#376 - Kevin Lavelle - Building Mizzen+Main, Influencer Partnerships, His New Startup Harbor

Chris Powers: All right, Kevin, welcome to the show. 

Kevin Lavelle: Thanks, Chris. 

Chris Powers: I want to get the beef out now. You went to SMU, I went to TCU. We're not going to fight over it. 

Kevin Lavelle: We don't need to anymore... College football was very interesting this year, but watching Sonny get marched out of the SMU stadium to just a deafening crowd when we just beat the snot out of TCU made all the pain of being an SMU alum for the last 15 years just worth every minute. It was great. 

Chris Powers: It was a difficult year to be a TCU fan. 

Kevin Lavelle: I don't know if it's going to be better anytime soon. 

Chris Powers: Well, y'all just hired, what, Texas's president. You've got a lot of donors coming in on the NIL stuff. 

Kevin Lavelle: Oh yeah. Center of Gravity is... Yes. SMU's back. Rhett Lashley is amazing. I’ve gotten to know him over the last year, and it's just an exciting time. Certainly, we will never see what college football was, given what's happened with NIL. Shane Gillis and Nick Saban's beef, I think, really exposed the extent of it. But yeah, it's an exciting time to be an SMU alum. 

Chris Powers: All right, now that we've gotten our beef out of the way, I want to just go back to 2011-12. You were working in the energy industry. 

Kevin Lavelle: Yep, like a good Texan. 

Chris Powers: Like a good Texan would do. And you're like, I'm going to start a fashion or a clothing company. Just walk me through like how you went from this needs to happen to I'm going to start doing this. 

Kevin Lavelle: It was a really long time from idea to action. I was a college intern, a political intern in D.C. in college, which taught me I never wanted to go anywhere near politics. But with that, I watched a guy run into a building, soaked in sweat, and I wondered why had no one ever made a dress shirt out of performance fabric. I grew up playing golf and watched these performance polos just transform life on the golf course. And at first, it was unacceptable to wear it, and now, like you're crazy if you don't. So the idea stayed with me for years, and every couple of months, I would Google dry fit fabric, and I could order 10,000 dry fit polos on Alibaba, but I had no idea how to find the fabric. Fast forward, kind of middle of 2011, end of 2011, I don't know if Instagram had been bought for a billion yet. It was around that time. The entrepreneurship wave just exploded. And I worked as a management consultant for two years and then I worked as an investment analyst at Hunt in Dallas for two years, two great companies. I learned a lot. But I felt like I was missing a wave, missing an opportunity, and ultimately decided to start dabbling, figuring out how to do it. The unlock for me ultimately was a friend of mine, a friend of my wife's family, was the founding CEO of Heelys, the shoe with the wheel in the heel. And we went to lunch and he sort of gave me a few ideas, but one of them was to look up the intellectual property. And so, I found the original patents on Spandex and others, and that's kind of how I found these fabric companies. It was funny, I called one of them and was like I'd love to order some fabric from you. And it was in Vista, which was owned by DuPont at the time, which only makes the fibers. And they laughed and said, we don't sell fabric. And my job as a consultant and investment analyst was to be quite fine being the idiot in the room and just keep asking more questions to get to the bottom of the industry, the trends. So, I said, well, give me a list of your customers, who buys your fibers. And that's how I ended up getting the fabric. So it was December of 2011. I had the first shirt made by a local seamstress, and I went home from my suit and tie job at Hunt and put on the first performance fabric dress shirt, came home from work and- 

Chris Powers: First ever. 

Kevin Lavelle: First ever. 

Chris Powers: On the planet. 

Kevin Lavelle: On the planet, other than maybe some of the 70s polyester shirts, but those weren't that comfortable. I came home from work and my wife knew what I was working on, but I walked in the front door and she didn't realize I wasn't wearing my normal suit and tie. And that was the aha moment for me because I thought about the idea for years. And when I came home and she didn't realize I wasn't wearing my normal dress shirt, that was that aha moment. And really, I thought about it for years. It was like, I have to do this. I have to try this. And my biggest both opportunity and miss was I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I'd never even interviewed somebody, let alone hired them, run a PNL. I was basically an Excel monkey for four years. But I just had this belief and optimism, and we're sitting next to an amazing American flag and it's a big optimistic time in the country. Like build something, try. And in the back of my mind, I felt like, sure, I have no idea what I'm doing, but if I fail, if I work on this for two years and fail, I will learn more doing this than anything else I could do for the next several years. And so that moment was when I decided I have to try, and then we officially launched the company in July of 2012. 

Chris Powers: When you ultimately got the fabric to come to the house, did you have to test lots of different fabrics? Did you just go to the seamstress and say, hey, here's a normal button-down shirt, just turn this into a button-down shirt? 

Kevin Lavelle: So, I ordered, the term is swatches, so small pieces of fabric, probably 200 of them. And that wasn't a specific number. Basically, they said, which fabrics do you want? And I was so scared someone was going to take my idea, so I didn't say dress shirt fabric. I just said, I'm making like a long sleeve golf polo. So, send me everything that could be made into that. And they, I think, assumed I was legitimate. And so they just said sure and sent me a box of this fabric. And you kind of go through it. This is too thick. This is too thin. This weave is too big. I found five or six that I liked and ordered a couple yards of each and then kind of draped them around me and thought, oh, no, too silky, again, the weave is too thick when it's on the body and found a couple that I liked. And then I realized I have no idea how to make this into a shirt. And it's Dallas. There's tons of custom suit and shirt makers, but they don't do it here. They take your measurements and they do it on the other side of the world. And a very long journey short, I found a seamstress in Bishop Arts who had her own sort of like vintage and costume company. And I called her and I said, I'm going to level with you. And I was exhausted at this point in time trying to find it. I'm going to make a performance fabric dress shirt company. I need someone to make me a prototype. And she's like, okay. And I took her one of my custom shirts that I had made. And I said, you can do whatever you need to with it, take it apart, but make me a shirt. And she was so kind. She said, well, since you're a startup and you're trying to do it, I guess I could give you maybe half off. I was like, you charge me whatever you want. Please just make me one shirt. And I think she charged me $150. And that, when I went to pick it up that day after work, it was hanging on a hanger. And now looking back, those first shirts were pretty terrible. It did not look good on a hanger. But when I put it on, it passed. It was legit. It worked. And that was, again, that moment was when I knew this could really happen once I actually had the shirt on my body. 

Chris Powers: How important is it that a piece of fashion or a piece of clothing looks good on a hanger? 

Kevin Lavelle: Really important actually. And in the e-commerce world, you wouldn't know, but one of the first pieces of very real advice I got in starting Mizzen+Main was from Damon John. And he really impressed upon me the importance of wholesale and getting into boutiques and getting people to try the product. And so, I couldn't ignore that. But being a startup, I did ignore it because if I didn't get going, I would never have started. And that's that push and pull between the minimum viable product, and now looking back, it was a pretty poor quality shirt. But people loved it when we first started. 

Chris Powers: I have to ask the question. I'm assuming in the early weeks and months of developing it, you said something like I didn't want people to steal your idea. Nobody was jumping off the shelf to steal that idea at that time. You were kind of solo at that point. 

Kevin Lavelle: I was safe. And ultimately, I now am very acutely aware, no one's going to steal your idea. And there were so many people who had, as it turns out, thought about this idea. And I think Damon even told me he knew people at Under Armour or Nike who had toyed with the idea and said, no, there are plenty of reasons not to do this. But that fear of theft, I think even more so in today's world, you just got to know you're not the only person with this idea. And indeed, most of the people who try it first don't end up winning. Most of the pioneers in the category end up with all the arrows in their back. And as we unfold the world of deep seek and the AI world crumbling around us, there's a lot of lessons learned there, too. 

Chris Powers: We'll get to the infamous partnership with Phil Mickelson and J.J. Watt. But you developed a product. How did you begin selling it in those early days? And if you can draw comparisons to would that work in 2025? So what worked then and would any of that even work now? 

Kevin Lavelle: So, I know most founders will say it's a miracle that I survived, I can't believe I got this far. Looking back, it really is crazy that I survived because we had no idea what we were doing. And there are so many things that we delayed our inevitable success by just having no idea what we were doing. 

