Chris Ricobono walked into garment makers all over the fashion district in New York and no one would make an off spec shirt for him.

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick in business partner Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those.

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Dave Young:

Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast, Dave Young here alongside Stephen Semple. And we're talking about empires being built and fortunes being made and brands being established and something different happening. And you mentioned the theme for today's show. The topic is a shirt brand called Untuck it.

Stephen Semple:

Untuck it,

Dave Young:

And I am a little familiar with them. Number one,

Stephen Semple:

Oh my God, a fashion brand that Dave's a little bit familiar with.

Dave Young:

Oh, I own two of them. I have two shirts. And I feel like I'm responsible for the brand.

Stephen Semple:

Okay.

Dave Young:

I'm just that kind of guy that my torso is the weird length and I cannot for the life of me keep a shirt tucked in. So years ago, I quit trying, unless I'm going to be in a tuxedo with a cummerbund that tightens that up. I'm like, you're not going to find me in a tucked in shirt because it'll untuck itself. So I've always embraced the idea of buy shirts that look good, whether they're tucked in or not, and Untuck It actually created dress shirts.

Stephen Semple:

Yes, sir.

Dave Young:

That you don't tuck in. You've got quite enough tail to be tucked in. So I'm interested in how they got their start. And I bought my two shirts from an actual Untuck store in a mall in Portland, Oregon.

Stephen Semple:

There you go. Yeah.

Dave Young:

So I think I know where you're headed with this, the experience.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Today they have, I think they're approaching 90 stores now today, and they also now have got a women's line and of course a major strong online presence. But it was founded by Chris Ricobono and Aaron Sendez in Hoboken, New Jersey in 2010. And they are, as you said, a shirt designed to be worn untucked. And in fact, their early ads featured Chris basically walking down the road talking about how this is what he wanted to create.

And they're kind of funny actually. If you go look at them, they're a great origin story. And he's walking down the street in New Jersey and he has this unbelievably serious tone to him about how he wanted to fix this whole shirt problem. And that actually in the early days, David Letterman and Colbert and whatnot were making fun of these ads, which he loved. Like, "Hey, I'm getting some free press here." But yeah, go and check them out on YouTube. Kind of great. I can really understand why those ads work.

So Chris grew up in New Jersey and he took finance and college, and he was actually always really nervous about corporate America. He was worried about his career. And so his whole idea was he was going to get a job, but while he got the job, he was going to look for what the next thing was going to be. So he was always looking for the next idea. And he was nervous in corporate America because he wasn't good in crowds, and he wasn't good with spreadsheets and he wasn't good with socializing. So he always sort of felt like he was an outsider there

And eventually got a job being a salesperson and medical devices for GE. And he was there for about 10 years, but he knew he was never going to be long-term. And while he was at GE, he did an MBA at Columbia and it stimulated a lot of ideas for him, and he knew he needed to get an idea. And the early one that he did actually was a wine blog. He did this wine blog called Pardon That Vine.

Dave Young:

Oh wow.

Stephen Semple:

It was the only idea he had at the time, and he did it. It was his passion. He loved collecting and drinking wine. And in fact, how that all started was he was invited to a dinner from a cousin of his and his cousin was a wine guy, and his cousin would say, "Go down and grab a bottle of wine, grab any bottle of wine." And he'd bring up the wine. And this is going to speak to you, Dave. He would bring up the wine and they would tell a story about the wine, about the region, about the grapes, about the winemaker. And all of a sudden Chris fell in love with wines through the stories, which is what you guys teach at the whiskey marketing school, right?

Dave Young:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

And he became obsessed with it. And so he decided to do this blog and he thought it would lead to some consulting and presenting, and social media wasn't around yet. There was only Facebook, and it was kind of limited. And wine was very snobby then, and he wanted to make it accessible and mainstream. Now, turned out this helped him at his career at GE because his customers would want to go out for dinner with him. He wouldn't sell them anything. He would take him out to dinner. They'd have this great dinner. He would tell the story of this wine, and then they would end up buying product from him, power of that story. But he hated the shirts, so they would always feel uncomfortable and whatnot. And what ended up happening one day as he bought a shirt that was off spec, a J. Crew shirt that was off spec. So in other words, it was a medium shirt, but it wasn't the right length. And he loved it. He wore it all the time.

To the degree that when he would go into stores, he would try to find off spec shirts. He would specifically look for ones that were improperly made. In other words, they were too short. And he started sharing this idea with his friends of, "I think I'm going to do this as a company." And his buddy, Aaron, who was a partner at one of the big accounting firms, forget which one.

Dave Young:

Fives.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. He shared that idea with Aaron. And Aaron was like, "Let's do it. Let's do it. We're going to do this idea." Now, here's the fun part. Neither one of them had any background in fashion. Have we heard this theme before?

Dave Young:

Sure.

Stephen Semple:

New idea coming from someone with no background in the industry, but lived in New York. He was outside of New York in New Jersey, and as we know there's a huge garment district in New York. So he grabbed this J. Crew shirt and he would walk into places going, can you make this.

Dave Young:

Okay?

Stephen Semple:

He would go through the pitch with the garment makers and they all go, "You can't make a shirt like that. It's off spec. You can't make a shirt like that. It's off spec. You can't make a shirt like that. It's off spec."

Dave Young:

Yeah. This is the new spec.

Stephen Semple:

He went door to door. It took him two years to find somebody who'd be willing to make the shirt.

Dave Young:

Wow. Two years.

Stephen Semple:

Two years. So he went door to door two years, and I finally found somebody who'd make the shirt. So he had to raise some money, they had to build a website, and they had to come up with a name. He came up with the name Untuck It. Now, the interesting thing is anybody he shared the name with, they all hated it, but he decided not to listen to it. And I think Untuck it is an awesome name. It's a verb.

Dave Young:

Sure. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

It's a verb. And right away it describes what his product is. The Untuck it dress shirt. Do I need to say anything more?

Dave Young:

No.

Stephen Semple:

Shirt designed to be worn. Untucked.

Dave Young:

Right? You don't tuck it in and you don't wear a tie.

Stephen Semple:

Right?

Dave Young:

Damn It. I'm in. Take My Money.

Stephen Semple:

They pull together 150k. They found this guy from Poland who had an office in New York City. They're going to make the shirt in Poland. Now, it's interesting, Chris believes that today it would be far easier of all of these fashion brands that are springing up to do this today. And he actually feels, because of the challenges, it actually created an advantage for him. So the first shirts were terrible. They didn't know that they had to be pre-washed, so you have to pre-wash stuff before you make it. The shirts were wrong and they started getting back this terrible feedback, but they had to still sell the shirts.

And here's one of the decisions they made. We're still going to sell the shirts. We're going to keep these people's names. And when we eventually get it right, we're going to give them a free shirt, but we need the money. Next one, buttons were wrong. You could just pull the buttons off because the machine, something was wrong with the button machine. And so they sent everybody an apology letter and a five-dollar coupon, take it to your laundromat, have them fix the buttons. So initial quality was, they struggled a long time with it, but they remained positive. When people first got the shirts, they would get this big long letters from folks about how much they loved it.

And the problem was they didn't understand this idea that there's this tech pack that you have to send when you do a shirt. It has to be laundered this way. It has to be done this way. It has to be done. They were figuring all that out because the problem is cotton both grows and shrinks.

And length really would vary because even when you pre-washed it, you're pre-washing 15,000 shirts together, one would shrink a little bit more. It turned out to be a very imperfect process, and it took them a long time to figure out how to make the length exactly the same. And it took them like three years. For three years,