Name: How the Bombas founders navigated tumultuous early careers to create the best-selling Shark Tank product in history
Uploaded: 2024-12-20
Duration: 5 min 8 s
Description: Randy Goldberg and David Heath’s certified B-Corp apparel company Bombas is one of the biggest-ever brands to appear on Shark Tank.

Randy Goldberg and David Heath’s certified B-Corp apparel company Bombas is one of the biggest-ever brands to appear on Shark Tank.

How the Bombas founders navigated tumultuous early careers to create the best-selling Shark Tank product in history

Bombas cofounders Randy Goldberg and David Heath

Features

Bombas is one of the most successful brand to appear on Shark Tank.

Bombas is one of the biggest-ever brands to appear on Shark Tank.

Bombas founders navigated tumultuous early careers before creating best-selling Shark Tank product

I think on our first two days we ended up doing like $300,000 in sales. Mind you, our business up until this point in the first year had done about $900,000 so we did a third of our business in two days and what we had done in the first year. Our website crashed, we had horrible time, you know, really challenging experiences for what was at the time was the biggest moment, uh, in our company's history. Hi, I'm Dave Heath. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Bombus. I'm Randy Goldberg. I'm the co-founder and chief brand officer of Bamba, and this is the secret to our success. Going back to 2011, scrolling on Facebook, I came across a quote that said that socks were the number one most requested clothing item in homeless shelters, and it kind of stopped me in my tracks. I took a step back and was like, Wow, here's an item of clothing that I don't really spend more than a few seconds a day thinking about, and yet it's being perceived as a luxury item for over 600,000 people living here in the. US, I remember I shared this fact with Randy, and he had kind of a similar reaction that I had, and we started asking ourselves if there was anything we could do to solve this problem and I think naturally both being interested in entrepreneurship, I think our brains went to, you know, is there a way to incorporate business to help you solve this problem at scale took a lot of inspiration from brands like Tom's shoes that kind of pioneered the buy one, give one model. And then I think we asked the question to ourselves like could we create a. A sock company that donates a pair for every pair that it's sold to have some small impact on this problem facing a community here in our own backyard and having no experience in retail or manufacturing or apparel outside of I think a 3 month job that I had at the Gap, we went to the whiteboard and we started concepting and thinking to ourselves like how can we differentiate a product in the marketplace. We spent 2 years developing this product and ended up putting it out into the world. people really loved it. We were obsessed in that moment with making something that was going to blow people's minds just because we had started to get obsessed with the idea of what a pair of socks could do for you in terms of your comfort. When you put on a good pair of socks in the morning, it changes the way you feel for the day. It's small, but it has a big impact on how you feel. So we decided to launch the business on Indiegogo, the crowdfunding platform. We launched that in August of 2011. 13 and in 30 days we had sold $150,000 worth of product and at the end of that we were like wow, OK, I feel like we have something here, built a website, placed our first production run, and then started shipping orders. At that point we were like, whoa, we can't really even keep up with the demand. We were selling out of the product long before we were able to replenish it, so we did decide to go out and raise some capital. We ended up raising a million dollars from angel investors and In June of 2014 we got a call from Shark Tank to see if we wanted to audition to be on the show. Obviously we said yes. When you walk down that hallway in Shark Tank, you're kind of thinking, oh this looks like that TV show Shark Tank, and then you sort of realize, wait, we're on this show, this is really happening, and the one thing you can control is that pitch in the beginning. So we were really focused on making sure we got that right, you know, you're on national TV and you say the wrong thing and millions of people are going to see it. There's definitely a lot of pressure that comes along with that. The thing that's within as much of our control is whether or not we, you know, are prepared enough to not necessarily look like idiots on national television. So we ended up creating a spreadsheet of 200 of the most commonly asked questions from watching previous episodes, and we had an answer written out for every single one of those questions. We had also run through scenarios of like, well, what if this shark goes out first and then these sharks are remaining we had. Kind of played out every single scenario so that we went into it as prepared as possible for almost every outcome and I think that helps us feel a little bit more confident going into it knowing that we had an answer for almost every question we knew that they were going to ask us. Fast forward a few months they ended up airing our episode on the season premiere in September of that year, and we got a deal with Damon John, and then we get a call from Shark Tank about 2 weeks before Black Friday. Letting us know that they were going to re-air our episode on Black Friday, biggest shopping day, you know, in the US, and we ended up getting another big gangbusters day. Our website crashed again before Christmas of that year. We had completely sold out of all of our inventory. I think, you know, from the moment we aired on Shark Tank to that moment where we completely sold out, I think we did about $2 million in revenue, and that's really kind of where we feel like the business took off. It's a success beyond what we imagined and the impact that we've had proving out the original thesis of the business through donations, through making amazing products, it's been incredible. It's way beyond what we thought and we enjoy it every day, most days we enjoy it every day, almost every day. Some days, some days.