Chris Powers: Like?

Kevin Lavelle: So I didn't hire a merchandiser or a designer for, I think, five years. Our team just figured it out. And that was not a good choice. We definitely should have had someone who knew something about design making design decisions. But I was our core customer and a bunch of my buddies were. And so, I just designed what we liked. We could have made better decisions without sacrificing our speed. In terms of how we were able to get out there, because I knew nothing, it was get 10 customers, get 100 customers, get 1,000 customers. I set up a rolling rack in Gold's Gym in Uptown in Dallas. And I used to go there, and they were like, I don't know, sure, go for it. And I think I sold one. I bought a booth at the Dallas Marathon Expo and sold zero. I bought a booth at the Wichita Hotter Than Hell bike ride. And what I assumed was, these are my customers. I'm going to show them a performance fabric dress shirt. They're getting ready to perform. It's going to be a no-brainer. But basically, at every one of those expos, they just kind of looked at me sideways, like what are you doing here? And I would explain it to them, and they'd go, huh, weird, and then just kind of walk away. So none of that worked. But what did work was we got our first wholesale partner. There were two stores here in Dallas. There's a store called Warehouse in Uptown and Pebble and Pine in Bishop Arts and we hosted some events. And I worked really hard at trying to be responsive on social media. And one person would order a shirt, and I would follow them and try and engage with them and try and get them to spread the word. And then it was a lot of the really small stuff that doesn't scale. I wrote a thank you note in every box that went out in every order; every order got a thank you note from me personally. And then, as I said, we would follow some of the people on social media and one of the guys went to University of Arkansas, and I sent him a University of Arkansas koozie as a thank you. And those really small things worked, but it also was an absolute grind. We did about $50,000 in the last six months of 2012, a quarter of a million in 2013, and then we did a million in 2014. And that's when things really started to take off. 

Chris Powers: Was it just because awareness had gotten out or had something changed in the business or you had had another aha moment of how to get sales velocity? 

Kevin Lavelle: It was a little bit of the sum of all parts. There was no one moment until we took off in the world of pro athletes and we sponsored Tim Ferriss' podcast. It was not a game changer for us, but we had a pretty meaningful presence in the CrossFit world. We could never sponsor the games or do any of the big, big things, but like we sponsored the after party at the CrossFit Games in, I think, 2014. I think that's when it was. And those guys were definitely our customers. And I wasn't in a rolling rack in the gym trying to sell it, but they heard about us. And that did start to help. But there was no one thing until Ferriss and pro athletes and those worked wonders. 

Chris Powers: And we're on a podcast, so maybe go a little deeper on how Tim's impacted you. Was it just the reach? Was it hearing directly from him? Because I think, again, might sound biased, I think advertising on podcasting is the next frontier. It's already happening, but it is a great place for people to get their product out. 

Kevin Lavelle: Couldn't agree more. There are some challenges now with some of the podcasts. The reach is so huge and the cost is so high that it's hard to, for especially startups, to be able to make that ROI work. Smaller podcasts, I completely agree for early stage startups. And then there's some magic in between. I was not big on Twitter at the time. I don't know that I tweeted anything. But I saw a post from Tim, and I had heard his name, I'm accepting sponsors into my next, basically my next quarter of advertising. And maybe I had just read his book or I saw that and then read his book, but I'd never listened to a podcast. I loosely understood what it was. And I did some Googling, and I basically applied to be one of his sponsors, Kelly Starrett, a guy who, Supple Leopard, Mobility Wad, everyone in the CrossFit world knows who he is. Kelly and Tim were friends and Kelly loved Mizzen+Main. So, I mentioned that in my application to Tim to sponsor him. And we ended up coming to an agreement to sponsor, and Tim was very empathetic and supportive and basically said, if this is a make or break decision for you as a business, because he knew how small we were, I don't want your money. I think I can really do something special for you, but I don't want that pressure. I got plenty of people who want to sponsor the podcast. And I said, no, it's not make or break. And technically that was true. It was just pretty close to make or break. Like, I don't know how many more swings I would have been able to take. But we were small enough at the time that, yes, it was a huge check for us, but we would have survived. I just don't know how. 

Chris Powers: Okay, how did you weigh the decision then? That's a big decision on something you've never really listened to before. Obviously, Tim was kind of famous, but you probably were just getting to know him. What was the- what went through your brain to say, okay, we'll take the swing? 

Kevin Lavelle: There were a few things. One, I did some research on Tim, and there was a blog or a article that was written called the Tim Ferriss Effect. And it was about some guy who had had his book on CNN, hit the New York Times something review, and Tim talked about it. And it was very tongue in cheek, and it was like, would you rather be on CNN, the New York Times book review, or some random guy and he just talks for two hours? And he said I could see on the Amazon rankings the impact of each of those things that happened. And New York Times and CNN did almost nothing. And when Tim talked about his book, he went from 1,072 to like 240 in the day after that happened. And so that was a really good data point for me. And then also I was watching other brands. This was the early DTC VC mania that were spending an absolute fortune and very clearly pursuing a land grab mentality. Grow at all costs and solve the problem later. We didn't have that much money. And I knew that we weren't a VC style business. And so, in that process, I sort of said, I need to take some big swings. I was really good at getting us press. We had a couple of good press hits that were helpful, but not this Tim Ferriss level swing. And so, I just looked at it as a calculated risk that said this isn't foolish, but I need to do something big. And so, we took the swing. We had to wire the money for all three episodes up front. And I think the first one dropped maybe two weeks after or 10 days after. And the ad read started out with something like, if you know me, I hate dress shirts. And it's like that's not a great start. Basically, it was like, but I finally found one that's worth wearing. I can throw it in my bag. I can travel with it. I'm on the speaking circuit. I don't like to waste my time. This is the best, one of the best, not just dress shirts, but shirts I've ever owned. It was a really good endorsement, especially for his audience. And we were, I think, if memory serves, net positive ROI within like 72 hours of the first episode airing across all three ads. And then we ran into the problem of, oh my God, like the number of orders. We were not doing that many orders in a month and we did it in a day or two. And so, it nearly killed us to have it be that successful. And indeed, one of the things that Tim and I ended up talking about a couple months later was like, what questions should I be asking startups to make sure that like- because if the startup fails, it's bad for Tim. Because he endorsed the product and people are going to have a bad experience and it's going to damage his reputation. And so, the second thing that I did from that experience was I knew that Tim had changed our business and I could keep that train going by helping Tim also. And so, I wrote a Medium article called the Tim Ferriss Effect Podcast Edition. And I talked about what went into the decision. And I talked about not in absolute dollars, but in total percentages, ROI and what it did for us on a daily basis and a monthly basis. And still to this day, Tim includes that in his like, if you want to sponsor my podcast, look at what it did to this business. And so that's been a very, very, very long tail thing. And we can talk about it more later. But Tim ended up investing in Harbor, now my second startup. I very loosely kept in touch with him. If you know anything about him, he's very sporadic and he's very protective of his time. But as I reached out to everybody about Harbor, hey, will you buy it? Will you post about it? I wasn't going to say that to him. And so I just said, I never would be here if it weren't for what you did for us with Mizzen+Main. Thank you, and this is a new business I'm launching. Hope all is well. And that led to a conversation which ended up leading to an investment. 

Chris Powers: I love it. I love it. All right, I got to ask, what's Mizzen+Main? How did you get to that name? You could have named this thing anything. 

Kevin Lavelle: Yeah. So, one of those nights on the startup journey you'll never forget, my wife worked at an ad agency and her, she was the kind of production manager, her design partner at the agency, her husband was also a designer. So the four of us were friends and we went out to dinner, and I sort of said, I'm working on this thing. And he said, you should name it Lavelle. That's a clothing name. And it sounds fancy. And I said, I'm not a fashion designer and I don't have the ego to name this company after myself. And so, he said, well, I'd love to help you with it. I was like, that's great. I have no money, but I'll give you some equity if you want to help me do the design and branding. So, he came to me a couple of weeks later, and I gave him this sort of manifesto of the brand that I wanted to build. And the easiest way I can sum that up is if Ralph Lauren and Nike or Ralph Lauren and Under Armour had a baby, that would be Mizzen+Main. Classic American style, advanced performance fabrics. And he came back to me with 10 names, and I think the third one was Mizzen+Main. And I just knew instantly that was it. I also am not ashamed to admit I had no idea what it was. 

