· Ronnie Fieg, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Right. [00:00:00] S0: And that was his point. He's like, "I don't care if other people see it." And he learned that from his dad, who was a carpenter. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: He's like, "You're not going to use a..." He goes, "Listen, we're building a cabinet or a dresser. What do people do? Put dressers on the wall. You don't see the back of it." [00:00:00] S1: Right. [00:00:00] S0: So people that don't give a shit, they use crappy wood. We're not going to do that because we know it's there. [00:00:00] S1: And that's the difference between being such an active founder and being the end user of the product that you make. [00:00:00] S0: It's also what's required for greatness. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is like my brother, one of my closest friends. You went on his show, and we were talking. We were upstairs with one of the greatest entrepreneurs living right now. He's just this maniac. He's just obsessed with operational excellence. And we were talking about his competitors and stuff, and Patrick made the observation. He's like, "Man, it's amazing. It's like everything is shit." And it doesn't matter what category or industry you compete in. He's like, "There's two to three guys. There's two to three guys in every single one that are doing great shit, and then a whole sea of mediocrity." [00:00:00] S1: Yep. And the mediocrity is when you're working backwards from money. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah.
· David Senra, Ronnie Fieg
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah. [00:00:00] S1: Right? So when it's about the money and not about the product, you could see that. It's transparent today to people, I feel like. More than ever before, actually. As this generation starts to steer back to substance, as you see vinyl start to pick up, and as you see the mom and pop stores kind of have this resurgence into people looking for discovery. People want to discover things in real life. And I think that the digital world has cheapened information, and information comes in the form of art sometimes. And it's like, you could pass over certain things by not touching and feeling them. You wouldn't understand the substance within the product. So, I'm a firm believer of that because half my life is pre-internet, kind of like yours, right? And I think the pre-internet portion of my life- [00:00:00] S0: Half our childhood, we should say. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. [00:00:00] S0: No, because the internet came around early. I was on AOL in '97, '96. [00:00:00] S1: Right. [00:00:00] S0: So half the childhood. [00:00:00] S1: Right. But that wasn't influential internet. [00:00:00] S0: No. You had to call the internet when we were kids. Remember, literally, I got to call up the internet. [00:00:00] S1: Right. [00:00:00] S0: And like, "Oh, mom's on the phone. Can't call the internet." And then when you're on the internet, they can't call you because the line's busy. I tried to explain this to my daughter. [00:00:00] S1: That's so true.
· Ronnie Fieg, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: That's so true. [00:00:00] S0: And I even went up and looked, and you can find this on YouTube, the noise it would make when you did. She's like, "What is this?" I'm like, "I was calling the internet." [00:00:00] S1: That's so funny, man. That's really true. But the first time you were influenced by the internet was really in the blog era. So, the blog era, the development and the beginning of the blog era was right when I was putting out my first product at David Z. And they were interested in the products after that Wall Street Journal article. They were interested in what was happening, and they were even writing for the right reasons back then, where it was before brand deals. It was a hobby. [00:00:00] S0: Again, go back to love. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, man. [00:00:00] S0: Doing it for love.
· David Senra, Ronnie Fieg
[00:00:00] S0: Doing it for love. [00:00:00] S1: I don't ever want to step away from that. So, everything I do is for the love of what I do. The market needs more of that. It needs more attention to detail. It needs to have more purpose. And I think purpose is huge. I often go back to the purpose behind a lot of these products that Apple makes, and it's to better people's lives. And it doesn't only come in the form of technology. The product that you're wearing can make your life better. You can feel better in the product that you're wearing. It can make you look better. It can give you more confidence. I want to give them more than what they pay for. So, there's so much that goes into just that portion of it, of making sure that there's value in the product when you touch and feel it, or through 50 washes of a garment. There are a lot of words that I think meanings of some of these words are changing over time, like the word luxury and like the word value. Typically, luxury and value don't come together. Value is this beaten-down term by downmarket retail. And then luxury is typically like, it needs to cost a certain amount to be luxurious. What luxury should mean is how much people love what they're buying, that it's a luxury to have the product. That's what luxury should mean. So, a lot of these luxury companies, I think, are overexposed now and are becoming less luxurious, at least to me. That means it's overaccessible. [00:00:00] S0: So, how do you avoid that with Kith, though? [00:00:00] S1: First of all, we don't wholesale. Second, we don't license.
· Ronnie Fieg, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: First of all, we don't wholesale. Second, we don't license. [00:00:00] S0: Why is that important for somebody that's outside of your business? Explain why that's so important. [00:00:00] S1: Because then you can't control how those products are spoken about and where they're placed and how they're merchandised. Then you can't storytell around the product. You could storytell top line by creating these TV ads, and then you're walking in the airport and there's some fucking little rinky-dink shop that there's construction done on half the store, and you walk in and it's messy as to how you see the product and the people that are catered to you. They might not be best in class, and then all of a sudden, people are subconsciously associating your brand with that experience. From day one, I've always wanted to control the experience that people have because I thought I could be the best at speaking to it since I'm the creator of it, right? So I wanted to walk people through the full experience, from ideation through walking out the door, walking out the Kith door. So the storytelling, I feel like we're 50% storytellers and then 50% retailers. But on the retail side, that's then broken up to what we do digitally versus what we do physically. And as the business starts to skew more digital, I feel forced to open more physical. And that's how the brand grew, because I have a number, there's a threshold where I won't allow the percentage of the total pie to go over an X amount on the website for the web revenue. [00:00:00] S0: Why?
· David Senra, Ronnie Fieg
[00:00:00] S0: Why? [00:00:00] S1: I don't want to become a digital brand. The touch point, the touch and feel. [00:00:00] S0: So you're purposely foregoing more sales. This goes back to the love and not how the conversation started. It's like you can't work hard for this money. You're purposely foregoing more sales because you have to be a physical, and that's a better experience for the person. So if I order something from kith.com, right? As opposed to going in your stores- [00:00:00] S1: Yes [00:00:00] S0: ... it's like way better experience that you control the whole story, the whole experience. [00:00:00] S1: We're controlling from the website down. And actually, no, that's not true. I'm not foregoing revenue because the website revenue continues to grow and it's on its path. But I always want it to be half digital and half physical. So, I want the physical to grow at the same rate, is what I'm saying. [00:00:00] S0: Okay. [00:00:00] S1: Does that make sense? [00:00:00] S0: Yeah. It's not like, okay, wait, we're at 50%. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. Stop selling product on the internet. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah, that would be kind of... That actually might be a good idea. It's like, "Sorry, the website's closed for a few days." [00:00:00] S1: Right. [00:00:00] S0: "You got to come back." [00:00:00] S1: By the way, there are some brands that do that and then create demand because they go away for a little bit. Supreme does that in their off-seasons, which I think is really smart.