock company, I was all but pretty much laughed out of the room.

• 6:00Guy Raz?

  Not exciting.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, how big could a sock company be? Or like, you know, it's a pretty boring category. And I think from a confidence level standpoint, that made us like re-question things a little bit, too. And so as a salesperson, that was pretty hard for me to take.

• 6:23Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:34Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how two friends decided to take the tools of innovation and apply them to one of the least innovative products, socks, and ended up building a multimillion-dollar company, Bombas.

• 6:52Guy Raz?

  A great idea is almost never an original idea. It's usually an improvement on an existing concept. You can apply this logic to some of the most innovative brands in the world. Tesla didn't invent electric cars, but it made them so much more interesting and efficient. Google didn't invent the search engine, it just made a better one. And Dropbox didn't invent cloud-based storage, it just made it easier to use. Now, all of these examples are technology companies, and many of us typically associate the word innovation with technology. But the reality is, the opportunity for innovation is often found in the most boring places,

• 7:36Guy Raz?

  in products that we don't even notice. Like women's shapewear, no one really bothered to improve that category until Sarah Blakely came up with Spanx. And the same can be said for socks. Socks have been, for the most part, an afterthought. You've got your dress socks, your sports socks, and maybe some thick hiking socks. But no one was really thinking, hey, you know what needs innovation? Socks. That is, until 2011, when David Heath decided to do just that. How he got the idea, well, you're about to hear that in a few minutes. But what David quickly realized is that no one was making a product that had the qualities

• 8:21Guy Raz?

  of a high-performance athletic sock and a casual dress sock, all in one package. So with his friend Randy Goldberg, David began the long process of trying to figure out if there was a market for his idea. They called their brand Bombas. Now, at the time, as you will hear, very few investors were interested. Socks just weren't seen as exciting or profitable. But it turns out, socks are very profitable, almost like popcorn profitable. And over the course of 10 years, David and Randy have managed to build Bombas into a business that does more than $1.25 billion in revenue. David and Randy met around 2007,

• 9:06Guy Raz?

  when they were both working for a men's lifestyle website called Urban Daddy. Randy Goldberg grew up in Baltimore, the son of entrepreneurs who ran a business making lenses for glasses. David Heath grew up in Westchester County, just north of New York. His dad was also an entrepreneur who actually pioneered the technology that makes wood chips for playgrounds. And like his dad, David wanted to pursue a life as an entrepreneur. So he went to Babson College to study, well, entrepreneurship. But it wasn't college that turned him into an entrepreneur. It was a job he had during college, a job selling knives, door to door, for a company called Cutco.

• 9:50Guy Raz?

  David decided to become a Cutco sales rep after meeting a recruiter on campus.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And I bought full in. I was like, this is it. I'm like, I could do this. I'm a great salesperson. I was very into the product.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  And I also just felt like, okay, there's something I can do on my own. So I ended up joining. And over the course of the next four summers, I became one of the top sales reps in the Northeast. I'd sold like $400,000 worth of Cutco knives over four summers.

• 10:23Guy Raz?

  What was your sales pitch? I mean, you'd call me up and you'd say, "Hey, I've been talking to Susan, and she gave me your number, guy." I know that from what I understand, you're in the market for some new kitchen knives and like what?

• 10:34Speaker 01

  No, no, no. You don't even like, you don't even get there. You're just like,

• 10:38Guy Raz?

  What do you do?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  All I need, you know, is 30 minutes of your time, you know?

• 10:42Guy Raz?

  30 minutes of my time? My time's valuable, David. I don't, and then you're gonna say what?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  I wasn't calling people like you, Guy. I was calling, you know?

• 10:51Guy Raz?

  No, anybody.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  See if you can sell Guy some knives, Dave. Sell him some knives.

• 10:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah, sell me some knives. Okay, okay, 30, 30 minutes of my time and then, and then what are you gonna do with that time? Okay?

• 11:01Speaker 01

  30 minutes of your time. You don't need to buy anything. I get college credit for this.

• 11:06Guy Raz?

  You get, oh, you get college credit for it? Okay.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  You really like leaned on the college part, right? It's like, I'm a struggling college student.

• 11:12Guy Raz?

  You're a college student, you're getting credit for being involved in this business. Okay, I got you. Okay, that's interesting. Okay, well, you know, I want to help a college kid. Okay?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  And I'd say, sure, you know, how's Tuesday at 3pm? And then, you know, I'd come over and I'd have my little roll up of knives. You know, before I even unrolled it, I'd like put them on the counter, kind of create the mystier of like, what is this thing? And I had a little like sales pamphlet and I'd say, actually, I can't even remember these days, but I just remember you'd always start with, I'd say like, do you have a penny? This was one of the big like Cutco like things. So like, do you have a penny? And they'd say, yeah, why do you need a penny? You've got the penny and you take out these kitchen shears and you cut the penny into a corkscrew.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  I'm really enjoying this.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  And they'd be like, what is going on? I was like, this is Cutco, right? We make high quality, American made kitchen cutlery. And then it's like, please go get your three best knives, right? And they'd like get this night, knife drawer with like rusty old, you know, dull things. And I'd have a piece of rope and it's like, we're gonna start by cutting, you know, with your knife.

• 12:21Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And like, you'd cut, it's like, you'd give, ask them to cut it and they'd be like, I can't cut it.

• 12:26Guy Raz?

  Cut what? Like a chicken bone?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  No, a piece of rope.

• 12:29Guy Raz?

  Oh, rope. Okay. You'd bring the rope.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'd bring the rope. Yeah. Rope was provided by me.

• 12:35Guy Raz?

  Yep. And they would try and they'd struggle with their.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Ah, couldn't get through. Yeah. Then they'd be like, let me go get my sharpest knife, right? They go, yeah, always go get a serrated knife and they're like, I got you. They'd cut it and it would like tear the fibers of the, you know, the rope.

• 12:54Guy Raz?

  No.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Like it's all over the place. And I was like, all right, now try with the cutco because it had a double edge and it would cut the rope within one, like a half of a pull. Oh, yeah. Now you've built up this like tremendous amount of like wow and value. I think, I think honestly, the two things that this job told me or taught me was one, and the skills of like how to sell, right? And how to like,

• 13:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  you know, build value, handle objections, right? Like the, like sales 101. They, they were incredible at sales training, incredible.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  And really kind of teed me up for, you know, my interest in sales, but also my pursuit in kind of in, in, in wanting to be really good at selling and kind of that drive and hunt mentality. But I think the other part was always what was realizing that it was really easy to sell a good product.

• 13:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  And I think this idea around, if you have a great product, right? It almost sells itself.

• 13:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  And so I just, I believed fully in the product.

• 14:00Guy Raz?

  But to do that, you know, at 18, 19 years old, and you made a hundred and $20,000 in one summer selling knives as a college student?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:09Guy Raz?

  That's insane. That's a crazy amount of money. I mean, I mean, you were making, you were making more money than anybody in college.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  By far. And, and, and not to mention, I mean, I can't underscore the fact that again, I worked four hours a day, four days a week.

• 14:25Guy Raz?

  You were the original Tim Ferriss.

• 14:29Guy Raz?

  You're the four hour work week guy before Tim Ferriss did it. You could have written that book.

• 14:35Guy Raz?

  All right. So you, so you're, and when, when you graduated, did you think, you know, maybe I should just go to Cutco full time? If I made 120 in one quarter, times four, I mean, you know, you could be rolling in it right after college.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  So, no, I did not have a desire to continue to sell knives. But I did follow that, that line of thinking in the sense of saying, wow, I'm really good at sales. And I think like every broke college kid that comes out of school, especially I think as well, being a product of the 90s and the MTV Cribs generation, everything was about make as much money as possible. Right? I think, I think the newer generation of Gen Z millennial, that's like, do what you love. I'm like, thank God that they figured that out a lot earlier than I did. And so I remember approaching graduation. I looked at sales jobs and I figured out what industry do salespeople get paid the

• 15:35Speaker 01

  most amount of money? And pretty consistently it was in software sales.