Chris Powers: I don't have any idea what it is. What is it? 

Kevin Lavelle: They are sails on a sailboat. So, every sailboat has a main. And then if there's a second, it's a mizzen. And he just thought, and it's true, it sounds like an old cross street in... London or something like that. And as it turns out, we were at the front end of a wave of DTC companies all naming themselves something plus something. The ampersand, the written out. In hindsight, Mizzen+Maine is a nightmare from a URL perspective. We own the URL, but telling somebody Kevin@Mizzen+Maine.com, that was not fun. As it turns out, Harbor, which is our new name, I didn't intend for two maritime names, Harbor.co, I have to spell it out for almost everybody on the phone. 

Chris Powers: Really? 

Kevin Lavelle: It's very strange. 

Chris Powers: They think it's B-E-R or B-O-R. They don't know it's B-O-R? 

Kevin Lavelle: I don't know. It's not that hard of a name, but I run into the same issue. 

Chris Powers: My guess was that that sweaty guy you saw running into that building, you saw him at the corner of Mizzen and Main. That was going to be my guess. So that was where I thought we were going. Real quick before we get to Phil, when you're just in the retail business, more specifically your category, how do you think about inventory management? Because I always, I walk through Target sometimes with my kids and I see all this clothing out there. I'm like, there's no way that all this is being sold. 

Kevin Lavelle: No, it's not. 

Chris Powers: So to be efficient, especially when you're small, is it just a constant fight or do you kind of nail it over time? Like, is there a lesson you learned? 

Kevin Lavelle: Yes, one of those lessons is there are experts in that, and I did not have one in my company. A very humorous memory, when we were growing up and Gatterton invested, we were interviewing more formal board members, experts in the space. And for the first few years and before I started, every industry expert told us, this is dumb, it will never work, you're dumb for pursuing it. And so, I basically ignored everyone in the industry and I didn't ask for advice. And there was a woman that we were interviewing and she said, tell me about your planning function in the organization, and I said, what does planning do? Her jaw hit the floor. And she said, I don't care if you pick me, like I hope we work together, but promise me at the end of this meeting, you will go hire a planner. And we were- we weren't profitable at the time, but we weren't like these other companies that had a ton of money and were losing a ton of money. So, I was really tight on hiring. I was like, I don't know that I really want to go spend six figures on someone to tell me how much to make because we keep selling out of everything. Like we're doing great. And she goes, basically like slapped me across the face, like you idiot. And so, we went out and hired a planner, and I learned a lot about what planning does. It's a science. I mean, these are like actuaries in insurance companies. And you know I'm going to sell this much over this time and then I'm going to sell this much over this time, and I need to plan for some arc of, even if you sell out of everything, you have broken sizes because you'll always have some extra smalls and some extra 2XLs. Or you'll sell out of the M and you'll only be left with larges. It's actually almost impossible to sell out of every single thing that you have on a site because people just abandon it based on inventory levels. And so, we hired a planner, and for the first five years, it was we sold out of everything. And then we had broken sizes and we just sort of like made do. We donated some stuff, and we were doing well enough that it didn't matter. Then when we got to, it's probably around 10 to 15 million a year in revenue that it got really complicated. And that's when we ended up building out that function first without them and then hired some experts. But the reality for us was it was a guessing game and we got it wrong a lot. And mostly the biggest problem that we had was we weren't ordering enough. And it's because I thought, well, last time we ordered 10,000, I guess we'll order 20,000 this time. And that was fine, but we probably could have ordered 30, but no one would touch us from an inventory financing perspective. It was all paid well ahead of time. And so that push and pull made buying more almost impossible and no one could tell me exactly how much more to buy. So, we just kind of went like this for a while. 

Chris Powers: Okay. So, if you had to start over again today, you kind of mentioned the merchandiser designer, you mentioned the planner. And again, a similar budget, maybe unproven category, but even a proven category, what would be your order of hiring if you were starting today over the first few years? 

Kevin Lavelle: Yeah. So, I mean, if we're talking similar category on the Mizzen front, having somebody probably in a freelance capacity who's doing the design, you don't need somebody full time right out of the gate. And there's lots of great freelance designers. I am good enough when it comes to branding and marketing. But one of the first hires that I made at Harbor after technical was I hired my old marketing director from Mizzen+Main to come and be our CMO. It's one thing to know how to build a brand, it's another on how to pull the levers on Facebook and SEO and what to do on Amazon. And so, until you hit a certain scale, you don't really need somebody full time in that capacity, given that's more of my world. But somebody who can manage on the inventory merchandising and basically accounting side. So, it's some version of a planner. And that's a really hard trigger to pull. And I can look back and say, I should have done it differently. Also, like I never had any money. We were barely surviving the entire time. And so those are really hard things to do. And the blessing of now building my second business is I've raised money to go do it. And so, I'm hiring very capable and competent people because our bet is that we can make it work. It's really hard to do if you can't raise that money. It's really hard to do. 

Chris Powers: All right. I found out about Mizzen+Main because Phil Mickelson did this like goofy commercial. And maybe this was probably also early on in like influencers rocking products. So how did the Phil Mickelson thing come about? 

Kevin Lavelle: So going backwards, because it very much flows into Mickelson, I told you I was really good at getting us press. Had some good PR firms in work that were helpful sometimes, all good people, but kind of ebbed and flowed on effectiveness. And all of our biggest press came when I'd sort of said, this isn't working, and I would go out and do this blitz, trying to get press myself. We got a bunch of it. And that is relevant because one day, a guy named Ian Desmond, who played briefly for the Rangers here, retired with the Rockies, but had a great career in the Nationals, followed me and Mizzen+Main on Twitter in the same day. And I went to high school with Ian but hadn't spoken to him since we graduated high school. And he said, hey man, I love the product, looks great, I really like the shirt. At the time, I was still shipping every shirt out of our house. So, I said, I would have known if you'd ordered one, what happened? And he said, well, my wife's mom bought me one for Christmas. She read about Mizzen+Main in the Sarasota Herald Tribune where I grew up. And that was a very humbling moment for me because my dad said, hey, you're getting a lot of press. And I got us in the New York Times, I got us in Inc. And he goes, you should get an article in the Sarasota Herald. I'm like, I've been in the New York Times. But I reached out, I found somebody to write an article, Sarasota High alum, started a business, blah, blah, blah. Ian bought a shirt. And he said, you should come up to spring training and do a trunk show in our locker room. We have custom clothing companies that come all the time. Long story short, went up, did a trunk show. I introduced myself to Bryce Harper because I had no idea who he was. You do that like, hey, I'm Kevin, waiting for them to tell you their name. And like, well, I'm Bryce. And I think the next year he signed a multi hundred million dollar contract. But I say this with respect, I didn't care who they were. I just wanted them to buy my stuff. But I wasn't seeking autographs. I wasn't fawning. I was just like this is what I'm selling. And these pro athletes had never had a shirt that fit like this before. It stretches, it's more comfortable, it moves with you. And in many cases, for especially guys with bigger shoulders, it fits better than custom because it moves with their body in a way that a non-stretch shirt doesn't. So, we sold like $10,000 worth of product in that first trunk show. So, I think that was the spring of 2014. That was when things started to accelerate. So, with that background, we started to take off in the world of pro athletes because in baseball, guys get traded all the time. And so, someone would get traded to another ballclub and say, hey, why don't you come do a trunk show? I told my buddies about this. And I would give the guy who hosted me two or three shirts as a thank you. And then when agents would reach out, they would say, hey, send my guy five shirts and he'll tweet about you. Yeah, we don't do that, but I'll come do a trunk show in the locker room. And so, we just really proliferated across MLB. And it was in ’14 that I said, I want to do an endorsement deal with a major athlete, one of the biggest names in sports, and all of my advisors and people that I talked to were like, you should probably aim for a tier C athlete that may have a breakout year and become well-known over the next couple of years. But I was in a hand-to-mouth scenario where I needed it now. I needed it immediately. And it just so happened that one of our investors that we got on board as an angel out of luck was very high up at CAA Sports. And so, we were having lunch and catching up, and I told him what I wanted, and he goes, well, here's some clients that you might be interested in. Obviously, I can't make them do a deal, but I can introduce you to their agents. And there were three people on our list. It’s not a secret now, but Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, and J.J. Watt. And they had the reach, the style was aligned. Because a lot of pro athletes, they're wearing crazy stuff. We were middle of the road.  

