00:21 Hey, welcome back to the show! And today I'm so stoked because we've got a founder on who I am wearing his clothing line and you're gonna love hearing the story. Ben, tell us who you are and what do you do?

00:33 My name's Ben Perkins. I wish I did something more glamorous than this, but I'm a stretchy dress shirt salesman. 

00:42 I love the stretchy shirts.

00:43 I started, well thank you. I started &Collar. It's a performance dress shirt brand. So what we say is it's a dress shirt for guys who hate dress shirts made by a guy who hates dress shirts. So that's as simple as that. We make stretchy, machine washable, wrinkle resistant, you know, forget all the technical you know, the technical features, we make stress-free dress shirts.

01:08 I love it. I love it. Now, now why is this important today? What? Who? Who doesn't like to wear dress shirts? I mean, come on.

01:15 I mean, that's what I think. So for us, we say the everyday guy doesn't want to wear a dress shirt. I mean, COVID showed that when everyone was stuck at home, the first thing they stopped wearing, dress shirts. 

01:28 Oh man, dress shirts and pants, right?

01:30 Yeah, seriously. I'm sure you probably even did this podcast without pants. 

01:35 I did, I have done that before, yeah.

01:37 So it's like, hey. And that's what we were trying to accomplish saying, hey, you still have to wear a dress shirt occasionally, life's biggest moments, weddings, job interviews, minerals, if we're going this literal rite of passage and it's like, let's make a dress shirt that you don't hate during that or you hate a little bit less.

02:00 Right. Right, and for those listening, if you have not heard of Andcollar, go to And, A-N-D, collar.com and check it out because literally the marketing, the brand, everything about it screams you gotta try this stuff. And once you do, I'm telling you, once I got my first shirt, the first time I heard about it, to be honest, was from one of my sons. Served a mission for two years, was out of the country, I said, dad. I need some new white shirts. And I'm like, all right. And I'm thinking, all right, I'm just gonna rip out the Van Huysens out of Costco and send them over. And he's like, no, no. I don't want another Van Huysen shirt. I need an AndCollar shirt. And I'm like, what is going on? He's getting picky now with his white shirts. So I send him some Ann Coller shirts and I bought one for me. And I was like, okay, I now see why he loves this shirt. Comfy, air, like what you obviously work around a lot of people that wear fancy shirts sometimes. What was the inspiration here? I mean, you also worked on that athletic program, like you were involved in university stuff. Can you play basketball? Have you ever played basketball in one of your shirts?

03:12  Yeah, I have. So answering in reverse order. I'm not surrounded by anyone who wears dress shirts anymore. It's funny. We've got a team of 20 now at Ampedcaller and they all joined the company so they didn't have to wear dress shirts anymore. Which is this funny thing. In terms of inspiration, yeah, quickly, I grew up in Southeast Asia, specifically in Hong Kong. And so as a 13 year old, you know, I loved sports. You were talking about basketball, soccer and athletic fabrics, I was the advent of synthetic fabrics. So you're ditching them. So we're talking under armor with their turtleneck, the classic turtleneck on this tall, six-four American kid walking around the streets of Hong Kong wearing a under armor base layer. I don't know what my parents were thinking letting me walk out there. And I was like, this fabric is awesome. That's like in stark contrast to, as a 13-year-old, my biggest pain point is, I guess, a dress shirt, school uniform, having to wear it to formal functions. I was like, what if I could combine my under armor with a dress shirt was the idea. And so that's 2008. I designed a logo on my family's singular desktop computer on Microsoft Paint. It was called Wicca Sweat, horrible logo. But my parents' allowance didn't cover minimum order quantities of 5,000 stretchy dress shirts, lo and behold. So I kicked the can down the road on these stretchy basically back then when I was saying soccer jersey dress shirts, and then I was in the Philippines every day for two years and the humidity again wearing white dress shirts. I'm at home and I'm in college. I'm like, hey, dress shirts still suck. I hate them and I can't be the only one who hates them. And can I get some school credit while I start this business? The big idea was my life savings were 20,000 at that point. And I said, I'm going to set this aside as my mini MBA. I'm going to pretend I never had that 20,000 and it will be educating so I can learn how to manufacture, sell, market. And here we are, I guess that was 2017 or 2023. Yeah, six years almost to the day since officially launching then blue and white color, now and color.

