Alex Salz and Buzz Bonneau talk with us about their journey starting an international wetsuit brand.
Alex and Buzz are two avid surfers who started and still run FERAL Wetsuits, a mostly direct-to-consumer brand from Ocean Beach in San Francisco. FERAL designs and produces the Vans Surf Team wetsuits, has collaborated with Volcom, and Stab's editor-in-chief, Michael Chiaramella, was quoted saying "it's my favorite of the entire wetsuit test.
Their business has been featured in Surfer, Stab, Vans, Vogue and in the short film "Once Upon a Time in New Zealand" with Raglan surfer and comic Luke Cederman @RaglanSurfReport.
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Anne McGinty Host.
Alex Salz and Buzz Bonneau talk with us about their journey starting an international wetsuit brand.
Alex and Buzz are two avid surfers who started and still run FERAL Wetsuits, a mostly direct-to-consumer brand from Ocean Beach in San Francisco. FERAL designs and produces the Vans Surf Team wetsuits, has collaborated with Volcom, and Stab's editor-in-chief, Michael Chiaramella, was quoted saying "it's my favorite of the entire wetsuit test.
Their business has been featured in Surfer, Stab, Vans, Vogue and in the short film "Once Upon a Time in New Zealand" with Raglan surfer and comic Luke Cederman @RaglanSurfReport.
Subscribe on Apple Podcast , Spotify or other major streaming platforms.
If you have a comment, a question you wish I’d asked, an idea for an episode or want to say hi, I'd love to hear from you!
For inquiring guests, please keep in mind that this podcast is for the benefit of listeners and I am not interested in any “puff pieces.” Thank you for understanding!
Feel free to send me a message through my website, or through LinkedIn.
Follow the show/host on Instagram at
Anne McGinty Host.
So in the past I designed medical devices for doctors and it was always really frustrating because I didn't understand the end user that well. That was one of the things I was most excited about this and it's turned out to be true. You can just make a much better product when you either are the end user or you really understand the end user.
Anne McGinty:Welcome to the 25th episode of how I Built my Small Business, the show that is dedicated to sharing the insight that entrepreneurs have about how to start and grow small businesses. Join us as we unravel the stories behind their entrepreneurial journeys. I'm Anne McGinty, your host, and today we have Alex Salz and Buzz Bonneau talking with us about starting a wetsuit brand. Alex and Buzz are two avid surfers who started and still run FERAL Wetsuits, a mostly direct-to-consumer brand from Ocean Beach in San Francisco. FERAL designs and produces the Vans Surf Team wetsuits, has collaborated with Volcom, and Stab's editor-in-chief, Michael Chiaramella, was quoted saying "it's my favorite of the entire wetsuit test. Their business has been featured in Surfer Stab Vans Vogue and in the short film Once Upon a Time in New Zealand with Raglan surfer and comic Luke Cederman at Raglan Surf Report.
Alex Salz:Thanks for having us. Good to be here.
Anne McGinty:So, to start out, how did you guys meet?
Alex Salz:So, funny thing I'm a little bit older than Buzz and we met at a daycare when I think I was three and he was two, but since he's a year and a half younger than me, he doesn't really remember, so I remember that. But then we went to high school together and when I was a junior in high school and he was a sophomore, we had a party and the surf was going to be good the next day and we were chit-chatting about surfing and decided to meet up and surf the next day and then became lifelong friends.
Anne McGinty:So for each of you, how did your connection to surfing even begin?
Buzz Bonneau:For me this is Buzz. My dad surfed a lot when he was younger and so every summer we would go to Santa Cruz for a week and rent a house. And my dad just started renting a surfboard when I was like maybe 11 or 12. But I didn't get into it till it's hard. It's hard up here to get into it, really in the Bay Area, until you're a little bit older. So then I guess I really got into it with a couple friends friends that I went to middle school with like 13, 14.
Anne McGinty:And then what about you, Alex?
Alex Salz:Yeah, I started skateboarding when I was like five, I think, and was super into skateboarding and then started snowboarding around when I was 10. And then surfing seemed so cool and I'd buy surfing magazines and study it, and study it. And then I was on a trip to Monterey with my mom and I was like, let's run a surfboard, let's run a surfboard. And that was when I was 12 and rented a surfboard and was hooked. And then same kind of thing as Buzz, like didn't really, you know, surfed all through like 12, through middle school and high school, but didn't really start surfing a ton until, like, I was able to drive. Then skateboarding took a backseat and I was all surfing.