Chris Powers: Cam Newton was not going to be your guy. 

Kevin Lavelle: I would have loved to work with Cam. He would have gotten us a lot of attention. I don't think he wants to wear our stuff. And that's true. I mean, look at Joe Burrow today. Like every show is a runway. Every show, every game is a runway for a lot of these pro athletes. And so, as it turns out, Drew had a deal with Wrangler, and we just happened to call ourselves the next great American brand. We just did that for fun. And Wrangler, not an official tagline, but was a great American brand. So they told Drew he wasn't allowed to work with us. Never got any where with Peyton, but I was really excited about J.J. And so, we did this deal with J.J. It was a cool experience getting the deal done. He was amazing to work with. It was that first year that we were working with him, he was on Hard Knocks. It was like the beginning of peak J.J. mania. Awesome to work with. Really, the single biggest thing I can say that J.J.'s deal did for us, I mean, there were lots, but the specific thing I can point to is we had spent five years trying to get into Nordstrom, finally got into Nordstrom, and they said, we'll give you a two door test. You're based out of Texas, we'll do Houston and Dallas. And the test started on Super Bowl weekend, and it just so happened to be that the Super Bowl was in Houston that year. And we got one appearance a year with J.J. So we said, you're coming to Nordstrom during Super Bowl weekend. We got Entertainment Tonight to come out. And within 48 hours of the two-door test, Nordstrom said, we'll do 11. And then two weeks later, we were in 22 doors. And Nordstrom, I mean, we just absolutely blew up there. So, it's an example of like, can I point to the specific ROI of the deal with J.J.? No, because that type of guy isn't going to go sell an extra 50,000 shirts. But from a credibility and an awareness perspective, it was unlike anything we could have done otherwise. 

Chris Powers: So is it kind of luck that it all landed in those dates? Or had you kind of planned it around that and all the stars aligning? 

Kevin Lavelle: It was heading in that direction. And I told Nordstrom, I will ensure this success. Like, give me the test and I will find a way to make it work. And as we were angling, it was like, why don't we do Houston Super Bowl? And we were able to force some of that and some of it was just luck. Like had the test been two months later, I don't know how much we could have managed to have the same impact. But then they also saw this is a brand and this is leadership at a brand that gets what it takes to make this partnership successful. We have faith that they will continue to make this work. 

Chris Powers: And did you hire an agent on your behalf that just goes out into the world and finds athletes? Or when you say you were talking to those three, was that just you reaching out to their agents? 

Kevin Lavelle: All of those guys were with CAA. So that was another aspect. And I was talking in some cases with the agent directly and some through a different channel. And it was clear it wasn't really moving. And again, J.J. was an unbelievable partner. We got to do some really, really cool stuff together. I think it was a two year deal. And we were lucky because his athletic apparel provider was Reebok. And I had a bunch of friends at Reebok and they knew we're not trying to be an athletic apparel company, so it's not competitive, so they blessed the deal. So, a lot of things went right in that regard. It was a two-year deal. It was great. I think we all always knew that was probably going to be what it was because we couldn't just pay J.J. a lot of money. It was equity at that point in time. It was a bet on his behalf. So, when that deal was up, we were kind of figuring out what was next. One of my very good friends and has been a friend for a very long time is a guy named Jordan Lewittis. He's worked with Jordan Spieth for many years. I started Mizzen+Main, and he became Jordan Spieth's agent basically at the same time. Really cool, we were both wanting to do something entrepreneurial, and he had this really cool opportunity to go work with Jay Danzy. Jay's actually out here in Fort Worth. And so that was always my view into the world of golf, and Under Armour owns Jordan head to toe, and so I could always talk to my friend Jordan very openly because there was no subtext of I'm trying to get to work with Jordan, and that was fine. But as we were talking about potential deals, he was saying, this guy's clothing deal was up next year, this guy, it's another two years, and in apparel, which is something I learned later, all of the endorsement money in golf is like Under Armour owns Jordan or Nike owns Tiger, whatever. Other than that, apparel deals tend not to pay a ton of cash because Citibank or Wheels Up is going to pay an enormous amount of cash because every logo you have dilutes the amount of money that each logo is worth. And other companies just have a lot more cash to throw at those. And I'm speaking in generalities here. But with that, it was, okay, we're going to have to get creative, and we're going to have to find somebody that isn't Nike or Under Armour. And that sort of narrowed things down. But in the process of trying to figure out if golf could work, I was thinking logo. And Scott Denke is the co-CEO of L Catterton, one of the largest consumer retail PE firms. They were our investor. They came in in 2017. And I was at a Catterton conference of CEOs. So they brought in some CEOs and they were- we were working with some of their investors, some of their deal teams on giving feedback and what we're seeing and what we're working on, just kind of a mind share. And Scott and I were in a side room, and he said, the challenge with Mizzen+Main is we're not a logoed brand. And so, when someone wears your shirt, you don't necessarily know that it's Mizzen+Main. And that's part of the purpose. Like guys don't want a giant logo on their dress shirt. You don't want to wear a logo to a wedding. And so, it's a blessing and a curse. And he said, I wonder what could you do to like show what this shirt is capable of? And we were spit balling, and he basically said like, could you get a golfer to wear a dress shirt? I was like, well, that's interesting. Maybe, probably not. That's insane. But those two things were happening in confluence, and I ended up talking with my buddy Jordan, and he said, well, Phil doesn't currently have a clothing deal. Do you want to talk with Phil? It's like, obviously yes. So, his agent happened to be in town and said, let's go get lunch. And it's one of these moments I think back to, I'm so lucky the way that things unfolded. Jen, my wife was pregnant with our son, or it's 2017, so he was young. I think he was sick, she was sick. I needed to go meet Steve Loy, everyone calls him Coach, out in Las Galinas. They were sick, it was raining, traffic was going to be bad. When was I going to be able to be helpful? And I just thought, Phil's not going to want to work with us. Like, this is going to be a waste of time, and I got to get home. And so, I almost canceled lunch or just said, let's meet up next time or something and decided, no, I made a commitment. I need to honor that. I need to go. Lunch lasted like two and a half hours. We had a great time. I sent some product to Phil, and it was kind of like, let's see. And Steve said this tagline, you'll never know what Phil's going to do next, which was really popular a couple of years before we worked together, is true. He's like, I don't know. We have no idea how Phil's going to feel about this. Didn't hear anything for a couple of weeks. And then the tournament before the Masters, Houston Open, Coach called me and said, hope you're ready. I think he's wearing it tomorrow. It was like, we don't have a deal. What are we doing? How should I talk about this? And he goes, it’s Phil, I don't know. And he didn't wear it. And so, I was spinning up and then I stood down. And he said, the shirt's a little too big for him. Like, let's try and get him a smaller size. Okay. And then Tuesday was practice round. Phil was paired with Tiger, Tiger's first round back at the Masters. And he walks out onto the range wearing our dress shirt. And the way phones work there, even agents aren't allowed to have phones. And I mean, it just blew up. And I didn't know what can I say. I want to be respectful of that we’re in this process. And the second question that the reporters asked Tiger after the round was, what's up with Phil's dress shirt? And so, I mean, it got a lot of attention. And I think, this is my supposition, that Phil wanted to like test the waters, and he loves doing different, fun, crazy things. And coming now to we met after the Masters, got a lot of attention and worked out a deal. It was a crazy deal. It took a lot to get it done. It was a lot of fun going through that process because I'd never done anything like that before. The deal with J.J. was really straightforward, concrete set of deliverables, this is the value of the deal. And with Phil, it was like, how many times is he going to wear the dress shirt? And we're going to design a line of clothing that has his logo on it and, and, and. But it was, that was 2018, it was an absolute whirlwind of a year. 

