Muse

Before we get into the episode, thanks to our presenting sponsor, Anthropic. They make Claude an AI built for the problems that take real thinking, research, strategy, planning, and making sense of a lot of moving pieces. Give it a try for the next thing you can't quite stop turning over in your head. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai.hibt. support for today's episode comes from square the easy way for business owners to take payments book appointments manage staff and keep everything running in your business without running yourself into the ground in my neighborhood there's a shop that sells incredible locally made food fresh breads prepared meals sauces jams all from producers within an hour's drive and they use Square. And as a customer, I love the seamless payment, quick checkout, and easy receipts. Square's intuitive software and hardware simplifies everything. You can sell anywhere, in store, online, or mobile, while managing inventory and tracking sales in real time. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business, with none of the contracts or complexity. And why wait? Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware at square.com slash go slash built. That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash built. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Do you want clear, transparent information about the ingredients in your favorite beverages? I do too. That's why today's sponsor, American Beverage, launched Good to Know, a website with tons of information about your favorite beverages. No spin or judgment, just the facts, so you can decide. Juices, sodas, even seltzers. Sometimes I look at the ingredients and say, what is that? I can't even pronounce it. And that's when I go to goodtoknowfacts.org. At GoodToKnowFacts.org, you can check out more than 140 common beverage ingredients. You can find out what they're called, how they're used, and how they're reviewed for safety. Now you can get the facts about what's in your drinks without the chaos of random Google searches. All of this puts you in control because you know what's best for you and your family. So if you want information about the ingredients in your favorite drink without any spin, goodtoknowfacts.org is a great place to start. Visit goodtoknowfacts.org for more information. Hello and welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. Each week, I'm joined by a legendary

founder, a former guest on the show who will help me try to help you. And if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-433-1298. Leave us a one minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. All right, let's get to it. Joining me this week is the legendary Kenneth Cole, founder of the fashion brand, of course, of the same name. Kenneth, it's so great to have you back on the show.

Thank you, Guy. You just reminded me that it's been a few more years than I thought it was.

A few years. You were back on the show in 2020 when you told us the incredible story of launching the brand, Kenneth Cole. You actually grew up watching your dad run a women's shoe factory in Brooklyn, and then you branched out on your own. You launched your own shoe business from the back of a 40-foot truck parked in Midtown Manhattan. I remember the story you told about doing that during fashion week or some fashion thing going on, and you almost got ticketed and towed. You grew that brand into, of course, an iconic fashion brand. You took the company public, then you bought it back from your investors and shareholders. It's an amazing story. And as always, if anyone listening hasn't heard that episode of How I Built This, we will put a link to it in the podcast description, so check it out. And Kenneth, you built this brand at a time, you know, really when brands were built through department stores and print ads and physical retail. And today, a lot of brands are often built through TikTok and creators, and they may not be sustainable. They may not last as long as Kenneth Cole has lasted, but that's how they're built. What do you think younger founders in this industry misunderstand or don't really fully understand about what actually creates a lasting

brand you know when social media was kind of came into its own i was petrified that you know we now had all these competitors that had access to our customers from all around the world but then i came to realize that we also have access to all of theirs So, you know, everybody today can tell a story and everybody today can find an audience. But you have to find a unique narrative and you have to find a voice that distinguishes itself from all the other voices because to your point, there's a lot of noise out there. You know, I used to think when I started my business that my goal was just to find people to sell stuff to. I came to realize that my goal really was to sell them again and again because there aren't, it's not just selling stuff. I have to create a fulfilling experience for our customers, and they have to want to come back. So that's the goal. But it starts, I think, with understanding emotionally where your customer is. And I also learned early on in my career that my goal is not to tell them what they should wear. It's to understand what they want and give it to them, but not how they expect it. That's the challenge. And it's a nuance, but it's not insignificant.

Your name, obviously, your identity is wrapped up in your brand. It is Kenneth Cole. When people hear that name, I know over the years you've had an idea of what you want them to think or feel. How has that changed? Like when people hear Kenneth Cole now, what do you want them to think or imagine?

You know, I think that the man and the brand are somewhat interchangeable. I've come to realize that. And I don't take either very personally. You know, I built a business and the film just came, there's a documentary that just came out that kind of tells a little bit about the story more of its social impact than about its fashion. It talks about the intersection of cause and commerce and how the two that together you create something greater than the sum of its parts. And I do think that all businesses, they need to service the customer, not just when they're in their stores, but when they're not, when they're in their lives. A government today is neither willing or able to service so many of the social needs that it used to in the past. And I do believe it's incumbent upon us to do a lot of that.

