The Sweat Club—Founder & CEO, Bryan Lewis

Welcome to the DTC Growth show.

Every episode we talk to founders and leaders at some of the most exciting DTC brands in the world. We discuss their vision, how they launched, and how they are growing their brand.

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In this episode, we talk with Bryan Lewis, CEO and Founder of The Sweat Club, a subscription eCommerce fitness brand focused on women’s activewear. They just launched to the public, so you’ll hear about the trials and joys leading to Day 1.

How did the launch go? It was a pain in the ass. They launched a month late. Of all the brands he launched, Bryan says this was the hardest. He was never going to have ass it.

Always be networking. That’s how Bryan connected with Bree, his Chief Creative Officer, and part of the founding team. Why this role? Why her? Because Bryan isn’t good at content creation, and you have to hire for areas that you’re weak — that’s foundational to build a 50MM+ brand.

Why not launch with subscription right away? Customers want to see what they’re purchasing, so they’re giving customers some time to see, feel, and try the clothing before going live with it. He learned this from his previous company, FabCrate.

Start with why you’re making a garment. If you focus on that, it’ll help you make good manufacturing decision. Another tip, share your vision with vendors early! That will get you better terms, and more leniency when it comes to minimum order quantities.

What’s Bryan’s philosophy on funding? if you’re in eCommerce, figure out how to cover your costs, then try and get net terms with vendors, and then try and get some funding. Don’t raise too much money, only raise what you absolutely need. Having less money helps you make better decisions.

When it comes to user experience, the buying process should mimic the feel you have when you engage on Instagram. After buying, people should get a phone call, and all unboxing material should be high-quality and made from sustainable material.

The vision is large! Bryan wants The Sweat Club to be about everything sweaty — The amazon of fitness. Keep an eye out for more products and services from them, like yoga studios, supplement hydration, and more. If you think fitness, he wants to associate that with The Sweat Club.

Wondering what DTC brand Bryan is excited about. Check them out: sailawaycoffee.com

Learn more about The Sweat Club, and maybe pick out a kit at the thesweatclub.com

To learn more about the DTC Growth Show and #paid, visit hashtagpaid.com/dtc

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If you prefer reading, we have the full transcript below.

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Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit about The Sweat Club?

Brian: The Sweat Club is a full subscription based e-commerce brand. We currently focus on women’s active wear and are rolling out more and more fitness products.

Now, you just launched. How did that go?

Brian: Pain in the ass. Launch was like, I guess, overhyped. We were supposed to launch a month ago or a month prior to our original date and tech problems and other things came up and it was just a nightmare. So, we ended up pushing it back and then the week of the launch, team didn’t sleep. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to launch was this brand, actually.

Wow. What do you think made it more difficult than some of the other brands you’ve launched?

Brian: I was never going to half ass it. This brand is my 10-year plan or 20 year plan, whatever. I have such passion for this one. I think it’s the level of detail the team went into. I mean, even the website is so hard coded and detailed that every little bit of it is custom, our load speed, checkout experience, right down to the boxing and the packaging and how we deal with logistics.

So, I think from a standpoint of not half assing this one, like most founders, they just start get going; I’ve already done that. This time, I wanted to make sure every touch point was covered. We really got it right this time.

What do you think, if you’re looking back at the launch, what were one or two things that you guys absolutely nailed?

Brian: Nothing. I can’t even tell you. I mean, I got on this shit. It was a shit show from the minute I launched this brand. Literally, like from — like we make clothing, obviously. So, let’s talk about the clothing and manufacturing and just product designers, not just not working out. And you’re trying to find the right people there and manufacturers and fabrics.

And then keep moving forward, at one point, we were trying to find an investor and I spent two months on a roadshow trying to meet an investor and then final hour, the investor changed the deal. And I’m like, “Why are you even focused on this?” You know, like most founders try to raise money, it’s like, “What’s the point?”

And then we’re originally like, “What are doing here, whatever?” And it’s just honestly, I couldn’t say anything went well. I think the best of the launch is my team. This company that I’m founding is probably the best I’ve ever put together. I literally have my software engineer is next level, my chief creative officer, also co-founder, Bree, she’s phenomenal, has a great eye behind the camera.

I think we’re the strongest team right now. I think that’s the only thing that went well, is the team; everything else was a shit show.

Alright, let’s talk about how you built that team. When you’re building a team for launch, how are you thinking about who you need? Tell us a little bit about what’s going on in your head.

