Ep 75: Building a Life Around Denim with Beau Lawrence

Beau Lawrence built his career by following the work, then building a life around it.

In Episode 75, Andrew sits down with Beau Lawrence, founder of Ace Rivington, to talk about denim, entrepreneurship, retail, Santa Barbara, and what it takes to build a business that can actually support the life you want.

The conversation starts in Nashville, moves through Los Angeles, design school, Guess, The Territory Ahead, Union, and back again to Guess, where Beau helped shape men’s jeanswear during one of the most active periods in premium denim.

From there, they get into Ace Rivington. A piece of fabric kept in his pocket. A Kickstarter campaign. A first store in Santa Barbara. The long process of learning what retail, direct-to-consumer, wholesale, fit, margins, and manufacturing really require.

They also talk about the parts of the industry people like to skip over. Working hard. Staying flexible. Making the numbers work. Moving production when quality breaks down. Building something profitable instead of something that only looks good from the outside.

Underneath it all is a quieter question: what does success actually look like when the dream is not just growth, but happiness, stability, and the ability to keep doing the work?

Thank you to our sponsor Inside Denim.

Beau Lawrence
Founder & CEO at Ace Rivington, Inc.
Ace Rivington, Instagram, LinkedIn

Please follow us on: Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

Transcript

Andrew 0:00

If you value these conversations, subscribe and leave a review. It helps more than you think. At first glance, my guest today, Bo Lawrence, is living the life. He's about to be 51, 25 years in the industry, settled in Santa Barbara, has his own store and brand. He sells directly to consumers, has a great family, lives in an amazing town. I mean, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara has it all. An amazing climate. Perhaps the best one I've ever been to. And I've been to 90 countries. It's got the ocean in the front, mountains behind, no real winter, and wealth. I mean, it's a population of 80 to 85,000 as a town, but Santa Barbara County has like 400,000, 450,000 people, and everyone has a car. It's 90 to 120 minutes from Los Angeles, an amazing city. If things were different for my life, I'd live there. I think it's the best place I've ever seen to live and has the best weather on earth. And that brings up the idea that our industry can allow one to live where you want to live and do the job you know and have your own business. It's all kind of dreamy, but all of it takes a lot of planning and a lot of hard work, big dreams, and in this case, a spouse who's also into the work. Not many people live where they want to and do their jobs. Most of them live where they don't want to. Not Bo. Good morning, Bo.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Great to have you here. Thanks for doing this. Thank you so much for the opportunity, Andrew. It's incredible to be on this on this podcast. We're thrilled to have you.

Andrew 1:40

You have an interesting story, I think, one of the more interesting ones. So let's start from Nashville, where you were born. How on earth does someone go from Nashville into Jeans and to LA?

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Uh it it was it was all it all took all it took was a station wagon. Yeah, I guess so. So uh, so yeah, I was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Um my my parents were established there. My father actually was the stage manager at the Grand Old Opry from 1965 until 1975. So country music was his lane, and that developed into television. He was Johnny Cash's stage manager, made hee ha. You know, that was that was a big base. But when I was born, like many uh many young parents do as they're thinking about their future and really building foundation, you know, opportunity came my father's way to shift into television specifically, uh, to make Knott's landing, eight is enough, and and Dallas. So he came to Hollywood, put our Saint Bernard in my mom's station wagon, left the day after I was born. My mother did not tell him that I was in the incubator because I had jaundice and was in the incubator for a month because he would have turned around and come back. We followed a month later, settled in uh Sepulveda, um across the street from Bush Gardens, for anybody who grew up in or was in Los Angeles in the 70s in the valley. And uh, and that's how that's how I got to LA. Um, but the big part of of growing up that really influenced me significantly was my grandmother's, you know, they both taught me how to paint and sew. You know, my grandfather, who was a handyman, taught me how to hammer a nail. And then I was hooked on making things, and at that time, specifically interested in building. So, you know, whether it was, you know, um tree houses or forts or this or that, I just wanted to make things. And when I was in the second grade, I did a book report on Frank Lloyd Wright, started learning about what an architect was. And between my Legos and Lincoln Logs and just spatial thinking around design, that was the path that I leaned into pursuing. Um and that was all I wanted to do. Took drafting courses, you know, studied design. I was gonna be an architect. I was gonna be the next Frank Lloyd Wright. That's what my vision of myself was. And got my first degree in math and science. Um and then my best friend calls. I left Valencia after getting that first associate's degree from College of the Canyons in Valencia, moved to Santa Barbara, spent a summer living in a house with 10 girls, surfing every day, you know, um, working in a nursery, just having a great time and loving life. And Ryan called and he said, Hey, let's travel. And I said, Well, what are you talking about? You want to go to Europe or what are you what are you thinking? He said, No, let's go explore like North America and let's get a van and do it. And I said, Okay, that sounds interesting. So I moved home, spent a year and a half planning the trip, saving up. Um, I was selling nuts and bolts to five different Home Depot stores. And I'll tell you, I filled those little pegs of nuts and bolts, you know, nuts and bolts as full as you could fill those pegs because I was getting paid on all those little baggies and nuts and bolts I was selling.

