Vineyard Vines

“Every single competitor, Vineyard Vines, J.Crew, Banana Republic, just go on. Everyone led their 2019 spring campaign with shirts meant to be worn on tuck.”

“Well, it was 1800 dollars. I just remember it was 1800 dollars. So everybody, that was 60 ties.”

“Said, I'll tell you what, we play a game. If I win, you take some ties on consignment. If I lose, you'll never have to hear from me again. And so we played and I beat him. And that was the beginning of a very, very nice relationship.”

“And he said, I think it was five million dollars. And I think he said, you know, get your tie sales to five million dollars if you can do that. If you can do that, layer on one more product. And so we're like, five million dollars, well, you know, that's gonna…”

“We found that that was a price point over a hundred dollars. We found that you could get novelty ties that sort of had the same sort of motifs, but they were like 25 to 30 dollars. And we saw an opportunity to do something right in the middle.”

“And so we were doing, like, I don't know, a couple million bucks, and we were losing a million bucks in the process.”

“And that night, that little clip was on every major news network on the Six 30 News nationwide.”

“Ties have very good profit margins. And it's, and they have no sizing, and they take up very little space in retailers.”

“So the ties, I mean, just the cost of the tie itself, the physical tie and the components was probably somewhere around 12, 13 dollars, something like that. And we didn't realize it at the time, but it was a very high profit margin product.”

“So, 70% of the people that were walking through our door was a woman 35 to 55 years old. And 70% of the product was for men.”

“Oh, we were a hundred million.”

“And at the time that we started, it was all about the casual workplace. Steve Jobs is wearing the black mock turtleneck. And a lot of the other companies were making drab colors as a result. And we saw an opportunity in the marketplace to make a tie with color…”

“And what we found like almost immediately is that Nantucket was selling like two X what we were selling on Martha's vineyard.”

“And we would get handwritten notes back by people, and then those anchor people would call their producers and say, hey, listen, this is an American dream story. And so we ended up getting segments about our story at all the major networks.”

“And so we liquidated a lot of our Inventory to, like, the TJ Maxx's and Filene's. And that actually was, I think, the thing that saved us during that time.”

“So we financed the business with credit card cash advance checks that we wrote to ourselves. So while we still had our incomes, we signed up for like four or five different credit cards while we had credit.”