You guys were pioneers in this whole space, right? In the 80s, it was about AIDS when that was still controversial. I mean, you had ads calling for research into AIDS, and more recently, and you started to do this, I think, when we last spoke, a focus on mental health.

And mental health, I think, it affects everybody. Because if it isn't you, it's somebody you love, somebody in the family, in the community, in the workplace. So here was an opportunity to talk about something that few were. So I built a coalition of 50 of the nation's largest mental health service providers, mentalhealth.org, if you want to look at it. Our goal is to give them a platform and then ultimately connect needs to resources. And it's real. It's not a marketing tool. It's something that's truly embedded in the business model. And you'll see that in the documentary if you see it. And we run the not-for-profit like a business. And we run business with a heart uniquely. It adds value to everything that we do. And I can bring my commitment to social purpose and activism to the business. and then i've got something that's greater than it could be otherwise so it's all very gratifying

all right well ken we've got callers standing by waiting on the edge for advice from from you and a little bit from me i hope uh so you ready to take our first call careful what they ask for yes all right let's bring our first caller and welcome to the advice line you are on with kenneth cole please tell us your name where you're calling from and just a brief bit about your

business. Hi, Guy. Hi, Kenneth. Great to be on with you both. My name is Matt Jacobs. I'm the co-founder of Pedestrian Project, and I'm calling in today from Astoria, New York. Pedestrian is a modern wellness brand focused exclusively on the hardest working yet least loved part of the body, our feet. And we are on a mission to inspire everybody to care more about and for their feet with a line of targeted topical products, hardworking hydrators, and wellness accessories.

Okay, awesome, Matt. Thanks for calling in. So you are, you sell like lotions and balms, creams for feet.

Yeah, so it's a mixture of moisturizers, creams, lotions, pain relief. We also have a salt soak. And then recently we've expanded the line with accessories. We've got a foot file, reflexology balls and a ball of foot insert as well.

I love that. We are on our feet all the time. And you know, they don't get the love and attention they deserve. How long have you had this business going?

So we've been in market for a little bit over three years, and it's going pretty well. So we primarily launched e-commerce, a mix of D2C and Amazon, and have recently expanded our retail presence as well. So we're now nationwide with Sprouts and continuing to see growth within the business.

What are your sales? What were your sales last year?

Yes, we did a little over $500,000 last year. Fantastic. And this is your full-time job? No, I still do a little bit of consulting on the side. So we're bootstrapping the business. And so probably readying ourselves for going out and maybe looking for some institutional funding. But we primarily focus. on this and I'm excited for it to be 100% my focus in the near future. And before we get to

your question, what makes, I mean, there are of course brands out there that make products for feet. What makes what you guys are doing different or unique or yeah. Yeah. Foot care,

interestingly, is kind of the last category in the personal care world that hasn't gone through a modern brand evolution. So if you think about how much we invest in skincare and wellness and sleep and all of these adjacent categories, they've all kind of matured and innovated. And foot care has unfortunately been left in the dark ages, still dominated by a hundred year old legacy brand. Products are full of chemicals. Positioning is still super out of touch. So what we've brought to the market is a more modern brand, clean formulas, plant-based, super efficacious. And we're trying to shift, and this is part of my question, the category a bit from reactive problem solution to more of a proactive component of the overall wellness routine.

So the question is?

Yeah. So to ground the question, I think the struggle or the debate that we're having internally is around balancing going for a share of the existing category. So $4 billion in the US today, or do we actually invest in marketing and education to grow the category outright and drive the importance of foot wellness as part of our overall wellness?

Got it. Okay. Before I bring Kenneth in, just a quick question. The big brands here, like the huge massive brands are like Goldbond or Dr. Scholl's?

Dr. Scholl's, Goldbond, O'Keefe. What's also interesting about foot care is there's a lot of players who own a very niche sub-segment. So Loterman owns Athlete's Foot, Carousel owns Fungal Nail, but nobody has really established a holistic kind of proactive wellness approach

to the category. Okay. Got it. Okay. Kenneth Cole, I want to bring you in. Thoughts, questions,

comments for that yeah so the place i initially go which is a quote that i love which is people will sometimes remember what you said and did but they'll never forget how you made them feel i often say in the shoe business everything you wear affects how you look but shoes uniquely also affect disproportionately how you feel yeah so if you talk if somehow you can communicate some emotional relationship to the individual below the knees i think that could be very very

powerful. Yeah, totally agree. It's actually, the foot care category is still pretty stigmatized. So it's always the back corner of the drugstore and it's dimly lit and you leave kind of feeling embarrassed. And our perspective is that it's really about celebrating feet and talking about the importance of caring for them since they do so much for us. Yeah, we don't want to be defeated,