Andrew 5:25

And you've always been you've always been a planner and entrepreneurial.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Always, always. And just being able to think about control and building something and having vision and being inspired and looking at people like yourself and other people that have been a part of our industry who have built significant things and thinking to myself, you know what? Like everybody's smart, everybody works hard, but I'm smart too, and I work hard as well. So how did you get in our industry? So so basically, that van trip, you know, bought the van, spent a year driving the van all over North America, 36 states, six provinces, working random odd jobs from raking blueberries in Maine for 11 cents a pound. That was the worst job I've ever had, to uh being a bartender in the taverns in Illinois to working as a ski lift operator in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and at a movie theater in, you know, in uh in Atlanta, in Kennesaw, you know, um, worked along the way, came home, realized my parents were in a pretty challenged financial position. And I got home at 21 years old and decided that I was gonna fix their problems because that's what 21-year-olds are supposed to do. Not really, but it's what I felt like I was supposed to do. So it was interesting coming home, having all that time to really kind of reflect on myself, who I was, how much I believed in myself and all these types of things. So came home, you know, um, was it was really trying to kind of figure out what I was doing. Um, some friends at the time had generated spectacular success with their snowboard company. Um, I started learning a lot more about uh how you could build a brand and do something interesting with it. So June 20th, 1997, I'm in Newport, uh Newport Beach at a graduation party for a friend from UCSB. Um, let's say I had thoroughly enjoyed the evening as a young 21-year-old with some beverages in another fancy town. In another fancy town. So at like midnight, my best friend turns to me, and he had been screen printing at that point for probably 10 years. He turns to me and he says, I'll give you 2% of my screen printing company. I'll pay you between five and six dollars an hour if you come and work for me. And the next morning I went down to the pier. I went into the surf shops, and I'm looking at brands like Rusty and Billabong and Quicksilver, and I'm thinking to myself, you know what? These guys are smart, they're not any smarter than I am. I'm gonna change majors from architecture into fashion design, and I'm gonna build a company. So I drove home from Newport to Valencia. I said, Mom and dad, I'm not gonna be an architect. I'm gonna be a fashion designer. And they last yeah, my mom was sure I was gay at that point, which is a wonderful thing. Um, ended up not being the case, but you know, but then I decided I'm gonna find the best school in the country that can fast track me into the industry. I looked all over the country and found fit 'em in Los Angeles, went in at the time as what was called a professional designation major, and it was supposed to be a one-year course, you know, and I stretched it out as that place is expensive. That was expensive. And but at the at the time, you know, I think like the total cost was going to be 18 grand or something.

Andrew 9:07

And that's a long time ago. 18 grand in the 80s or the 90s is like um 45,000, 50,000 now.

SPEAKER_00 9:14

Yeah, and I got to figure out how to pay for it myself. You know, um, I remember the day it was paid off, but I hustled all the way through. As soon as I went to school, I made a thousand business cards that said I was a fashion designer that had my beeper number on it. You were born, you were born, you were born entrepreneurial. Had to do it. So, you know, I I had 10 internships while I was at 10 internships while I was at school. Can I just stop you here?