Chris Powers: I will never forget that day that he wore it. I'm a big golfer. And I couldn't- I didn't remember it was the practice round of the Masters, but I just remember the golf world went nuts. And in 20- it was either 2018 or 2019, I caddied for my buddy at the FedEx St. Jude on tour. And Phil was hitting right next to us, maybe on Saturday. And he's got a white, long sleeve shirt on just pounding drivers down the- it was iconic. It was honestly iconic at the moment. Like it was so wild and everybody, it brought a lot of attention. 

Kevin Lavelle: It was so much attention. And every consumer brand is just in a nonstop war of attention. That's all that matters. And attention good, attention bad, love of brand, all of that. And Phil, his agent told me, and I believed him, Phil is one of the best endorsers in any sport that has ever lived because he knows how to get people talking. He knows how to live up to the brand promise and he always over delivered. And so, we had a set number of days he was supposed to wear the shirt, and like basically it was, we'll put something in here, but he's going to do it a lot. And he did. And there were things like, I've got my- this is my new business Harbor, but we gave him a Yeti and it was the Mizzen+Main logo. And I think it said Phil, I think it just said Phil underneath of it, like custom for him. And he was at the Open one year and he brought it with him, and he was doing an interview, and he was holding the cup like this logo forward perfectly. And he doesn't have to do that. That's not in the contract. But he knows what he's doing. And if he's aligned with the brand, even though his personal incentives are aligned, he's like, I'm going to make this work. I'm going to be somebody that you want to work with. And the commercial was insane. So, it was so much fun to do that commercial. It obviously went super viral. And that's where, one of the questions I saw people were asking on Twitter coming into this was, was the deal worth it? And what should you think about when you're doing a deal? And I would just say, if you don't have a playbook or a way to generate outsized attention, celebrity endorsement deals probably aren't worth it, especially if you're dealing with equity, because who knows how much it's going to be worth. So you have to have a playbook to say, this is how we're going to generate substantial leveraged awareness. And obviously we were able to do that in spades. 

Chris Powers: We'll drop the YouTube video to the commercial with Phil in the show notes. It's an iconic commercial. 

Kevin Lavelle: And going into that, our creative director at Mizzen+Main is a genius, Richard Ross. He's got a new project coming out. I encourage everyone to go check him out. When he came to me and he said, hey, I know what we're going to do with Phil, because we knew we needed to do something big. And he said, we're going to have him dance dodge golf balls to Ghostland Observatory’s techno, Ghostland Observatoy’s Vibrate was the song. And he's going to be moving in our shirt. And I just remember looking at him, and I don't think I said anything for 10 seconds. And then I just had so much confidence in him and his creative vision because I'd seen him come up with these ideas and what the execution was. I was like, okay. And so, I went out and pitched Phil and Amy, his agent, out in his house, which was one of the more memorable experiences in building Mizzen+Main. And I pitched it, I played the song, and they all just sat there looking at me. I was like, this was a huge mistake. I should not have done this. And they're regretting the contract. They're probably thinking of an out. And Amy burst out laughing and said, should I tell him or should you? And he said, you can tell him. And she said, Phil can do the worm. And that was the moment where I was like, this is happening. This is going to be amazing. And as it turns out, everyone in the golf world knew that side of Phil because Presidents cups, Rider cups, they would kick all the agents, all the media out, and they would just go nuts and have a lot of fun. And so, Phil had been doing the worm in those fan kicks in front of the other golfers for a long time. And so we did the video, and I'll never forget, I don't remember if it was Rory or Justin was interviewed after the commercial had aired at the Bridgestone. So we can talk about the kind of mechanics of that airing. But golfers were coming off the round. And I think Amanda Balionis was like, have you seen this video of Phil dancing in the dress shirt? And they hadn't because they just got off the course, and they're watching going, just unbelievable. And it was either Rory or Justin said, I knew that Phil could do that. I knew that side of Phil. I just didn't expect the whole world to see that side of Phil. And I do feel like we helped unleash the like fully free, the full autonomy Phil. And it's been a lot of fun. 

Chris Powers: I would totally agree. And I miss Phil. I mean, he's at lib now. He's gotten a little bit beat up by the media, but Phil's the man. 

Kevin Lavelle: Yeah. And this is the pioneers get the arrows in their back. He was the pioneer, and as it turns out, he was right about just about everything he said. 

Chris Powers: And I have a feeling he's going to come out somewhat of a hero in this also. It might take a few more years. It might be looking back in hindsight. But he's been right pretty much about everything. I think PGA Tour’s viewership is down incredibly this year. 

Kevin Lavelle: I hate that we don't get to see them all together on a consistent basis but I also understand the gripes that Phil had with the tour and the changes that needed to take place that have virtually taken- like everything that he said has taken place that needed to change. I understand why people were frustrated and I understand the qualms that people have. But he's not an evil guy in any way shape or form and people who've been around him his whole career can tell you he's incredibly kind, very generous, very supportive. And he was an amazing partner to us, and he's still an owner in the business and so we still cheer him on at every turn. 

Chris Powers: All right. I kind of want to bridge over to what you're doing now. So we've kind of heard the Mizzen+Main playbook and what I also think is interesting and let me see if I can ask the right question. It's not like you grew up going I want to build the best performance athletic shirt ever. You saw an idea, but you actually kind of quickly became passionate about it. But it's probably- like the way you saw that one idea, you'd probably seen like a hundred other things that probably could have fit that box. I mean who would have thought a sweaty guy in a shirt would like totally captivate you. So then, enter Harbor, one night, your daughter doesn't sleep very well, like every other parent in the world, and that seems to be the next thing where it's like your vision narrows quickly and you're like this is the thing. So maybe let's start there. How did this become the hot thing besides one poor night's sleep for you and your family? 

Kevin Lavelle: Yeah, so the moment, it was my son, our first, he was a couple months old, he was in his nursery, and I had done a whole bunch of research, and Nanit was the hot new baby monitor thing. And you could get an app on your phone, and I thought that's really cool, I like technology, that's great. And I woke up one morning, and the app on my phone had crashed. And I realized apps on phones are not baby monitors, because if an app crashes, it can't alert you that it crashed. If you forget to plug your phone in, an app can't override iOS settings to tell you to plug your phone in. And in other cases, how many of us have plugged a phone into an outlet in a wall and the outlet wasn't working and you just didn't know it? Like anyone who's ever traveled for business has plugged their phone in and the alarm didn't go off. That's just the nature of it. And so, we went out and bought an old school monitor, the little tiny screen, and the camera and the monitor connect directly to each other, but they don't connect to the Internet. They're little teeny screens. They don't work that well. If you have multiple kids, it's a nightmare to try and watch multiple kids on this tiny screen. And so, I've wanted to build what is now Harbor since that happened. My son just turned eight. So it's been almost eight years. And the idea for Mizzen+Main sat with me for many years, and the idea for Harbor sat with me for many years. And with Harbor, I thought, I've done the entrepreneurial thing once. I don't know that I can go through this again. What is- maybe it's Elon. 

Chris Powers: You're a serial taker of pain. 

Kevin Lavelle: Apparently. I can't remember if it was Elon or somebody said like, it's like chewing glass and then staring out into the abyss and then you learn to like the taste of your own blood. I just couldn't shake this idea for Harbor. And I just kept thinking someone else is going to solve this problem. Like, don't make me go back into this. And no one was. And that, the more I talked to people, because with Mizzen+Main I wouldn't tell anyone what I was working on, and with Harbor I told everybody about my idea that would listen, and everyone I spoke to was like, yeah, I hate my baby monitor. I really don't like Nanit. I had to throw away how many other baby monitors. Everyone that I talked to felt the same way, and no one was building a product. And so, it was early 2022 that I ultimately, we glossed over part of it, I stepped down from Mizzen+Main in the middle of 2019. I was in the process of hiring a president and a major philanthropy that I cared a lot about asked me to come help them build some new capabilities. Two birds, one stone. Maybe we get into that, but I've talked about it elsewhere. I spent three years at the philanthropy, and towards the end of that third year, I just was like I have to do this. I can't not try one more time because I learned so much the first time, all the things that I would do differently, how to build a product, how to raise capital, how to hire a team, how to not lose your mind along the way. And so, it was early ’22 that I decided to go down this road. And I met my co-founder through one of my best friends who's our head of product, brilliant engineer, great dad. We started working on it in the middle of- middle to end of ’22 and spent almost two years building the product. And we started shipping to customers basically in September of ’24. 

