Million Dollar Monday
Million Dollar Monday
Protecting the Planet in Style: The Fair Harbor Clothing Story
Get ready to be inspired by Jake and Caroline Danehy, the visionary siblings behind Fair Harbor Clothing, who transformed their shared passion for sustainability into a thriving and profitable company – not to mention earning recognition on the Forbes 30 under 30 list! Listen now to hear the dynamic duo sit down with host Greg Muzzillo and share their journey of creating a sustainable beachwear brand from scratch, scaling it to new heights, and turning it into the success story it is today.
Chapters:
1:51 - A Passion for Business and Sustainability
6:17 - From Idea to Business
8:48 - The Start of Designing and Constructing Clothing
11:46 - Trunk Shows
13:46 - Scaling the Business
16:57 - Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned
19:45 - Success Along the Way
Resources:
Connect with Fair Harbor Clothing
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Takeaways:
- We've always really had this passion deep inside of us. And this is just a way to kind of make a larger impact through the work that we're doing with the Harbor.
- Sometimes there are no massive, big wins. There is just grinding, grinding it out. Great little decisions that at the end of the day, lead to a big business
- If you treat a customer well and you have a great product, they'll keep coming back.
- It got crazy. At one point, we were sending up to 500 to 1,000 orders per day from our parents' garage.
- We'd been so passionate about this from the beginning, and that passion is what drives you to make time to see the vision through.
- In the first four years of the company, we did over 500 trunk shows. We traveled up and down the east coast, going to small beach towns, talking to everyone and anyone who would hear our story and touch and feel our product.
- Our mission statement in a nutshell is to create products for people that make it so they can enjoy the home that they love.
Hello and welcome to Million Dollar Monday. I'm your host, Greg Mazzello, bringing you real successful people with real useful advice for people with big dreams. I understand big dreams. I turned an investment of$200 and a lot of great advice from some really successful people into my big dream proforma that today is a half billion dollar company.
Speaker 2:Well, hello and welcome. I have a first for today, and it is a brother and sister team that are very cool. They, uh, have developed a clothing line, uh, that not only is super cool, celebrating the simplicity of summer, but also dedicated to our environment. They are both recognized by Forbes Magazine and they're 30, under 30. And so I'm excited to introduce brother and sister and co-founders of Fair Harbor Clothing, Jake and Carolyn, Dana Heat, Jake and Carolyn, welcome.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much
Speaker 4:For having us. Really appreciate it. Excited
Speaker 3:To be here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're, I, I I, I, I love your story and, uh, uh, especially how you don't just have a cool clothing line, but how you're really dedicated to our environment. Let, but let's start at the beginning. Talk to us about your growing up years and, and maybe your school years and, and where did you first of all learn a passion for business and then eventually where did you learn a passion for the clothing industry and most importantly, our environment?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so thanks for asking the question. Um, we, so kind of our story in a nutshell is we grew up going to this place called Fair Harbor and Fire Island. Fire Island is a, it's a island off the coast of Long Island, and the island's about 27 miles long, but only about a hundred yards wide. And so there's no cars in the island. Um, it's pretty much covered in Boardwalk. And, um, when we were kids, really all we need was a surfboard and para swim trunks, and that was it. And kind of ran around as we learned how to surf and fish. And, um, it was incredible. You know, it, it's funny when we have, we don't really talk about this often, but we had a, a strong business acumen, um, from the beginning. We used to, would, would collect seashells from the shore and paint them and sell them, sell them to people. We'd have lemonade stands, we'd create lanyards and we'd sell them. And that was our, um, first lesson on margins and trying to figure out how to turn a profit by selling goods. So, um, well,
Speaker 3:And because there's no cars on the island, the only way to bring everything around is on wagons. So we would kind of create our own wagons on different corners, street corners, um, on the docks too, people were going down for a sunset. So we've kind of made those wagons. Our, uh, our mobile, our mobile workshops,
