Apr 20, 2020 · 1h 9m · how-i-built-this
Brooklinen: Vicki and Rich Fulop
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Rich and Vicki Fulop share the founding story of Brooklinen, detailing how an overpriced hotel bedding experience inspired them to overcome logistics crises, venture rejections, and lean bootstrapping to build a $100 million direct-to-consumer home comfort brand.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 34.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 2.2 Guest teaching 1.6 Guest disagreement 0.3 Guy pushing back 0.6
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 29:55 Rich counters host skepticism regarding commodity bedding shopping
When Guy questions why customers would need an alternative to discounted Target sheets, Rich forcefully reframes the issue around brand identity and lack of consumer alignment.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 29:41 Guy challenges why bedding shopping needed fixingGuy presses Rich directly, arguing that average consumers feel satisfied getting discounted 1000-thread-count sheets at big-box retailers.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 23:01 Rich explains why high thread counts are inferior marketing tricksRich systematically breaks down the physical limits of single-ply yarns and exposes high thread counts as dense marketing gimmicks, catching the host entirely unaware.
Guy holds their own ▶ 32:44 Guy cites S'well manufacturing in China as a counterexampleGuy brings up his interview with Sarah Kauss of S'well to challenge Rich on whether factory minimum order quantities in China were truly prohibitive.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Announcement of the Food-Themed Facebook Live Series | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Host opens with an announcement of a Facebook Live series before presenting the narrative introduction to Brooklinen and setting up the interview during quarantine. | |
| Early Backgrounds and Meeting in Manhattan | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Rich and Vicki discuss growing up, going to NYU without meeting, and later reconnecting in an apartment building elevator. | |
| Early Career Paths in Sports and Public Relations | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | The guests recount early professional pivots, from Rich's sports agency internship to Vicki's transition from law school to public relations. | |
| The Las Vegas Wynn Hotel Bedding Epiphany | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Rich and Vicki recount their Las Vegas hotel stay at the Wynn, where they realized high-end hotel bedding cost nearly a thousand dollars. | |
| Conceptualizing Customizable and Gender-Neutral Bedding | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Rich describes how getting a custom suit inspired the idea of customizable, gender-neutral bedding marketed towards men and millennials. | |
| Demystifying Thread Count at Barnes and Noble | 2 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Rich educates the host on how thread count above 500 is largely a marketing gimmick resulting in denser, less breathable fabric, which the host admits he had no idea about. | |
| Assembling the NYU Stern Founding Team | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Rich discusses recruiting NYU Stern classmates Ben and David to cover supply chain, accounting, and legal needs while starting outreach to factories. | |
| Field Research and Bedding Aisle Customer Surveys | 4 | 3 | 2 | 4 | Guy pushes back, questioning why unbranded discount bedding at Target would even be perceived as a problem by consumers. Rich explains the brand void in the industry. | |
| Securing a Manufacturing Partner in Israel | 5 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Guy cites S'well founder Sarah Kauss to ask about manufacturing runs in China, prompting Rich to detail why textile looms differ from hard goods before discussing Israeli manufacturing and US free trade agreements. | |
| Naming the Brand Brooklinen | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | The co-founders recount naming the company Brooklinen, pitching early VC investors who passed, and navigating personal career crises. | |
| Mid-Episode Break and Logistics Preview | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Vicki explains their grassroots PR campaign with handwritten notes and U-Haul drop-offs that led to raising $237k on Kickstarter. | |
| Customs Port Crisis in New Jersey | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Rich shares the crisis of having their first major shipment seized at the New Jersey port due to lack of import bonds and customs knowledge. | |
| Fulfilling Kickstarter Orders in Greenpoint | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Rich and Vicki humorously describe fulfillment chaos in Greenpoint, hand-packing custom boxes without barcodes amidst piles of unorganized pallets. | |
| Website Launch, Rapid Sellout, and Executive Changes | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | The founders describe selling out 7 months of inventory in four days at website launch and David stepping down, which freed up salary for Vicki. | |
| Bootstrapping Hypergrowth from $2 Million to $20 Million | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Rich and Vicki explain managing hypergrowth from $2M to $20M through word-of-mouth, transitioning to a third-party logistics provider, and maintaining lean habits. | |
| Series A Funding and Restoring Fiscal Discipline | 4 | 2 | 1 | 3 | Guy probes the financial discipline after taking $10M in Series A funding. Rich admits to falling into the trap of negative EBITDA before pivoting back to profitability. | |
| Diversifying Beyond Sheets: Loungewear, Spaces, and $100 Million | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Guy and the founders reflect on expanding into spaces and loungewear, hitting $100M in sales, navigating pandemic uncertainties, and evaluating luck versus hard work. |
Statements from this episode (23)
Rich Fulop pursued puppy portraits and vertical hot dog ventures before Brooklinen
“I had a puppy portraits business that I was trying to pursue. And I was also I was really passionate about these European style hot dogs that you eat vertically in like a baguette that I experienced when I traveled. And I wanted to really start like the next, …”
The Wynn Las Vegas charged nearly $1,000 for a complete bedding set
“When we took a look at the sheets, and the sheet set was 450 dollars, the duvet cover was about 350 dollars, and the pillowcases to match were about a 150 bucks. So, we put that all together, you know, we're just under a thousand dollars for that set of sheets…”
Rich Fulop: Bedding industry marketing historically ignored male customers
“A key piece actually was also was I wanted something that was gender neutral because I felt like every presentation and photography and marketing only spoke to a female customer and I felt very underserved. So I really wanted to position this where it was acce…”
Framing field surveys as student projects easily disarms hesitant respondents
“A lesson we learned is easy way to disarm somebody for a quick survey is let them know it's a student project, and it very much was at the time, so.”