Anne McGinty:Can you tell us about the exact moment when you both looked at each other and decided to create your own wetsuits?
Alex Salz:Yeah, so we were both working in San Francisco and I used to surf on my lunch breaks and I just done a quick surf out at ocean beach and was driving back and had the idea pop in my head Like, ah, let's make a wetsuit and let's do it direct to consumer, because nobody was doing that at the time and called Buzz and told him about it.
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, and I mean we both remember like exactly where we were when we talked about it. Like I remember the parking lot at the company I was working in, like exactly where I was sitting while I was talking to him and thinking like, okay, this is actually a really good idea, because we'd talked about doing surfing businesses before, or like different concepts in surfing, cause we'd always kind of wanted to do something together and we'd had some like less good ideas that we'd gone over, like how to swap between fin systems, cause like the fins detached from boards and there's two different kinds of systems, and we thought it would be cool if you could like make one system that worked for both, but like it's not a viable business. And so this was the one where we were both like, okay, this is a good idea.
Anne McGinty:That just gives me chills to just thinking about you guys holding the memory of the moment, of where you were when that happened, because it's obviously such a core part of where you are today. So what were you both doing for work before starting FERAL? What kind of experience or skills did you have that gave you the confidence that we can start a business in this?
Alex Salz:Yeah, I think that's the unique thing between the two of us. We have kind of all the skills necessary to start a business Like we have the serving experience and it's just a lifelong passion of both of ours. So know the market, know the sport really well, like industrial design, graphic design, branding I worked in advertising for a little bit so I had all the skills to do the branding, the wetsuit design. We both have business degrees, so have business backgrounds. And then I'll let Buzz discuss what he's done.
Buzz Bonneau:I went to college and studied mechanical engineering and I actually designed surgical robotics for the first six years of my career, so really different than Farrell. And then in the years before FERAL I kind of started small medical device companies where I did more of like the business, finance and some of the engineering. But, like to this day, I still don't think I have a great eye for design. But Alex definitely does. So, combining like the entrepreneurial stuff that I'd done and kind of the business and finance and then Alex with this really good eye for design and branding and that stuff, it was just like a really good match.
Anne McGinty:That is a really good combo. So what was it like making your first prototype together?
Alex Salz:Yeah, it was interesting. The first one wasn't that great type together. Yeah, it was interesting. The first one wasn't that great. I think the concept was there with our design, but just the execution of the pattern wasn't perfect. So got the first one and the moment we put it on it was just like, oh, change this, change that, change this. And then we just went through a ton of iterations and so we were working with our factory and getting prototypes and just iterating over and over and making big changes at the beginning with the pattern and then smaller and smaller changes until we felt like we had a good working prototype that we could put into production but yeah, it was hard because it was both like getting the pattern right.
Buzz Bonneau:But then we were also testing all these different materials. There's just a lot of different sort of quote-unquote technologies in surfing. So like liners inside that supposedly keep you warmer, there's air bubbles in the chest. So we were also integrating all these different technologies and seeing what would work, while trying to also get the pattern right. And yeah, it took more iterations than I thought, like I. I remember trying on like an early. I thought we'd get it right in like two or three tries and I remember trying one on and telling Alex like I wouldn't buy this wetsuit and just realizing that like we had a lot more iterations. At one point I had like a whole like probably yard long thing filled with hanging prototypes of like 15 iterations that we went through before. Like all right now this wetsuit is better than all the other wetsuits that I've ever had.
Anne McGinty:Well, that sounds like such an adventure, trying and fine tuning each iteration. So when it came time to source the materials, what was that process like?
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, so both of us had had a lot of wetsuits over the years and there was one or two brands that use this Yamamoto rubber from Japan. That's like the biggest difference is it's like totally water impermeable, so it weighs almost the same when you're in the water as it does on land, whereas most most neoprene absorbs a lot of water. So like a wet wetsuit will typically weigh like twice as much as a dry wetsuit. So we'd had those suits in the past and so we thought, well, if we want to make a high-end wetsuit, it's sort of like the median price, like the standard D2C kind of model that we kind of needed to get this material. So we just started contacting the factory directly getting the specs for the different rubbers they make. We have made wetsuits out of a ton of different materials but we've never found anything as good as the Yamamoto, and it was kind of our first idea for the rubber we wanted to use.