Andrew 9:42

For young people listening, if you're not entrepreneurial, don't even bother, okay? I got good advice for you. This business is not easy. No business is, but I can tell you this business is not. And if you don't have entrepreneurial spirit, quit now. Go work for the bank. Or deliver pizzas. Because I'm sure that as we go on, you're going to hear the same theme over and over again entrepreneurial.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

Uh you have to, you have to work hard. And, you know, I think I think from early influence, perspective on myself was developed in a lot of ways. And self-confidence and vision for what I could achieve. So as I as I really started leaning into school, design school, which was amazing because at that point in the late 90s, like I had my math and science out of the way and was just able to focus on the the product stuff cutting, sewing, drawing, you know.

Andrew 10:40

All you need in our business for school is is arithmetic.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

Yeah. Math's a big deal. You need to you need to know how to add fractions. Apparently, that's a thing. I know. So leaning into school, I made a thousand business cards and I passed out every single one of those things while I was at school. And with the 10 different internships that I had that took me through all different aspects of the apparel industry, from, you know, uh from working for Richard Tyler, who was a couturier in Pasadena or Los Angeles area at the time, to uh whatever, doing all kinds of different random jobs, dressing at fashion shows, working for the entertainment industry, all kinds of things. I was able to get a really good idea of what the industry was about to figure out for myself what was interesting. And before, before graduating, I made, I was manufacturing costumes for the film industry. I made all of the US Navy and Russian Navy costumes for Kevin Costner's 13 days. And then uh that was a film about the Cuban Missile Crisis. And then before graduation, before graduating from Fitum, I put together a bid to produce all of the costumes for Pearl Harbor. And like that's what I was doing when I was still in school. Um, because I had met small factories, I had met fabric resources, I knew where I could go for trims, you know, I had started putting these puzzle pieces together in my head, didn't get the gig, uh took the samples that I made to my local newspaper, did a story, said all kinds of stuff about what the film was supposed to be called and things. And apparently Disney did not like that because they sent me a cease and desist order, which I I wish I had that letter still, because it would be so cool framed in my office. Um and honestly, at that point, I started looking for a job delivering pizzas. That's why you brought up the pizza thing before. Yeah, it's a it's a path, you know. Um, but I was able to find a job making uh girls' pajamas, which was absolutely not what I had any interest in doing. Um, but I took the gig and you know, and then six weeks later, guests called, and that was for a bottom of the barrel design position in men's design. And, you know, in design school in the late 90s, the only thing they taught you was women's couture. Couture was like the top of what, you know, was being taught, you know. Um, and my vision at that point for myself was that I was gonna replace John Galliano as the head designer of Dior. And I started studying French. I was working at BCBG. Uh they had just acquired a division called um called Hervilliger. And my my perspective was I'm gonna move to Paris, I'm gonna be an understudy for Hervilliger, and that's gonna be my path into Dior. And then they fired Every Leger.

Andrew 13:57

I'm gonna stop you there again. Because for young people, that's another story that you have to actually think about, which which I had in my career. You have to have dreams. You have to actually see yourself in the dream. And the dream of your future, right? Yeah, you have to. And you know, you mentioned that twice already, or three times already in this short little time that we're talking, how you visualized yourself doing something.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

Yeah, the dreams, the dreams are real, and you know, and and technology was different than. I actually I created my very first email address at Fitum in October of '97. And, you know, so if you think about the difference from from today to then, you know, technology was a very different thing. Research was a very different thing. I used that library at the school. And what I did in that library was I studied every brand that I could. I made, I filled up file cabinets in my bedroom with brand profiles because I wanted to know how those brands got someplace and who was working there. You know, so for me at school, I was taking classes based on where the teacher had worked. Because for me, I looked at that as an opportunity to build a path relationship to get a job. One of our teachers was an instructor at, he was actually the president of a division of BCBG called Parallel. And, you know, and I wasn't using him to get any place, I was doing it myself. But he invited the class to take a tour of BCBG. And, you know, and he brought it up as he was giving the class the tour. He's like, and this guy's already got an interview, you know. Um, the hustle is real. And regardless of the industry that you're in, vision for best in class opportunity, highest in class opportunity, whether it's selling houses or selling toothpaste or making jeans, you've got to believe in the potential that you have to have an impact and make a difference. And you also have to understand that just because someone else has done it doesn't mean that they can do it any better than you can. But you sure as heck better know what you're doing.