05:34 Fantastic. I love it. No, what a fun story. I mean, what island are we going to the Philippines?

05:41 Sorry, oh, in Luzon, so right outside of Metro Manila.

05:47 Gotcha, gotcha, ugh. Hot, stinky, yeah, that's a rough place to, ugh.

05:52 Yeah, yeah, it was awesome. I would live there again, but it would be have been much better if I had these dress shirts.

05:58 No doubt about it, amen. Now listen, this is a real deal. We all have to wear dress shirts sometimes, and it sucks when it's so stiff, and I used to starch my collars to keep them from getting dirty and stuff like that, and your collars, your material, you know, you joke a lot. I don't know if this is a byproduct of the materials you used or it was intentional, but water repels off of it. I mean, I got a bloody nose the other day, dripped on my shirt, dripped right off.

06:29 We've heard cool stories about that. So when we first launched, there wasn't the stain repellent factor or the fact that the shirts were made out of recycled plastic, recycled polyester. It was just all the rest of the features. But then it's like, you know, the worst thing about a white dress shirt, and somehow it only happens in your white dress shirt, is when like that tiny little bit of spaghetti like gets spaghetti sauce gets right there and you lick your finger and it doesn't come. And it's like, let's stop that. Our ads showcase, you know, your crazy uncle dropping a whole thing of Kool-Aid on you. It's like, that's not going to happen. It's the nose drip. And it's like, hey, let's save your day from the little things or your kid's Cheeto puff hands. So you have a little, the little classic Cheeto fingers. So we tried to make a high tech dress shirt for the average guy who really just doesn't want to wear a dress shirt in the first place. So we say it's function, not fashion. Although I have to say, Todd, you look awesome in it and you look really good in it.

07:29 Hey, you know, thank you very much. I love, my wife loves the way they fit. And so she literally last year for Christmas, I ordered me two or three for Christmas for myself. There was four more under the tree and I was like, honey. It was awesome. So thank you again for developing a cool brand. I do like to wear dress shoes, shirts a little bit, but this makes it even better. And I have played golf in these shirts. Like literally they are functional. Very, very cool. So tell us now about the business, because we've talked about who you're trying to serve and who you're trying to help with this problem. And as an advocate of, yeah, go try them out, go buy a couple and just see what you think. But moving beyond that, let's talk about the actual growth of the business. I mean, you've been doing this since 2017. Fresh out of college, you're at least familiar with Asia, where a lot of the manufacturing for these things happen. How did it all get put together? Like what was the origin story of your first order of 5,000 units?

08:37  Yeah. Thankfully we found a place that accepted 1000 units, which is more like what I could afford. Um, but yeah, long story short, and these are basically like my very tactical suggestions, because if I can start a business, anyone can, and I genuinely believe that and the moat is getting smaller to start a business. I think people think it's a daunting thing, but it's like, Hey, I still don't know the first thing about clothing. I kind of tell you. Basically anything. Yeah, that's what it was. Basically a factory. So you hop on alibaba.com, which connects you with, it's mostly Chinese source manufacturers. And for us, what we did was we took, you know, my favorite basketball team, the Utah jazz, took their jersey with a dress shirt that I thought looked good in terms of like shape. The fabric, of course, wasn't really what, and I sent it to a factory and I said, Hey, I don't know how to explain this, but make this good looking shirt out of the fabric of this jersey and just combine the two. So Dr. Frankenstein, there was no technical me saying, hey, we need it to be this weight of fabric with this sort of drape. There's just, I connected, yeah, combined to the two.

09:51 That's hilarious. That's awesome. All right, so that's a great origin story. So you buy your first thousand units and you're selling them where?

