So Bart, I'm going to let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background and the brand you guys are building.

Yeah, for sure. Good to be here with you guys. I'm Bart and I started dad gang with two of my friends, EJ and Grant. And all of us have different backgrounds, kind of that help fit building a new brand. Grant has been in sales and some content and marketing and just building companies with me for a long time. And then EJ has been in ops and kind of like operational roles for several different brands for a while and then I've been marketing and content for the longest time. Well, I don't know the longest time to some people, but twelve years for me and so I've worked in d to C before it was called D to C. It was just selling things online.

Probably 2011 was when I kind of got my first taste of trying stuff. I've always been into hip hop, apparel, music events and I think in college I kind of got the bug to start making t shirts and throwing events and selling stuff online. So since then I've always kind of been know. Back then it was like blogging and Facebook and YouTube were just kind of getting its real go in the market. So just trying to sell things and create new traffic through those avenues back then and then I worked for a couple of street wear brands after college. Had no idea what I wanted to do post school, but I knew I had this kind of passion for marketing and branding and building brands. So I worked for a streetwear brand in Seattle and then from there I worked for a company called Strideline and pretty big company still, it's an athletic sock company. So I was there for about six years doing everything there is.

I was the first employee ever, so there's two co founders and then they hired me to do the marketing. Through there I kind of learned the ins and outs of a company. It wasn't like you're the marketing guy and you don't get to see anything else. It was be with us on this journey, help us build this thing, but you are the marketing guy, so let's focus on that. But you'll learn along the way. And then from Strideline I kind of grew with the company to well over 50 employees and good revenues and all that kind of stuff, working with big athletes. And from there I moved on to an agency space. So worked at Strideline for six years, loved it, still great friends with those guys, still talk all the time, but just kind of wanted to do more for others.

And so I moved from there to the agency that was actually running Strideline's paid social and it was like the nicest transfer too because the guys knew I wanted to do more. They knew that I would still be helping a little bit because I'm working with the agency that helped Trideline. And so I did that. Moved to an agency mainly focused on paid advertising, Google and content, so making content for ads. And I was at that agency for three months and then Covid hit, so it was cool, new opportunity and then it's gone. And we had just bought as a family our first home around that time. So that was really cool. You buy a home and then you get laid off.

So that happened, and I had no idea what to do. I'm like, people are losing jobs left and right. Felt bad for everybody around me. And then you see manufacturing slow up. All these things kind of fall apart. Companies are laying people off. And so I was like, well, I've worked for Strideline for six years. I have all these skills.

Why don't I just try to reach out to some contacts and see if I can help them? And so I just did my own thing, kind of like growth consulting for the most part, did that. And then I got hired by an agency at the end of 2020 in LA. And that company is called Mint marketing at the time now called, I think, flight performance. They partnered with flight story and so worked as their head of growth for almost two years. And then I did a lot there. I just worked as overseeing every single client, every single department, paid social, email, sms, influencer content for about 30 clients in about two years. So I oversaw all those clients and then got burned out. I know a lot of people love that grind of the agency life, and it is for everybody, or it is for some people, but for me, it just definitely was not.

And so I went over to another company called Haldi. They specialize in. They created an algorithm for skincare. So you hop on their site, it doesn't sound that innovative, but I've seen the background of it. So you take a quiz and then they match you with the best skincare for you. But it's not their skincare. They just partner with a ton of skincare brands to provide the proper output for what you're looking to do with your skin. Great company.

Loved working there, but also only worked there for two months. So started working there. Everything was great. Growth month over month in two months. I can't even stamp that as anything of an accomplishment. But things were going well. And then one day I got called into a meeting that was like, hey, we have to let you go, investors this and that. And it wasn't like you're screwing up layoff.

It was more of another economic downturn type of situation. And I don't want to make excuses for being like, oh, it's just kind of like what I was told at the time. And from there, I went into panic mode because we have a second child on the way and just moved to another home because that second child is on the way. So here we go again. House number two, getting laid off again. What do I do? And just started kind of interviewing, applying, and talking to friends. And I landed a job as the director of marketing at a company called the patch brand, which is, they make patches that go on your wrist. They're like vitamins, melatonin energy, that kind of stuff.

If you don't want to take gummy vitamins, great company. Enjoyed working there. But at the same time, I was building dad gang, it was just kind of this thing that grant, EdJ and I wanted to do because fathers were just getting served, like, funny stuff on the Internet. Barbecue culture, new balances, mowing the lawn, dad bod, you name it. All that stuff is great. But I was like, damn, I'm a dad of two kids, and the shit's not funny. It's a little bit funny at times, but it's hard. It's a lot on the mom and on the dad.

And you're trying to figure life out while you're trying to figure out how to be a good parent. I was like, man, dads don't really have anything that connects to that. And then I've always been into street wear apparel. Even when I was telling you guys, my earlier days was super into clothing and street wear. And it's just like, let's make something that represents fatherhood for everything that it is, but let's make something that is also quality. You've seen the dad hats that exist out there. They're just kind of like floppy old hats that say dad on them, or Dilf, or just like, funny stuff. And it's like, man, we could do so much better than that.

And so we made 100 hats. Grant, EJ, and I all posted on our stories and our instagrams, like, hey, we made 100 hats. This has dad gang on the front. If you want one, let us know. And those sold out in less than 36 hours without any paid social, without any advertising, no influencers, and on a free shopify theme, so somebody could get excited about that because they're like, whoa, that was so fast.