• 15:41Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. So, so Randy, let me turn to you because, because by the time David was making like a hundred and $20,000 on knives in college, you had already graduated from Georgetown University in, I think around 2000 and went straight to a job at a, like a tech consulting company, I think in Boston, which was, I guess right, right before the dot com crash. Is that right?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Things started to unravel pretty quickly and I got laid off in April of 2001. So it was seven months into my first job.

• 16:16Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  I'm out, you know?

• 16:19Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:21Guy Raz?

  So seven months you're out and living in Boston.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Living in Boston.

• 16:25Guy Raz?

  And so what'd you do next?

• 16:27Speaker 02

  So it's a moment where I had to decide, am I going to move home and figure things out there? Or am I going to sign a new lease and try and figure things out here? And I felt like if I moved home, I I might get a little stuck. I wasn't really certain of what I wanted to do, but I I made the the decision to, you know, move into a new apartment with some friends, sign a lease and then start interviewing. So I got it. I got two jobs in the meantime, just to pay the rent. I got a job at a wine shop and I got a job at a bar. I started out waiting tables and then eventually worked behind the bar and helped manage the place.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  And I learned a lot pretty quickly, but in the whole, the whole time I was there, I was interviewing, you know, because I wanted to be doing something else.

• 17:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How long did you stay there?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Well, I ended up meeting some people who would come in regularly and we became friends. And they worked at an ad agency and they said, you know, I think you would kind of be good at what we do. You know, do you want a chance to to like, to do a project with us as a copywriter? And I took a job as like a copywriter, working on a brand book for for Johnston and Murphy. So the the shoe brand.

• 17:44Guy Raz?

  The shoe, yeah.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had never done this before and it went really well. It was the kind of thing where, you know, it felt sort of natural to me to do this type of work. Couldn't believe it was a job, that type of feeling. And I thought, maybe there's something here. So I I started pursuing writing more regularly and I was still working for this restaurant group for for a while after that, for a couple of years, as I started to build my career as a copywriter.

• 18:11Guy Raz?

  Like freelance, doing freelance work?

• 18:13Speaker 02

  All freelance, yeah, all freelance. So like writing a campaign or picking a song for a commercial, things like that. And a lot of the work was working on brand books for companies that had sort of lost their way. Right? So larger companies that needed to be reminded of why they started in the first place. What was special about them? What was unique? And you're doing this for companies that had once been great, but had maybe lost their way. That's a very interesting practice.

• 18:40Guy Raz?

  All right, just hold that thought for a moment. I want to go back to to David here for a second. David, when you graduated from Babson around

• 18:49Guy Raz?

  I think around 2005, you landed this sort of the quote unquote coveted tech sales job that you wanted. I think it was for an Israeli company called Nice Systems, based in in New Jersey. So how did that job go?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  I did incredibly well at the job. I hated the product. I found I found no emotional connection to software. It's not anything I studied. It wasn't anything that I was like personally interested in. I was purely there just for the money. And so after a year and a half there, I kind of gave them an ultimatum. I was like, either make me an outside sales rep, or I'm going to leave and go do something on my own. And by the time I was 24, I was kind of in this, you know, I'd made a bunch of money and put a bunch of money in savings. And I started my first business because they didn't give me the job. I left and I created a social networking site for apartment buildings called buildingneighbors.com.

• 19:48Guy Raz?

  And what was how did the social network, how was it supposed to work?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  So I'd just broken up with my girlfriend of a few years. And I was in this massive building with mostly young, you know, post-college people in it. And, you know, it was like 32 floors, two towers, you know, like 100 apartments each floor type of thing. I mean, this was 2006 or five, yeah, 2006. So Facebook was not what it is today.

• 20:19Guy Raz?

  It was out there. It was out there.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  It was out there, but it wasn't as prolific as as it is today.

• 20:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  And so I was like, and I also think this was the time when everyone was like, a social networking site for dogs, for apartments, for people who like to cook, you know. I was just like, oh, maybe this is an interesting way, you know, to meet other people in my building.

• 20:40Guy Raz?

  To connect people. Yeah.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  And I worked on that for a year and put about $50,000 of my savings into that.

• 20:49Guy Raz?

  How long did you end up working on this business?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  So I worked on it for about eight months. And as I watched my savings dwindle without any cash flow coming in, I kind of quickly got nervous and was like, whoa, if this takes much longer, I'm not going to have much left. So that's when I said, I'm going to go back and get a job, you know, while I continue to work on this thing. And I said, okay, if this is a Online, digital focused, you know, first type of company, I should probably go get some skills or experience in the online space. And my roommate at the time, I was working on this project with my roommate at the time. And I remember he came home one night and he

• 21:32Speaker 01

  said, I applied for a job for you. And I was like, what do you mean? It was like, I sent your resume into this newsletter that I get that I really like. It's called Urban Daddy. I was like, I have no idea like what this is. I'd never heard of it. And 30 minutes later, like my phone rings and they're like, hey, it's Rob at Urban Daddy. Would you like to come in for an interview this afternoon? And I was like,

• 21:57Guy Raz?

  Wait, sorry, back up. Your friend applied to Urban Daddy on your behalf? What? Why? I mean, you were not a

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Because, because he knew that I was like, wanted to get back and find something in the online space.

• 22:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  And again, we were, we were roommates and we were working on the building neighbors project together. And I was bankrolling the whole thing. And he knew that I was like stressed out about like, my savings going away. And, you know, so I became pretty focused on like, let's find a job. And like, within like, a few days, he just like, was like, oh, applied for this job for you. Kind of thinking it was a lark, like, I don't know, they're not going to like, reach out or reply. Like 30 minutes later, they called me.

• 22:39Guy Raz?

  And so you had that, obviously, experience as a salesperson. And, and this was a, just a, did you know anything about this site? Was it, was it?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Nothing. I'd never seen it. I never knew, I didn't know anything about it.

• 22:51Guy Raz?

  Called Urban Daddy?

• 22:52Speaker 01

  I was like blindly walking into an interview. So

• 22:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a horrible name. It's a horrible, it's a horrible name. Urban Daddy.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  I spent days.

• 23:03Guy Raz?

  It's like, it's sugar daddy. What does it mean? Is it, is like, this is my sugar Urban Daddy? I don't understand what it means.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  It's not just weird. It's, it's aggressively terrible. And

• 23:14Guy Raz?

  Terrible name. It went on to be successful, I know, but it was an aggressively terrible name. Keep going. Sorry.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  I spent days trying to convince them. Days trying to convince them to change it.

• 23:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Branding exercises. We, we just tried so hard and the, the founder was, you know, it was his name and he loved it. So.

• 23:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. Okay. So, all right. So to David, um, you get this interview to be, to, to do business development for, for this website.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  And this is an important part of the story because I, like you, like you do when you get a job interview, I put on a suit and tie and I go downtown and I show up to this office. Office is a, is a stretch. I like open this door and there's like six people sitting at desks and like four interns sitting at a big table and then like one small office in the corner. There's a single chair.

• 24:11Guy Raz?

  And this is like 2005?

• 24:13Speaker 02

  2007.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  2007.

• 24:15Guy Raz?

  2007. Okay. Yep.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  So there's a single chair by the door and they're like, wait here. And I'm like, full suit and tie in this like cool hip publication. Everyone's like super stylish, like staring at me.

• 24:31Guy Raz?

  It's New York. It's New York, of course.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  This is so embarrassing. I'm like, I, I'm never getting this job. I'm leaving. This is awful. I go into the meeting, I meet with the head of sales and the founder and 30 minutes later I had a job offer and I showed up like whatever, two days later.

• 24:50Guy Raz?

  A job offer to run business development.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  I was the second salesperson and like business development and partnerships to like grow our email list.

• 24:58Guy Raz?

  And sales would mean trying to get advertisers basically for the website.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then also try to get people to partner with us to share email lists. So we could grow our email lists and distribution. And this is a key part of the story because my chair like backed up against Randy's chair.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  I remember Dave walking in for that interview as well, in his suit and thinking, who is this guy?

• 25:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And you were, and Dave and Randy, you were a writer, right? You were writing articles or like pieces.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was, I was writing the New York edition, right? That, that was, that was my job. And I had started a month earlier. So it's not like I had been there for a long time. You know, there was six of us and then Dave was seven.

• 25:43Guy Raz?