Brian: Building the team that I have now, honestly, we’re just being out in the scene. Most people think that they have to network on social media and be behind the scenes.

And to be honest with you, every single person that I’ve met, whether it’s selling a big deal, getting an investor, a girlfriend, a partner or whatever, they all come from being out and about. You know, coffee shops.

And I’m not talking nightclubs and bars; nothing good comes from that. I’m talking fitness, yoga studios up at 6 a.m. or at a coffee shop. You kind of want to be where you where you want to be.

It took me six months to do it. But I met, Bree, our chief creative officer, because she owned a past company and I owned a past company and I kept watching her and I said, “You know what? She’d be a perfect fit for this clothing brand that I got on my mind and I’m thinking.”

And then sure as shit, it lined up perfectly where she had and exiting her company and I shot her an Instagram message and then met up for coffee. And next thing you know, I brought her on board as employee number one or partner number one because she co-founded the brand with me.

And then I just kept collecting from there. I mean, every time I meet somebody talented, I figure a way of working with them. And then if we end up doing business together, great. If not, so be it. So, I think I’m just always networking and I’m always out in the scene.

So, Bree is the creative director, right?

Brian: Yeah, she’s chief creative officer.

Why was that an important first hire for you?

Brian: I knew my weaknesses. So, originally, before The Sweat Club was founded, I founded the company called FabCrate.

We were just purely a subscription box company. You subscribe, we send you three piece of clothing for 65 bucks a month. And it had a little bit of a success with that. You know, we scaled up to a million bucks in revenue; absolutely crushed it. We had some speed bumps along the way. Ended up having to pivot that name and then kind of do things differently.

And then this time coming back into like, you know, the most important thing with any brand is content creation. And I knew I wasn’t good at shooting it or creating it. So, I knew that was the strongest thing I needed. And I also needed somebody that understood that my demographic pretty well. And I was multi-tasking the women’s market.

And I know clothing and fashion pretty well; like I can tell you trends and what’s popular in the female community, but I still needed that that that voice.

So, when I when I saw Bree, I saw so much talent. Her brain was just something that I just could never put a price tag on.

So, that’s why I brought her on the team and brought her in as a partner because she’s worth millions, billions, if not that brain. I brought her on board and just said, “You know what? Listen, stay in your lane. That’s what you’re great at. And then throughout the years, let’s learn and evolve and become more of a leader in the company. But in the meantime, just focus on your master of trade and do the creative director role pretty well.”

Incredible. So, you hired for an area that you were weak at and that was a chief creative officer, Bree.

Brian: Yeah. That took me a long time to figure out. And I was always a know it all like, “Oh, I could do that. I could do this.” and I was struggling. And it got to a point where it’s like there’s no way of scaling the company that way.

If you want to make a million dollar company or $2 million company, yeah, for sure, you could do it yourself. But if you want to make 50 or $100 million company, you got to need like a good squad behind you at day one. If you don’t put those foundations there from day one, it’s never going to get easy.

Fab Create, your previous company that you founded and led. How did that help you launch The Sweat Club?

Brian: A lot of failure. It learned me how to make clothing. I got into that because I love tech. My previous company was in the Wi-Fi industry in technology. That’s why it came up.

I exited the business and I’m like, “You know what? I love subscription. I love technology. It’s so scalable. You know, it’s easy money every month” or so I thought.

And I’m like, “How can we make clothing subscription based?” And active wear is like underwear and socks, right? If you’re doing yoga, you’re siting on your bottom all day long and you’re wearing up the leggings or you’re sweating it, if you’re a runner or if you just have a mom that wears clothing, you’re eventually going to wear out of it.

So, I identified that yoga wear was one of the industries that you do need every month. And even if you get 30 outfits in a lifetime, that’s one outfit a day for sweating once a day. So, it really is pretty practical.

So, I launched that business and we took off pretty quick. And I think I just figured it out, man. I mean, the biggest thing I figured out was how to make clothing and merchandise it. I mean, I really figured out how to make a piece of clothing during that business for the customer and sell it. That was the hardest thing for me, as I never had any prior fashion experience.

So, I think going from hospitality to agency marketing to technology, now into a single product where we have to make stuff where it’s on a service backed product, I had to really go out and meet people and pick their brain and learn how to make this stuff.

But the trick was I always acted like I knew how to make it and then they just educated me the more I asked questions. So, they didn’t think they were educating me or they had to charge me for it for their time.

Why not go subscription again?