Speaker 2:<laugh>. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 4:Um, but yeah, it continues. So that's definitely like our first, I guess, business and entrepreneurial, um, or project. But, uh, what we notice with Far Island in Fair Harbor in particular, it's a glorified sandbar. So if plastic waste wasn't disposed of correctly, it went into the waterways if they on one side ocean on the other side. And we started, cuz we, we grew up, we started to notice more and more plastic waste washing up on the shorts. Oh. And, um, fast forward a bunch of years, um, I went to Colgate University, um, I played the cross there and, um, I went in with the expectation of being an economics major. Um, but then I started taking some geography classes and was learning about global ocean occurrence and climatology and ultimately this massive plastic problem. And, uh, Caroline at the same time had always been super into fashion. She had a fashion blog since she was in middle school called Case Cook is in Cardigan. So Caroline was on the latest trends, but she was also, um, considered the tree hugger, our family, so very, you know, into sustainability at a, at a very young age. And so, um, basically with all of these issues going on with our environment, I actually ended up running a thesis on plastic waste and fact and erosion. So I spent an entire semester with the professor really digging down the nitty gritties and nuts and bolts of what was happening. And in my study, this is back in 2014, I found a mill that was actually converting plastic bottles in a yarn. And so I turned to Carolyn, I was like, we need to do something about this issue. And so that's when the idea of her harbor was born. And our objective was to create a platform to help promote the mitigation of uced plastics by making an awesome product that people wanna wear and love. And so we make all of our products out of recycled plastic bottles, about 11 going into each of our shorts. And, um, yeah, so really like what our mission statement is in a nutshell is we create products for people who enjoy the place that they love, like Fair Harbor is for us. And while they're protecting those places at the same time,
Speaker 3:And it's, it's fine too, based on what Jake said, part of my fashion blog, I started it actually when I was in sixth grade. So it was a way for me to kind of have a foot in the fashion industry while still in school. Um, the whole premise of it. On the weekends, I would come into the city and go to consignment shops and vintage shops and try to find a way to make, you know, old clothing new again, um, by kind of changing the way the styling and finding different treasures and finds. And it was a way to kind of give fashion a second life by, you know, going through that process too. So, um, from I think both of our standpoint, we've always really had this passion deep inside of us and this is just a, a way to kind of make a larger impact through, uh, the work that we're doing with Fair Harbor.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it. All right, so at some point you talked about having this idea and you've discussed the idea and feeling that you really needed to do something. Talk to our listeners about how do you go from this idea, and I think we need to do something and some passion about the environment, some passion about the simplicity of summer clothing and living, right? And uh, uh, uh, um, how does that go from an idea to a real business? Talk to us about those detailed steps, like how long did you talk about it and then when did you start incorporating designing some clothing, putting some stuff online? I mean, how did you go from an idea to a real business? How long did it take and then start really designing and selling stuff?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so we first kind of discovered this technology in the summer of 2014. Um, and then in the spring of 2015 or the fall of 2014, um, we applied to Kogi University, had an entrepreneurship program called Thought Into Action. Um, and so basically, kind of like what you're saying, um, their idea was like, let's take a thought and let's turn it into action. So cuz Colgate's a liberal arts school, so we didn't have an entrepreneurship major or business major or anything like that. And so what they did is they connected aspiring entrepreneurs with alumni, entrepreneurs who could really help them start and mold their businesses. And so we started working on it in this fall of 2014. Um, we had no idea anything about the apparel industry. Our our dad was in real estate and, um, our mom was a stay-at-home mom. And so again, like apparel in general was a super foreign concept to us of how to actually get stuff made. But we found this mill that was converting pla balls in the er. And so we thought about what, what can we make outta this product? And, and Bor Schwartz in particular is the first product that we started with. It was a really kind of natural segue into starting our business because it's where you spend the most time around the water. And, and so people typically who spend time in the water, around the water should have a strong appreciation for the environment. Um, and so that was kind of what we started. And then we, um, part of this program, um, we reward the opportunity to pitch at a mock shark tank competition. So, um, Colgate put together a Shark Tank competition every year and, um, in the spring we reward the opportunity show. So we pitched in front of Jessica Alba, MC Hammer, Neil Blumenthal from Morby Parker, Jessica Oh
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 4:The runway. And uh, yeah, we ended up winning$20,000 in grant money from the university to start the business. Carolina was a senior in high school at the time, and I was a junior in college. And, uh, that's how we initially got started. You know, I I would say it's a lot of, it's a lot of just like cold calls trying to figure out, you know, different people that could help us, um, and with, you know, manufacturing products. And so that was, that was quite the journey to figure out how to actually get something made. Um, but so I, I'd say that that was definitely a very interesting part of the, the journey.