Anne McGinty:And when it came time to look for and negotiate with a manufacturer, what was that like?
Alex Salz:Yeah, so my past work in industrial design. We'd worked with a wetsuit manufacturer and I knew they made good products. So I contacted an old work friend who I hadn't talked to in a while and asked her to connect us with the factory, because it had been at least a decade probably since we'd done that.
Buzz Bonneau:This is kind of an aside, but the vast majority of wetsuits on the market from all the different major manufacturers are all made in the same factory, and so we did look at them just for a competitive comparison. But we also felt like we wanted to use this material which they don't use, and so we wanted to find someone that we could really trust the quality of and that would be willing to like put in the time with a smaller startup, which is basically what we were at the time. So our contact there had a long history of wetsuit development and really understood technologies that matter and that didn't. We felt like it was someone that we could trust and really work with, versus just trying to do what everyone else is doing and just be another customer.
Alex Salz:The construction of wetsuits is pretty standard across all brands. All top end wetsuits are glued and blind stitched. Now we're doing testing on our end with different materials and I think we were kind of taking it beyond what most surf companies do. I'm making an assumption, and then we'd bring back our findings, because Buzz has a background in mechanical engineering and medical devices and did have equipment to test stuff, and so we tested things and then we came back with our results and we were asking questions with our contact there and he's like yeah, your results make sense, because this quote technology is actually just a marketing thing, it doesn't do anything. And we're like Okay, so we were able to like challenge them and they were honest with us. So we learned a lot and it was a cool working relationship.
Anne McGinty:That's incredible that, first of all, you had a connection to the factory and, second, that they were willing to work with a new company when you had to place the first initial run. How many wetsuits did you have to commit to making and how did you decide on the sizes?
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, so our first year the minimum felt so high at the time but it was 300 suits and we kind of did like the back of the envelope calculation, I guess you'd call it.
Buzz Bonneau:And we're like between friends and friends of friends, like we can probably definitely not sell 300. But, you know, sell enough. And in terms of sizing, we really just reached out to people that we knew who had like either worked in the surf industry or worked in surf shops, and so we just kind of got like a rough feeling for you know, like how many larges and how many smalls and how many of these different sizes do people order roughly? And then we just kind of like averaged all the data we got from people and then obviously every year we adjust it based on the data we have, but I mean at some level, because we have like I think we had 10 sizes the first year and now we have 13 per style. At some level, we would just hope for the best, and you know. And then, like every year, we iterate on our sizing and we've really nailed it now. But yeah, there's like some guessing for sure.
Alex Salz:Yeah we have a great photo. We borrowed my sister's 1996 Toyota two-wheel drive pickup work truck and it has like a lumber rack on it and we were able to fit all 300 wetsuits on it. But it was like the back was totally full, the cab was totally full and then the top was just piled with boxes, strapped down and just super saggy and dragging in the back. But we have a good good photo of it in Buzz's driveway because at the time we were just super scrappy and, like most people, order stuff and get it shipped to their warehouse and we were doing everything out of our houses and just went to the yard where they unload the containers.
Alex Salz:We obviously didn't have a full container, but they unloaded the container and put a bunch of boxes in the yard and we just showed up in this janky pickup truck and we're just like two random dudes, it just definitely didn't fit into the scene there and filled up this pickup track and drove it across the Bay Bridge and Buzz. We had to take two cars because he couldn't sit in the car because we knew we were going to have need every little space to put the wetsuit. I had him drive behind me to make sure, like if anything flew off on the Bay Bridge, like at least we'd know it was, it was pretty low budget but it was a cool memory.
Anne McGinty:I mean, that is like really the very beginnings. I hope you always hold on to that. Where did you take all of the product?
Alex Salz:We went originally to Buzz's house and I think we've left a lot of them there because he has he lives on a hill and has this like super tall basement thing, because he's on a hill and I lived in a teeny tiny house with a small basement. So we put most of them in Buzz's house and then I took a certain amount back to my house and did all the fulfillment from my basement.
Anne McGinty:It's amazing, you guys. So so, so amazing. So how did you get your first few customers beyond your friends and family?