Andrew 16:21

That's true. All right, take us to guest. You're you're in the low end position at guest doing men's genes, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:27

Oh my gosh. And that first day when I started, my designer who I was working for told me two things. She said, let's see if you last a week. And um, and the second thing was I got to send my first email to India. And that's when my world started becoming such a smaller place. And, you know, and that's one of the things that I feel so incredibly grateful for about this industry that's that's filled up passports for me and helped me understand truly how small the world is with the right point of view. And I'll talk more about that later, but but that was the beginning of influence. And I just was dumped into this wild world at the in at the first, it was in woven shirts of learning how to do learning what desk looms were and learning how to pick out, you know, yarn colors and build cads and you know, and manage swatch libraries and you know, um, just just work, you know, understanding what a tech pack was and the importance of information on a piece of paper, apparently it's important.

Andrew 17:41

Details also, little numbers can make a big difference.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

So, how many years, how many years were you at guess for that period? So that time I was there for 20 months. And what what kind of um what took place during that period was you know, started in woven shirts and then started digging in there, and then there was some change that was happening within the business. Apparently, the um the shiny denim uh hookups, you know, and my Timberland boots and attitude that was influenced by what Tyrese was wearing on the campaigns in the late 90s, that was not going to be the future of the brand, um, or that was not going to make the brand relevant. Um truly getting back to the roots of denim was what was going to make the brand relevant. And that's when Silvio came in to guess. And this guy came in like a bull in a China shop and set himself up. He was the creative office. He was the creative director, right? Yeah, creative director set himself up in a private office that no one was allowed to go into, and except for a couple of us. And he just buried himself in there and designed, designed, designed, designed. And what came out of that was the relaunch of like of true jeans wear for guests. And that was the beginning of what would influence like the next, honestly, the next more than the next 10 years of the business. And I knew, I understood what he knew, and I said, I want to be your assistant. And that's when I really started focusing on denim as a product category. And um it was like, as you very well know, and many of the folks who are listening to this know, denim is an unbelievable product and category for the level of flexibility that comes with it, the level of change, the level of creativity that you can have, you know, um, working with a living product that changes over time. So I fell in love with that category. And and, you know, I was so inspired by what I was doing every day in my 70-hour work weeks at the time that I would go home at night and I would make a shirt that I would wear the next wear to work the next day. My nickname at guest was Bosacchi. And uh it was just such an incredible and inspiring time. And then one afternoon I got a call from my sister, and she shared that mom had stopped breathing. And I didn't know what that meant, but uh, but I got in the car and drove home. And I drove home as fast as I could in the emergency lane from downtown Los Angeles all the way up to Valencia, California, which is about 40 or 45 miles. And the the whole time I was I was just saying to myself, um, mom, don't die. And when I got there, our our pastor was giving my mom her last rites um in the emergency room. And um obviously, I guess at the time I was 27 years old. Um incredibly heavy, heavy life experience. Um that led to me taking a leave of absence from guests for three weeks. And my mom was the glue that held the family together. And um, and for us at home, you know, um my father's path in the film industry, which was his career, you know, he spent the first six or so, six or seven years we were in California working for the studios. Then he pivoted into freelance, which was feast or famine, and you know, and the famine just started becoming more consistent and lots more consistent with consecutive years of not working. And when I when I got into when I sat down on my mom's desk just to try to understand what was happening, how were the bills being paid? What I what I found was like $300,000 worth of credit card bills. And she was just using one credit card to pay another credit card to pay another credit card. And my father was not involved. And that was kind of the way that my parents' relationship worked, where mom was in charge of the finances and dad was in charge of making the money. And that's how it worked. And just like the example of mom not sharing with dad that I was in an incubator for the first month of my life, you know, when he would go away to work, she wouldn't share the the challenging things that were happening because she knew that he was because you travel travel for work. He traveled a lot for work, you know, um, would be away for months. Um that's how I got to know what Cabbage Town was in Toronto. Um neat place. Um so, anyways, got in, was doing that, realizing like just how big of a mess of a situation my parents were in. And all that did was further reinforced the perspective that I had on my need to make things happen so that I can make the life easier for my family. And again, not responsibility that I should have been bearing, but that's the way that I looked at things. And uh I went, I went again back up to Santa Barbara to visit some friends. Um and Santa Barbara's always been an incredible escape for me. You know, um it's only it was an hour and a half or so away from Valencia, where we grew up. And like I shared earlier, came here right out of high school just to cause trouble and have fun. And so came up with, you know, was hanging out with friends, was walking down State Street, the main drag here in town. And as I was walking in, walking down the street, I was looking in the windows and looking at shops. I look in one window and I see a bunch of, I see design boards. And on the design boards, I see tears from guests and other brands, and I start being curious about what that is. And it was a it was a catalog company, the Territory Ahead.

