🎧🍌 The Einstein of Ecommerce 🧪 Bootstrapping to 9-Figures in Revenue with Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge Wallet)

Lessons from sponsoring 5,000 influencers, a crash course on the fashion market, why wallets are a terrible category, how to build an enduring brand, and why Ridge is a top 10 advertiser on Twitter

Stream on:

👉 Apple

👉 Spotify

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Sean is the CEO of Ridge, a men’s wallet and accessories brand that does over 9-figures in annual revenue. The company started in 2012 and raised $266,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to sell the first 5,200 wallets.

Ridge hasn’t raised a single dollar of outside capital, and has since expanded into new categories like rings, knives, watches, backpacks, and keys, with dozens of more products coming soon.

Sean is known in some circles as the “Einstein of Ecommerce”, and he gives us an inside look into running a consumer brand in 2023.

🔥 This episode is full of hot takes and insights on all things branding and entrepreneurship.

Topics include:

• Why selling wallets is a terrible business

• How Ridge has 80% gross margins

• Why brands should generally not raise venture capital

• When a founder should step down as CEO, and how to hire a new one

• Why Ridge is one of the top 10 advertisers on Twitter

• When and how to hire a marketing agency

• Closing clients in a 1991 Honda Civic

• Why Ridge never raised outside capital

• A crash course on the men’s and women’s fashion markets

• Why Sean thinks women’s fashion will have 50% return rates this holiday season

• Investing in a watch manufacturer and building a factory in Arizona to vertically integrate

• Why every company needs a core competency

• The simple tech stack Ridge uses to run the business

• Why Crocs and Lululemon are great businesses

• Why Amazon shut down its private label program and why every brand should sell on Amazon

• Lessons from sponsoring 5,000 influencers

• The reason influencer marketing performs so well

• How to start and scale an influencer marketing program

• Why more companies should incorporate creators in their content

• How FTX and other crypto companies inflated influencer marketing prices

• Paying $1,000,000 to hire a creator in-house

• How the Ridge Wallet has saved customers from bullets and chainsaws

Follow Sean on Twitter and his podcast The Operators for more hot takes and behind the scenes of running a consumer brand.

👉 Find this episode on Apple and Spotify

🙏 Thanks to Zac and Xavier at Supermix for their help with production and distribution.

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Transcript

Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.

Turner: Sean, how's it going? Thanks for joining me today.

Sean: I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you.

Turner: I'm very excited to have you on! I think you're in a really interesting spot. You run a direct-to-consumer brand. It's a men's wallet company. I've heard you say that both are not the best spaces to be operating a business in. Can you explain that?

Sean: Yeah, I think by default all of us are D2C brands, but I will just caveat that it's way better just to call it a brand, right? I think D2C has some stink on it. It was proven to just be a way to sell things and not the identity of a company. So yes, it is a brand. And then we are mostly a men's wallet company.

I would like to be a wallet company and then I would like to be an accessories brand, because there are no wallet companies. It is a horrible category to be in, but we have made a niche for ourselves in it.

Turner: So why is it so tricky running a men's wallet brand?

Sean: When was the last time you bought a wallet?

Turner: Personally, I don't know if I've ever bought a wallet. It's always been someone else that buys me one, and it was when I lost it. I think I only buy a new one when I lose the other one.

Sean: Yeah. You've just summarized the challenge of running my company – it’s that it's a product category nobody cares about. If you ever worked in traditional fashion like department stores or fashion brands, there's a totem pole.

If you are at Gucci, women's runway is the top, and then maybe it's women's handbags and then it's men's runway. At the very, very bottom of the totem pole is, men's accessories. It's literally like where they put people that want to quit. Nobody cares about it. So we've been able to build a great business because it's a category that nobody cares about.

But the challenge of that is the average man gets a new wallet every seven years, and he doesn't know where it comes from. It just shows up. His sister gets it for him or whatever. Compare that to shoes. There's an entire culture built around buying as many shoes as possible, collecting, cherishing. I'll tell you right now, there's like eight people on earth who cherish wallets and collect them, and they’re our customers and I really appreciate them.

Turner: So how big are you guys today? I've seen the numbers, it’s like nine figures in revenue. How do you guys talk about it now?