Alex Salz:Both of us really leveraged like every contact we've had from surfing our entire lives. And in that first year, which was fall 2015, we had a article on surfermag. com which the former surfer was the bible of the sport and it was still in print then and it was just through my friend who I surfed with. She was like you should talk to my friend and get him in a suit. And then got him a suit and he was like, oh, my friend works at surfer and he's editor, you should get him a suit to. And he was like, oh, my friend works at Surfer and he's editor, you should get him a suit to test out and do a review. And drove by his house in Richmond and dropped a suit off and he tested it and loved it and it got the Surfer approved stamp and I think that really started to get the word out, and that was December 2015.
Anne McGinty:So so how long did it take after 2015, before you knew that your brand was going to make it and you were all in.
Alex Salz:Yeah, I mean honestly we were. We were all in from the get-go but we both had other jobs, so we did it on the side just because we have children and families and didn't have the means to drop everything. So it was 2019, I'd say 2019, we did a collaboration with Volcom, which was pretty huge for us as surfers, skateboarders, snowboarders growing up in the 90s and like seeing Vulcan begin and growing up watching those videos and everything.
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, I mean it was slow. It was like a lot of little things, like an article here and like the Vulcan thing was big, like that was definitely a turning point, but there was no like single moment, I guess, where we were just like, okay, we've definitely made it. I think this is true a lot of times, unless you get a New York Times article or something where there was just little things, where I was like, okay, wow, like I'm starting to see people that I definitely don't know wearing our wetsuit. And then I did and I paddled up to him and it turned out it was a friend of Alex's, I just didn't know. And then I'm like, oh man, but now I mean, obviously now we see it pretty regularly, but there was like little turning points. And then, like you know, one day I saw two people that I definitely didn't know wearing our wetsuits and I was like, wow, this is so cool.
Anne McGinty:Seeing other people wearing something that you created. I mean, what an affirmation. So can you give us any insight into how many wetsuits were you selling at the beginning of the year and what are you looking at now?
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, so the first year I mentioned we ordered 300 suits.
Buzz Bonneau:We definitely did not sell them all, Like I still had boxes left.
Buzz Bonneau:We sold like sort of enough though that we were like pretty convinced it was worth going like a little bigger the next year and then, without going like too much into my own history, like I'd also raised money and felt like the need for growth and progress in the past and so I think in other brands and other things like in outside of surfing and I think Alex and I were like pretty aligned that will like let it grow slowly and naturally and not raise a bunch of money to try and push huge growth.
Buzz Bonneau:So the growth has been with the exception of a couple years where it's grown a ton, it's been steady. Our average growth rate since the beginning is very high if you average it over the years. Now we're selling in the thousands of suits a year and we have a lot of customers who just are really loyal to the brand. So, like our returning customer percentage is very, very high. So it gives us a lot of comfort in the long term and that we've built something that really is a good product that people like. And it's been slow and I think we've done it authentically and without expensive marketing push or anything, and so I think the brand authenticity has stayed the same since the very beginning.
Alex Salz:Primarily, we've had a very low marketing budget and it is those return customers telling their friends how great the suits are best wetsuit I've ever had and then those people purchasing suits becoming loyal customers telling their friends. So our main marketing has been word of mouth, because the product's fabulous, and then authentic brand story. It is just an extension of myself and Buzz and our years of surfing.
Anne McGinty:It's really exciting when a small brand like you guys, when you started, comes out and can compete against the big players that have been in that space for so long and who have these bottomless marketing dollars.
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, we don't spend that much. We make sure we're in buyer's guides and wetsuit review tests and we always do really well on those, I think because we knew we were going to grow a brand that we wanted to be around for a long time. We could let it grow slowly and authentically and we're always worried that if we do something big that maybe it would come off as inauthentic, which I think is pretty core to what we're trying to do.
Anne McGinty:Well, it seems like you guys are doing a really good job of that authenticity. So, between the American market and the international market, where are you seeing your sales?
Alex Salz:It's primarily in the US, but we have gotten more sales in Europe, Australia, South America.
Buzz Bonneau:We do ship internationally and like our percentage growth outside of the US is actually higher than in, than in the US. It's just like a very small percentage of our sales overall. I mean they're just in California. There's so many surfers I mean there's more surfers in California than multiple European countries put together and we do sell a lot on the East coast and we've sold wetsuits in like 30 countries, maybe more. Like we sold wetsuits all over the place in places that I don't even didn't even know people surfed. But yeah, our core market is still the US.