  And, and just to be clear, Urban Daddy still exists, but, but at the time it focused on, and it was basically like cool places to go eat, cool clothes to wear, like place, cool places to travel, like.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  It was mostly about using the city.

• 25:57Guy Raz?

  New York, okay.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Like, what is a new restaurant, a new club, uh, something happening? You know, if you, if you were trying to go out or go on a date, it was a resource of like someplace to go to impress your friends or impress a date or take your parents. Like, it was really about like getting out.

• 26:17Guy Raz?

  And it was for men? It was designed for young men?

• 26:19Speaker 02

  It was like geared towards, it was like a male vibe.

• 26:22Guy Raz?

  So tell me about how the two, I mean, you were, it was a office of seven, eight people. So presumably it wasn't that hard to meet each other. Did the two of you become friends right away? What do you remember about that, Randy?

• 26:34Speaker 02

  You know, Dave has one of the loudest voices in America, right? So he comes into this tiny office. There's seven people now in this small office and we're all in one room, right? So he's, his chair is backed up against my chair. There's no space. It's tiny. It's New York, right?

• 26:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  And he's sitting on sales calls all day.

• 26:57Guy Raz?

  And just chat, just talking people's ear off and.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  It's like he was screaming inside of my head.

• 27:03Guy Raz?

  You're hearing it all day. Yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  You know, he's on a sales call and I'm sitting there trying to formulate an angle to write a story, which is the exact opposite environment.

• 27:13Guy Raz?

  Open space offices are not good.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Not good.

• 27:16Guy Raz?

  Bad trend.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Bad trend. Yeah. So there was some tension at first and I was, I just was, I remember being like, who does this guy think he is?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And then you have an office of seven people. So we went out to lunch and I soon figured out who this guy really was. And I realized that we couldn't be more different in a lot of ways, right? Like, like, there's a lot about the two of us is super different, but we have a very similar outlook on the world and we're both pretty entrepreneurial and Dave's got a big heart. And I was like, I like this guy. And we became fast friends, you know, it didn't take long to get over that, the guy bumping his chair and the loud voice and just realized like, this is one of my people.

• 27:59Guy Raz?

  And when did you start to, when did you start to think in your head? Like, was it, is it early on when the first, when the two of you met where you thought, he might be the guy that I could start something with? Or was that, was he just like, an office friend and you would just kind of chit chat about ideas?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  I think because we spent nine hours a day together, we got to know each other's strengths, weaknesses, you know, what they valued very, very quickly. And then from a creative standpoint, we started just sharing ideas, right? That would like pop into our heads randomly. Add to that, the commiseration that we had over what was a 50% like amazing office environment with super talented, you know, people that were doing great work with a 50% like, pretty toxic culture that was built on a lack of transparency and a

• 28:56Speaker 01

  lack of trust. And I think our bond was further forged by the fact that we both felt mistreated a lot of the time, or deceived or confused around things that were promised to us that weren't delivered upon. And just this kind of feeling that if we ever had the chance to do something together, that we would, we would take the lessons learned from this experience and do things completely differently on the culture side, but, but, but realize the emphasis on what great talent can actually do, and a great product.

• 29:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah, for sure. While you were, while the two of you kind of became better friends, at what, and start to talk about like, things that you might do. Because clearly, both of you were motivated by this idea of one day having your own business. What kind of ideas would the two of you talk about?

• 29:55Speaker 01

  I remember Randy came to me and was like, I think there's an idea for a universal gym membership.

• 30:04Guy Raz?

  Oh, ClassPass.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  ClassPass.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  We did not start ClassPass, but you know.

• 30:10Guy Raz?

  No. Pyle's been on the show before, yeah. So that was an idea.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  And then another one, I came to Randy and I was like, you know, because I was like a single guy living in New York. And I was like, I think there's an interesting idea around selling like pre-portioned food like for menus, like for like recipes. Because I was like, I don't need a whole onion, you know? I just need a quarter of an onion.

• 30:34Guy Raz?

  You founded Blue Apron?

• 30:35Speaker 02

  So we founded ClassPass and Blue Apron.

• 30:37Guy Raz?

  And Blue Apron. While you were dreaming of ideas.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  I had another idea where, you know, I lived in a walk-up building with no doorman and I'd have to like be home to get my packages. And so I thought of this other idea where it'd be like a last mile delivery service that would aggregate all your Amazon packages and then like Fresh Direct, you could schedule a two-hour window when you'd actually be home to get them. But no, that didn't turn into anything.

• 31:06Guy Raz?

  And then, and then Amazon Locker kind of just.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Yes, Dave also invented Amazon Locker, so yeah.

• 31:13Guy Raz?

  Wow. Amazing, you guys are unstoppable.

• 31:18Guy Raz?

  But actually, I mean, I mean, I mean, for real, David, I think around 2012, you left Urban Daddy and you did start a business with your brother Andrew, right? Which was based on like, on truffles, not chocolate truffles, like the kinds that pigs look for in the woods, right? Like that you shave on pasta, scrambled eggs.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Truffles, caviar, wild edibles, like rare mushrooms and, you know, different types of, you know, greens and fiddlehead ferns and ramps.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  The usual.

• 31:51Guy Raz?

  And what did you call the company, by the way?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  It was called Regalis.

• 31:54Guy Raz?

  Regalis, okay.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I ended up getting another job at a private equity firm that paid really well. I was like, this is kind of interesting, but I don't have the time to run this. So my brother really stepped in to kind of run that business. My brother had just come out of MBA at Babson and was looking for a job. And I said, well, why don't you step in and run the operations and finance component of this business?

• 32:20Guy Raz?

  So you were basically a kind of a founder investor in Regalis. But you didn't have, you were kind of sort of in running it, but not really running it. It was being run by your brother in this. Yeah. And, and, and I mean, eventually you sold, you sold your share of that company, right?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 32:39Guy Raz?

  All right. So you've got that going. You get a job in a private equity firm. Meantime, I mean, clearly, you know, you were both looking for an idea. How did you land on socks? How did that come about?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  So, you know, it's like meeting your partner, right? These stories happen in kind of the most interesting and unexpected ways. It was February of 2011. I was still working at Urban Daddy and I was scrolling on Facebook and I came across a post from the Salvation Army that said, socks are the number one most requested clothing item at homeless shelters. And I remember thinking to myself, that's both interesting and sad. And it's like, I never would have thought that would be the most requested item. I thought sneakers or jeans or a coat or something like that.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  And yet, here's an item of clothing that I've never spent more than a few seconds of day thinking about, and this is the number one most requested item for someone who's experiencing homelessness. And I remember walking over to Randy's desk and I said,

• 33:46Speaker 02

  I just saw this thing that was socks are the most requested item at homeless shelters. Like this was around the time that I think TOMS was in their fifth year of business and like growing like crazy, taking over the world. It's like one for one business model.

• 34:03Guy Raz?

  Shoes, yeah.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Warby Parker had just launched in December of 2010.

• 34:07Guy Raz?

  The one for one glasses.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Eyewear. Randy and myself kind of put two and two together and we were like, oh, like, maybe there's an interesting idea around solving this problem in the homeless community by building a brand around a sock company that donates socks for every sock item that we sell. That was really kind of the initial like spark.

• 34:33Guy Raz?

  And so the spark was, wait a minute.

• 34:36Guy Raz?

  If this is the number one most requested thing at homeless shelters, maybe there's a model we can build similar to TOMS or to Warby Parker. I mean, were you thinking along those lines or did it just kind of come to you? What do you remember?

• 34:49Speaker 02

  It was community first, I'd say. So first, we asked why? Why are socks the most requested clothing item in homeless shelters? So we, we made a call. We called a shelter and we said, is this true? First of all, and why? And they said, well, you know, if you, if you're living on the street, you might not take off your shoes at night and you know, a fresh pair of socks means a lot. You walk everywhere, you have hygiene issues around your feet and then it can be a huge issue if it rains. This is a big issue. And because socks are a wear through item, we don't allow people to donate them. So you cannot donate used socks to the majority of shelters and

• 35:33Speaker 02

  organizations that help in the homeless community. And they said, so we end up having to buy socks. So it's a big issue.

• 35:40Guy Raz?