Speaker 2:Okay. So you wrote up a business plan and you pitched the plan to this shark tank kind of group people at, at Colgate, you won$20,000, you have a source for recycled fabric. Um, yep. But I still don't know. How do you actually start designing and constructing clothing and get to the first real cell? Tell us about that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so we actually, um, prior to pitching at the Shark Tank competition, we had a consultant who had a factory in Guatemala. So he had actually, we hadn't designed our first pair of board shorts before. So it took about a year from the, actually more like six months. So from the start of 2014 to when we pitched in the spring of 2015. That's, um, when we actually, uh, had our first samples and we had a whole production ready to rock and roll. So we had a consultant that we hired that really had a factory that they worked with in Guatemala. And then we manufactured, uh, the fabrics, um, in China where we, but
Speaker 3:Before the consultant actually, we had ordered some sample yardage of this fabric and Jake and I were running around the garment district of New York City just trying to convince a single sample factory owner to allow us to make one simple product. Um, and we just realized from that that wasn't scaled, like we needed to kind of take the next step. So that's when we hired the consultant after Jake and I were sweating, running around trying to find a, a sample maker in the city. Um, so that was kind of the first step there too.
Speaker 2:So you're still no revenue, um, you're trying to find somebody that you got, you got the cloth or the fabric, um, yeah, that, that, that, did you design the clothing, Carolyn? Was that you that actually designed it?
Speaker 3:So Jake and I really compliment each other in that sense because Jake focuses more on the fit and the construction of the garments. And then we collaborate on the actual aesthetics and the color and the inspiration for the seasons. Um, but that's, we, um, yeah, we kind of worked that way.
Speaker 2:So you're both young, you're in, you're, you're in, you're in college, Jake and Carolyn's, uh, in high school. Where does the money come from to hire a consultant and do some of these things still pre-business formation?
Speaker 4:Our consultant was paid a commission on the amount of products that we produced. Ah,
Speaker 2:Clever.
Speaker 4:So basically, um, we had our samples. We didn't pay them anything until we actually won the grant. And then with the grant money we basically utilized it to purchase our first line of production.
Speaker 3:And after that too, because, you know, we're still figuring it out and we didn't really have, we had our website but um, weren't really spending on digital or anything like that in terms of actually getting people and traffic to the site. So Jake and I took it to the, to the road and we did trunk shows. So in the first four years of the company, um, we did over 500 trunk shows, uh, just going out and we traveled up and down the east coast going to small beach towns, talking to everyone, at anyone who would hear our story and touch and feel our product. And at the same time, you know, that was really our market research that people were giving us feedback on, you know, the product that fit the customer experience. And that was really kinda those pivotal years.
Speaker 2:What is a trunk show defi, help me understand, is that where a group of people put on a fair by a beach or is that you just going to the beach and saying, Hey, look at our swimsuits, or what is that beach trunk show?
Speaker 4:A little everything<laugh>. We, we, we had a plastic table, like a fold up table that we put in the back of my car and we had a bunch of like product and we would like, we would talk to different store owners and we'd set up in front of their shop or we would set up in a park or we'd set up on a beach or there'd be an event. And yeah, so really, you know, no, no event was really too small. We were actually joking cuz I actually did a, a trunk shot of pumpkin patch one time.<laugh>.
Speaker 2:I love it. There's a lot of hustle. I say hustle builds muscle. So good for you guys. But wait a minute, I'm still a little confused though, Carolyn, you're still in high school and then college, so how are you able to straddle school and trunk shows and all this other stuff?
