Matt Kelly | The Midnight Pod

Sam Posthuma started at 16, selling electric lighters at school in Holland. A dozen brands later, he built Old Money into a fashion brand with half a million followers, sold it after two years, and went all in on HiStrips: the pink nasal strip that started as a party brand on a boat in Valencia.

Now world-class athletes wear the strips, 4,000 creators make content for the brand, and the factory in China says it gets a request to copy them almost every week.

This is a conversation about why the story now matters more than the product: building with three co-founders, how a small e-commerce exit really works, growing through creators, funding stock without investors, and how Sam would start a brand today on a small budget.

Sam Posthuma: https://www.samposthuma.com

HiStrips: https://histrips.com

✅ All my links are here - https://www.midnight.co

00:00 Why e-commerce is now all about the story

03:14 The factory that said "you're number 14"

06:29 Selling lighters at school at 16

09:51 Song Shirts and the copyright claim

12:37 Years of trial and error

15:49 Building Old Money

19:21 Why fashion is brutal

22:56 Why he sold

25:26 How a small exit actually works

31:59 The buyer, and keeping 20%

35:47 Joining HiStrips as co-founder number four

40:39 Four co-founders, four jobs

44:28 18 months of compounding

46:03 World-class athletes in pink strips

48:03 4,000 creators: the growth engine

50:03 Why he still runs the ad account

52:08 Funding growth without investors

56:09 Electrolytes and the email-list test

58:52 Can HiStrips sell more than strips?

1:00:22 Making the best product possible

1:04:08 Hiring from the DMs

1:08:46 Retail, global and getting 10x bigger

1:11:49 Why they won't sell

1:13:43 The hardest part

1:16:58 Money, freedom and how much is enough

1:19:31 How he'd start a brand today

1:24:37 Quickfire

1:26:56 Advice to his 18-year-old self

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Four and a half years ago, Jack Zambakides came on the pod running LS Personal Shopper: designer clothes for footballers and about £1 million of PlayStations a month in lockdown. He said he'd never take investment and that he'd sell within two years.

Almost none of it went the way he predicted. Robberies helped end that business. He walked away, went all in on D.Louise, the jewellery brand he built with his wife, and moved to Dubai.

This is two founders comparing what they believed then with what actually happened: focus, hiring, investors, founder mode, retail vs DTC, AI, and the biggest lesson from scaling that nobody tells you.

Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/ltBAVubWL7I

Jack's first episode (March 2022): https://youtu.be/zS7hUIJP65Q

✅ All my links are here - https://www.midnight.co

00:00 Four and a half years later

02:39 Leaving LS Personal Shopper

05:21 Building D.Louise

17:29 The bootstrapped grind

21:54 Blagging into Gymshark's world

29:30 Founder mode and hiring

40:34 What's driving growth

43:58 Retail, ads and trends

52:25 Trust and the customer

57:45 UK vs US

59:34 Money, ambition and being CEO

1:06:29 Could you do it again, bigger?

1:14:56 Dubai and the modern team

1:21:16 Pay yourself more

1:23:39 Quickfire

1:27:46 Advice to his 18-year-old self

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.