Insight
Kudla: Curated Wholesale and Seeding Beat Digital Advertising for Emerging Brands
“Advertising online is just, is challenging. It's hard to cut through in today's environment, so I really am a Much bigger believer in the right wholesale partners, the right activations at those wholesale partners to build awareness and getting the staff excit…”
Insight
Kudla: Founders with day jobs retreat too easily when startups get tough
“I was going to have to jump in with two feet because there's just too many opportunities where things get tough and you want to retreat back to what's comfortable. And if you have a day job, you have a salary paying the bills. It's too easy to return to that s…”
Insight
Kudla: Legacy athletic brands missed premium textiles, conceding apparel to Lululemon
“The dirty secret in our space is that the big brands, you know, they were really premium footwear offerings, but they never really had a premium apparel offering. Whereas like Lulu inherently was working with fabrics that were much more expensive. So before yo…”
Disclosure
Kudla: Vuori used 2019 VC funding for liquidity to preserve financial discipline
“A lot of the money ended up going to shareholders because the business didn't need capital. So we didn't go out and put a bunch of money on the balance sheet at that time because we didn't want it to create bad habits. We were very proud of the discipline and …”
Insight
Kudla: Early Brands Should Prioritize Retail Staff Relationships Over Wholesale Breadth
“I'm a big believer in less is more initially sell into a few wholesale accounts and really be present, like show up, develop relationships with the staff on the floor. Get your product on them so they're wearing it, and then they get excited about it and want …”
Insight
Kudla: Brands Must Build Scalable Supply Chains to Protect Marketing Margins
“Margin is what empowers you to go out and market the brand and build a community. If your cost structure doesn't support you selling into wholesale, I would be looking really closely at that to see if there's a new supply chain that, that could give you that m…”
Assertion Supported
Kudla: Women's apparel now accounts for 50% of Vuori's total business
“And so, 2018 was when we decided it was time, and we designed a very small capsule for women's, and we brought it to market, and today, 50% of our business is actually women's.”
Disclosure
Kudla: SoftBank approached Vuori with an unsolicited investment offer
“Yeah. We weren't looking for capital, but, you know, we had ambitious plans for Viore, and that was a really big moment for the brand, because short of an IPO, I think it was the first time that Maybe the market understood how special this business is that we'…”
Disclosure
Kudla: Vuori's early marketing head took a 50% pay cut
“I mean, in my early days, our head of marketing took a 50% pay cut to join us because she believed in what we were building and she had some skin in the game.”
Disclosure
Kudla: Vuori's Initial Five-Store Nordstrom Test Failed
“We sold into five doors at Nordstrom and it didn't do well. You know, and it didn't do well because we were just too early to market and we hadn't built a community around the brand. We didn't have like a group of advocates and influencers and celebrities that…”
Disclosure
Kudla: Vuori missed its $2M initial funding target, raising only $500k
“I think our first raise, we had a goal of a couple million dollars, I think we raised 400, like 400 to 500,000, somewhere in that range.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kudla: Vuori's early direct-to-consumer ad spend hit a 3x monthly return
“Before you knew it, we were putting 10,000 dollars in and we were getting 20,000 dollars back in a month. And then we were putting 20,000 dollars in and we were getting 60,000 dollars back.”
Disclosure
Kudla: Vuori raised its first $2M entirely from friends and family
“So over the first few years of the business, we raised two million dollars of capital from friends and family, no financial institutions.”
