Brian Smith

“It was only a matter of weeks before I arrived in, in Los Angeles, and I had my surfboard, so I just started going up to Malibu. I surfed that place for nearly a year.”

“Yeah, and I was really literally on a search for something to take back to Australia. I had no desire to stay and live in America.”

“We pulled 500 bucks together and called the guy who ran the advertisement, and we talked him into being distributors for the U.S.”

“He came back with about a 150 business cards of all these retailers, and not a single order, and said, Brian, they tell us we're crazy trying to sell sheepskin in California.”

“We were able to raise 20,000 dollars from them as capital, and we didn't even have a business plan.”

“The total sales for the first year was 28 pairs.”

“That was one of the worst facets of the entire UGG project for 20 years, was the lack of margins I had because the pressure of the retail price kept us way, way down, so it was very hard to make money.”

“And I did a search of the world, especially the US, to see if there'd been any prior use of the trade name Ugg, and they had not. So, That opened up the gate for me to do the registration of the trademark.”

“The ski market was even harder than the surf market. Because their attitude was, well, we have mud, and we have slush, and we need rubber, you know, we gotta have Sorrells, and they couldn't see sheepskin being strong enough or waterproof enough to work in the…”

“I learned early on that trying to walk into a surf shop with sheepskin boots on a hot day was like pointless. So I learned to wait for a really shitty day when, you know, the storm would hit, you know, then I'd go on the road and sales were, you know, I would …”

“So when I ran those ads, the sales, which had been around, you know, 30 to 50,000 per year, the immediate jump was like 200,000 dollars.”

“The more sales you get, the bigger your problems get in, in supply. I never really understood that. I, my accounting thinking was, we just sold a million dollars worth of product, we're broke. What's the answer? Oh, we'll sell two million next year and think w…”

“No, you don't get your stock issued until you finish the trademark. And I just hung the phone up, and I drove from Huntington Beach straight back to San Diego, and I pulled out my contract, and I read it, and I reread it, and I just went, oh, shit. I don't own…”

“I think that was the fifth or sixth year. That was the first money I'd ever taken out of the company.”

“By being out there with the customers, it was so much easier for me to, you know, get a rapport going and introduce the product by having them try the boots on. Now, that turned out to be the biggest factor in closing our first orders was having the buyer try …”

“That cost me a pair of boots for each new store I opened, but that changed the trajectory of Ugg forever, and it was probably the best marketing plan I ever executed on.”

“Between the time he called me to get my stock, and that was the very next Sunday, he had a heart attack in this race and never recovered. And so, now his widow, who'd never stepped forward, Foot inside the Ugg business, now owned 100% of Ugg.”

“Black and charcoal were just kicking butt with all of their orders. And we were, you know, getting two or 3000 pairs of orders a week.”

“We ended up getting 200,000 dollars as a settlement to walk away... And so I signed a promissory note with her, and this 200,000 dollars was enough to pay her note out, And then by, you know, I owned the company 100% again.”

“By the end of that year, for the first time ever, UGG turns a profit, 140,000 dollars, which is great news.”

“We ended up doing a deal where we purchased the UGHS company, and we maintained that factory for a couple of years.”

“I found a mailing list of stylists in Hollywood and sent a letter to them, and about 400 people responded, and so I sent them all a pair of Ugg boots, you know, no questions asked, and it was a couple of months before I started seeing them on Celebrities”

“You know, we'd spent years building up this image of casual comfort and fashion and everything, and so I really fought it, but I was outvoted at a board meeting.”

“If we had announced that Oprah was wearing our shoes or boots, it would have killed the company when I owned the company, because I didn't have the capital to build the product to take on that demand.”

“So, so, I was working with Joseph Aghese and Peter Coleman and Brian Smith, and these are the people behind the first neuro-interdates drive, which actually was designed actually with computation. So, they used a program called Goodford This grid to map the pr…”

“So my background is, as you said, so I was a director of sports science for USA track and field. Right. And then what we did is we use data science to predict performance or predict injury and professional athletes.”

“Depending on the size of the company, we're looking anywhere between seven to about 12, depending on the structure of their team.”

“So from a sales and marketing standpoint, it's just me and my co-founder who are still leading the sales and marketing aspects of it. And then the rest of it is customer success and engineering.”

“So we're at 26 people currently right now.”

“No, we've raised right. So roughly about four and a half.”

“We made a ton of mistakes as far as keeping staff on too long, over-investing in certain things, you know and I mean, you live and learn, you know, so But yeah, we made a shitload of mistakes, man, to tell you the truth.”