pun intended. Yeah, a lot of puns in this world. I think we don't celebrate as a society, as a community foot care. But I think part of it also is how do you articulate the relationship between cause and effect? And if you can just, from a business standpoint, you can show impact. This is what it was and this is what it will be. It's much easier to get people to want to cross the lease line in effect and metaphorically and to want to click in and click through and to invest more and help you tell your story. At the end of the day, it's more about getting people to want to tell your story and then the rest of it happens on its own absolutely and i was just

to touch on something you said earlier around that intersection of cause and commerce i think the project part of us is hoping to inspire more people to live more of their life on foot and come together on foot and so that's something that we're hopefully focused on too in terms of meetups and run clubs and walking guides we're big believers that uh foot care is actually largely tied to overall physical wellness and mental wellness so very inspired kenneth by what you're doing as well

You know, one of the things that my head goes right away to is footwear brands. And of course, we're talking to a footwear legend here. So Kenneth, for a moment, just close your ears because I'm going to talk about like zero drop shoes. You know, you want to wear the Kenneth Coles when you go to dinner. But like, you know, a lot of people are wearing barefoot shoes, right? Because they feel like it strengthens the muscles in their feet. And there's some evidence to suggest that it does. I wonder whether there's something there. You know, we're talking about people who are more attuned to foot health, foot strength. I wonder whether there's some sort of collaboration you could do, even with a smaller brand. You know, we've had smaller barefoot shoe brands on the advice line, for example, insole brands, for example. I wonder whether there's something to that, whether you've explored that.

Yeah, we definitely have a little bit. My wife is actually a marathon runner, and I think there's huge opportunities to unlock those channels. And as it relates to kind of the education and category expansion side of things, we're looking at runners, hikers, teachers, nurses, people who are on their feet for their profession or their passion. And we think there's a huge opportunity there, just kind of counterbalancing the investment that goes into introducing people to a behavioral change versus kind of competing for the share of what exists today on shelf.

You know, Matt, one thought I had was because your question was about, you know, we want to educate consumers about this wellness space around feet, but also people just don't think about it. They think of Gold Bond or whatever Burt's Bees, whatever brand they buy. And I think I would think that right now you probably still want to bias towards just conversion, which is like Amazon searches and you're in Sprout. So just selling through retailers. And as you really gain more and more traction, you want to layer in the narrative, right? you want to layer in the sort of the content and the brand voice and partnerships or, you know, maybe you've got some more cash to work with influencers. Yeah, absolutely. Do you see a way, a sort of a window to connect a product like this to fashion, right? To beauty, right? Where, like, I'm just kind of spitballing, but almost a campaign that would say, like, be proud of your feet. Yeah, we've talked about a little bit. I know you guys were talking about

TikTok is a new media channel, but even kind of like feet on the street interviews where we ask people to show us their feet. But there is definitely some skittishness. It's something

that we want to de-stigmatize. You know, we also just, not to avoid the opportunity to be shamelessly self-promotional, but we have a brand called Gentle Souls, which is built on comfort. And for the most part, they have flaxseed insoles and orthotic. But there's a story about the attributes and the unique user proposition and what makes these shoes special so maybe we

could figure out how to work together would love that yeah i love that's amazing and what an amazing idea matt jacobs hey you you never know there might be a collaboration with kenneth cole down the road good luck the brand is called pedestrian project thanks so much for calling in thank you

both really appreciate the time thanks man good luck to you thank you we're gonna take a quick

break, but when we come back, another caller, another question, and another round of advice. I'm Guy Raz. Stick around. You're listening to The Advice Line on How I Built This. Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. I've been using Claude when I'm prepping for interviews, and it's become one of those tools that helps me get out of the messy middle faster. I can be looking at a founder's timeline, trying to understand what happened when, which early decisions mattered, what the real turning points were, and where the story actually starts. And instead of just giving me a quick summary, Claude helps me work through the material and find the thread, the thing that connects where someone started to where they ended up. And that's what I love about it. Claude doesn't just give me answers. It helps me think through the problem and organize what I already know and get to better questions. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. And now with Cowork, you can use Claude to help with the operational work that piles up too. Point it at a folder on your computer or connect tools like Google Drive, Gmail, and Slack. Describe what you need, and it can help organize files, build spreadsheets, draft reports from scattered notes, and queue up tasks so you can come back to finished work. So whether you're in deep research, prepping for a conversation, thinking through strategy, or just trying to hand off the busy work that slows everything down, Claude helps you keep moving. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai slash h-i-b-t. They say that every day your business is late to AI, you fall two days behind. But how do you keep up when the competition is only moving faster? With NetSuite Next. NetSuite Next is the next huge leap in how business gets done. Because AI is built into everything you do. It automatically provides custom insights throughout your day, while AI agents work alongside you to solve problems and handle routine work. And anytime you have a question about anything, ask, just like you're having a conversation with a colleague. If I needed to manage HR, commerce, inventory, CRM, financials, I would use NetSuite Next. Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, it's time for NetSuite Next, where your business meets AI. For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures,