  All right. So it was around 2011. You read that quote and it sparked the idea of whether socks could be a one-to-one business model. But you didn't launch right away, right? Like, that wouldn't happen for another two years officially. David, you had left Urban Daddy and Randy, I think you hung on. So what made you guys actually take action and, you know, pull the trigger?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  So Randy, do you want to jump in?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  No, go ahead. I mean, we should probably at some point talk about The Godfather.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna get to that.

• 36:19Guy Raz?

  The movie or A Person Called The Godfather?

• 36:22Speaker 02

  No, no, no. This is A Person Called The Godfather.

• 36:26Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how a key connection gave Randy and David a leg up in the sock industry and how they struggled but eventually found their footing without venture capital. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 36:53Guy Raz?

  Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production-ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together. The agents bring

• 37:36Guy Raz?

  speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 38:20Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new, expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called "Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work." And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization, and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 39:05Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, "Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work", at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Stripe is built for whatever comes next because the pace of change has never been faster than it is right now. New business models, new currencies, and new expectations for speed, reliability, and scale. Stripe builds financial infrastructure that helps businesses start, grow, and operate globally. From payments and billing to fraud protection and cross-border payouts, Stripe is built to support

• 39:50Guy Raz?

  the new pace of commerce. They're trusted by the companies building at the frontier, from 86% of the Forbes AI 50 to global leaders like Salesforce and OpenAI. In fact, more than 1.6% of global GDP flows through Stripe, with Stripe's users processing a combined $1.9 trillion last year. So if you're already thinking about what's next for your business, see what's possible at stripe.com.

• 40:29Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2012 or so, and Randy and David are starting to put together a team to launch and run their sock business. But they realize pretty quickly that they know nothing, really nothing, about the sock industry. So enters, stage right, the godfather.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  I remember sitting down for dinner with my dad one night, and I said, I'm thinking about starting this sock company. It's going to donate a pair for every pair purchased, but I don't know the first thing about making a pair of socks. And he turned to me and he said, well, you know, your godfather spent 40 years in the hosiery business and did incredibly well. I don't know what, I don't know what he did, but you should give him a call. And so I hadn't talked to this guy in 15 years. So I give him a call.

• 41:18Guy Raz?

  Where did he live?

• 41:19Speaker 01

  He lived in Westchester.

• 41:21Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  I call him up and I said, hey, Steve, I have this idea for a sock company. And it turns out that Steve Lowenthal was the president and CEO of Gold Toe in the late 80s and 90s, which is like-

• 41:36Guy Raz?

  Gold Toe socks. I remember gold. They must be still around, right?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Big time.

• 41:41Guy Raz?

  Gold Toe socks. The toes were gold.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:45Guy Raz?

  I mean, not real gold. They were gold colored. It was gold fabric. And the idea was that that's a quality. You've got your toes in the gold part of the sock. That's the quality sock.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  He left Gold Toe and then started one of the first and largest private label sock manufacturing distributors in the country. He worked for brands like Nautica and Polo and-

• 42:10Guy Raz?

  And he would make their socks, like white label.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Make their socks as a white label. So he understood global supply chain when it came to socks. And so me, Randy, Andrew, and Aaron sat down with him in this meeting once.

• 42:26Guy Raz?

  Andrew, is your, just to-

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Andrew's my brother.

• 42:30Guy Raz?

  Andrew's your brother and Aaron is?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  The fourth co-founder, who I'd worked on Regalus with from the branding perspective. So the four of us sit down with him and we say, here's our idea. And he said, tell me the product you want to make and I will introduce you to the best factories in the world.

• 42:50Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  And so we start working together on figuring out what are the components from each individual sock that we liked the most? You know, the toe from this one, the calf from this one, the fabric from this one, the arch support from this one. I kind of Frankensteined this sock together and we like cut up a bunch of socks, put them in a plastic bag and handed them to the godfather and he said, let me come back to you in a few weeks and see what I come back with. Ended up introducing us to this factory partner in Asia. And because of his legacy and credibility in the sock business, they were willing to work with us.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  I mean, this is a factory that produces for Nike and, you know, Salkany and Smartwool and some of the biggest sock brands in the world.

• 43:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  And here they were talking to us and we didn't even, we didn't have like two nickels to rub together, let alone like a full blown brand or concept.

• 43:46Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  And their willingness to work with us for almost, almost two years on product development, where we'd go back and forth and say, we like this, we don't like that, send us some samples, we'd give them, we'd try them out, we'd give them to friends. And this development process that, you know, ultimately led us to a product that we thought was pretty great.

• 44:10Guy Raz?

  All right. It reminds me a little bit of, I mean, Warby Parker saw a gap, right? And the gap was glasses shouldn't be so expensive. I mean, they're, they're, it's, you know, the markup is crazy and they figured out a way to make them more affordable through this direct to consumer model. How did you identify? I mean, how, cause now you look back on it, you're like, of course, cause socks were like made by Nike or Adidas or they were tube socks you'd buy in packets at Target or dress socks that you would buy, you know, or whatever it was. Thin dress socks, athletic tube socks and, you know, but, but now I can look back and say, of course there was a gap, but it didn't. I can't imagine it was super clear to you at the time, was it?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  I think it was pretty clear pretty quickly. I mean, we didn't have the data. We weren't in the apparel business, you know, and I think this was a big advantage for us.

• 45:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  We just looked, we took a look around and we just saw what was available. And what was available was always the same over and over and over again. And it just, it felt like an afterthought. I don't know, Dave, maybe you have a different perspective on this, but I think we knew pretty quickly.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the sampling process for us was a pretty big eye opening experience, right? We didn't go into the product development process with margin or pricing targets. Or, you know, this speaks to Randy's, you know, comment around us not having any experience in the manufacturing or, you know, retail apparel world. So we kind of came at it from a pretty blank slate of just saying like, what's the best product that we can make? And then as part of the development process, we would give samples out to friends and family. And they would come back and they'd say, wow, these are really great. And then we'd be like, yeah, but maybe they say that because they're our friends and family. And so I very distinctly remember bringing samples to the gym with me.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  And I'd walk up to complete strangers and I'd say, I know this is really strange, but I'm developing a sock company. Would you be willing to try these socks for me? And, you know, if I see you next week, tell me what you think. And I'd get a lot of really weird looks. And inevitably though, I'd show up the next week and those same people would come back and be like, where can I get those? Those are amazing. Like, what are they?

• 46:27Guy Raz?

  All right. I want to talk about the design process because the four of you are working, this factory is in China?

• 46:32Speaker 02

  China, yes.

• 46:34Guy Raz?

  And, and so they agreed to work with you on product development, which meant that, what, they, they had a designer there or you would sort of send them socks you liked and say, or sort of email them pictures and say, I want a sock that looks like this, but has these features.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  More the latter.

• 46:50Guy Raz?

  So you'd send them a photo and say, I like this, but I want these features in the sock.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  We'd also send physical samples and we would send pieces of socks and

• 46:58Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  They would, you know, they started with a prototype and they'd send us things.

• 47:03Guy Raz?

  And while you were working with this factory to just get samples, I mean, presumably you had to pay them something. So what did it cost you?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Luckily, the sampling was like the inexpensive part. I think they were thinking longer term, like, oh, if this is, turns into something, we'll get the business. And again, by having my godfather tied to this, I think they were less concerned or they had a higher degree of faith that it would be successful. You know, we, you know, I had to incorporate the business, right? So I hired a lawyer and ultimately when we decided to launch on Indiegogo, we had to pay for the, you know, video and some of the creative assets. But our whole approach to launching this business was try to bootstrap as much as possible.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  I think by the time we launched on Indiegogo, I had about, I don't know, 12 to $18,000 of credit card debt.

• 47:59Guy Raz?

  Okay, so it wasn't, it was not insignificant, but it wasn't like, it wasn't, it was doable. I mean, there was four of you involved. And by the way, how did you, how did you decide how to divide up the business? Was it based on how much money each person could put in?

• 48:15Speaker 02

  In terms of the ownership or the work?

• 48:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah, the ownership.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  So it was pretty, it was pretty easy because, well, I would say it was pretty easy. A lot of hard conversations early on.

• 48:28Guy Raz?

  That's a fraught conversation.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:29Guy Raz?

  I've had this conversation with my business partner, so I know it's not easy.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of hard conversations early on.