Brian: We are. So, we launched The Sweat Club fully. It was a lot of things here. So, this is part of the launch. So, we were supposed to launch a subscription based box, everything in The Sweat Club. We saw a subscription aspect to the business that we’re launching next week.

We identified that customers want to see what they’re purchasing. So, we wanted to give them the opportunity to go online and shop and then have that subscription aspect in the back ends.

A lot of what we’re doing is a technology play and data science. I didn’t want to launch something that wasn’t perfect to the — or at least 80 percent there to our consumers, because we only get one shot at getting it right.

Yeah, I like what you just said, that customers want to see what they’re purchasing. How have you learned that that’s important to customers?

Brian: A lot of things that I’ve learned are studying the numbers. I mean, I just literally at nighttime, instead of watching Netflix, I stare at numbers and analytics. I’m sick in the head; I don’t know what it is, but — but when I launched Fab Create, people are always telling me invisible.

You go online, you take a style quiz, then I’d have to try to figure out a way of formulating a formula. Like if you like blacks, I’ll give you and the black outfits. If you like pinks and bright colors, I would give you a more vibrant outfit.

What I was noticing is we had extremely high amount of churn. So, when we sent that outfit out to the consumer, they opened up the box, they didn’t like the outfit. No matter how good our return policy was, the minute they didn’t like the outfit, they cancelled. And when a customer cancelled, we never got them back as a customer.

So, then I put an email. I’d say, “Hey guys, how can we make it better?” I literally just put it out. It was the ugliest text email ever. I said, “Hey, so sorry, blah, blah, blah. We’re having some difficulties with losing you guys. What are we doing wrong?” And our customers said, “We want to see what we’re getting.” And then I’m like, “Okay.”

So, I rolled out a pilot for a beta program where I said, “Okay, we’ll charge every month. Log in and you can see what you have available.” And our churn rate went from 65 percent churn to 19 percent churn.

Wow.

Brian: Yeah. Honestly, it was like that. It was like, “Okay, I’m onto something.” And that was when I was like, “If I’m going to do this, though, I’ll have to raise money” because to manufactured goods, like, “Okay. Wow, we need some money here.”

But yeah, I think the biggest thing there was just studying the numbers and then really identifying that people do want to see what they’re getting and you can’t reinvent the wheel. Consumer used to shop in a retail store, touch things. Now, we just have to make them see it better online. We can’t take that process away.

Tell me a little bit about the manufacturing process and how you learned how to get a product develop. This is not your first time.

Brian: Yeah, I’m still learning. There’s no right or wrong answer. I think time. With product design, you have a lot of time on your side. I think start with why you’re making it and not for design. I think if you focus on why you’re making the garment; whether it’s for the yoga person or the runner or the guy who just wants to feel really good about themselves, I think if you focus on that first, it’ll make it a lot easier.

But from the manufacturer’s standpoint, I think what you need to do, the best tip I can gives any entrepreneur is if you want to be in the business is: line your vendors up right now because the hardest thing in this business is finding the right vendor.

Because in the clothing business, you have 15 different people do one thing. You make a jacket, one manufacturer makes a zipper, one person makes the fabric, and then one person helps you put that all that together and then you’ve another person to the labeling and the tags and then the packaging.

So, if you have to go out and you’re really good at relationships and networking, because without those people, that manufacturing army behind you, you’ll never be able to get anywhere because you’re going to be overpaying prices.

I mean, one question I’ve been getting a lot is, “How do you manage the MOQ’s?” MOQ is the minimum orders when a brand starts. And a lot of brands don’t ever get to market because they’re they can’t afford that 300, 400, 500 MOQ order. You know what I mean?

So, what they forgot to think about is say, “Hey, people are human. Why don’t you go pitch the story to them?” So, when I could not afford those 500 minimal orders, I just went in there saying, “Guys, I’m building a hundred million dollar company. You want to be with me or without me?” And I sold the vision to the owners. I always deal direct with the owners of the company because they have emotion there and they get where I’m coming from.

And that’s how I moved. Every single vendor was able to give me a net terms, “You know, work with me.” “Hey, Brian. Go for it.” They were betting on me. And then I’ve been loyal to them ever since. And I think that was the biggest thing as I just went out there, wherever I had to fly to go meet them, and I say, “Guys, I’m a person; your person. I’m starting out as a business owner. I can’t afford 300 MOQ; your minimum orders. Let’s make this happen and move on.”

From what I’m gathering, it’s really important to get your vendors on board with your vision. It’ll reduce the amount of money that you need upfront to get this product launched. How does that change your approach to financing and funding?