Anne McGinty:Well, there's plenty of market here for you, that is for sure. So what has it been like running a business with someone who is your best friend?
Alex Salz:Yeah, it's been great, because we know each other really well. Travel together. Yeah, it was really great at the beginning and then we did have some issues as we were growing, but luckily, since we know each other so well and value our relationship, we were able to work through those and talk about them and reached a great point now where we have this awesome relationship where we both respect each other's expertise and can look to the other one and trust them. There's a lot of trust. Yeah, I trust Buzz with his business knowledge and he trusts me with my design knowledge, so it's a really great working relationship.
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, I guess the other thing I'd say is I see a lot of people start companies with their friends and like they start out awesome and they're like this is what I always wanted to do, and then like over time, slowly their opinions on what to do with the business and various things, and then like they kind of grow apart through it. And I feel like we went through a lot of that stuff, talking through our differences, super early, and then actually it's been better and better every year working together since then. And there's certain things with design where I'll be like I don't know, I don't like that, but to be honest I don't really know. So, whatever you think and Alex will do that with financial stuff sometimes and so because we respect each other, where we feel like we're the expert, that we're able to make decisions pretty easily and with a lot of trust in the other one.
Anne McGinty:And that's a great tip for anyone that's considering starting a business with a friend.
Alex Salz:Yeah, trust and respect of the other person, and I think we're both very similar in a lot of ways and our values and just the way we want to go about living our lives on a personal level align, and on a personal level align, and on a professional level, no matter what we were doing align. So that helps to. You know, neither of us are looking to become tech billionaires or anything.
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, and I think we both are pretty open-minded to changing our opinions. So, like we've had a lot of things where we're like I think we should do this. No, I think that's a terrible idea, and at the end, one of us is always pretty much completely aligned with the other one after we talk through it. So like we don't end up in these standoffs, I think we're both pretty good at seeing the other person's perspective and being like okay, I think you're right, nevermind.
Anne McGinty:Nice. So as the demand has increased and you're producing more of these, how have you ensured that you could maintain top quality that you started with?
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, I mean that's always a challenge, right, and the more you make, the more that smaller things slip through. So in the past few years, as we've grown and we've been doing it more and more, we make sure we get samples of literally every material that's going into the wetsuit. So all the neoprene, the jersey, the tape, the glue. We're trying to get samples of everything independently so we can measure all the properties that people love about our wetsuit what's the stretch and what's the finish of it and all these different things. And so we'll test that.
Buzz Bonneau:And because I, as Alex said, did a lot of testing when I was a mechanical engineer, I have a whole test set up at my house and so I'll test everything. And then we'll get full suits made from the production, lots of material, and we'll wear those. And so we do a lot of personal checking. There's a whole QC document that they go through at the factory to make sure that everything's good. But even beyond that, we try and test them on like a practical level, Like how does this feel surfing and how does this feel paddling, and things that the factory just there's no way they can check. And so by doing both of those together, we feel pretty good about maintaining quality and, yeah, there's more, lots of material and more stuff to check now, but it's worked pretty well for us.
Anne McGinty:Have you had to expand the team at all?
Alex Salz:We keep it pretty lean. The one thing we do outsource is the shipping. So first year, as I mentioned, shipping out of my teeny tiny basement, my teeny tiny house. And then the second year outgrew that and knew a guy who was shaping boards and shaped in like kind of like a modified shipping container down by a boat area and he was shaping out there and he's like the little space next to me is is up for grabs and I was like cool, it's super cheap.
Alex Salz:Because it was weird and took that place and it was pretty close to my house and so I just put all the wetsuits in there and I built it out with shelby in a little area to refold, return wetsuits and box them up. And so for two years we were shipping out of there and I'd go down there every day because we ship every day and box them up and fill up my car with boxes of wetsuits and drive them to the post office, where the people knew me there, and drop them off every day. And then by the end of that second year of doing that, it was so overwhelming I'd take my kid with me after school and he was super over it. And then we're like, oh, we got to move on from this, because this is not a good use of my time spending hours a day shipping wetsuits when we're a little two person company that's growing pretty rapidly.
Anne McGinty:That's really cute that you can empathize with that. So at what point did you decide to shift to third party logistics?