Fulop: Bedding lacked a consumer brand like Warby Parker before Brooklinen
“There's no Warby Parker, there's no Nike, there's no brands that people can align with and say, I like the look, I like the value, I like the price point that, like, it speaks to me as a customer. There was just nothing out there that did that.”
Brooklinen co-founders launched the company with $4,000 to $5,000 each
“If I remember correctly, we put in about four or 5000 dollars a person to incorporate and start the business, and that, that was it. We put it into the pot.”
Fulop: Textile manufacturing requires high MOQs due to loom and table scales
“Textiles are totally different, because if you think about how big a, like, uncut textile is, it's just not, you have to run thousands of yards of fabric through a loom to weave it in any particular color or fabrication, and then to cut and sew, you need, thin…”
Fulop: Customers ultimately pay a multiple of every supply chain cost
“At the end of the day, all those contribution costs, the customer ends up paying for them in a multiple of that. So they don't see it, but every little thing that's done, they end up footing a bill for it.”
Rich Fulop: VCs rarely say no directly, preferring soft excuses
“Well, you know, with VCs, you don't really hear no, which is the frustrating part. You hear you're too soon. You're too late. Let me think about it. Check back in with me. You know, no one really wants to tell you no, that's stupid.”
NYU Venture Fund wrote Brooklinen's only early institutional check for $100,000
“The only investor, the only institutional investor that took a chance on us was, believe it or not, the NYU Venture Fund. So here we are, four NYU students, and NYU was willing to write us a check at some point. It wasn't pre-launch, but that was the only, lik…”
Fulop: Journalists rarely discover stories independently, relying instead on pitches
“What people don't realize, myself included, and most people, is that just, you know, journalists and writers aren't just discovering things on their own and, you know, spinning their wheels to, like, figure out something to write about. They're pitched constan…”
U.S. Customs seized Brooklinen's first shipment over missing import trade bonds
“We were all set to go, but then all the goods came in, and we didn't have our import bonds in place. We didn't even know what that was to legally be able to import goods into the country, so all of our goods were seized at the ports in August.”
Fulop: Going dark during operational delays is the worst customer service strategy
“The worst thing you can do from a customer service standpoint, and we learned this lesson very early, is just say nothing, honestly, and just go dark and, you know, under-communicate. That just frustrates people and always better to over-communicate.”
Allowing Kickstarter backers to mix and match sheet patterns was a mistake
“We, you know, we wanted to just please the customer, so we had six patterns with our Kickstarter. We said, mix and match, do whatever you want, kind of, and tell us what you want. Huge mistake.”
An Israeli manufacturer fronted Brooklinen inventory on credit to fuel scale
“I got back on a plane alone to go back to the factory in, in Israel and talk to them, and I said, hey, we want to scale this thing up, and ultimately I convinced them to front us the inventory without paying and give us, you know, some sort of favorable terms,…”
An early employee's resignation allowed Vicki Fulop to draw a $50,000 salary
“And it was one of those moments that was very, very critical to the future of the business because Vicky was not pulling a salary at that point for us. So I was very, and David and I were pulling very small salaries. We had prorated 50,000 dollars or so we gav…”
Brooklinen's revenue jumped from $2 million in 2015 to $20 million
“Yeah, in terms of the growth so we did, including the Kickstarter in 2014, we did about four or 500,002 1015 was two million for the year, and then for the year of 2016 it jumped to about twenty million or so.”
Brooklinen ran zero paid advertising while scaling to $20 million in revenue
“That's all it could have been because we weren't doing any advertising.”
Brooklinen quickly fell into negative EBITDA after raising its Series A
“Oh yeah. We got on the drug really, really quickly with that. After we raised our series A and it was not a fatal mistake to the business, but it was certainly a point in time that was not one that was easy for me as the CEO. We dropped into the negative in te…”
Fulop: Bootstrapping forces companies to build strong unit economics early
“The fact that we were trained on a shoestring with no money to fund the business from the get go, the bones of the business and the unit economics and the margins and everything were really, really good and built well because they had to be in the early days b…”
Brooklinen created Spaces marketplace after customers requested photo shoot props
“Spaces, for example, was a product of our customers repeatedly asking us about props on our photo shoots that were, like, kind of secondary in the pictures. Like, ooh, where's that cool bed frame from, or that night table, or that vase? Like, it's really like,…”