Brian: So, yeah, there’s a lot of things. So, I’ve never really been a big believer of investing or financing from a standpoint, up until I came to a product based company. You know, I’ve always had the service space; technology, software, hospitality, training or agency work. I never actually had that physical product business.

You need financing with a product business because to get it right, you’re working on a six month out calendar. And there’s no way that a young entrepreneur in the business or just getting started can afford six months out because you’re paying for goods, six months out and you’re not selling them till month seven or eight.

So, I think for a financing play, if you’re in this industry, I can’t talk anything else right now, but if you’re in this e-commerce product based industry, figure out a way to cover your nut. If it’s three grand a month, figure out how to cover 3K a month, then go out and try to make a relationship with the vendor to trying to get net terms.

If you cannot get net terms on the product, then I would go out and try to get some financing. And I would always recommend structuring as a convertible loan note. With a convertible loan note, you’re pretty much telling your investor that you’re confident that this is going to work, but you don’t want to cap yourself at a valuation right now at the seed rounds.

So, I think the smartest thing to do is to go out, raise money and raise a little bit of money. Don’t raise too much because a lot of founders go out and they raise five, six million and they blow through it on stupid shit.

I think the best way for a founder to build a hundred million dollar company, is to be poor first. And if they’re poor with your last dollar in the bank, they’re going to make smarter decisions.

And I’ve always been good with that. And anytime I go to ask for money or get money and get financing, it’s always in small batches. And then what I’ll do is, let’s say I get $500 thousand. I’ll take 50 thousand, put that into the working capital account and that’s all I think I have.

And then I have 450 sitting in a separate account in a separate bank that I have to physically go to to access and transfer, just for a mental thing. Because I know if I had 450, that $10 thousand bill doesn’t seem as scary. So, I try to just always stay on budget with things because, hey, listen, that money can run out really fast.

Tell me a little bit about how you’re thinking about the customer experience for Sweat Club. I know you spoke about it earlier. Everything from the website experience, how quickly it loads the unboxing. How are you thinking about that?

Brian: Yeah. So, I spent three to four months sketching this design. So, I did the whole design of the website, then myself software engineer did all the fun stuff from there.

I think from a customer standpoint, it’s got to be first, the speed as the insanely fast. So, when building this site, we needed to build it where we were loading it in seconds. People are so used to Instagram and Tick-Tock and all these fast platforms where you just have it as quick as you’re scrolling. That was one thing.

The next philosophy that I’ve always had that I like read in this guy’s book a long time ago. And it was a guy who — I’m trying to get short. But he owned an agency and Mercedes Benz hired him to make an app on the phone to open up the car.

And then he sat for a month, he went back to Mercedes and you said, “Well, I have nothing for you guys.” Mercedes were like, “I’ll give you a million bucks for this to build this app to open up the car.” And then he was like, “No. Well, why would you want them to take out their phones to open the car? It makes no sense.” He’s like, “What if you just put the technology in the key, put in their pocket and they just open it up without having to bring anything out?” and they’re like, “Oh, sure. That’s a good idea.”

Well, this guy went on to write a book. I forgot the title, the book. But in this book, he said, “The best interface is no interface.” And just thinking about that was like, “Okay, what does it actually mean? Having to get people to download apps and do things is kind of a painless experience.”

So, when I went out and built the website, The Sweat Club, the best interface is no interface; I kept having that in my mind. Like, you know what? The biggest platform right now in the world is Instagram. People know it. They know how to navigate it, why am I trying to reinvent the wheel with Pop-Up pictures and pretty things?

So, what I did is I just tried to build the site around Instagram’s platform. So, if you go to it, you’ll notice I have little Instagram Story Cards at the top where people can swipe and get through this website quickly. And as you scroll, it’s all based on Instagram Cards.

And I did that because the world is used to Instagram. So, why would I want to change their experience to make them think about anything? All I want them to think about is, “Hey, I want to focus my attention on the products and the emotion and everything else from there is all branding.”

So, we really spent a lot of time on the data sites, on the site and to study the traffic and that’s exact what we built. But if we want to keep going on customer experience, I think goes down to every customer that signs up, gets a phone call, “Hey, how are you? This is so-and-so from The Sweat Club. Welcome.” They get a text message. They get a package in two days. We try really hard on working on two-day shipping.

And every package, every piece of garment is hand wrapped with tissue paper. And we don’t use plastic here; we’re sustainable as a company. So, every touch point of the garment, to a degree, is very sustainable. Our packaging is made from cornstarch and biodegradable recycled cardboard and on and on.