Alex Salz:So, yeah, the end of the third year I talked to a friend who also had a direct consumer company and asked him like who do you use for shipping? It's like, oh, these people, they're so great, it's a little family-run business, you're going to love them, I'll intro you. And he introed us and we met up with them and even though we really weren't shipping that much at the time compared to their other clients, they liked us and they're down to take us on. So we moved there and it's in a different location now, but still the same family and they're rad. Yeah, we have a super close working relationship with them. They understand our business really well. They understand our product. Couldn't be happier with that.
Buzz Bonneau:What's funny, though I just remembered is, yeah, Alex was starting to spend, like I mean, he was doing all the fulfillment, partly because the place was a lot closer to his house than my house. But I remember calling him and being like man, this is getting ridiculous, we need to outsource this. You're spending all your time driving back and forth from our tiny little storage place. He's like, yeah, okay, I guess that's a good idea, even though I wasn't doing it, I was just seeing it and it's just like this is such a bad use of our time when a professional can do it with the stuff on site and much more efficiently than we can do. But they've been fantastic and it's great because it's family owned and so we try and do as much stuff as we can with other small businesses.
Anne McGinty:What an incredible journey that you guys have had and the fact that you're partnering with other small local businesses. I see your approach and it's a really beautiful approach. So what are your philosophies on the vision for the future of Beryl?
Buzz Bonneau:We aren't 100% D2C so we are in some shops but we've been like very slow and methodical.
Buzz Bonneau:So we're in three Mollusk Surf Shops which we think are like a really good brand fit and have been a great partner for us.
Buzz Bonneau:And then we're in one store in New York and we're considering maybe adding one or two more stores, but we do a lot of vetting to make sure that they fit. But I could see us being in a few more stores. But the vast majority of our sales are still direct to consumer through our website and I think we're pretty well aligned that we're going to keep growing slowly. We're not going to raise a bunch of growth capital and try and turn this into something that isn't kind of the vision that we had for it In terms of building it to sell it. I think we went through an interesting exercise a year or two ago where that option presented itself and we just decided that that's not what we wanted to do, that we feel a lot of pride and ownership in the company and we're not trying to build a company to sell it. We want to keep running it as long as we can and, you know, slowly grow and keep things true to the way we started.
Alex Salz:Yeah, it's just been such a cool journey to dudes who surfed Ocean Beach every day and connecting with people about the product and it's really like the product is us. We're so ingrained in the brand and it's just an extension of who we are and it's really rewarding.
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, I mean we've turned down a lot of different potential growth avenues with distributors internationally and in the US. We've turned way more stuff down than we've said yes to to kind of keep, control and keep it how we want it.
Alex Salz:Yeah, we still do all the customer service emails, as of myself, so that'd be a really easy thing to outsource. You had a young surfer who understands the product and is really knowledgeable about the sport maybe in school to do it as a side job, but we want to be able to maintain that level of contact with our customers. We know tons of names of the customers. We meet them out in the water and just maintaining that level of contact has been amazing, versus trying to go super huge, really quick, and losing that and losing the brand ethos and just seeing all the emails, frankly, like we get a lot of emails from customers who are like you know what, I would love it if you made this suit.
Buzz Bonneau:And just seeing all the emails, frankly like we get a lot of emails from customers who are like you know what, I would love it if you made this suit. And we get a ton of those. But because we're reading every single one, we start to see the trends and like, okay, we really need to develop this suit. So like the women's 6-5-4, like the thickest suit for in cold conditions, like we're like, okay, we really need to make this suit. Like we have a lot of women asking for it and a lot of our suits that we're prototyping now are because customers have continually been asking for it.
Buzz Bonneau:And I just think you lose a lot of that if you aren't seeing sort of like every interaction you know and we talk through our customer service emails a couple of times a week and different things that we're seeing in our emails and how to adjust our business or where we're doing well or could improve on. But yeah, Alex and I are answering emails 365 days a year. With our first two-day break, we took over our kids' spring break a couple of weeks ago. It was the first time that we didn't answer email since the beginning of the company.
Alex Salz:Yeah, first time we did an out-of-office message In the history of FERAL and that said if our brand grows and there is a demand, because we don't want to cap it, you know, if people want the wetsuits, we don't say, oh, we're only going to make this amount of wetsuits. You know, if we grow it's like, oh, we're all of a sudden selling trillions of wetsuits. We're still going to figure out a way so we can be involved with it.