10:02 Yeah, so we launched August 1st, 2017 while I was in school in a marketing class. I remember everyone in my class got angry. They're like, Hey, he's like cheating. Because, you know, that's usually where you take like Nike and you do it. You spent five minutes with your work. And I'm like, no, I spent all my time. Uh, lots of weeks. So we launched on Kickstarter for, yeah. And just invited all your friends and family. That's kind of when you're, you know, doing the pen handling. Yeah. Please. And at the time, I think everyone felt bad for me. They're like, oh, this guy we thought was going to, yeah, it's like, oh, he had like a decent future ahead of him. And now he's trying to be a stretchy dress shirt salesman. I think they felt bad. And so, you know, friends and family paid for that first. I have any six, 700 units and not all on the Kickstarter, by the way, let's say half of them on the server and then from there, I just had it stored in my college apartment.

10:36 He's got a thousand units to go through.

10:38  You said you went to BYU, so I was at Glenwood, a pillar of the community. And so, me and my co-founders, like I had all the smalls and mediums. They had the large, an XL, for example. And whenever we'd occasionally get an order with it's like, Oh, I've got the medium. I'll go fulfill that or draw. 

11:24 Whoever's apartment it was in did the fulfillment.

11:26 And to be honest, so many orders back then were still coming from within Utah. That's where we're from that we would lots of times just hand deliver it. So let's say you said you're in Heber, that's what 20, 25 minutes from pro. It's like, oh, it makes sense for me to drive an hour. I don't think we thought like, that's a little like alarming and arresting. Or it's like, hey, I know you don't know me Todd, but here's your shirt you ordered. But thankfully, yeah, so it was fun. And we didn't do it for like to provide like great customer experience. We did it out of a naivete. It's like, oh, this is cheaper than me. You know, at the time I think I got 15 miles a gallon. So it probably cost more than dropping it off at the post office. But yeah, that's what we did. And for the first two years, as all while I was still in school, just very organically, it would be, we didn't spend any advertising dollars on Facebook or Instagram, which now is where we spent a huge part of our budget. But it was just… Hey Todd, hopefully we have a good enough product that, like your story, you'll tell your son or your cousin or brother. So it was all organic. 

12:38  Totally. Or my son will tell me, and then I'll tell everybody else.

12:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so that's how we did it. And then graduated spring 2019 and that's when we decided to do it full time.

14:27 Love it, love it. That's actually a very similar timeframe. 20 years earlier, I did the same thing. I actually had a, I started a business while I was at college and a couple of buddies, but we had pagers, okay? We had pagers to start our first company and we literally would be sitting in class and get a page and it was like, boom, straight to the pay phone, call back and it was like, yeah, let's do this thing. But we grew an amazing business, bootstrapped it all the way through college, and then when we graduated, I bought my partners out and went and did it myself for a little while. Yeah, so I can totally empathize with your story. I love that origin story. And so as you grew from there, I mean, you graduate, it kinda sounds like you got married, things start happening. When did you start to take this thing really seriously?

15:22  Yeah, so it was the summer of 2019, we officially started full-time. So all throughout, because, and you know, looking at it, we ran a fundamentally sound business because we were forced to, where we couldn't place a new PO for new shirts until we sold enough of the existing one, and then you do it. And, and so we were doing that. And occasionally, whenever there'd be a student like pitch competition, which I think most states have you, you pitch and it's, you get five grand here, 10 grand there for winning a thousand here. Uh, I'm a perennial loser by the way. I usually took second. Like we never watched, but it'd be local VCs and private equity judges, and they would judge your business against others. And so it was the entrepreneur organization was like the young, the EO. It was their pitch competition. And we took second, but there were a couple. Utah VCs really reputable in the consumer space. They said, hey, you've got a little bit of traction. Like, are you trying to raise money? I'm like, no, I'm about to stop this in five months and go get a real job. You should rethink that. So I went home to my dad and his favorite thing in life, other than golf is Excel. And he goes, he does a spreadsheet and he's like, you only have to sell X number, these guys are right. You only have to sell X number of units and this will be a great life. And so that was December, 2018, right when I was getting married. And I'm telling this girl that I'm going to move her somewhere really cool out of, out of state. And I moved her about five minutes from where she went to college. So I, I failed on that one, but I said, I think this shirt thing is going to be real and we both agreed let's give it a year. Let's see if we can make it a legitimate viable business. And yeah, here we are.