And so, I mean, it’s an actual level of caring for the world, but I think as a touch point, we spend an extra two, three dollars per package just to get it right, so a customer feels like going to get that package like, “Yeah. This feels amazing. I’m glad I bought this product.”

What is it that makes it so hard for some people to turn an idea or a dream into reality; to execute on a vision that they have?

Brian: Yeah. Yeah. They care too much. I think there’s a level of ADB that I have. It’s a secret sauce of formula that the trick to winning is to care less*. And now, there’s a there’s an asterisk sign there. You’ve got to care about a degree of your business, but I think — and this happens all the time to my team is like, for example, I had some the team says, “Just leave the office. Just don’t come inside because we’re so burned out from working so hard.”

That you get so close to something that we actually start to care. And the minute you start to care, you stop thinking. And it’s a weird psychology. So, like, for example, when we first started The Sweat Club, we like, “Yeah, The Sweat Club.” It just came so natural; the branding, the name, the mantra, what we want to do.

Then four months into the negative, because owning a business, owning a startup does a lot of negative. You barely see any positive the first year. It’s a lot of putting out fires.

So, then you start to care. And when you start to care, you start suffocating the brain. And then you can’t write advertising content. You forget how to write your why factor. You forget to communicate your customers correctly.

So, a big part of my success is I always cared a little bit less than what people thought of the product, what I’m writing about the advertisement, whatever. I mean, I do care about product design; when but it comes to viewers, is it ever going to be perfect? Never. That legging’s never going to be perfect. That stitch is never going to be perfect.

I mean, my first run for The Sweat Club was supposed to launch. We had these rubber patches on every garment. My first drop was about six thousand units. So, the six thousand units get to our warehouse and there’s a rubber patch at the back and this it says our name on it. Every rubber patch is crooked. And I’m like, “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.” And I’m like this is just another thing of like, “Hey, I signed up for this.”

Like, I laugh, I walk away, I catch some breath and I’m like, “You know what? But I signed up for this” and I’m like, “We’re going to fix this.”

So, I just said, “You know what? Let’s push the launch. Let’s get it fixed. We’ll just send it out for repair.” It costs us a lot of money to repair it; like 12 thousand to repair the goods, but we figured it out.

It’s one of those things that like there’s always going to be shit you going to deal with. So, I think to get it right, to come to market, I think the entrepreneur needs to worry about that nothing’s perfect, ever. Just launch and then iterate as you go and then care less.

If you care less about what you’re doing, like, “Ah, you know, it’s just going to happen. It’s going to course correctly. You know, it’ll happen. It’s okay. It’ll all work out.” You care less about it, you’ll see that the brain will operate on a much higher level because you’re not putting up stress on your body and your minds.

And I think that’s a really secret formula for me. Anything I’ve ever done was like, you know what? I can do it. I know I can do it. And I’m going to do it with ease. And if something happens, okay, it happens. And I’m not going to stress about it. It happened. What do you want me to say?

So, that’s kind of like the secret formula for me. Everybody’s different, but that’s just how I always handled it.

What are some of the marketing channels that you’re depending on in these early days?

Brian: Obviously, we’re heavy on Instagram right now. You know, with any new brand now, there’s a level of burn that I’m experienced with right now. So, we’re experiencing. So, like we’re spending money but we’re not seeing our ROI quite yet, because the brand is new and there’s not too much reviews out there.

So, this week, funny enough, I just mentioned that I have a meeting with a team. We’ve got to go on a big social shift strategy in place. I think we’re going to go, from a non-ROI standpoint, from just purely a search standpoint, most consumers, including myself and you, when we want to buy something, we don’t just buy it right away. We tend to look at it and then do some research or Google it or see a picture.

So, we started spending some advertising dollars, but now we have to pivot it over the influencers, purely not for ROI, just to get our name out there and people wearing the product for content. So, we’re going to go on a 30-day kick where we’re going to flood the market with content on every platform and try to generate user generated content and reviews, just so our consumers, when spending on ads on Instagram or Facebook, will be able to search something or see something.

Because right now we’re spending a lot for acquisition; we’re not seeing any profit yet. So, now we need to figure out how to do that influencer stuff a little bit stronger.

What are the channels you’re relying on right now?

Brian: Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest; we’re going to get into it shortly. I mean, it’s hard to focus on all channels. I mean, Tick-Tock is on our radar. I don’t have a big enough team yet to get that that Tick — Tock channel going, in terms of like creating videos every day.