Speaker 3:It was definitely a lot. Um, and I think it, you know, it seems a little less painful looking back in terms of cuz every, you know, every summer that's really when we did our trunk shows. So it was, you know, my summer, ah, summer off and then, yeah, really since my senior year in high school I've been doing Fair Harbor. Um, but every Sunday, you know, I would sit down and map out my, my week in terms of when I had classes, when I'd do my homework, when it was fair harbor time. Um, and ultimately just, I, we've been so passionate about this from the beginning and so make you make the time. Um, and so
Speaker 2:Yep, yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And how were you feeding yourselves? Um, or, or did you start making pretty good money from these trunk sales right away?
Speaker 4:Uh, no, I, I lived at, thankfully my parents are are good people and let me live at home for the first few years after school. My parents was in college, so yeah, no, I, we didn't pay ourselves for quite some time. It was really just, um, I, I know people say the, the ramen diet, I wasn't quite on the ramen diet, but pretty close to it.
Speaker 2:<laugh>, I get it. Yeah, no, it's all good. I love it. I love it. So, um, it, that sounds like you stopped doing these trunk shows three years ago, four years ago, something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 4:In 2017 we realized that the trunk shows were not scalable in terms of, so we could do a lot of'em. They're profitable, they're a good way for us to get the brand out there and talk to people. But they weren't scalable in terms of what we actually wanted to, you know, make the company how big that we saw that this company could be and aspirationally where we wanna take it. And so that's when we raised a small round of friends and family funding to invest into our D d C infrastructure. And so that was really making sure that we had the infrastructure to really build out to support some growth from an econ perspective,
Speaker 2:Pay per click the money mostly went to your pay click PPC strategy is what you're saying? Um, no, I
Speaker 4:Wouldn't say so. Most of our marketing was paid for through credit cards. Um, it really went into developing, um, it really went into developing kind of the infrastructure from an e-com standpoint. Revamping our website, um, went to, um, making sure that we had the proper consultants or agencies to work with. Um, and, and yes, we wanted make sure that we did have an ad budget, um, to go alongside that growth.
Speaker 3:But we have been pretty, I mean we've been really bootstrapped since the beginning and as we mentioned before, we actually shipped all of the product out of our parents' garage up until 2019 and oh, it was, it was a lot. Um, but ultimately we needed to have a proof of concept, um, and keep the low, you know, overhead lean.
Speaker 4:It got crazy at one point we had, you know, we were sending up to 500 to a thousand orders per day from our parents' garage.
Speaker 2:That's alright. I guess if, uh, I guess if it's okay for Amazon to start from a garage, it's okay for you guys. So that's exciting. But come on, you're brother and sister, you fight sometimes, huh? Come on.
Speaker 3:I have to say it's, it's kinda we, you know, I think we do compliment each other and we had, I think, you know, we have complimenting skillsets and if we didn't we wouldn't be, you know, where we are today. And I think we can support one another respect to another and ultimately trust one another. Yeah. Uh, you know, obviously, you know, family dinner tables are, are one thing, but ultimately, you know, there's, it's been, it's been really great to be able to do this together and um, yeah. And share the ups and the downs and our whole family's been incredibly supportive too from day one as we were mentioned. How fun
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:<affirmative>. Yeah. From shipping to the, you know, out of our garage and um, everything like that.
Speaker 2:How fun. Well I'm excited for you. So, um, and I love the idea about how you, um, were a part of a pitch competition, you know, especially we've had a few other folks who are Forbes 30 under 30 and I'm learning that these competitions really are a great way to raise money and some of them aren't even limited to students at the school. There are some of them that outsiders can even come in and then there are other incubator competitions. So it really is a great way, way to bring in at least uh, an initial seed round. Alright. Tell us about a couple of the things that maybe mistakes that you made along the way that gave you what I call, you know, a very expensive mba. What were the lessons you learned from some of the things uh, that didn't go quite right?