Chris Powers: Okay. And real quick, what is the product? And then I'm going to take a step back on how you actually build a product like this. I think every entrepreneur that hasn't built a product has this idea in their back pocket of like, I actually want to build something to give to people. And even Elon's been inspiring about that. He's like, you actually got to build things. And the Silicon Valley narrative lately is like, what have we really created the last 10 years? It’s a bunch of code, a lot of code. 

Kevin Lavelle: A lot of code. And Mark Andreessen, I think it was two or three years ago, had the, it's time to build, which was one of the most kind of motivating things. I'm not going to say that is why I decided to start Harbor, but it was a motivator, and when Elon caught the rocket, I shouldn't say that, people are going to hate that I said that, when SpaceX caught the rocket, it was maybe two weeks before the election, three weeks, it was a particularly rough month. There were some tough things happening. I remember watching that and thinking they just caught a skyscraper that was in space. Whatever I'm doing is not that hard. And we need to build things. And I'll back up, one other piece on this, when I stepped down from the philanthropy, I was pretty sure I was going to go build Harbor. And I was talking to a bunch of investors and other founders and also sort of surveying the landscape to say maybe I should go build alongside somebody who's already started something. And there was a guy, his name is Sideboy, and a friend introduced me, he's building something really interesting. I said to him, hey, do you want- I'm the non-technical side, I know how to sell, I know how to build a brand, I know how to raise capital. And he may have just been being polite in saying no to me, but he also said, you're a founder and we need more people that are going to build real things. You should go do this baby monitor thing that you're talking about. And we need people to build real products. And we'll touch on what an insane journey it's been to convince investors to invest in something that you can touch. Like investors don't, if you can touch it with your hands, investors have not wanted to invest in it over the last two years, two or three years. So briefly, Harbor is a camera and a 10 inch monitor that connect directly to each other without internet. And both devices also connect to the internet. So, you have the best of both worlds, the old school dedicated device that alerts you if you've lost connection and doesn't rely on your internet, and also everything that comes with Wi Fi. So, an app, remote access, record and rewind. And two of the fundamental differentiators relative to everything else on the market, other than just the modality, is we have a memory chip in the camera and an AI computer vision chip in the camera. So that means all your memories are stored on the device locally, and all of the advanced processing takes place on the device locally. We do not store or process any of our users' data. And that is, no other Wi-Fi camera company can say that. Everything is going through their or rented servers, and they're storing everything for you and processing everything for you. The other thing that we've done, along with very robust cybersecurity, the other thing that we've done is created something called Smart Audio, where you as a parent can elect to decide what you want to hear. So your couple-month-old child, you need to hear everything. But your two year old, every parent listening will know they make a lot of noise, and you don't need to hear almost anything. And so, you can enable smart audio to filter out the things that you don't want to hear. So the cough, when they wake up and start talking to their stuffed animal in the middle of the night, or hey, I want some more water, you can filter all of that out and just be alerted if they're screaming or if it lasts longer than five seconds. It's totally customizable. And of course, no one has to use that. 

Chris Powers: Am I a bad parent if I just want to mute? By the third kid, you just mute it all. 

Kevin Lavelle: It's good for you for waiting until the third kid. But that's part of our vision, is for people that have multiple kids, you can still have all the benefits of the monitor for the things that you really do need to hear. I've said this many times. My parents' baby monitor was a box fan outside my door, and I made it. And we'll talk briefly on the insane state of sleep guidance. But the second thing that is, I think, more revolutionary and cooler is we are using this baby monitor as the foundation for something we've created called the remote night nanny. If you can afford it, an in-home night nanny or night nurse is one of life's greatest blessings. Kids have to sleep through the night. They need that sleep for dysregulation, they need it for immune support, motor skill development. They need sleep. And so, you are doing the right thing for your kid by helping them learn how to sleep. You're doing the wrong thing for your kid if the minute they cry, you are in there holding your hand because you're scared because of some sleep influencer that you will deeply traumatize them for life if they are allowed to cry for more than 30 seconds. And so night nurses or night nannies alleviate that pain for parents and support the journey of developing healthy sleep habits. It's also unaffordable for almost everybody. In Dallas right now, it's 350 to 450 dollars per night, and you're typically doing it for several or every night a week for six to twelve weeks. That is just never going to be affordable for most people. And then you also have to bear in mind, it's night shift work. You have someone else in your house. There's a lot of challenges with that. So, what we've done is you can turn over the controls of your monitor to our professionally trained night nurses, who will turn the volume on your monitor all the way down to zero and only wake you up when a professionally trained night nurse says it's time for you to go in. And because we've built the hardware and software and firmware, if the device disconnects from the internet for any reason, power outage, internet outage, whatever, the monitor will turn itself back on and alert you that you are no longer being supported remotely. So, when your child cries, as they inevitably do for two, three, four, five minutes and stops, you won't hear anything. But if they cross that age and stage appropriate threshold, like 10 minutes or 15 minutes, depending on how old they are, we're going to turn the volume up. We're going to send you a reminder reminding you what to do. And because we have built this and because we can leverage the internet, we can get the cost down to about $25 a night for all-night coverage from like 9 or 10 p.m. until 6 or 7 a.m. And we've now worked with many dozens of families and have changed their lives. And what I find is most parents the first night are like this is a little weird. I'm not totally comfortable with this idea. And then we send them the report in the morning for how many times we didn't wake them up and how their child did. And on the second night, they slept like they haven't slept since before they had kids. Because it's not only I'm not being woken up, it's I'm being supported by a nurse who will tell me when it's time to go in. And so, it's like a double deep sleep. You're not hearing anything unless you need to, and you know that someone is telling you when. So long-term vision, eventually one nurse will be able to support many, many families, right now, it's about five, because technology and AI can improve the effectiveness of human caregivers. We want nurses and doctors to be supported by technology, but our promise with Harbor is it's still real people. Like these are real people, these are nurses, they are trained in sleep training and expertise, and that has been life-changing for the families that we've worked with. 

Chris Powers: Did that develop, was that the overnight night nurse, was that part of the day one idea, or is this listening to customers and watching technology evolve that you landed there? 

Kevin Lavelle: So similar to the Phil Mickelson, can you get someone to play golf in a dress shirt from our PE investor, I've just found the more that I talk to people, the more great ideas kind of filter in. And so, our lead investor for Harbor, a company called Trust Ventures out of Austin, Texas, and Sal Cherry and Brian Tuckman have been good friends for a long time. Sal is very good friends with a guy named Jonathan Swanson, one of the founders of Thumbtack and now Athena, executive assistant in the Philippines. Jonathan is a life hacker, and he was working with executive assistants in the Philippines and he gave one of them access to his Wi-Fi camera and said, I've blocked every number but yours. Call me if my kid cries for more than 10 minutes. It was this very rudimentary life hack. He was obviously very comfortable with a whole host of potential issues. But my friend Sal sent me that article before we started Harbor and said, do you think you could do that? It's like, that's a really interesting use of technology. You bring scaled hardware, software and time zone arbitrage to take something that is inaccessible to almost every American and now is accessible to a very significant percentage of the country that's never been possible before. That's a really interesting way to think about that. And so, we started dabbling with the concept. I hired, there's a night nursing company here in Fort Worth called Newborn Nightingales, and Melissa O'Neill is the woman who started it. She's worked with thousands of families. I called her, I asked her what she thought about the idea. And it was so cool, because I said, look, I know this is kind of competitive to what you're doing. And she goes, I just want to help more families sleep. I will never run out of families who want somebody in their house to help. I think if we can help more families sleep, then this sounds great. So she came on board as an advisor, and she's been our director of sleep advisory services basically. And I hired some of her nurses and we did low fidelity MVP test versions of this, and we proved that it can work and we've proven that we can make a real impact for families remotely and then we built in the safety redundancies and the protocols to make sure that we can alert parents no matter what. And again, we've worked with dozens of families, and they've told us things like, you've given me hope to have a third child. I haven't slept this well since my first trimester. This is the first day I put on adult clothes and took my kid with me to go grocery shopping and stop by Target because I finally had a good night's sleep. And every parent who's been through this knows that feeling of, it's almost hopelessness when it's been days or weeks without sleep, that it's just hard to get motivated to do literally anything. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture and warfare. And when you don't sleep, not only can you not be a great parent or a great spouse or a great employee, it's very dangerous – driving, being responsible for other people. And so, if we can do this right, I think we can really make a profound impact on millions of Americans. 