Andrew 24:23

And I want to stop you right there. There is um, for those that don't live in America, there's a big catalog company here called Land's End. And they started in the um, I guess in the late 70s. Really big company. And this company was called Territory Ahead, which I always thought was really funny. How they kind of took their name from Land's End. I mean, it was just so funny.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

Anyway, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just always thought that was it's it's amazing and um and very true. And when, you know, so I I reached out to those guys and you know, I said, hey, listen, they were they had an opening and you called me at the time. You called me at the time and asked me what I thought. I remember I told you I had graduated from from Guess University, and Andrew, it was so wild. The opportunities that developed when I made that shift. And it was moving from uh from an associate design role into a designer role, which meant I could start traveling the globe. And it was unbelievable. I got paid twice as much money, got to work half the hours and surf at lunch, and um and still be close enough to Valencia to get in the car and drive home whenever there was what you didn't know at the time was that direct marketing was gonna become a big deal in your later years. Oh my gosh. You know, it just it the control that you had over that conversation with a customer, you know, um from a service standpoint or a communication perspective was spectacular. And, you know, and what was amazing about the territory head was, you know, at let's say $100 million in business, first of all, it showed me that you could build a hundred million dollar business in Santa Barbara. So that planted the flag in the sand for the dream for me.

Andrew 26:12

That is a that's something which I never thought of, but that's true because you saw someone doing what you what could other people could do.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

It was awesome. It was so awesome. And then at the same time, you know, I want to study there again, I'm sorry.

Andrew 26:26

But I always felt that way in Toronto, you know, because I grew up in Toronto and I wanted to do business in America because the an order in Toronto was one-tenth the size of an order in the United States. So I kept thinking, well, why would you want to work so hard for an order when you could go work the same amount of effort and get an order ten times bigger? So that's when I started working in the States, and I did it from Toronto. And you you you are doing the same thing in Santa Barbara when you have to be in LA to do your job.

SPEAKER_00 26:54

Yeah. LA is such a mess, you know, and um, but it they're all important, and you need to understand what they all are in order to be able to actually be really holistic in your approach to doing something. So did territory ahead teach you a lot about margins? It did. And it was a really interesting position because um at guest, you know, I was siloed into design. At the territory ahead, in um in the early 2000s, we were still working with quota, which was you know a tariff requirement that was lots of lots of countries had. So I had to negotiate quota. I had to build my own specs. I had to negotiate my manufacturing cost. I had to coordinate this all of the details in the supply chain from the factory to the fabrics we were using. And what was incredible about that place was we didn't have the volume.

