Lululemon proved women would pay $100 for leggings. Nobody had done the same thing for men. We just asked: what if men's athletic clothing was actually good?
I was a CPA sitting in a cubicle thinking, this can't be it. I quit to teach yoga, started designing shorts in my apartment, and ten years later SoftBank valued the company at $4 billion. Life is weird.
Our customer wants one outfit that works from the gym to the office to dinner. That's not laziness — that's how people actually live. We design for real life, not Instagram.
We were profitable before we took a dollar of venture capital. SoftBank didn't save us — they accelerated us. That's the only reason to take outside money.
We started in one surf shop in Encinitas. Now we're in Nordstrom, we have 50 stores, and we're expanding internationally. But the brand still feels like Encinitas. That's deliberate.