Chris Powers: Okay, I want to go back real quick, just from the pure entrepreneur side. Did you know your co-founder already? Or did you know you were going to build hardware that needed this type of product? And so how did you find your co-founder? 

Kevin Lavelle: I knew the hardware that I wanted to build. I had absolutely no idea technically how to do so. And I was very fortunate. I built a great network. I had some great folks that made some great introductions for me. And talking to some technical folks, my question was, can this camera go to the internet and to a dedicated monitor? Is that even technically possible? And as soon as you talk to someone who knows these things, they’re like, absolutely, let me explain to you how. And so, I knew the skill set that I needed. And one of my best friends who's been in my forum for, we've been together for eight years, he had sold his company to RealPage here in DFW area. Charlie Hill, my co-founder, was chief development officer at Stratus IoT, which had also been acquired by RealPage. And so, as I went through that process, my friend Mike told me, Charlie's got the skill set that you are looking for. And like, I haven't talked to him about it, but I think he's going to want to be a founder someday. Like, he's got the right mindset for it. And he also said, I've never seen anyone command the level of loyalty and respect amongst developers that Charlie has. And he is not a developer himself, but he knows how to speak that language. Charlie was an electrical engineer by background. He flew attack helicopters in the military for eight years, got an MBA, and then became a chief development officer, largely self-taught at a – this is very important – at a company that was pioneering IoT protocols in devices for large deployments in very secure environments. If you don't allow residents to be able to access their apartments, you have a very big problem. So, very high uptime requirements, very high cybersecurity. They built the software for the hardware-connected devices. And so, when we talked to him, when I talked to him, it was, I mean, this is the guy. This is exactly the skill set that I was looking for. Had I not found Charlie, I don't know what that journey would have been like. But he had not started a company before, and he saw what I'd done with Mizzen+Main and said this is worth taking a plunge. 

Chris Powers: From the time you first met him to the time he committed, what was that delta? 

Kevin Lavelle: I had a phone call with him in March when I was very early on and I don't really know what I'm doing next, I'm just kind of trying to figure this out. And then we reconnected once I actually understood what I was trying to do in the summer, I think in June. We had a long phone call. And then I was like, we're basically getting married. And so I said, I'm coming up. He lives in Philadelphia. We spent a day together, and I've heard from friends who, it’s very different, but like they get divorced, and in their thirties or forties, they remarry. It's like, there's no time for BS. I need to know exactly what you're like, you need to know exactly what I'm like. There's not this like, I'm in my 20s, I don't really know who I am or what I want. And so, we basically were like, how do we want to run the company? How do we want to communicate with team members? What's the fluff that we never want to deal with again? What's the biggest mistakes we've seen from people that we've worked with? And at the end of it, it's sort of like, did we just become best friends? Yep. And we've worked together for several years now, largely remotely. And it's been a great journey. I think we work really well together. And despite him being the chief product officer, he's got a lot of really awesome ideas on the marketing front. And we have really complimented each other very nicely. 

Chris Powers: Okay, so you're a marketing genius. 

Kevin Lavelle: I don't know that I would say that, but I've done well enough so far. 

Chris Powers: You've pulled some stunts. You've done- you've pulled some, you got Phil Mickelson to wear a button down at the Masters. Do you have- I'm assuming you- is there a way to bring that? Like are you, maybe it's not something so wild as that, but how are you thinking about marketing this in ways that will look back, if we did this in five years, and be like, I can't believe you pulled that off? 

Kevin Lavelle: I've got some things in the works that I'm not ready to share publicly yet. However, again, learned a lot along the way. So some of the key things that we're doing right now, one is we're working with a ton of micro to midsize momfluencers. A momfluencer, so moms who just share their lives. And what are their life hacks, what works, what doesn't. There's a lot of them. And some of them, it's just a rev share based on the sales that they help drive. Some of them, it's both cash payment and rev share. And some of them, it's just, if you want to work with me, here's my rate. We have a couple influencers that we have partnered with on an equity front, both on the mom and dad side. And so they have certain deliverables. 

Chris Powers: There's dad influencers? 

Kevin Lavelle: Ish, Trey Kennedy, who's a hysterical comedian. He's got millions of followers. He is both an investor and we've also done an equity deal with him. And so, we're using his reach. I wouldn't call him a dadfluencer, but we're partnering with him for his reach. And so, he's done some hysterical videos about being a parent. He just had his second kid. And I am in talks with several celebrity parents. The biggest challenge that I've run into is with Mizzen+Main, it was like pro athletes with a large reach, enormous. And then like they need to want to wear our fabrics. That kind of maybe shrinks it, but it's a huge total number of people that we could work with. With Harbor, well, they have to be famous, a mom with very young kids that's willing to be an influencer on the mom side. Because we've talked to some that are like, I've done some mom deals, I don't want to do any more mom deals. I want to get back into fashion or I want to get into something else. Other cases, moms that you wouldn't know unless you could find the buried news article that they even have kids because as a celebrity, they go, I don't want my kids a part of this at all. So it's a very, very small number of potential moms that we could work with, but we're talking to some, so stay tuned. And then the other thing that we're doing is doing everything that we can to build trust with our audience and so that people can understand this is not some fly by the night, new piece of electronics from China. There's a lot of that on Amazon, which surprisingly still gets bought, but we're very transparent with how we build. I've been building in public some version of it for a long time, sharing about the journey, what are we working on, how are we thinking about our ambassador programs, so that there is a sense of there's legitimacy behind this. Not that Kevin Lovell or Charlie Hill deserves all the trust and credibility in the world, but how do we imbue more trust and credibility faster so that people can understand. And then the last thing is, and I've got some flack for it so far... 

Chris Powers: You've got flack on the internet? 

Kevin Lavelle: Just a little bit, just a little bit, and we can unpack some of that, is being remarkably assertive about why we exist and contrasting ourselves with the leaders in the space. And there's two fundamental aspects to that. One is Nanit literally failed our family. And it's not about Nanit as a company or the people behind Nanit. It's just Wi-Fi cameras with apps on phones are not baby monitors. This is why I built the company. So we're very clear in that. And then the second piece is- 

Chris Powers: They probably didn't like to hear that. 

Kevin Lavelle: They have not liked to hear that. The second piece is I've never had an issue with competitors. There's always going to be competitors. That's fine. And one of the greatest commercials series ever made was I’m a Mac, I’m a PC. It was so memorable as to why these things were different based on the clothes, whatever. I have a real bone to pick with Nanit and Owlet with their baby biometric fear mongering. They have convinced a generation of parents that you need to strap a device to your child to understand whether they're breathing or not. And then there's an asterisk. And at the bottom, it goes, you cannot rely on this to tell whether they're breathing, to tell whether SIDS has occurred, RSV, CRUPE. You should not rely on this for anything in any way whatsoever. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is one of the most risk-averse organizations on the planet, says we do not recommend these devices because it reduces adherence to safe sleep guidelines. And straight up, it's just anxiety inducing. We are not meant to strap a wearable to a healthy child. And if your child isn't healthy, then you should get medical help for that child. And so, I hear from, as I talked to thousands of parents over the last few years, I remember one conversation, a mom said, I'm just so much less anxious because I bought both an Owlet and a Nanit, and I can check both of the apps all night long and make sure that he's breathing. And so I just in the middle of the night roll over and check. Like, you're less anxious? It doesn't feel like you're less anxious. And that, it's already hard enough to be a parent. We don't need to scare parents anymore. And with Harbor, I'm not trying to scare parents to buying Harbor. I'm saying an app on a phone isn't a baby monitor. You should just know that you can't be alerted if your app crashes. And if you have a Wi-Fi issue, there's no way to know. So, we built the modality of this product to resolve that problem. But I'll also say scaring parents into- like some of these companies’ taglines are monitor every breath. No, you can't. These devices disconnect. They rely on the internet, which is not reliable. 

Chris Powers: The data's going to China or whoever knows where. 