Andrew 27:54

The company was small.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

It was small, and we didn't have the volume to support the the Chinese fabric minimums. So that meant I got to work with the best fabric mills in Europe to ship fabric from Europe to uh to to China, whether it was Legler or you know, um or Tev Tevez. Well, Tevez was was at guests. You brought Tevez to guess when that was when I met you the first time uh for a Poplin shirt program that we did in Portugal. And um it's just it was amazing. And how big was territory ahead when you went there? 100 million bucks. They were that size already? They were that size already, and I think that's a big company. Over the two and a half years I spent there, they got maybe they were like in the 90s or something. They got up to about 130 or so. Really? They were that big. They were that big, and then they just crumbled. Um, but I spent two and a half years there, got to spend a lot of time um with the family, and it was kind of a slow pace, slow enough pace to like to really be able to kind of reset where I was in life and turn 30. And the whole time Silvio was calling, asking me to come join him at Big Star for AG or for this or that or whatever. And finally, after two and a half years, I knew I needed to kind of get back into fast because you know, making cool shit for old people at the territory ahead was like was not fast. And I wanted to be involved in something exciting that was changing the game. So um I didn't know it, but uh, but Silvio had an opportunity in Seattle, and the deal was if Bo moves to Seattle, then it's gonna happen. If he doesn't do it, then it's not gonna happen. And I go to uh to Burbank to fly up to Seattle, and I realize as I'm sitting in the airplane seat that I forgot to call in sick. So territory heads. So I go into the bathroom and I'm like holding my hand over the microphone as the flight attendant is making the announcement about, you know, taking off or whatever while I'm calling in sick to the territory ahead. And go up to Seattle, interview, get the position. Um, Seattle Pacific Industries, which is the parent company for Union Bay, financed us to launch a brand called Union. And it was amazing seeing you in Seattle at that time. It's funny. I was thinking about this morning because do you remember the the breakfast that you and I had at that Greasy Spoon place with my dad? Yep. It it was just it was such a special time. And uh, and you know, and then getting to launch a brand from scratch, and Union was a premium men's and women's denim brand, you know, um, got to use again the best fabrics and was up there for about six months designing and building the whole collection, creating tech packs, establishing the supply chain, kind of figuring out all the details. Came to Los Angeles for a week to uh to um to go work in the sample room and you know, at one of the denim factories in Los Angeles, and the sample room coordinator went to lunch and she never came back. And that week that I was there turned into six months of me being there because we had to build the product, and that's that's how we built the brand. Um and what an amazing time that was in 2004 and five, you know, um, with so many innovative companies that were starting at that time. It was such an exciting time for premium. It was such a great time for premium, such a great time, you know, and uh and it worked, you know. Um, I think the rocket ship for that brand, we got in like 300 specialty boutiques, you know, almost immediately. We had the right sales force and the right strategy and the right support, and just really exploded a great business. And, you know, and I spent, I think, a couple of years there, and then guests called back and they said, Hey Bo, you know, um, do you want to come be the head designer for men's jeans wear? And and uh I said, yeah, it'll take me 30 seconds to make up my mind. Um, yes. The money was probably great. The money was amazing, you know, it was such an incredible time. And, you know, and again, just filling up passports, you know, really understanding what was happening in the world of denim, getting to work with all with all of the best denim mills on the planet. And with that, that planning, you know, perspective that you talked about earlier in the call, and the organizational mindset and the approach to having things together, that's that's what my role was. You know, I designed and I crushed it in design. That grew into a director role, that grew into you know, a head of like men's jeans wear role for the globe, you know, helping to guide what was happening in Florence, Italy or Seoul Korea, you know, and obviously in Los Angeles. And then again, with that um, that sort of planning and organizational perspective, you know, a lot of designers don't have that that that ease or that ability to actually be organized. And because I did, that turned into me running product development or me building the North American denim product development department for for guest jeans. And and that grew, that whatever, everything just continued to grow, you know.

Andrew 33:51

But what I I want to take you as soon as I can to your new business, the business that you've been doing for the last 13 years.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

So you killed it at guess. Killed it at guess, and then you were actually a part of pivoting into this new business because you know, um, I left a meeting one day and decided um I had had enough. And enough of what? Enough of enough of the the magical uh people that I was dealing with, and by magical I don't mean magical. Um, but there were some challenges that were happening in the business and just awkward approaches to um how people deal with one another, and I didn't feel comfortable with that. So I left, I left a meeting one day and I went to Kingpin's and uh and I saw a friend and um who you introduced me to, and I said, I need another opportunity. And he said, Okay, call this kid Sean Neff. So I called Sean Neff, who at the time had, I don't know, $15 million business that was on its way to I I believe that business could have been a billion bucks if it was if the whole path laid out continued to work out right. But I called Sean and I said, Hey, you know, this is what I do. And he said, All right, well, why don't you come be my VP of design and merchandising? So that was the beginning of the pivot, going from, you know, multi-billion to 50 million or 50 on the way to 100 or whatnot. And it was incredible going from large format to small format and really understanding um that I wasn't that far from being ready. And in 2010, I spent four months putting together a hundred-page business plan, the most ridiculous business plan ever. Hundred pages, absolutely completely unnecessary, but taught me a whole lot about what I wanted to do. I pitched that back then, didn't get the the investment, shelved the thing. So three years later, when in 2013, when I'm working for Sean and kind of doing my thing, I realized like I am not that far away from from starting. And I was in Los Angeles doing a sourcing project for some sweatshirts that we were working on. I found a fabric that I fell in love with, and I literally kept a piece of that fabric in my pocket for two weeks. At the time, we had already moved from from Los Angeles to to Carpentaria, had just bought a new house. Yasmin and I, and um B was two years old, and Layla was you know in Yaz's belly. And um, so we were we were preparing for you know the next phase of future, and I found this little piece of fabric I and I just was in love with it. And finally I got up the nerve one day to sit down with Sean and say, listen, I love you. I've learned so much here. This has been such an incredible experience. I quit. I'm gonna build the company. And I went home to Yasmin and I pulled that little piece of fabric out of my pocket and I said, Sweetheart, this is our future. I just quit my job. That's funny. Uh so I made the worst prototype for a sweatshirt you've ever seen. Um, I fixed it in Photoshop. We launched it on Kickstarter, um, and I sold um 890 sweatshirts in 34 days, raised almost $61,000. And that was the beginning of Ace Ribington back in at the beginning of 2014.