go to netsuite.ai slash built. Built for every industry, ready for every boardroom, netsuite.ai slash built. Whether you're... starting a website from the ground up or thinking about a complete overhaul, Framer is a complete website platform that can help launch and keep on improving your site in one place. Thousands of businesses from early stage startups to Fortune 500s are choosing to build their websites in Framer, where changes take minutes instead of days. Framer is the pro site builder for creators, teams, businesses, anyone that wants a professional site and cares enough to get every detail right. You can close the gap between AI generated ideas and a ready to launch website with Framer's agents. Agents and humans work together to make your site work. Agents bring speed and scale while you 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 slash built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash built for 30% off framer.com slash built. Rules and restrictions may apply. Welcome back to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz and my guest today is the founder of the iconic fashion brand Kenneth Cole. All right, let's bring in our next caller. Welcome to the advice line. You are on with Kenneth Cole. Please tell us your name, where you're calling

from and a little bit about your business. Hi, Guy. Hi, Kenneth. My name is Emma Fekwade. I'm calling from Toronto, Canada. I am the founder and fashion engineer of Israel Akabla. We are women's clothing brand, bringing more personality to the minimal aesthetic. And our pieces are heavily inspired by my background in engineering. And we offer a range of dresses, separates,

outerwear, all produced in Toronto. Amazing. Emma, welcome to the show. So you are based in Toronto and you've got this fashion brand, Israella Kobla. I'm looking at the website now. And tell me a little bit about the brand, who do you design for? What kind of apparel do you

make? Yeah, absolutely. So I'd like to say our pieces are the perfect mix of that minimal, but feminine, but bold aesthetic. And I think a lot of fashion brands, they tend to lean into one of those, but we found the perfect mix of all of that. So we have pieces that have this thoughtful asymmetry, you know, bold kind of silhouettes and details. And what I found when I've been doing trunk shows and met with our customers is that there's a level of familiarity in our styles, but we bring something truly unique and different that they appreciate too.

Tell me a little bit about when you started this brand.

Yeah, so I started just before the pandemic. So towards the end of 2019, and then there was maybe a year or two of downtime, but I really used the pandemic to network and get the brand out there and really solidify kind of our business model and pricing strategy. And then in 2021, we launched with Hudson's Bay through their marketplace, eventually managed to scale that and getting to three of their stores, including their flagship location. Unfortunately, they have gone bankrupt now. But in 2023, we also launched with Nordstrom. And so they right now are our biggest retail wholesale partnership.

And you're also selling D2C online?

Yes. And we sell D2C as well, but I'd say the wholesale is the predominant part of our revenue.

Like roughly what percentage? Over 80, 70%?

Yeah. So I'd say a solid 85% is wholesale and then the remaining 15 D to C.

Okay. And can you give us a sense of what your sales were last year?

We were just under about 400K.

Got it. Okay. Before we dive in further, by the way, you sound like you must be from like Yorkshire or Northern England. I'm trying to pinpoint the accent.

Yeah. So I was born and raised in London, but then we lived in Preston, so Northwest England. And then I spent a few years in Ghana before moving to Canada. So I've got a mishmash of all of the accents.

All right. All right. Cool. So before we get to Kenneth, what's your question?

Yeah. So we've had really great kind of traction with Nordstrom. We've been in eight of their doors and we just shipped our fifth season with them. And when we originally launched, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to leverage and scale into new markets and also use it as an opportunity to grow our D2C. But I'm finding that that hasn't translated the way I expected it to. So I'm really trying to figure out what the disconnect is and how to build a more repeatable growth model for both our wholesale partnerships, but also our direct channels as well.

Got it. Okay, Kenneth, I'd like to bring you in. Please meet Emifa.