Anne McGinty:That just feels like real success because it's beyond the money.
Alex Salz:My advice would be do something you really understand and a product that you believe in that doesn't exist out there, and if it's an extension of who you are and yourself, you're going to have success in some way and learn a lot from it, versus trying to push a product or service that you just think might make you a ton of money.
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, I would almost say the same. So in the past I designed medical devices for doctors and it was always really frustrating because I didn't understand the end user that well. That was one of the things I was most excited about this, and it's turned out to be true. You can just make a much better product when you either are the end user or you really understand the end user, and when you don't, it's really hard to without just you know, basically doing what one person tells you, like you're not really developing the product on the same level as when you're like I can wear the wetsuit surfing and be like I wouldn't wear this one. Okay, this is the best wetsuit I've worn. You just can't do that unless you're actually the end user, and I think if Alex and I didn't surf and we're 10 times smarter than we are we would have developed a worse wetsuit.
Anne McGinty:Right, yeah, both of you guys. That is really good advice. So last question here If you could go back and have a conversation with yourself when you were in your young 20s, what would you say to yourself?
Alex Salz:Don't question that obsession with surfing. It'll all pay off in the future. But I made a lot of big life decisions based on, like, having to be able to surf every day and I didn't do a very linear journey through my career and it was frustrating at times. The other advice would be like don't get frustrated by being a jack of all trades, which made it hard to find a job at certain points, because it's like I wasn't like just doing this one kind of design or managing this type of thing. I could kind of do everything pretty well, but I didn't excel at one thing and it's just really cool looking back and being like, oh, all those different things I did in different companies and jobs and all that hours and hours and hours I spent surfing all paid off and now I have an amazing company, my best friend and wonderful lifestyle and yeah, just, I guess, don't doubt your passions and interests.
Buzz Bonneau:Yeah, so I agree with that 100%.
Buzz Bonneau:I mean, that's almost what I would say.
Buzz Bonneau:But I was thinking back on could I have started this in my early twenties and what would have held me back?
Buzz Bonneau:And I think I used to be really intimidated by like, oh, this guy has 20 years of experience, or this company has a hundred really smart people working for it, like how can you possibly compete against that? And so like I think that held me back from having the confidence to do something on my own, just because I felt like everyone else was so much smarter and more experienced than me. And I think to some degree every company that's growing fast is flying by the seat of their pants a little bit and people generally don't probably know as much as maybe you give them credit for including us and that if you really care, like most things you can actually figure out, even if it seems like insurmountable. Most things you can figure out. And if you just keep trying and keep focusing on it, other companies and other people and most things aren't as intimidating as they might seem when you're early in your career and trying to figure out what to do.
Anne McGinty:Yeah that's right, and a lot of times what we see on the outside it's not the whole picture.
Buzz Bonneau:Exactly.
Anne McGinty:Thanks for being here. Today's Key Takeaways. If you've got a great business idea but you only have half of the skills you need, don't let that stop you.
Anne McGinty:Look for a friend with a complimentary skillset and see if there is an option to partner up. You can work with a factory to get prototypes and then reiterate over and over until you have the pattern exactly the way you want it to be. It took Buzz and Alex 15 iterations before they launched their first wetsuit. One of the best ways to think of a new product is to be the end user of that product. So think about your own life. What is missing, what could be improved, what could make life better. When it comes time to launch, leverage every connection that you have and spread your own word. If it's a product, think of who you can get a sample to to get some publicity and honest reviews.
Anne McGinty:Going for quick growth may mean you have to give up either control or values of a business, and there are other definitions of success beyond rapid growth. So before you dive into institutional funding, make sure that you've played out what that would mean when going up against big corporations with giant marketing budgets really lean into word of mouth. Growth and authenticity in your brand story is so key. The direct to consumer business model allows you to keep control over the customer experience, to have direct access to data and analytics, including purchasing habits and feedback, to develop brand loyalty and to capture higher profit margins to reinvest into growth.
Anne McGinty:If you go into partnership with a friend, make sure it's someone you absolutely trust. All partners should respect what each person's expertise is that they're bringing to the table. Talk about your differences in skill sets and roles to prevent the possibility of growing apart. If you're a small business, consider the impact of choosing to work with other small businesses when given the choice. Lastly, make products that you really believe in. You can make a much better product if you really understand the end user and especially if you are the end user. That's it for today. I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.