• 48:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  That I think were determinant of, you know, I had kind of put most of the capital upfront in terms of, you know, paying for the legal incorporation and some of these other things. Think the, the rest of it was kind of determined by, you know, who could take the risk to, you know, jump first. You know, Aaron had a family at that time, right? So he was like, he valued being able to keep his day job and keep a steady.

• 49:11Guy Raz?

  As a graphic designer, as a creative, yeah.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Andrew was working at Regala, so he had a paycheck coming in.

• 49:18Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  So. The most likely, you know, person to kind of take the leap first, like I didn't really have anything else going on. And I didn't really like the job I was working at. So I kind of took the leap first and kind of front loaded a lot of this stuff.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  And I just think naturally, you know, while certainly difficult, it wasn't, it was never like argumentative or contentious. And I think everybody kind of just agreed to let, you know, kind of made separate agreements and decided to divide the business up, you know, the way we decided to divide it up.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  We had the luxury of time, right? Because, you know, like we took two years, there was no pressure from anyone but ourselves to build this at that time because it was bootstrapped. And it gave us time to develop the idea. And, you know, like Dave said, he leapt first. And then in early 2013, when I was no longer an urban daddy, we sat down to write the script for our Indiegogo campaign. And that was sort of a moment where we felt like we were writing the covenant of the business. It took three months for us to write that and something today that would take, you know, three hours for a copywriter to do. But it was putting all of our ideas down on paper in the right way and getting our

• 50:40Speaker 02

  storytelling, you know, around this product that we believed in at the time.

• 50:44Guy Raz?

  And, and by the way, the name Bombas, was that the name from the beginning?

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was the name from the start.

• 50:50Guy Raz?

  And it means bee, bumblebee, right? It's like the Latin word for bumblebee?

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the word Bombas comes from the Latin word for bumblebee. You know, obviously we're a company that's community based. Bees live in a hive. They work together to make the world a better place. We love like the inspiration and the idea of things coming together in a hive to work together to improve their world.

• 51:10Guy Raz?

  How did you, did you just come up with a name? Or did you work with like a branding agency to help you come up with a name?

• 51:16Speaker 01

  So I think when we got to the point where we were ready to like name it, Randy and Aaron said, give us the weekend, right? Let us, we kind of know what this company's kind of feels like and stands for. Let's throw a bunch of things up on the wall and come back and present, you know, me and Andrew and the group with a broader set of ideas.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  The, the two that kind of they came back with that were the most, you know, the, the top were something around bees or ants because they're two animals that are naturally altruistic that work together as a community.

• 51:55Guy Raz?

  They're collaborative, sure.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Collaborative. And so didn't think that ants were that marketable. Bees tended to be a little bit more playful and fun. And so kind of landed on bees and it was mostly Aaron had kind of come up with this idea of naming it Bombas. The Latin word for bumblebee is, is Bombas, but with an A, B A M B A F, B U S.

• 52:19Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Um, and kind of our thought was, well, if you Google Ambus, you're going to get a bunch of like beekeeper information, um, you know? And so we thought, all right, change the A to an O and make it a little bit more unique and ownable.

• 52:34Guy Raz?

  So you guys came up with the name over a weekend. It's a great name. I mean, it doesn't, doesn't like, I'm sure there are people who are like, well, but it doesn't scream socks. Just call it like, call it, uh, feet mittens or call it, um.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  You're hired.

• 52:50Guy Raz?

  You know, you know, whatever, like, right? Did, did anybody say that to you? Like call it, call it something that screams out socks.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  We had somebody tell us that you have to write socks with an X, S O X. It's the only way you're going to stand out in the market. I mean, people.

• 53:04Guy Raz?

  Spanx.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, people tell you crazy, crazy things, you know? You have to have conviction around, you know, the, the reasons you put a brand together and how you build the world of a brand.

• 53:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah, fair enough. All right. So, so how, I mean, you get, you're getting all these samples back and forth. And, and, and I guess we should say like, I mean, doing, doing research about this interview, I discovered a lot about socks, you know, like, um, this arch support in socks and, you know, these like honeycomb weaves and stuff like that.

• 53:38Guy Raz?

  When, like at, at what point, you know, cause I know you landed on like mainly cotton and merino wool. I think you also do some synthetics now, right?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, cotton was what we launched with.

• 53:51Guy Raz?

  Cotton, okay. And, uh, a different kind of toe seam and like this honeycomb arch support. So how many iterations of the samples did it take? Do you remember before you were like, that's it, we got it?

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Hundreds.

• 54:04Guy Raz?

  Hundreds.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Hundreds and hundreds.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  I mean, guy, just for the calf sock tension level alone, it took us 137 tries.

• 54:15Guy Raz?

  Tension on the foot.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  On the calf. Like if you pull up a sock.

• 54:18Guy Raz?

  On calf.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Like on a calf sock. You pull up a calf sock. Right? You want it to feel comfortable and not too tight, but not so loose that it'll stay down. And you want it to be supportive, but you don't want it to leave a mark. So we just were, these are the types of details where, once you're in it and you have the luxury of time, this is the type of, this was the approach, right? And this is still sort of the way we approach product design today, but that is it, right? Like thinking about each little detail and the idea that all these little things that nobody thought about or cared about, could, when you put them together, just come up with something that's greater than the sum of the parts, right? Like you don't have to remember the honeycomb arch support or a seamless toe or a Y stitched heel,

• 55:02Speaker 02

  or that we used, you know, Pima cotton. But when you put it on, the feeling is this feels different and I like it more and I want to wear this every day. That's what we were going for.

• 55:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I'm looking at my sock now here and I got a seamless, yeah, I guess, I guess that toe, right? There's like that little, little toe thing there and I never thought about that really, you know?

• 55:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a product that we discovered most people don't think and or care about. Yeah, this is where the opportunity comes in, right? Like you're a thoughtful guy, but you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about, well, it's not something people think about. It just wasn't, right? Like we didn't, Dave and I didn't grow up dreaming of being in the sock business. I mean, nobody did, right? Like this is something that we stumbled upon.

• 55:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  But it was, it was an opportunity to test out an approach and a brand and do something great. And it was all really motivated because we wanted to make a difference, right? The idea looming out there was how can we donate as many pairs of socks as possible? And that's a real motivating factor when you're building a product.

• 56:15Guy Raz?

  All right. So you have this, so you land on this idea, you land on this sock.

• 56:20Guy Raz?

  And at what point do you feel Randy comfortable quitting your job and quitting your steady paycheck to actually go into this full time, full force?

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Things were coming to an end for me at the end of 2012 at Urban Daddy. You know, it was time to move on. It wasn't a good situation at the end.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  There was conflict. It wasn't ideal, but we were also, you know, things were moving, moving pretty quickly compared to how they had started with Bombas. We started to get a little momentum and Dave had left his job. And, you know, there's that moment where you have to say like, okay, now's the time. Let's, let's do this thing. And again, we, we had other things going on. So we had a little bit of safety. But, you know, after having a job for six years, to be in a position where you're just building something, building multiple things even, it's a moment. And I think a lot of people face that moment when they're doing this. And you just have to, you have to give it a little bit of a leap and you have to, have to have put in the legwork, I think.

• 57:31Guy Raz?

  You know, it's interesting because you launched this product as an Indiegogo campaign, essentially, right? You went out on Indiegogo to raise some money to see if you could get the capital to do a, presumably to do a first run of socks. But it's interesting because now that I think about that, and I want to talk a little bit more about this in a second, it's kind of, David, it kind of reminds me of your job at Cutco, right? Because you would, you weren't selling people knives. You were a college student who was genuinely, earnestly trying to gain experience and that was a gateway in. And then you had this great product that you could also sell. And it seems to me that there's a connection between what you were also offering here, which was

• 58:13Guy Raz?

  The Indiegogo campaign was saying, hey, you can help give people socks and you can also get a pair of socks, too. Is that, is that a fair kind of analogy?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  We felt like this was really our one shot to get it. And so being relentless, I even think to a certain degree, shameless. You know, I found a way to download my entire Gmail contact database. And I don't mean like just the people that are like in my contacts. I mean, every single person that I'd ever emailed with ever in my Gmail, you can like find a way to do this in Gmail. And I remember downloading this like 12,000 person email file and sending it out, not knowing who was on it entirely. And I got response back from people who are like, this is awesome. I sold you a set of concert tickets on Craigslist four years ago. Like, I'm gonna buy a pack of socks. And then I had people.

