Introducing Bodacious Brands

About Preston and Tom:

Preston and Tom co-founded Chubbies Shorts, a direct-to-consumer brand creating proper length men’s shorts (read: short shorts), which they profitably grew to (undisclosed) revenue and ultimately sold for 9+ figures to Solo Brands. At Chubbies they led all things Digital including end-to-end Marketing, E-Commerce, and Data & Analytics. Tom stayed on with Solo Brands as Chief Digital Officer to take that company public (NYSE:DTC) and learn a ton from the incredible Solo Brands team and portfolio. Tom and Preston are lifelong learners who believe deeply in the powers of humility, empathy, connection, and mathematics.

Welcome!

Welcome friends and soon-to-be-friends to Bodacious Brands! A place where Preston and I will be writing longer form content, mostly to flesh out our thoughts on brand building & retail (maybe some interesting side tangents here and there!), with hopefully a dose of something you all can take away to try at your brands or with your businesses.

Bodacious???

First off - Why Bodacious Brands? To be completely honest with you - because it’s fun. It’s fun to say, it’s meaning is fantastic (bold + audacious = bodacious), it features prominently in the Keanu Reeves classic Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. And with so much seriousness out there in the world, we’re hoping that when you check out Bodacious Brands, you get a bit of a smile on your face and remember, in the words of Bill S. Preston, Esquire (just realized his last name is Preston - double win) - “Be excellent to eachother.”

And while there are always challenges along the way, creating something that brings positive vibes to others (which is generally the goal of creating a brand) is super fun, an awesome gift, and a pretty amazing and joyful thing to do with our time on this earth.

Our Newsletter:

Now, onto what you can expect from this newslettery sorta thing we’re doing and why we’re here in the first place.

In our time building brands for the past 15 or so years, we saw many ups and downs. We saw unprecedented growth, and took some major lumps.

We had low moments. We cut our salaries to $0. We had layoffs (with an “s”). We had doubts our company would survive.

We also had very high moments. We saw huge growth. We sold our business for a great outcome for our team and our investors. We took our company public. We built bonds among our team and community that will last for a lifetime.

And through all of that, we really started to see a pernicious, pervasive, and wildly recurring problem in brand building - both in our own brands and in catching up with the other brand builders in the direct-to-consumer ecosystem.

The Problem We’re Tackling:

This problem we saw was that even for the most successful direct to consumer brands out there, your Allbirds, your Bonobos - the posterchildren of DTC ecomm- these winners typically achieve only topline growth or profitability, not both.

And even when one or both of these are achieved, it's short-lived.

Case in point - the vast majority of VC-backed public DTC e-commerce businesses are now worth less than the total amount they have raised.

Let me repeat, valued at less than the total amount they have raised.

Long-term profitable growth has been hard, if not impossible.

Why Should You Listen to Us?

Now, many of you at this point are likely saying “Duh - this sh*t is hard” and you’re absolutely right. However in our time building brands at Chubbies and then again at Solo Brands, we think we might have some useful advice on how to approach this massively difficult problem.

We are some of the gray hairs in DTC/ecommerce. We were the first brand on Shopify to move onto this new tier afforded to fast-growing merchants called Shopify Plus (after haranguing them for more support, and more features, for years). We were some of the first advertisers on Facebook. We were some of the first advertisers on Instagram. On Snapchat, on Tiktok. We were among some of the first brands to create a real dialogue with our community that resulted in a massive outpouring of UGC that drove a huge portion of our content engine. And we were also some of the first in-house DTC e-commerce marketing teams building real, genuine content to grow and engage their audience.

And, mostly by sheer dumb luck and a ridiculous level of scrappiness (content is cheaper if we produce it ourselves - distribution is cheaper if we can get our organic content to go viral), we found ourselves at the center of the toolkit that defined modern brand-building.

We were also the canary in the coal mine of profitability. The canary was used in the coal mines because of its sensitivity to the external environment, thus making it a great early indicator of problems for miners. And there’s not much more sensitive in the world of DTC e-commerce than a men’s fashion business slanging tiny men’s shorts.

Around 2016 we realized our fast-topline-growth-but-no-profitability strategy was just not going to work. The broader fundraising environment had dried up completely for our particular sorta business (see again - men’s fashion, tiny shorts), so we had to make massive changes to the way we were operating or we were going to be underwater.

We made them. It hurt. It took a couple of years.

But within two years we got to profitability. Within three we got to healthy profitability AND growth. Then, with the pandemic, and extremely healthy overall business dynamics as a result of our efforts, we got to very healthy profitability and excellent growth that was sustainable.

Our Content:

Through this journey, we documented all that we learned about how to get profitable and do so while 1) maintaining a highly engaged and growing brand, and 2) building for long-term sustained growth.

So that is what, in turn, we plan to share with all who care to take note of our little piece of the internet over here. We took a TON of lumps and, if we can, we’d love to help y’all avoid some of those mistakes on your individual journeys to long-term profitable growth.

Our content aspires to be:

• useful

• actionable

• understandable

• valuable

If is it not - please tell us. We have thick skin.

Our Reason Why

Finally, the question of why take our time to do this. Why spend all this time thinking and writing on this problem?

Preston and I both come from families where the primary breadwinner in our households was a small business owner. Preston’s mother was an absolute rockstar real estate agent in the Tucson area in AZ (BEAR DOWN), and my father was a franchisee of a handful of Wendy’s restaurants in Bakersfield, CA (famously the birthplace of legends like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens). By the way, that whole thumb in the chili thing was a hoax, and Wendy’s has the absolute finest burgers on the planet don’t @me.

Due to this, and to what we’ve seen in our history with Chubbies and Solo Brands, we deeply understand and fully believe in the transformative power that entrepreneurship wields to improve the existences of all the families it touches. We believe in small businesses' power to create a deep, deep sense of community among their employees and customer base. We believe that successful entrepreneurship allows for a massive amount of freedom for all involved - both in lifestyles, but also in creating brand new ways of working. And we also believe that truly anyone can be an entrepreneur, that truly anyone can create emergent and visceral brands, and ultimately take these same life-changing steps that we saw our parents take and that we took in our careers.

But we also know that it’s very very hard. The odds are stacked against small business owners. They have to constantly do more with less, innovate to survive, and outcompete larger enterprises at every turn.

We hope to be an arrow in the quiver of small business owners and entrepreneurs to help them survive and, ultimately, thrive. To us, the future of retail looks a whole lot better when there is a huge diversity of brands, supporting a huge diversity of entrepreneurs, all finding great success in their own right.

And so, my friends, that is what we hope to provide to you all.

Thank you so incredibly much for taking the time with us today, and we look forward to hearing from you (hopefully excessively) on how we can improve, and what topics we can focus on in the future to help you improve your incredible brands.

Bodaciously yours,

Preston and Tom

—
Thanks for reading. If this post was helpful, here are 4 things you can do right now to 

• Get more strategic + tactical nuggets on brand building, 

• Tactics on connecting brand building to financial impact, 

• And specific things you can do to build strong emotional connections with your audience: 

1) Subscribe to the Brand Builders podcast on YouTube or Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 
2) Apply to join our brand builders slack community (suuuuper small group exclusively for brand founders and operators), 
3) Follow Tom and Preston on Linkedin for regular posts on this stuff
4) And heck, share this with someone