Andrew 37:33

You came up with the name yourself?

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Yeah, you know, at guest we did a whole lot of mashups. We would always do mashups with words because that was a way of like of legally getting around creating a name. So I wanted to make a massive mashup. You know, I had this whole story about this character and you know, his family and all these other things. Ace was a wonderful pilot's name, and Rivington was half a river runs through it and half Remington typewriters. Right. And that's where I came up with the name. And, you know, the vision for the brand carried carried all the way through my my path, you know, um, perspective on making the world a smaller place. And really my vision of what the advent of modern aviation was in, let's say, the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the world very rapidly became much smaller for people, you know. And do you know what happened in Afghanistan today, by any chance? No. Somebody was born, somebody was married, and somebody died. And it's exactly the same thing that happened here. And what people don't acknowledge, what a lot of people don't understand, because they just have never had the um the point of view shared or been open enough to think about it, we're all the same. Everybody's the same every place, period. And, you know, and when you have the chance to travel, when you have the chance to like sit down and have a meal, or talk about family, or hear about school, or this or that, like you really realize everybody's the same. And yeah, we've got different twists and turns and different pressures and different upbringings and you know, and whatnot. But my vision for Ace Rivington as a brand was to really um celebrate the world being a small place. So I created the story about this pilot who travels all over the world and you know, has all these different episodes of experiences because I wanted to celebrate the world being a small place. So, you know, our our logo was uh Stearm 1942, steerman biplane, you know, um it's just Ace is a modern day private jet pilot. His grandfather's the one who flew the steerman, you know. Um, so I saw that retail was a thing, built a successful business with a small shop, and realized that I wanted to open more stores. So we opened our first proper store in Santa Barbara um with a door that we had the keys to. We could control the music and create the experience. And we opened up that in May of 2017, and I leaned into Hollywood and those guys showed up and helped big time. You know, um showed up in what, as customers or as helping? So back to the global vision of what the story was. I wanted to. Oh, yeah. And Cuba was the theme of that store. We had Johnny Dubb's dinghy as a dry aisle table and from Pirates of the Caribbean as a dry ball table in the store. You went in there and it looked like a Disney level experience that was Cuba themed. It was amazing. That was amazing for Santa Barbara for sure. It was so incredible. And then then I thought the I thought the formula was open a hundred of these stores and cheap rent next to a restaurant, go. Um, so then we opened up in North Santa Barbara County and Los Olivos. We opened our Alaska themed store up there. Then the mudslides happened, then, you know, so it was challenging the fires and all that stuff. Close that store, focused on Santa Barbara, then the pandemic happened. Um again, like huge challenges, you know. Um well, it's hard to sell a store in a store when no one's going outside. Oh my gosh. And it was hard to uh it was hard to build product at a at a price value that made sense. You know, at the time we were still making our jeans in Los Angeles. And and as you, you and many of the folks who are listening very well know, the industry, the domestic industry has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. You know, if there is anybody left alive in the United States making product, with the exception of one or two like superstars, you know, the rest of them don't have middle management, quality controls out the window, and uh good luck making anything consistent. You know, so the last production orders that we did in LA for denim, our jeans came in two inches short, and the factory said, eh, sorry. And I said, you know what? That's not that's not going to help me build a business. So I was fortunate to be able to move the business to Mexico, where I was actually able to begin building margins, you know, um, really start turning it into a profitable business. And um it's been amazing. You know, this whole path has been amazing. Now we're in store number five, our first proper flagship store. And we've gone from small to medium to large, kind of opening, building, closing, opening, building, closing, and so on. And um, I just feel so blessed. We're really established in retail, really established in um the community in Santa Barbara. We've got a thriving online business that services tailored denim because we will tailor jeans to the half inch so that you can actually wear jeans that fit. And we've got a growing um wholesale business, you know, serving a premium product to the best men's stores in the United States, of which there are not that many left. But to be able to serve a premium product and do something special and care a whole lot is is what people want.

