Aviator Nation

“And so she wrote an order, a big order, and I think it added up to about 8000 dollars, and I had my first order.”

“So it's like the calling people thing just doesn't work. Like, and I kind of knew that from working at the surf shop because when people would call, I mean, it's just like leave a message, like the buyer never really got back to most of the people calling. But…”

“We had sold a 150,000 dollars worth of clothes.”

“And I went to Wells Fargo and they gave me a loan for 8000 dollars and boom, that was it. That was the money that I used to make the stuff.”

“Even though a lot of the product that we still sell, obviously, is the core product, we basically drop a new collection Almost every week.”

“And at that time we were doing, I think around 30,000 dollars online a day or something. And I put out that email and in 24 hours we did like over a million dollars. On our website.”

“I started getting super involved with actually doing every single interview myself. And even until, literally until about two years ago, I used to approve every single hire, even the retail level.”

“Yeah, everything's made in California.”

“I mean, did you have an influencer strategy? No, not at all. Nothing? Did not do any of that? Nothing.”

“It was in 2006, and I remember I ordered a couple books on sewing and DVDs, and I taught myself to sew. I taught myself to make patterns.”

“I would always negotiate where I would have several months of free rent so that I could have no expense on actually building out the store, and then I would make sure that I got the store built in half that time so that I could have the store open Making money…”

“Yeah, I was doing about six and a half million. I had like five or six stores then.”

“Yeah, so in 2019, I was up to twenty seven million in sales.”

“The very same night I was messing around with what I should do with the logo. And I put the A and the N together and I realized that that was really cool. And then the lines that are in the A were meant to represent the sunset.”

“By the way, according to Paige's mom, Paige and her brother Blake started their respective companies on the very same day in 2006, February 26, to be exact, which also happens to be Paige's birthday.”

“I have the ability to pivot so quickly, which ultimately I think makes me a better brand and a better company.”

“Literally nobody wanted to touch it. They thought it was too complicated, and they were all making, like, basic t-shirts.”

“No, I'm the sole designer.”

“So I ended up doing, like you said, this kind of mass firing all the retail employees. And I literally let everyone go, but I just didn't know how else to deal with all the drama.”

“And by the way, were you able to open them all purely through cashflow? Yes. Pure.”

“I mean, the thing is, I've had a lot of offers for hundreds of millions of dollars, but I do believe that if somebody comes in and tries to, like, make my company 10 times the size that it is now, that it won't be a good thing for the brand.”

“I spent 500 dollars. I bought a booth at the street festival and I sewed up as much as I could. And I ended up making, I think, 85, 8600 dollars in one day selling clothes at that street festival.”

“What I did is I bought out a factory that was doing work for me. I bought all the machines, I took over the employees, and I hired the guy that was running the factory to work for me.”