Hi, Emifa. How are you? Hi. Congratulations.

business you've built. Thank you. So I'd love to understand a little bit more about where you're sourcing the product and what your margins are. A wholesale business has its benefits because you can sell product at scale and you can get it out to the market and you can leverage their distribution networks in theory. But you also have to have the margins to enable that because they need to take a full margin. You need to get your margin. Everybody needs to ultimately pay their bills um so it's a different structure and if for some reason it doesn't work you know the consumer proposition is not as enticing theory because the product probably needs to be a little more expensive but maybe there's enough you bring into it that justifies the incremental pricing i'd love you to speak to that for a second and also are you making money

yes we are making money and i think one thing that has helped us is that we make all of our pieces in Toronto we make a lot in-house as well I have a small production team in-house and then we partner with other factories in the city and because everything is local we have the flexibility so we don't need to meet certain minimums and things like that which allows us to respond to the demand from Nordstrom for example so in terms of selling wholesale our margins they vary between 35% and 50%. And then obviously we plan for them to have a 60% markup on top of that. So we are able to make money that way, I think, because of our flexibility.

Great. So, and then if you can keep your, if you have to own inventory, it's very hard. Right. Because you have to anticipate the market. You have to anticipate what the needs are going to be to the degree they're going to want, what product and what size and what color, which can be difficult especially in a wholesale business because you have to operate also much further in advance of the market than you do in the d2c direct to consumer right as again you know you know this probably maybe better than i do even but that is that's what you got to balance and the wholesale world is getting smaller right now we're seeing a lot of you saw what happened with sacks and hudson bay to your point and i don't know if you're going to find a lot of growth opportunities in the short term, what we used to talk about as being wholesale. And if you have a direct relationship with the consumer, you run the show. You can tell the story you want on your terms to the degree you want to tell it. And you have more flexibility. You can work closer to the seasons. Hopefully in an ideal world, you just make what you sell. You can make the supply to meet the exact demand. That's the optimal business model. You have way less risk, way less exposure.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what I viewed our wholesale partnership and why I wanted to replicate that in other markets as a kind of short term marketing strategy and a long term way of acquiring those customers directly. Because, for example, when we were with Hudson's Bay, a lot of our best customers in Canada, they discovered us through their marketplace. so to me it seems like a great opportunity to get the brand out there you know we're in eight locations in Nordstrom across the country so east west south and the amount of work and the money and the resources it would take for us to be in those places individually I thought that it would be a great opportunity through Nordstrom kind of use that as our strategy but that's the area that isn't translating the same way. And I'm unsure if there's something I could be doing. I've done trunk shows, I've put QR codes, even in our e-commerce packaging when we ship it, and people aren't just kind of taking the bite. But we are selling really well in those stores. So I'm really just trying to understand what I might be missing. I have a thought for you, MFA, which is the

wholesale side is not performing as much as a marketing channel as you'd hoped. It's more of distribution channel. And you could continue that, but the danger is that you're going to build a business that grows revenue without actually building the brand. And that's really sounds like that's what I would agree. That's what you want to focus on. You want to have a Israel, a Kobla, you want it to be a brand, right? But at the same time, you said 80, 85% of your revenue is coming from wholesale. I wonder if you can kind of split this in half for a while, which is, in a sense, could you, I mean, you mentioned putting QR codes in the direct to consumer sales, but could you, you know, when people are going to Nordstrom or wherever they're going to buy your dresses, they're thinking I'm going to Hudson's Bay to buy this dress. I'm not going to, they're not thinking I'm going to go online, but I wonder if you could add a storytelling card. I'm looking at your website. You have a compelling story. You're British born Ghanaian fashion designer. You have a really cool story that you've told on your website about being an engineer and how you

you became a fashion designer and what the brand stands for. And I wonder if you could start with something like that where maybe even a registration QR code where people could register for repairs or care, which enables you to start to collect more information and data from those shoppers at Nordstrom or wherever they're buying it and build a direct connection with them in that way as you are also trying to build out the D to C side? In other words, can you use the wholesale distribution to kind of surreptitiously start to build that connection by asking consumers to register for exclusive drops or things like that?

Nordstrom's, by the way, is very sophisticated in that regard. They're very careful. They're not going to build a following and then just hand it off to the vendor. If they can avoid it, they will. So you just have to know that. Whatever you do has to be in their interest to the degree it's also in yours. And to the degree you can create brand loyalty through their platform, everybody wins. But you can't easily go around them.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what I did attempt to do with the QR codes with a bit of more information about the brand. It was actually Nordstrom's e-com packaging. but maybe trying that in store as well and adding because we do add our as well as our Norsham codes we do add our own personal codes but taking it a level further with that kind of storytelling element is something I definitely try. Because you want to be able to explain

what you stand for emotionally. Absolutely. You want for people to think of this brand and to