Kevin Lavelle: Wherever. And importantly, it creates this impression amongst parents that they should be monitoring every breath. Now, I will say, I remember I did it a lot with Jack, my first, and a lot less with my daughter, Lala. I would go in probably once a month and just sort of like listen to them because you're so nervous. But the reality is and the American Academy of Pediatrics and any non fear mongering, competent doctor will tell you, you follow safe sleep guidelines. So firm mattress, firm crib sheet, appropriately fitting pajamas, appropriate airflow in the room, right temperature, the right crib setting, and nothing in the crib, and you've done everything that you were supposed to do and you can do as a parent. There's nothing else that will prevent tragedy. And the awful aspect of talking about this is SIDS does happen. We also have no idea what causes SIDS. Doctors do not understand what causes it. But if you've done all of those things, you've done everything you can do, and strapping a device to your child will not save your child's life in that instance if you've done everything that you can do. And I can't speak for the AAP, but I will say if the American Academy of Pediatrics thought that this could save children's lives, they would be all over it. Regardless of any of the other aspects of this, if there's a way to save kids' lives, the American Academy of Pediatrics is going to be behind it. And so, I've been very aggressive about this baby biometric BS. It's dystopian. It's bad for parents. And I think it contributes to this broader, I think there's a postpartum and pediatric sleep crisis. There is a real problem with parents not getting good sleep because they've been scared to death. 

Chris Powers: And we do have to remember, we have been around as a species for tens of thousands of years. People were sleeping in caves on dirt. We've made it. Real quick on the, you've mentioned equity deals. Are you able to share like, if I were going to start a company and I came to you for advice and said, I want to strike an equity deal with an influencer, what matters? Is it just here's the amount of shares you get, or do you align incentives in a way that is a little bit more performance-based? 

Kevin Lavelle: There's absolutely no formula that is standard. And this is part of what makes me chuckle when you hear about AI is going to replace every job. Like, there's not a consistent equity deal, especially on a big one, hardly ever. There's always nuance, and there's so many different ways that you can align incentives or have gut checks or have out clauses. So, I would say the first thing to consider on an equity deal is how much do you trust the person that you're going to work with and the impact that they can have on your business. There are no shortage of stories of equity deals that have gone sour, and what are you going to do, sue them? How's that going to go for you? It could take two years to work out and your business is dead by the time it happens. And certainly, some influencers, their reputation will catch up with them, but you might not catch up with them. You might not survive. So, the more that you can do reference checks on the type of person that you're working with – how many other deals have they done? Talk to the other businesses that they've worked with. What would they recommend? How well did it go? What were the expectations and what was the outcome? That's a big part. The second is understanding the tools that you have at your disposal. Most people think it's like X percent of the company, done. Well, there's a lot of different ways you can structure equity. There are vesting periods, there's clawbacks, there are ratchets where you can double up, and there's also royalties, straight cash payments, there are affiliate licensing opportunities. There's so many different ways that you can structure it. So, come back to what are you trying to do in what time period? A lot of equity deals, it's literally just, I want to go drive two more million dollars worth of sales, and the entire deal is structured around, if I can track two million dollars, this is what you get for it. Here's a baseline, and if you hit this, here's what you get, and if you exceed it, you get some sort of doubling measure for every million dollars over that. I think the consideration to bear in mind is, in today's world, there's so much money in marketing, and as marketing has become all the more difficult, a lot more brands and businesses are moving into influencer marketing. And so, your deal is likely far less attractive than you think it is because there's a lot of other options on the table. There are plenty of endorsement deals that have worked out beautifully for athletes and celebrities, but a lot more that haven't. And I'm thinking about how many athletes or rappers have done a liquor deal. And there's like a handful that have ever even remotely panned out. Why was Casamigos one of the most successful endorsement deals ever? And why are so many just absolute duds? It really comes down to like, what went well on the back end? And what were they using the face of the celebrity to do? And it's part of why, I don't know if you've- you should have Troy Aikman on here if you haven't... What Troy has done with Eight is incredible. But what people don't often see is Troy is working his ass off. He is at bars and restaurants and doing events and meet and greets. He works really, really hard. Troy Aikman has a beer. It's called Eight. No one cares. Troy Aikman works really, really hard at getting the word out there and getting people to try it and showing up at events. That's what drives success. So I share all of that, it's very general, to say, what is it that you're trying to accomplish and what are you willing to trade for it? And then how does that align with what the endorser has to offer and what their requirements are? I've talked to several endorsers, potential partners over the last couple of years, and some of them, their agent’s like, if you aren't prepared to write a seven-figure check up front, I'm not even going to entertain this conversation. Okay, no problem. Thanks for not wasting anyone's time. In other cases, it's they're kind of a little bit flexible, and then halfway through, it's like, and I need at least half a million dollars a year, guaranteed. Okay, in some cases, that's great, no problem. And in others, I mean, for our case, we're not flush with cash, we're an early stage startup. It's painful to trade equity, but that's what I'm looking to do is find somebody that wants to take a bet on the future. And so it's helpful to understand what else is in their wheelhouse and Rolodex. Because a lot of influencers now with huge followings, that's their basically W2 income. And they don't have an opportunity in some cases to wait three to seven years for a payout. So that was a lot, but those are some of the things.

Chris Powers: I think it's huge. I mean, you've somewhat cracked the code on how this stuff works. And I'm assuming if you give them an equity deal, they're going to own shares in the company forever. 

Kevin Lavelle: With some caveats. 

Chris Powers: With some caveats, but you would kind of want them posting about the product for a long time. 

Kevin Lavelle: And I would also say, what's the- trust is like the speed of contracts or relationships or something like that. Like you need bigger contracts because you have to prevent something bad from happening. In every endorsement contract, you're going to have a list of deliverables and services. If you ever have to reference that list, it's probably a failed deal. The most successful deals, a la what I was just mentioning with Troy, and it's his brand, so it's a little different, are where the talent is just all in all the time. Like, yes, we have to have something that we agree upon and to protect them too. The legal term reasonable is very much up for interpretation, but you will post at least once per month on these platforms in this manner. You have to be that specific sometimes. But what's really going to make it successful is when that person is commenting on another celebrity, I just got my Harbor. It's so great. Let me know if you want to talk with the team. That's not in a contract somewhere. When it's Phil Mickelson holding up the logo in front of NBC sports, that's not in the contract. That's what makes a great partnership. 

Chris Powers: Is there anything in the contract that’s like if you are on the cover of a magazine for doing something terrible that's brand harming, this gets revoked? Like, is there any language of what crossing a line could be? 

Kevin Lavelle: Yes, in a lot of contracts, there's the standard indemnity and arbitration clause that everyone just copy pastes loosely. There's a morality clause that is largely and widely copied in most deals today. And it's up for interpretation as to what it means, but it's like, there's some legalese around profane, or I forget exactly what it is, but that's generally there. That's one of those where it's like, if someone gets caught having an affair, that's not necessarily a violation of a morality clause for a lot of brands. But if you are the church app, you might write that in. You might say, if that happens, if you're accused of having an affair. And that's where a great agent and great talent and great lawyers are going to have to find a balance. Because you can be accused of anything, but it's going to come down to what's the reputation of the brand? What's the reputation of the product? And are there specific things that you want to call out? Every single thing is up for negotiation. And you may put something in that morality clause, and they go, no, you have to strike it. And then you're like, why is that a problem? 

Chris Powers: All right, Kevin, this was awesome. I appreciate you joining me today. 

Kevin Lavelle: Thanks for the chance to share our story and hopefully first of many. I've watched this. This is so cool to be in the studio. Congrats on everything you built.

Chris Powers: I appreciate it. Go buy a shirt or go buy a Harbor Sleep Monitor if you're a new parent. 

Kevin Lavelle: Yeah, and I'll say, our mission at Harbor is happier parents, healthier families, focusing on sleep. We have a ton of free resources available at harbor.co. You don't have to be a customer. There's lots of great resources. We've got sleep experts. We've got OBGYNs and peds that write articles for us. So just go check out Harbor.co, and hopefully you want our baby monitor, but if not, we've got lots of great options to help parents. 

Chris Powers: I appreciate it. 

Kevin Lavelle: Yeah, thanks, Chris.