Speaker 4:I would say the first mistake that I made that, or that we made that was incredibly important was, um, in our first line of production. Um, it was, uh, so our first line of production, we had the fabric we manufactured in Guatemala and uh, you know, like I mentioned before, we didn't have any idea how to actually build or manufacture a product. We were taking our consultants work for it, we had our general ideas of how we wanted the garment to construct and look and everything like that. And we were having a launch party at the Delania rooftop. We only made, we made 500 shorts, we had five different colors, so a hundred of each color. So really, really small production. But it was, it was a great way to get started. And we're having a launch party at the Delane rooftop in, in, um, lower Manhattan in um, lower East Side. And um, I am going to the bathroom and I'm opening up my fly to go to the bathroom and the Velcro completely comes off and I'm like, oh my God, this is horrible. Turns out that on one color of the shorts, the factory had actually glued down the Velcro instead of sewing the Velcro down.
Speaker 2:Ooh. Oh, you were wearing one of the products,
Speaker 4:Correct. I was wearing, I was wearing one of our shorts cause
Speaker 2:We have a fly failure<laugh>.
Speaker 4:Correct. And I was like, this is horrible. And so, um, it was our first lesson and we had already sold 20 of the products. Oh. And so it was our first lesson in customer experience and also product quality. So we reached out to all 20 people that got it. We got them to send it back. We sent it to, we found a local seamstress who sewed them down, sent it back to them. And um, those are still some of our best customers today, you know, and I think that sure, it was a mistake in not understanding really how to make a garment then we should have been looking for these things. Um, but then a lesson in how important customer service is and that, you know, if you treat a customer well, you have a great product that they'll keep coming back.
Speaker 3:You know, one other thing too, looking back, um, when we were first diving into digital marketing, we outsourced it to begin with and um, you know, while we worked with a few different agencies here and there, we didn't actually know what we were looking at. And so we decided to take it in house and do it ourselves and learn every part of it so then we can, you know, bring people on. And once, you know, we really understand everything that goes into it. And I think that was a big lesson too for us because ultimately we needed to do everything ourselves and really understand it so then we can help teach and coach people, um, once we kind of are able to do it that way too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Nobody cares as much about your product and your sales as you do. And um, yeah, I completely agree and understand that decision. Alright. Talk to us about a couple of the massive successes, the great successes that really taught you, um, that you were going in the right direction that taught you some other great lessons.
Speaker 3:That's a good question. Hmm.
Speaker 4:Um, a massive success that has taught us that we're going in the right direction
Speaker 2:Or that just was a great decision. I don't
Speaker 4:Know if there's been like, there's hasn't been like an aha moment, like, that was awesome. I'd say there's been a lot of little wins throughout the way. We had a, a nice breakout year in 2019 and in 2020 that was gonna be a kind of our, our growth year and we haven't placed a bunch of inventory bets. And, um, we had in March of, you know, March 13th, we, it was at, that's kind of when the country started shut down. And then in April, um, men swimwear was the fourth quickest clowning online category online. And we had to really figure out how we were going to continue building our business and how we were gonna continue forward. Like, we had a lot of inventory. And so I, I'd say that was a huge lesson for us because we had to be incredibly scrappy and, and learn how to pivot the business. So we figured out how to sell our shorts in a different way, how to portray how to, and we film some our, of ourselves, we collaborate with influencers, we leverage our email list. There was tons of different things that we did that, you know, we wouldn't have been able to do if we hadn't had that pressure. But it was because we had that pressure that we were able to make these small little victories and test out new things. And then once we had something that was working, we put our kind of foot down the pedal and then we continue to, to scale it that way.
Speaker 2:You know, there's a lesson in that and that lesson is that sometimes there really aren't massive victories. And a lot of, a lot of people that I know that are angel investors or a venture capital type people would say they don't believe in hockey sticks. You know, hockey sticks is when somebody says maybe sales are gonna go like this and then they're gonna go like that. Kinda like shaped like a hockey stick and there are no hockey sticks. And um, and so sometimes there are no massive big wins. There are just grind, grinding it out. Great little decisions that at the end of the day lead to a big business. Jake and Carolyn, I've really enjoyed our time together. Thank you very much and all my best to Fair Harbor Clothing. Thank
Speaker 4:You very much. Thank you for having
Speaker 5:Us. Really appreciated it.