think of something specific. Yeah definitely I'll see what else I can do and get creative with as well and try and capture that audience and recapture that audience i should say so my other

one other quick thought that i also uh had mfa is that it feels like you're doing a lot of things even you're even speaking about it as being minimum but also bold and storytelling is hard especially if it's not succinct i mean i think maybe if you had you know a real clear point of difference in the marketplace and you didn't try to be everything to everybody you might find it

easier to resonate yeah I definitely can I try and be succinct and you know I think ultimately we are redefining minimalism and but sometimes I found people didn't understand what that meant when we use that terminology so I swapped it to bringing more personality because a lot of times people will see when they think of minimalism, they think gray and oversized. And we're not that, but we have the essence of minimalism. Emma Foucaulte, the brand is called Israel

Acobla Fashion Brand. Good luck. Thank you for calling in. Keep us posted.

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. So Kenneth, I mean, I'm curious, would you, I mean, you had stores, standalone stores at one point. In a case like this, when you've got a sort of an up and coming designer, still small, but wanting to kind of make their name. I mean, is there value in, if you can, opening up a brick and mortar boutique in a place like Toronto where, you know, it's expensive or Vancouver where it costs a lot to get a lease?

You know, I opened stores early on in my business development because I found that I initially was selling the better stores, but I wasn't able to tell the story I wanted to telling in my terms from my point it's 100 from my point of view and in a retail store you can do that and you almost have to be prepared to write it off to look at it as a marketing and branding and initiative and then maybe if you get lucky and you can make it a destination and you can attract an audience i think today a retail experience has to be different than it used to be when I did this and it should be immersive in some ways. You should be able to bring them into the brand and let them feel the brand while they're in this space and then want to interact

with the brand when they leave it. Okay, next up after the break, another caller with another business challenge. I'm Guy Raz and we're answering your business questions right here on the advice line on how I built this. We're supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. When I'm prepping for an interview, there's always that moment where I'm trying to turn a pile of research into an actual conversation. A founder's timeline, early decisions, big inflection points, old interviews, company background, all of it matters. But the real work is figuring out what connects. And that's where Claude has been super helpful. It helps me work through the material, organize what I...

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welcome back to the advice line on how i built this lab i'm guy roz and today i'm taking your calls with the legendary fashion designer and entrepreneur kenneth cole all right kenneth let's bring in our next caller uh welcome to the advice line you are on with kenneth cole please tell us your name where you're calling from and just a little bit about your business

hey guy hey Kenneth my name is Levi Case I'm calling from Providence Rhode Island and I'm the founder of Swing Sculpt at Swing Sculpt we take any golf swing and turn into a beautiful custom metal sculpture that is unique to each golfer and their swing all right welcome

to the show Levi okay so so Swing Sculpt this is a you make sculptures it's not is a sculpture of

a like a golfer swinging like what does it look like so it's the path of their club head so using our patent pending process, we take a video of your golf swing and we track the club head throughout the swing and then recreate the 3D path of just the club head and then create it into a sculpture. I see. So it's like a piece of abstract art. Yes, exactly. Okay. Interesting. Tell me how this idea came about. You know, I've always been a golfer and somewhat of an artist and years ago had this idea and never did anything about it. And then I was out of college working a job I didn't really care about in finance and realized that life was too short to not be doing something you love. And this business came back into my head and I decided to go for it. And tell me how, as you launched it, when did you launch it?

So I launched it last year. So last March officially. Got it. And give me a sense of how you've done so far. You've been in business for a little over a

year. Yeah, we've done about like $25,000 in sales, not anything great, but it's not bad. That is a great start. Yeah, we're having our best month so far right now and hoping that with Father's Day and the golf season coming up, that we'll continue to do so.

Got it. And how are you, I mean, how are you reaching customers? How are you finding them?

Yeah, so mainly through social media, I've done a lot of posting myself, like the founder journey of starting the business. And so I've built up about a 14,000 follower Instagram page and then another thousand on TikTok. So mainly through organic social and then also with meta ads.

Got it. Okay, before we bring on Kenneth, what's your question for us?

Yeah, so with a product that is completely new to the market, takes a bit of education to actually understand and requires input from the customer, how do I reduce friction and make it easier for people to buy on their first visit?

All right, Kenneth Cole, I want to bring you in here. Swing Sculpt, are you a golfer by the way, Kenneth?

Unfortunately, I am. You are, okay. It's been a reliable source of frustration for a lot of years. As it is for all of us. I'm reluctant to call myself a golfer, but I do play golf.

So you understand the principle behind this idea, this sculpture?