• 59:07Guy Raz?

  Wow. Everybody you would ever.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Person I went to like, you know, sleepaway camp with eight years ago was like, haven't heard from you since. This seems interesting. I also had a fair amount of people be like, bleep you, don't ever email me again. Stop spamming me. And yeah, whatever.

• 59:23Guy Raz?

  It's actually amazing because you really, I mean, you really had developed all of these tools that would lead you to this moment, right? Like Randy, you know, you're sort of copywriting and David, like selling, just selling stuff and understanding like how to sell stuff. And it all kind of coalesced, it all kind of arrived at this moment on Indiegogo. I'm just making the observations and a question. It's just so smart how you sort of landed on this, this approach. Because, you know, Indiegogo, you're not going to raise that much money, you know, but if it works, if it catches fire, it can get a lot of attention.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, it's attention, attention that we were after, validation, right? You know, our friends and family said, we loved it. But, you know, your mom loving your socks is not that hard. But a complete stranger putting their money in to say, I will, you know, buy this product before it's available to me and wait however many months to get it. That to us was enough validation to keep going.

• 1:00:31Guy Raz?

  All right. So you launched Indiegogo and I think the goal is to raise 15,000. But you had raised within, I think the 30 day period, like 140,000.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  We did $25,000 in our first day.

• 1:00:45Guy Raz?

  I mean, now, the idea was to do how many, like initially, what was your idea? How many socks, pairs of socks were you gonna make?

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  We weren't.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  The $15,000 was the minimum amount we needed in order to place the minimum order production run for like all the styles and colors that we had.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  But we knew that if we only got $15,000, it was probably curtains.

• 1:01:12Guy Raz?

  So you needed to make more money, to raise more money. 140,000, that's now you gotta fulfill all these orders too, right? And so, yeah, I mean, did you just basically go to the factory and just hit the go button and say, let's go? And I'm assuming you just had one SKU, one, just one kind of sock at that point? Or did you have multiple colors and options? Or was it just like, you're gonna get ankle white socks and that's it?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  No, we had a calf and an ankle in a black and a gray base with four accent colors. You could like select what you wanted on, you know, when you like fulfill the order. And so about halfway through, when we were at about $50,000 of sales, we, that's when we actually hit the go button on the order. Cause we're just like, well, we've clearly surpassed, right? And we've got plenty of time left. Like this is way more than we thought. We placed the production order so that we could at least beat the lead time that we would have on the, on promising people when they would get delivered.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  And there was a thought, well, get them delivered before the holidays so that if we have more inventory, people could come back and rebuy for Christmas and.

• 1:02:26Guy Raz?

  What was the plan, once you got the socks delivered? Cause this is like, I mean Shopify's around and kind of this, these, you know, these kind of drop shipping thing is starting to happen. But, well, I mean, I'm assuming you're, you're, you're gonna get a huge container, maybe a half a container, you know, full of socks. And then what are you guys gonna package it yourself and slap on UPS labels or USPS labels and send them to people?

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Well, Randy, do you remember we like

• 1:02:56Guy Raz?

  We talked about it.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  We did the math and we said to pack 2,300 orders. And this is where my brother came in with his like finance brain. He was like, well, it would probably take the four of us two weeks in a garage to pack 2,300 orders.

• 1:03:14Guy Raz?

  No way.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  And we looked at each other and we were like,

• 1:03:16Guy Raz?

  No.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  I don't think that's a good use of our time.

• 1:03:19Guy Raz?

  That's not us.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  So Andrew went out and found a local 3PL that was willing to do what at the time was a very small run.

• 1:03:28Guy Raz?

  What's a 3PL again?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  A third party logistics provider.

• 1:03:31Guy Raz?

  Third party logistics.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Like a warehouse that would do the pick packing and shipping of the product.

• 1:03:36Guy Raz?

  And, and so they would handle all that. All right. So you had 2,000 plus orders to fulfill. Was it quick? You're just reminding me now about all the indie camp Kickstarter campaigns I've contributed to and never got my product.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a big issue.

• 1:03:50Guy Raz?

  Where's my damn, where's my damn drone that I bought in 2014?

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Sorry about your drone.

• 1:03:55Guy Raz?

  Yes. I know. I gotta, I gotta go back to my Gmail account and find that thing. But how quickly were you guys able to get these socks to people?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Well, like Dave was smart about this, right? Cause he said about halfway through the campaign, he hit go on the order. And that's a little risky because we don't know exactly how much it's going to be. But we were very, very adamant about trying to deliver our product within the window that we promised and then following up every person that ordered with a personalized email, thanking them. And listen, like you launch on.

• 1:04:27Guy Raz?

  How did you do that?

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  It's, it was, we did it in, in phases, right? Like every week there'd be order.

• 1:04:34Guy Raz?

  Did you use the AI software that you were selling back in the day, David, to make that work or was it, was it was a human being typing? Thank you for your order.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  We used some of our old email tricks from Urban Daddy to,

• 1:04:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  You know, personalize.

• 1:04:47Guy Raz?

  Personalize them. Yeah.

• 1:04:50Guy Raz?

  But you wanted everybody who ordered to get an email.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  We had a product and now we had customers and we had orders to fulfill. But we didn't have a website and we didn't, we didn't really know what to do next because we weren't sure how this was going to go. Right. And we started to see it happening. We started to plan.

• 1:05:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  Okay, what do you do now? Okay, like we know how to build websites. We've done, I've done this for lots of other companies, but now you got to do it for yourself. And what are we saying and how are we putting it together? You know, Shopify was not the Shopify it is now. So we had a lot of like technology decisions to make at the time and we needed to move quickly.

• 1:05:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  So this was like a little bit of a, the period where you say, we've got something here. We've validated it in the marketplace. We've got these 2,500 customers. Let's build something and then, and then just take one step at a time.

• 1:05:43Guy Raz?

  All right, you guys, um, so you have this momentum and I think pretty, not too long after in 2014, you decide to go out and raise a little bit of money, initially, I think a seed round, mostly from friends and family. It was about a million dollars that you raised because now you've got to stand up a website and try to get the word out. Because e- even with the customers that you got from Indiegogo, you now have to build a customer base. Right. You need to create awareness around this product. Um, so you need money to do that. And tell me, and then I know that later that year you raised another three million and this is from angel investors. But tell me with that, I mean, was that money primarily to, for marketing or was it just to make more product?

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So after Indiegogo, we launched the website, shipped the orders. And we kind of wanted to see like, would people come back? Would they be rebuy? Would they tell their friends about it?

• 1:06:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  The following few months, we did another couple hundred thousand dollars of the sales. In the beginning of 2014, we said, okay, feels like we have something here. As you mentioned, we ended up raising money from angel investors, but at first, you know, I went out to the broader venture community. Right. I met with first round capital, general catalyst, Mavron, you know, all the names that we know today of backing some of the, you know, biggest and best brands and companies and.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Despite having connections or relationships with people, when I showed up with a deck talking about building a sock company, I was all but, you know, pretty much laughed out of the room. Like, how

• 1:07:24Guy Raz?

  Not exciting.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  could a sock company be? Or like, you know,

• 1:07:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  it's a pretty boring category. And

• 1:07:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  I think from a confidence level standpoint, that made us like re-question things a little bit too. And so I think as a result of that, we said, okay, like, maybe let's not push it as hard as we could. And let's just focus on building a great brand with great product and give back to the community and kind of see where it goes, right? And we kind of were tempered our expectations a little bit.

• 1:07:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  And so as a salesperson, that was pretty hard for me to take.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  But it ended up being good for us, Guy, you know?

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Oh, amazing.

• 1:08:00Guy Raz?

  Right. Because you didn't, did you, did you raise beyond a series A? Did you ever raise any more money after that?

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  We brought in a private equity partner, but we never raised any more primary capital.

• 1:08:10Guy Raz?