So, right now, we’re just mastering Instagram and Facebook, always trying to — at least Instagram we’re mastering and then we’re going to pivot out, we’re going to hire somebody around Pinterest or Tick-Tock, somebody that’s really gets it and that uses it, in the next month or so, just to help us scale there. We can track the network.

Right now, you’re relying a lot on Facebook, Instagram, pivoting, then to Pinterest and then launching influencer marketing.

Brian: Correct. Their stuff and we’re talking about it. I mean, we’re trying to and we have a lot more things in our pipeline that we’re launching this year because The Sweat Club, the reason for the name is not just clothing. We’re launching yoga studios in 2020, we’re launching some supplement hydration stuff that we’re working on right now.

We’ll working on some cool things like the goal for us is to become like the Amazon for fitness junkies; that’s my vision. So, you come to thesweatclub.com and we got you covered for all things sweaty.

So, that’s kind of the goal of the brand, but in terms of everything else, you’re going on Instagram or Facebook and stuff like that.

What’s your approach to growing The Sweat Club in the future?

Brian: For me, I’m really trying to make this a media channel where people are very motivated when they get our clothing or join our club. So, for me, a very strong passion and why wake up every day to try to get the brand’s mission and values to light up with (a) clothing is a byproduct we need. When you think of The Sweat Club, they think, “I need to get out there and break a sweat once a day. I need to get moving, because this is what betters my life.”

So, I think, as a long term vision of the brand is I really, really, really, really want to make an impact for changing the way people feel, in terms of how they think and how they work out. And no matter what it is, I really want that to happen.

So, not sure how it’s going to happen exactly. I’ve got a lot of creative direction to go, but that’s what gets me up in the morning is to really motivate people to feel better about themselves, train harder and really protect that mental state of minds.

And I’ve been through it where just sweating once a day of fitness to change my life. And I’m not the biggest dude. I’m in shape, but I’m like going to the gym and going for an hour a day and getting in that sauna and hitting that really strong pillar of my life. It keeps me sane.

So, I want to try to spread the vision of that company and hopefully, we can grow. Our customer base will grow based on that vision, but it’s going to be hard to tell that story.

I’ve heard a couple definitions of D2C (Direct-To-Consumer). What do you think is at the core of the term?

Brian: I mean, the core of it, from investors standpoint, investors love direct-to-consumer because we own the customer data and the margins are higher. So, if you want to talk on a logical level, yeah, that’s what that means.

But I think right here, our D2C, it just means that we don’t work on a calendar. I mean, in the clothing business, one D2C business, which is typically wholesale business, they work on a calendar. Let’s say Nike. Nike works on a calendar, meaning that they’re designing every quarter and then shipping it out at a certain date to Nordstrom’s or whatever.

We can do whatever we want. What I love about direct-to-consumer is there are no rules; it’s like there’s no speed limit. We can drop a pair of shorts whenever we want to drop a pair of shorts. In a non-D2C world, it’s against the industry law to drop shorts in December. Well, says who? Well, somebody is going to buy shorts to go workout in the gym.

So, when I look at direct-to-consumer, I think no rules and we don’t work against a calendar and we’re able to do whatever we want to do and do it whenever we want to do it. So, I think that’s a pretty cool thing. I think that that’s why you’re D2C. That’s what I think.

What brand or founder do you think we should talk to next?

Brian: My boy, Chris; really good friends with him. He owns a company called Sell Away Coffee. And that’s a good plug for him. I’ve been a massive fan of the brand from day one. He pretty much is just crushing it. It’s cold brew coffee. Good plug there for him.

The respect that he gives a shit. There’s no ego. He’s not doing it for the money. He’s doing because he purely loves coffee. And it’s a great product.

So, I think you guys should talk to him just because I love replenishment. I think clothing is timeless. It’s never going anywhere. But I love the replenishment game; whether it’s coffee, toilet paper, supplements. I’m addicted to that. I think it’s a really cool business model. I actually would love to be a potential investor to a lot of brands like that; whether making acquisitions or physical investing.

But yeah, his name is Chris Vetter from Sell Away Coffee. Check him out. He’s got a really good thing going. I’m actually speaking with him next month at an event, but he’s just a just a great guy. Such a humble founder.

Thank you so much for joining us here today.

Brian: Thank you, Roger. I appreciate that.

If you haven’t already, go to thesweatclub.com to see what we’ve been talking about. That’s thesweatclub.com. Thanks for listening. This is the DTC Growth Show.