I do. I do understand it. I don't understand the business model, but I understand the product that you're trying to create. I would imagine scale is important. Ultimately, I think you could probably reduce costs significantly.

I would think. Is that fair to assume? Yes and no. With the product being each one of one and completely unique, our costs are still high per piece. But at a certain level, yes, we can lower

our costs. So to my understanding, most golf apparel, most golf accessories are sold in what they call green grass distribution, which is golf shops. And the problem with that distribution model is that they're mostly small businesses and you don't have people that have many because there are a lot of these private country clubs. So you have to deal with all the individuals that are running. But I would think if you could find a way to speak to people in the golf business and you can make them your partners and give them a fair share of whatever margin and make this worth their while, make it experiential, which I think anything today is experiential has an advantage over things that aren't. They could help you bring this product to the world in a way that you can't do it alone. And they all today have this ability to capture your swing because every golf pro has the technology today and they capture your swing and they send it to you in an email

within 24 hours. Yeah, we've discussed, I've reached out to pretty much almost every country club across the united states oh you have about doing like tournaments or events with them where every member or guest playing in the tournaments would get a swing sculpt the only problem is because of our higher costs even at a larger scale event the costs for us are higher so that passes on to them obviously and not all of them want to spend as much as we have offered for like our wholesale quote-unquote numbers for them and then the clubs that would be able to spend that amount are harder to actually get in touch with because they're so on the higher end and exclusive and

such so let me ask you the question too so it seems to me most people i know are not that proud of their swing unless they're touring pros or country club pros or they do it for a living so why would they want to memorialize something that they're not that proud of yeah that's definitely

like our biggest objection on like our ads and social media is like i don't want to see my swing it's terrible i think that the point isn't at it's actually your swing that you're memorializing it's the memories and everything that comes with everything you have on a golf course i think golf for all of us as golfers is something that you spend time you only really do because you're spending it with people you care about and love. And like my golf experience has been solely between playing with my dad or my good friends. So it's just about taking the memories from your golf trips or golf experiences and bringing that and being able to have it on your desk or your bookshelf as something to take you back to the course when you're in the middle of a Zoom call or whatever.

See, I would think if you could optimize the golf swing and memorialize that, that might be more of an allure. Yeah. It's something I can look at every day. This is what my swing should

look like, as opposed to what it does look like. I mean, we can definitely like manipulate it to look prettier. But what I always say is the more unique the swing, the cooler the sculpture. So I also think that if we manipulate it, it would kind of defeat the purpose of the whole business.

You know, I have a thought here. It's challenging. You've got one product here, but I think it's a great start. You know, you're a young guy and you're starting a business. And this is the first idea and product. And I think you can build on it. I mean, before I get there, I would just say, and I think you're doing this, you really want to lean heavily into the emotional use cases, right? Father's Day or retirement gifts or golf trip buddies or, and, you know, you can try and find those people through targeted social media ads. I think you can have some success there. But because this is a novel product, you need, you do need more social proof. Right. So you need, I think you need more, I'm looking at your website. I think you need more customer, you need customer videos. I'd like to see, you know, a side by side, like show me how it works. You know, I see a video of a guy doing a swing, but can you draw it, you know, so, so it shows and then transposes it to the sculpture, you know, more testimonials. I mean, even trying to partner with a pro who, who has some, some, some sway here, here, here's my alternative idea. And Kenneth, you can call me crazy or maybe this is just a dumb idea, but.

I know better than to do that, Guy.

You've got swing sculpt, right? I wonder whether, and maybe you've already thought of this, you expand it out. High school baseball players, high school basketball players, high school sports is a massive. Parents love buying their kids gifts. I mean, what about the baseball swing, you know, of the kid who's a varsity high school baseball player or a college player? Could you think about maybe expanding it beyond golf and seeing it?

you can actually expand your customer base is? Yeah, so that's definitely in the plans. We've actually done some baseball swings from people who have reached out to us directly, but it's just not something we've advertised or marketed yet just because personally, I believe that golf was the best use case for it just because of the demographic and the cult-like obsession that people have with golf. But the plan was always in the future to go into and expand into every sport, like tennis, baseball, hockey, basketball, like whatever. We even wrote figure skating into our patent application just because anything with movement can be used in this. And then for other products, like we do offer earrings and then eventually we're working on cufflinks and necklace pendants. And so there will be more variety, but for now, as I mean, we're only a year old now, but if you think that it would make sense to just go all the way on everything right now, then that is something we could consider. I just think high school sports is a potential