Andrew 43:26

Okay, let's let's stop there. You've come from Nashville to Santa Barbara, you've built a family, you've got a store, you've got online business, you've got a wholesale. Do you still have dreams?

SPEAKER_00 43:41

Yeah, I think uh I think what what became very clear about five years ago when when my best friend who called me about that trip to drive from my camp around the country, when he passed away, what became very clear to me at that point was Was the importance of happiness. And um, and I really got to lean into that and got to see and understand what that meant and what it could mean for life. And holy smokes, am I so grateful for every moment that I have and the happiness that is a part of it, you know, um, expectations that are simple, you know, um, needs that are simple, which include the opportunities to have conversations like this. You know, Andrew, this is it's such a special thing for me to get to do this with you. You've played such an interesting role in my career, you know, from the beginning until today. And being able to take the moments with people.

Andrew 44:51

I think I was the last guy the last guy that knew you before you met your wife. Last meeting. Yeah, I went from your house to meet her to your wife. To your date, your wife. I want to talk about happiness for a second because I did a podcast on, you know, there's there's calculations of which countries have the happiest lives. Yep. And that's really not generally a dream of most people that you meet in um in in you know, in America for sure. Yeah. Most people have, you know, monetary dreams or physical dreams, or they want to be with, you know, this, they want this. They use the word need all the time. They don't need any of the stuff that they think they need, but they use it all the time. But now we're talking about happiness. It's so powerful. I think I think it's really, I mean, I believe in that. I've always believed in that. I think that the purpose of all of us to exist is to try to find peace and happiness. And that seems to be now your new dream.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

It's totally my dream. And, you know, I'm really blessed to do something I love. You know, I get to talk to our customers every day. And it's so funny, you know, genes can make people feel confident in themselves, you know, um, and self-confidence and feeling good about yourself and having a simple perspective on things is really important. And apparel can do that for people. You don't need a million things, you need a handful of things. So the opportunity to like to spend time with people who um, I don't know, are happy about a product or an experience, or certainly coming to Santa Barbara and me telling them where to go get the best smash burger or the best, you know, Brussels sprouts, like that's what that's what matters. That's honestly what that's all that matters. Like, you know, um the business is going to continue to grow. You know, um, yes, the vision of a big fat check is in my path in the next five to seven years because I haven't filled my head head up with gray hair um to to not be able to create, you know, some stability for myself and for my family in our future. Um, and I have, you know, this special thing that I've created that's gonna continue to build and grow. That is that's the thing that you've created is stability, right? Totally. Totally. And and boy, who has who has stability in our industry? Oh, nobody. Nobody. I don't care if you're if you're like a trillion dollar company or a thousand dollar company, nobody has stability. And you know, and one of the things that is not practical is I don't care what the business is, is building a business that is based on not being profitable. You have to be profitable, you know. Um, at least that's what my my point of view is, and it's a pretty simple perspective. Um, but that comes with doing what's necessary to survive and understanding the importance of being flexible and being willing to make changes sometimes that are, you know, difficult. But that's how you survive, and that's what life's about, you know. Um, and if you can do all of that and be happy, you know, like you're winning.

Andrew 48:23

You're winning. And living in a place you want to live with, the people you want to live with. Bo, I am so happy to talk to you. I love what you accomplished. I'm so happy for you and for Yasmin, and really grateful that you would take the time out and do this.

SPEAKER_00 48:41

And I hope our listeners enjoy your story as much as I do. Andrew, it's such an honor to participate in this. And I just want to share like, I love you. I'm so grateful for you. Um and the constant like support that you've provided for me, you know, over the last 25 years. Thank you, Bo. You got it, man. Have a great day. Go um go, Canadian basketball team, whoever your team is, and uh, how's the lemon tree doing?