  Wow. So that's, you got incredibly lucky that those, those venture firms decided not to invest because it didn't dilute your ownership stake. I mean, in the end, it worked out great.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  And it also, yeah, it also allowed us to focus the business on sustained profitable growth versus go out, raise $50 million, build a multi hundred million, billion dollar brand, but be losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year, which we're starting to see how that's playing out for those companies today.

• 1:08:42Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how against all odds, a truly lucky chance at a TV show changes the scope of Bombas literally overnight, and how that momentum is nearly derailed with a very unlucky server malfunction. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  Football is back and PrizePix is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get $150 in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. That's right, if you win your first $5 lineup, you'll get $150 in lineups. On PrizePix, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their stat projections, and submit your lineup. Then sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want this football season, all in the same app. And now, PrizePix is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you on?

• 1:09:59Speaker 04

  Download the PrizePix app today and use code WONDERY, that's code WONDERY, to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix, run your game.

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  Must be present in certain states. Visit PrizePix.com for restrictions and details. With the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase, and you get big purchasing power so your business can spend more and earn more. Steven, Brandon, and Bruno, the business owners of Sand Cloud, reinvested their 2% cash back to help build the company's retail presence. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at CapitalOne.com/SparkCashPlus. Terms apply.

• 1:10:50Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2013 and Randy and Dave have raised some money and they're feeling pretty good. But at the same time, they don't have an easy way to get their products noticed in a bigger way.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  You know, my dad, he said at some point, you guys should go on Shark Tank. And we said, yeah, good luck with that. You are crazy. And then

• 1:11:16Guy Raz?

  They get a probably a thousand pitches a week.

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, what did they say, Dave? 30,000 people, companies apply every year, something like that?

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  So it seemed like a long shot. And then out of nowhere, in April of 2014, Dave got an email. And it was from a Gmail account. So we weren't sure if this was somebody like a friend of ours that was just pranking us or if it was real or not. But it was, it was a Shark Tank producer reaching out and asking about our company. They had seen our product on Indiegogo, our campaign. And they were curious about where we were in the process. And that started the conversation for us getting on Shark Tank.

• 1:11:53Guy Raz?

  Wow. Did all four of you fly to LA to film it or just the two of you?

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  All four of us went, but Randy and I went on the show.

• 1:12:00Guy Raz?

  All right. And I know the way it works is you don't meet the sharks until they like open the screen. They're like, and well, you know, and here are the sharks, like, right? You don't really like schmooze them beforehand.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  No, there, there's no contact. You are basically in a bubble for a week.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, they know nothing about us. We, we only know what we know about them from the TV show. That's it.

• 1:12:18Guy Raz?

  Right. Okay. Nervous. You must have been nervous as hell.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  I'll tell you this, the week that we were set to film Shark Tank, my father passed away.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  So he passed away on Father's Day in 2014. And we were supposed to fly that day to LA. So we almost didn't go. Dave and I had a conversation. They, you know, we talked to the show. We decided we were keeping the date. I went down to Florida where my parents were living at the time. And my mom and I dealt with the arrangements. And we had like a really like interesting conversation. And I said, you know, I'm not going to go. Dave will go on by himself. We'll figure this out. And she said to me, you know, if your father knew that you were skipping this opportunity because of him, he'd be furious at you and you have to go.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  And we've done all the work and the funeral will be next week. And, you know, go.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Which was Very hard. And I got on a plane, Dave picked me up at the airport with Aaron and Andrew. And the four of us had a moment where, you know, we'd been preparing for this, so we felt prepared. In a weird way, this took a lot of the pressure off because it just, you know, it was an important moment, but it also, you know, it was just in a very different space. And Dave and I were sharing a hotel room that week, right? And so I was there with my friend and I was away from my family and it was really hard. But we were here to do this thing and it sort of, it galvanized us and, and at the same time took the pressure off. But yeah, to your point, you get to that moment and it is a moment of nerves,

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  you know? They open those doors and you walk down that hallway and you look, you think to yourself, hey, that looks like Shark Tank, you know? And you're like, oh, okay, I come on Shark Tank. And you walk in that room and then, you know, it's, it's on.

• 1:14:19Guy Raz?

  All right. So you guys are on the set, make your pitch on Shark Tank.

• 1:14:23Speaker 06

  Bombas are athletic leisure socks engineered to look better, feel better, and with a mission to help those in need.

• 1:14:30Speaker 07

  The mass market athletic sock hasn't changed in decades. Same basic colors, same styles, same cardboard feel, until now.

• 1:14:38Guy Raz?

  But as soon as you finished with your pitch, you got like lots of pushback from the Sharks. I think at first, like, not a single one was interested in investing, but, but then like at the last minute, one of them, Damon John, who's been on the show, he kind of stepped out.

• 1:14:54Speaker 07

  Okay, guys, I'll tell you what, I'll try to meet you somewhere in the middle. I'm going to finance the inventory, $200,000 for 17 and a half percent. That's it.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  No line of credit?

• 1:15:04Speaker 07

  I'm financing the goods. I'm already, I'm on the hook for the goods right now.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Can we, can we take a moment and call our CFO?

• 1:15:13Speaker 07

  Uh, no.

• 1:15:15Speaker 07

  Your CFO gave you the bad advice already to ask for that valuation.

• 1:15:19Guy Raz?

  Damon John did make an investment. I think the deal, the original deal was like 200 grand for like 17 and a half percent equity. I guess what a lot of viewers don't realize is that you don't actually have to take the deal, even if you accept it on the show. And then sometimes you can renegotiate the terms, which from what I understand is what happened, right? You accepted that deal on the show, but then you renegotiated the terms?

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you accept the deal in good faith. It's kind of a good faith clause. And, you know, a big part was, let's even see if the episode airs, right? Because they film something like 150 businesses and then they air like 100, right? So it was a 33% chance that we weren't even going to get on air. And so we told Damon, Damon told us, like, let's see if this thing comes on air and then we can talk about it. Because kind of no sense in doing anything if it gets cut. And we were out fundraising at the time. And so we were like, all right, we're going to run our business as if we were never on Shark Tank and we never got a deal and continued to fundraise over that summer. And beginning

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  of September, we get a phone call that says, your episode is going to air in three weeks on the season premiere. Get ready.

• 1:16:35Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  So pick up the phone, call Damon. We said, all right, well, we've got to get a deal done. And we just closed our million dollars of seed funding and basically said, look, we don't need any more cash. So, you know, can we renegotiate the deal to provide you with some upside with no kind of cash investment? And the two of us, Damon and Bombas, came to an agreement that both parties, I think, were pretty amicable with and set the foundation for a really, really amazing relationship that has only built over the years. And I think, you know, both people feel really happy with what they got out of it.

• 1:17:20Guy Raz?

  Um, all right, that episode airs and what happens to, I mean, do you see an instant spike?

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, our website crashed, Guy, and it was terrible.

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, you know, it was like a super joyous moment and a huge moment and then a moment filled with dread and terror. I think we were, we had a viewing party. I mean, do you remember this, Dave? Like, just looking at each other and thinking.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  We'd been up for the last 48 hours. We didn't sleep the night before because we were working on the website and we were like trying to get the website ready for this massive event. We were like trying to scale up customer service people because that's the one thing we heard was like, people are like, oh, hire a bunch of temporary people to answer the phones and answer emails because like you will not be able to do this on your own. And so we didn't sleep for almost two days. We're at this like viewing party that we had put on, like zombies, and then we're getting phone calls that the website's crashing over and over and over and over again.

• 1:18:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  It was a nightmare.

• 1:18:26Guy Raz?

  All right, so this happens, the orders start coming in, and is it, I mean, at this point, what are the hires that you're making? I mean, are you thinking about, you got to come up with new designs, you got to come up with a, do you start to kind of expand your team and designers and marketing experts and, and what do you start to think about in terms of expansion?