17:16 Sure, I love it. And now, years later, you did, how much revenue last year and what are you projecting this year?

17:22 Yeah, so we did 11 million last year in that revenue. And this year we should do 15, 16 million, which is really exciting.

17:32 Awesome, awesome, I love it. Love the whole thing, man. Love the story, love the growth. I mean, 50% growth or 45 or whatever that percent growth is gonna be for this year, that is just freaking awesome. Way to go, way to go.

17:44 Well, we hold ourselves to a high standard, I think too high sometimes, where it's like, man, every other year we've been in the hundreds. And so it's good to hear that. Yeah, no, the exciting thing I think is for the first time, it's like, oh, now we're seeing triple and four digit growth on the bottom line, saying I think we're mature as a business. And so that's the balancing act that we're trying to find out where the best spot is.

18:15  Well, and the other amazing thing about your story is now that you've kind of gotten to this stage of growth and your cashflow positive and everything's kind of working, how much money did you raise to do that?

18:20 Yeah, so it was October, 2020. And so if everyone knows the backdrop of 2020, the last thing people stopped wearing dress shirts. Like we just talked about a little bit earlier, but we said, hey, let's either die really fast. Let's either die really fast and give ourselves a sh... Well, you know what? We didn't wanna die fast, but let's... If we have to, yeah.

18:56 But the reality is that you could have.

18:58 Yeah, like we don't want to peter out. And so let's like give ourselves a real shot swing for the fences. And if we die, it's gonna happen fast. And so we said, we're going to invest really, really heavy into video marketing, showing people pouring stuff on themselves, showing the stretch, you know, tug of war with the shirt and hoping that we, when people do come out of COVID wearing dress shirts again and buying dress shirts again, we'll be top of mind because no other dress shirt company was dumb enough to advertise at that time. And so we took that bet, October 2020, we took 300,000 for two angels. who knew clothing and consumer much better than we did. And so much more than the cash, we wanted just two people who were like, hey, this is actually what clothing was. 

19:46 Who could tell you what to do, right?

19:48 Yeah.

19:50 I love it. That is such a fun story. Now, the growth sounds fun. And I know that there's so much backstory there, having built and grow businesses. Everyone listening knows there's a lot of crap that can happen as you start to develop that kind of a product-based business. Like product-based businesses are hard. Digital stuff is so much easier because you don't have to wait on shipping from China and getting a container load, getting held up in customs and stupid stuff like that. Tell us about the biggest problems you've had to face and the growth of this business.

20:25 Yeah, you've said it. I mean, there are those, I don't know what we want to call them. It's like the, Oh man, just another, another one of these moments. They happen all, there's more of those. It seems like that the, Oh yeah. Moments. Uh, a couple that come right off the top of my head early on. So I was telling you how we did our PO, you know, purchasing back then we did 2000 units all the time. So all of our cash and all of my personal cash goes into 2000 units. They come and they're, you know, they're cream, like they're yellow. Not too far off the shade from Dwight Schrute's shirts. 

21:05 Oh my gosh, you're kidding.

21:07 I'm at his office. And I tell the factory and show pictures and I'm like, hey, this is not a, and we exclusively sold white shirts at the time. And I tell the factory, hey, this isn't white. And they are in China and they say no we can assure you in America cream shirts are very popular right now. 

21:25 Oh, shut up!

21:27 It's like, no, no. It's like, I know that we want white and we didn't have any payment terms at the time. So we'd already paid for them. So there wasn't anything we could do. And so we think to ourselves, we could not sell this as a white shirt. It's objective, we want white. And so we went on our website, said, hey, we'll call these things prototypes advertise everywhere and make it very clear, not like pull the hood over anyone's arm, but say, these shirts are off white, they are yellow, but our MSRP for shirts was 45 when we started. And we said, we'll sell these things for 25, cost of goods is 13 bucks, 14 bucks. Hopefully we just get rid of these. And you know what? We sent out email to customers and that was the only thing we had on the site. That is probably the fastest inventory term we've ever had. 

22:20 That is hilarious.

22:22 Yeah, where I guess we found out customers were price elastic and wanted a good deal. And even to this day, five years later, we get customers sometimes email in saying, Hey, are you coming back out with those prototype shirts? It's like, no, we, we hope to sell prototype shirts. So.

