Slow, Revisited
This summer, we wrote about Ridge CEO Sean Frank’s “Consumer is Boring” newsletter.
From that: “It is honestly so slow and boring, the best analogy would be farming. Farming isnt explosive. There is no WINNING in farming. Crops take as long as they take to grow. And brands take as long as they take to build. Try to rush it, you lose the farm.”
In other words, do the work to take what the market gives you. Don’t try to take more, though.
We were reminded of Frank’s newsletter earlier this week, when Bombas cofounders David Heath and Randy Goldberg were on Modern Retail’s podcast.
From Heath:
“We were never the brand that was like let’s go out and raise $150 million and try to be the biggest company as quickly as possible. We look at the brands that we admire — the Nikes, the Lulus, Under Armours, Patagonias of the world. These brands have all been around for 20, 30, 40 years, and they’ve built brick by brick every single year. And they never aspired to be the fastest biggest company as quickly as possible; I think a lot of the DTC brands over the last decade that have come — and mostly have gone — approached it with that approach. And that’s not how you build good long-term brand and company value. You’ve got to earn the trust of the consumer by being very consistent. And consistency is something that I think we’re very, very focused on as we think about every new strategy that we deploy.”
There’s that line of thinking again.
This, it appears, is the biggest “trend” in DTC: Ridge has a nine-figure wallet business. Bombas was profitable as early as their third year and did $250M in revenue in 2021 (the last publicly reported figure). Rhone’s cofounders, in October, announced they were buying out their investors and thinking about a “50-year plan, not a five-year plan.”
Go long. It might be slower, but you end up bigger in the end.