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  Well, I think in that moment, um, you know, there was sort of a new floor for the business. It's kind of the way we thought of it. We had all these new customers and we had made a lot of promises through this business, right? We promised we'd be donating a pair of socks and how do we show people the work that we're doing on the donation side? We promised a certain level of comfort and quality with our product. How do we ensure that people understand that and what we're communicating and how do we back that up? So customer service became super important. Dave mentioned he took every customer service call for the first, you know, Year plus of the business, we would be out at a bar, he'd get a call and he'd go outside and disappear for an hour talking to a customer.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  But in that Shark Tank moment, we brought in a team and, you know, that was the beginning of our customer service team and our happiness guarantee. And then we realized that like we had, we had brought somebody on to help fill that marketing gap, right? We just always wanted to surround ourselves with people that were smarter than we were about the things that we didn't know a ton about. We had our skill sets, right? Dave was a great leader, a salesperson, right? Aaron and I could handle the creative and the design. Andrew was running the finance and operation side of things and we just started to fill in the gaps around us. So eventually that was customer service, marketing, product design, right? These were, and then we had a sort of like GM and PR figure was our first employee,

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  Emily. And like this early team started to really galvanize around what we were doing and all with the same attitude of let's figure out the things that we need to do to keep building this, to keep pushing it, to keep growing it and be really honest about what we don't know.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think this is an important moment to though, interject that, you know, at a pretty high pinnacle moment. So in the first 13 months before Shark Tank, we did about $900,000 in sales pretty organically. And then in the two months following Shark Tank, we did 1.2 million. It sold out of every single item of product that we had leading into holiday. And we felt like we were on top of the world and we'd just closed this million dollar seed round. And I think you put, you know, three people like me, Aaron and Randy in a room, right? We're pretty optimistic, you know, growth focused and we were like, oh, like let's go for it. And Andrew really became like the voice of reason from a CFO perspective and kind of-

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  This is your brother. Is my brother and really instilled this moment of, you know, let's focus on continuing to build a good foundationally, unit economic, positive business that generates profitability. And we weren't going to sacrifice profitability at the expense of growth. So because we didn't feel like we were getting the recognition or validation from the venture community, that this might be a little bit of a harder road for us to go down. And I think it was also the moment where we looked at the brands and companies that we admired most, right? The Nikes, the Lulus, the Underarmors, the Patagonias of the world, right?

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  Brands that had endured the test of time over decades and decades and decades of growth. And the one consistent thing that we found in those companies that was different than our peer set of, you know, the Aways and the Warbies of the world, is that they didn't grow by raising hundreds of millions of dollars of capital and trying to skyrocket the highest valuation possible in a short amount of time. They did it brick by brick, slowly over time, sustained growth year over year over year over year. And that was the playbook at that time that we kind of at that moment, it was a pretty pinnacle moment for us to say that, you know, we're not going to try to be the biggest company as quickly as possible. We just want to be the best company and be around as long as possible.

• 1:22:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I think you reached profitability by year three.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  We did. We were profitable in year one. In year two, we made a lot of capital investments in inventory mostly that, you know, because we were growing so fast that we were just like,

• 1:22:57Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Got to stay on top of inventory. And inventory became the cash crunch for us always, every single year heading into holiday where we do about 50% of our business. That September P O order was always very expensive because we were front loading these costs and wouldn't really get those back until, you know, the books closed at the end of the year.

• 1:23:21Guy Raz?

  So, um, I wonder, I mean, you know, you're growing every year over year over year. And

• 1:23:29Guy Raz?

  COVID hits in 2020 and most D to C companies were freaking out. Of course, it turned out to be a good year, depending on the company, including for you guys. But, but before you started to see a spike in sales, were you preparing for the possibility of layoffs and of retrenching?

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I mean, we watched our business go from like 50% year-over-year in growth in that January to a negative 12% year-over-year growth in March of that year.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  And I'm grateful that within a matter of weeks, it had rebounded and we were back at like 30% plus year-over-year and then 40% and then we're like had comps that were insane. But yeah, I don't think anybody was prepared for that moment. I actually think the biggest fear for us is that we had built this amazing, incredible culture that we felt like fostered innovation and efficiency and was so collaborative. And we just built out a brand new 33,000 square foot office in Union Square, you know, millions of dollars of investment, took over a year to build it. And then two months later, everyone's remote and we're just like, hmm, how, how do we operate?

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  How does the, you know, are people gonna show up to work anymore? Are they, you know, just gonna mail it in or you turn their videos off or whatever? And probably one of the proudest moments I've ever had as a leader was we shut the office down on that Friday and by Monday, everything was like up and running and like people were showing up to meetings and they were like, you know, it was almost, it almost like rallied us. I think people were like, and, and this is a point actually where I think the mission comes back, right? Because

• 1:25:21Guy Raz?

  Totally.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  It became this moment where we're like, wow, this is actually a time where we can step up and use this other arm that was mostly used to just distribute socks. Now here we are as a, you know, as a platform that's helping a lot of our peer brands learn how, what it means to give in times of need.

• 1:25:44Guy Raz?

  What is the ultimate, I mean, you do have investors and people who put in some seed money and you're profitable, but you know, at some point, you're right, you either sell or you go public. So I know there's been some chatter about maybe going public. Tell me about the possibility, you know, possibilities of selling the company or going public or, you know, something along those lines, because obviously you have, you do have investors, you have some investors involved.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the way we think about that is we're incredibly opportunistic. We didn't, we didn't design this business from day one to say, oh, it's got to be X billion dollar valuation, or we're going to sell it to this person. Or I think, again, in hindsight, looking back, by not having influence from large institutional partners early on, it allowed us to really kind of make up our minds and decide that like, we're just going to run a great business. And if someone comes and is interested in buying us, we'll talk to them. And, you know, if it's a good fit, and we feel like they'll be good stewards

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  for the product, the brand and the mission going forward, then we'd entertain that. If not, you know, and there's an opportunity in the public markets to kind of fortify, you know, what we've built and, you know, help us kind of build the dream that we're looking to build in the future, we'll go that route, too.

• 1:27:19Guy Raz?

  You know, when you think about this, this, you know, the partnership and you guys sort of meeting at this company and kind of batting around ideas and then coming together and building this brand that is really big, you know, and even the fact that you got, you couldn't raise capital and all these things that happened along the way, the fact that your godfather happened to be involved in this sock business. How much of this do you think has to do with, you know, all the work that you put in, the skills and that you brought to the table? And how much do you attribute to luck?

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  So I practice Stoicism. And one of the great Stoics is Seneca. And he has a quote that says, luck is when preparation meets opportunity. And so I think, for me,

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  We were very opportunistic and we were really prepared. You know, we, we put ourselves in a lot of these positions, right? We saw this quote and decided to do something about it. We went out and researched product, but then led us to my godfather, which that, you know? So I think a lot of certainly luck that played in part to, you know, the moment in time in which we formed this company, um, to, you know, all the fortuitous events that have led us here, right?

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it, it is, it's a combination of course, right? That's, that's kind of the only answer. We, we've, we timed things well, which feels like luck, but you know, everything that led us here personally, the two of us to that moment, the four founders, this moment to start the company. And then the things that we committed to doing and that we stood by through the years, you know, things that we've put against tough decisions and those core values Dave mentioned, understanding what we're great at and what we need help with, being humble leaders, really committing to, to doing something that benefits our neighbors in need. All these ideas, like that feels like the hard work.

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  And then let's, it lets you be opportunistic around some of the lucky moments and capitalize on some of the lucky moments and things like that. So it's a wild combination and it's been a good ride because of that.

• 1:29:45Guy Raz?

  That's David Heath and Randy Goldberg, co-founders of Bombas. By the way, didn't one of you guys like make a promise to customers that you would like, that you wrote into your FAQs like really early on? But can you tell me that promise?

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  If, if we get to a million pairs donated, uh, Dave wrote this in. He's promised that he would get a tattoo to celebrate. And we thought that this would take 10 years, right?

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  And mind you, I had none at the time. Like, so this was not like a, oh, whatever, I'll go get another tattoo. Like I had zero, right? None.

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  Right? Yeah. So at about the two-year mark, we started to look at each other and we'd say, yeah, we're, we're about to hit a million pairs donated already. And, you know, a promise is a, a promise is a promise, right, Dave?

• 1:30:38Guy Raz?

  And yes, Dave got the tattoo. And yes, it is a B, but with two words under it: be better. It's actually their slogan.

• 1:30:50Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to support what we do, please spread the word or post about How I Built This on social media. We really do appreciate it. This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Andrea Bruce with research help from Sam Paulson. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Neva Grant, Casey Herman, Liz Metzger, Alex Chung, Josh Lash, Catherine Seifer, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.