22:38  That's awesome, that's awesome. You know, it's funny to say that. I was at lunch with somebody the other day who came up with a like a gym short type product and he said, yeah, we were just, my wife hated all the stretchy pants, you know, from do I buy Lulu, do I buy this, do I buy whatever? And so he's like, we went in and just bought an order from, we told him this is what we like, this is what we don't like, same kind of thing but every time they get an order and they never knew what they were gonna get because they had like different quantities, different sizes. And so they literally just said, every Wednesday we've got a drop and whatever they had, they'd sell. And he's like, it's been four years later, they're still doing the same drop sequence every week. They don't really know exactly what's gonna be in the container. Isn't that crazy?

23:28 That's awesome. Oh, we, yeah, we've had the same thing where it's like, we've had containers. Our first ever, you're wearing a pattern shirt. Our first ever pattern shirt container came and the sleeves are about three times as big and we kind of like ballooned that. And so, yeah, we've now hired a great COO who runs supply chain much better than I did, but it was one of those where you just fingers crossed and pray. It's like, we've already approved this thing like eight times, but I don't know what's on that container. So definitely had those, we've had moments where our container was off the, you know, port of LA and Long Beach behind the 90 other. 

24:05  Oh, during that big, yeah.

24:08  Yeah, and so we've had lots and lots of those moments.

24:12  Wow, wow. Well, listen, this has been so fun. I honestly love what you've been doing. Now, in terms of these challenges and to other people out there building a consumer, a product-based business, what kind of advice do you give? Like, what are the big things to look out for? If you were to start over, what would be the thing that you would tell yourself, okay, next time, don't do that?

24:23 Oh, I have so many of those. I have a full lot of lists that I'll message you over do's and don'ts where we could fast forward three years of business. 

24:26 Love it. It's a book to come.

24:27 Yeah. No, no one will read it, but there's some good stuff in there in terms of dues. I'll be very fast. If you're starting a consumer based business, I know that much better than tech. I'm not smart enough to know tech. Uh, I already said you can source and manufacture things on Alibaba.com. You can get for less than 300 bucks, you can get a great prototype. I would 100% launch on Shopify. I'm not paid to say that, but I think Shopify is the great equalizer. And it has paid processing. You can have a professional looking website for $19.99 a month. So those are for sure dues. The other do is just like take a swing at it, set aside two, three grand. At the very, very worst, sell them at cost to your friends. Like you're, you can find out who your true friends are, where they're willing to spend 30 bucks on your shorts that you just came out with. So yeah, the main thing would be for dues, just like the cloud. Hey, I'll just say it, just do it. Uh, you'll, you will not regret having done it in terms of things not to do. Um, things not to do, don't move too quickly into other products and skews. What I mean by that, I mean, I think it's kind of obvious, but I think you need to be best in class at something or have like a real winner. And I think I do feel like we accomplished that with the shirt and it took a lot of iteration. And the shirt you're wearing today took probably six points of variation or iteration from the one we launched Kickstarter. 

26:28 Is that right?

26:29 Yeah. I mean, now having recycled materials, a little bit of fit change, uh, where we rushed into our second product category. You're talking about stretchy pants. Uh, we, we launched a pant and it was fine. Uh, like I think it was, if I had to rate it, it's a B minus. It's a yeah. B minus. You know, 

26:51 Good, but not the best.

26:52 Good, but not the best. I think we lost a little bit of that where it's like, hey, we have so much brand equity. We can just sell whatever we want. People will like it. Where it's like, Hey, that thing is the stand on its own. And I feel like we've gotten back to that. But, uh, yeah, don't. Don't push losers is probably the way I'd reword that. So have a wonderful day.

27:18 I think that's great advice for anybody's vertical. Anybody's vertical. That, you know, oftentimes, Ben, a lot of founders will get in their head, this is gonna be my favorite product. And the reality is the market is telling you, we don't care. You know, that is not what we want. So how do you listen to that? What do you do to get over kind of your own impotence of thinking this is gonna be a winner, and then it just isn't?