place where people spend money. They want parents to spend money on their kids. They want to buy them something unique. They're spending tons of money on the sport already. You know, there's also a world where this becomes less abstract or you have multiple options. You've got the abstract art, but you also literally, I mean, as you know, with 3D printing today, you can make a perfect you know sculpture of a kid and his swing and his baseball stance or an athlete running track you know mid-stride I mean you get a bunch of photos you feed them in and I'm sure the people you're working with now can probably do a version of that as well yeah we definitely can do that I

obviously like I think the artist in me was like I want to focus on the abstract just because I think it looks interesting but people have brought up like oh you should put a figure in there which is definitely something i plan to offer down the line like offering both i actually like it i think

we're inclined to want to spend frivolously on our kids yes and memorialize them in their these cute stages they go through i have a couple of grandchildren now and and the sillier they are the more interesting it is but the other thing too is is there value in capturing rory's or tigers or somebody's or somehow doing a license with them where you can help them, you know, put that out into the world. 100%. In a replicatable way.

Yeah. I mean, realistically, the dream for the business is to make that the main business of selling these idols of people's golf swings and then make the custom a more of a like side because again, with wholesale, we could mass produce or not mass, but you know, larger quantities of like tiger swing or rory swing it's just again with being a small business it's hard to actually get in touch and i've reached out to a lot of these guys agents and just not gotten the response yet but the goal and hope is that once i build this brand bigger i can get that attention and hopefully

have those partnerships with those golfers i'm telling you right now kenneth cole would buy a sculpture of his grandchild swing is in the little league game swinging the baseball bat he'd send the video, you get the sculpture, he'd hand it to his grandchild. He'd spend the money,

a hundred bucks, 200 bucks, no problem. Yeah. Yeah. And you can also send to Rory and to Tiger how the gifts, just send them their swing. Yeah. Just send them gifts. Yeah. And one of them

likely may call you back. Yeah. And they might send you a cease and desist, but that's okay. But they might call you back and say, well, this is cool. Levi, good luck. The brand is called Swing Sculpt. Keep us posted. I'll be following what you're up to. I really appreciate it. guys. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. The first thing you said, I was like, God, man. Yeah. Right. If you're a golfer, you don't, and you're just frustrated. You just do not want to see your

swing represented in art. I don't want anybody to see that. It's a good thing. I don't have to see it, but I feel bad for the rest of my foursome who has to stare at my ugly swing. So I don't

want to also have to look at it. Kenneth, before I let you go, I want to ask you a question that I ask all of the returning guests who come on to help us answer these questions, which is, you know, you've had a lot of experience. You've run a massive business for a long time. If you could go back to when you started, you know, what advice could you give your, you know, former self that would be helpful? I think that people know what they want. And I'm

not empowered as the so-called designer to tell people what they should wear. I think my job is to give people what they want, but maybe not how they expect it. And it needs to be a dialogue, not a monologue. So you have to have conversations and you have to be good listeners. I do believe the best salesmen are the best listeners. I love it. That's Kenneth Cole, founder of

Kenneth Cole. Kenneth, thanks so much for coming back on the show. Thank you, Guy. And by the way, if you haven't heard Kenneth's original How I Built This Episode, you've really got to go back and check it out. It's super inspiring. You can find a link to it in the podcast notes in the description. And here's...

one of my favorite moments from that interview.

What happened in 94 was the landscape changed. When I started my business, there was maybe 70 or 80 department store chains in the United States. Wow. All of a sudden, 10 years later, there's maybe 15 or 20.

Consolidation.

After consolidations and some bankruptcies. Yeah. And I said to myself that these guys are going to need to find economies.

Hmm.

I thought at a certain point, they'd buy similar shoes. under their own labels, and I'm not in business anymore.

You didn't think that they would just continue to buy Kenneth Cole shoes and sell them?

I didn't. And if you don't see my design, it's like a tree in the forest. I'm only as good as you know me to be. And if I'm not out there, then I don't exist.

Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. And by the way, please make sure to check out my newsletter. You can sign up for it for free at GuyRoz.com or on Substack. And of course, if you are working on a business and you'd like to be on this show, send us a one-minute message that tells us a little bit about your business and the questions or issues that you're currently facing, because we would love to try and help you solve them. You can send us a voice memo at hibt at id.wondery.com or call us at 1-800-433-1298. Leave a message there and make sure to tell us how to reach you, and we'll put all of this information in the podcast description as well. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ramtina Arablui. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley. Our production staff also includes Carrie Thompson, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, Catherine Seifer, Neva Grant, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. One more mention for our presenting sponsor, Anthropic. Claude is built for people who like to keep pulling on the thread, the research, the planning, the questions, the follow through until the work starts to make sense. So try Claude for the next problem worth solving.