27:43 Yeah. So we did three years of me listening of us listening to mine and Jordan's instincts. In terms of product and it's like, Hey, that's so dumb. We have enough, enough customers now to reach statistical significance with just a survey. And so, and we're not even a survey, just follow up. It was Jeremy Andrus, the, you know, the CEO of then Skullcandy, now Traeger Grills. He gave me some of the best advice I've ever received, which was, don't let people vote with their words, let them vote with their dollars. Which was saying, you know, I can send out a survey and say, hey, Todd, what do you think of conceptually if I come out with a blue shirt with flowers on it? Let's just say. And you can say, yeah, I love that, but that's worthless until you willingly hand over your credit card for $48 and pay for it. And so his advice there was just come out with smaller quantities. Test say, Hey, we'll pay, you know, we'll pay an extra four bucks a unit to come out with 250 or 500 units instead of the usual 2000 units. And if the sell through and customer reviews tell us it's good, then it's good. So yeah. Genuinely as buzz-worthy as it sounds, just listen to customers with surveys and talking to them more. And second, just look at the data. Look at sell-through. You've got pretty clear winners and losers that customers are moving on.

29:18 Hey, fascinating. I love the journey, love the story. I don't wanna let you leave until you've given us a shout out. Who's kind of inspired you? Who's the mentor who's kind of said, you know what dude, let's get you there.

29:33 I mentioned one, I mean, Jeremy Andrus is awesome. Those two angel investors, David Kornberg, Michael Silverson are their two names. Both really, really awesome. But the one you said, I think the way that I heard you say it first, I'm gonna give a shout out to my brother. He's also an entrepreneur. He's done it. It's a serial thing. He's the one that told me, set aside your 20 grand, just set it aside  do this thing. And so I would not be here today, he's an unofficial board member where whatever, it's a cash flow problem because he runs it too. And it's like, Hey, I don't have enough cash for payroll, let's say. And I can't, I can't really open that up to anyone else. 

30:16 No, no, you can't really tell your employees that.

30:20  You can't. And it's like, I can't really tell my wife that either. Maybe that's an indictment on me, but it's like.

30:26 No, no, you're not the only one that doesn't tell your wife that stuff.

30:30 Yeah, but where the funny thing is, it's like the business is humming along. We're making more money than we've ever made, but I found that profits don't still equal cash and it's like, Hey, the one guy I can call and he could genuinely relate where it's like, Oh, this employee is giving me such a hard time or that XYZ. So yeah, Derek Perkins, I've got to give him a shout out. He's a hero.

30:57 Love it. Love the shout outs. Those are great shout outs. I know some of them and great people. So Ben, moving forward dude, what do you expect in the next two years?

31:08 That's the question. It's this existential question all the time. The goalpost is always shifting apparently. Where Jordan and I, when we started, we said, hey, if someone writes a check for $7 million, we said, I remember the day, for $7 million for this business, we take it and we run. We don't, no questions. And it's like, oh, well, we hope to do twice that in Riveland this year.

31:35 Right, it always does.

31:36 And so it's always changing. I think we're trying to stay dialed in. But if I had to give a very transparent number, it's like, hey, we really want to hit that $30 million revenue threshold in the next two years. And then we see.

31:51 Well, at the growth you're doing, I think you can get there.

31:53 We think so too. We think we've gotten a better team now and we're in a much better place to do that. But we want to do that. But honestly, I hate dress shirts. That's why we started the whole business. So I don't wake up every morning. I love dress shirts. And so we'd love to transact, get one under the belt and then take the learnings from this book or, you know, from my future book and then from the growth and scaling podcast and, and say, let's do it again. Yeah. I want to fall into your footstool.

32:23 I love it. Love it, love it, love it, love it. Thanks for the plug and we cannot wait to push this product. For those listening, if you hate dress shirts, you've gotta go check out andcollar.com. Excuse me, andcollar.com and buy a few shirts, man. Just check it out. It is the coolest place. And your white shirts will never stay whiter. Like honestly, it's the best. So thanks so much for being here again, Ben. We appreciate all you're doing.

32:51  Hey, thanks a ton Todd, really appreciate it.