We're going to make it.

And to me, and I think to all of us, there's kind of like, whatever that was, friends and family supporting, not like a big, healthy business, but let's try it again. So we kept making more hats. Made another 300 this time, and those sold out fairly quickly, and then just kept doing that. Kept making hats, selling them out, making hats, selling them out. And then who didn't get it on that first release would grab it on the second and then who got it on that second would kind of inspire the third batch to get a release. And so I know organic is used as a big term in our world, but I don't know that's truly organic. We were just trying something for fun and people are like, oh, we haven't seen this before, let's grab them. And so from there, we kept doing that and then started boosting posts, boosting organic posts.

Oldest strategy. And in the Instagram playbook, just add some dollars behind a post that's already doing well. And that worked for some reason. And dads kept coming back wanting more hats. And we kind of created this supply and demand battle between the customer and our lead time to make more hats. And, yeah, we've kept doing that for a long time, then inserted ads, then started doing email, then sms. Still on a free shopify theme. It's really lazy.

It's really lazy from the start, but in a way that's working because it's not forced. People spin up brands all the time and they're like, all right, we're going to lose money immediately, but let's spend money to get a bunch of customers. And for us, it was like, let's not lose any money. If people like this, let's keep going. And that was our only mentality, and it still is today. So that's my background to dad gang launch, kind of.

No, that's so awesome. And that brought me back because that really reminds me of, I was a high beast in the street wear era. There was this street wear store across my college and I would just spend all day there. And it was like the brands during this time, it was like ten deep Mishka and all these other brands. And so it was kind of like crooks and castles, I remember. And it was kind of like, what gang are you repping? When it was about these brands? And I feel like a lot of that has been forgotten today with paid marketing, those brands intentionally wouldn't market to customers that couldn't fit their gang or their tribe, et cetera. And so with being a dad, your life changes in the sense that, well, now you got to hang out with other dads. And so there is this sort of community and support.

And so I think that's what really helped you guys. But also your hats are really high quality. Like, just looking at the pictures, I haven't seen one in real life. I'm not a dad yet, so I haven't gotten one. But just looking at the pictures, it.

Seems like you guys really hit it.

Off with the quality. So how did you get that first production?

Right?

Because I feel like if the hat would also just say dag gang and really shitty quality, I'm not sure it could have hit the same way. So it was like a combination of all.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. So throughout my time at Strideline and working with various brands and just making friends along, twelve years really paid attention to the products that were being released. And there would be a brand that's on a shitty product or a high quality product that has a shitty brand. Sometimes you'd see that happen, right where. Amazing brand, great work, amazing websites, all this stuff. But then you get the product and you're kind of like, okay, I got sold on the marketing, but I won't be sold on the product because I have it now. And that was just like, honestly, I wish I had a better story for you. But it was a guy that I'd been chatting to a lot that always dressed super well.

He always had the freshest hats. They were just, like, plain black hats. And I'm like, man, you've got the coolest hats, and you always are dressed super fresh. Do you know any hat makers? And although I can't share our direct manufacturer, he just happened to connect us to that manufacturer. And I looked at a bunch of other hats before landing with this guy, but this one just happened to stick. And I was super particular on the embroidery of dad gang and making sure that it pops super well, that if you wear it all year, that it doesn't kind of have threads coming out of it, and that the bill is perfectly in place when it shows up, and the snap back is the actual snaps of the back stay in place. And we went through our runs of, like, hey, we got a couple of hats, and the snaps are, like, coming undone. Let's reinforce that and that kind of stuff.

So that's been a big bonus.

Yeah, I feel like it's a big bonus to have that quality because they were bought into sort of the culture, the message, and then I get this quality that I wasn't even expecting. Now I even want to buy this and gift it to someone else, to another dad, et cetera. So huge part in retention. But I'm curious, where is your guys? Okay, you did that first launch. It worked. You redid the launch. It worked again. Now, this is a real business, or let's turn it into a real business.

How long ago was this, and where are you guys today? In the sense of how much has it grown? If there's anything you can share?

Yeah, I'm happy to give you order volume and stuff. So we started with. There's a cool part of the story. We started with $250 each, the three of us, so $750 and got lucky on that first batch of 100 hats. So we got 100 hats, $750 invested and, yeah, started out of my garage that. It's funny, like, business stories always come with a garage and I didn't even mean to, but we had a tiny garage that couldn't even fit a car. My wife had a smaller, short rav four and it wouldn't even fit. So I was like, well, I think the universe put this garage in my life to sell hats or something.

So 100 hats out of that and we've been around for a little over a year and a half and we've sold over 90,000 hats since the start of that. So I won't get into revenues. You could do the math in your head, but, yeah, a little over 90,000 hats. And I think between November and December of this year, we were doing close to 1000 orders a day. But that's with the support of paid ads and stuff. But we're still like three, four, five x in our ad account compared to what you would typically spend to get that kind of volume. So, yeah, 100 hats over a little year and a half ago to 90,000 hats in that time span.

That's a lot of hats. And it just shows the power that when you hit a certain community with a message that really resonates, it reminds you of that company. That is really simple. It's just these shirts that say life is cool. Do you know what I'm talking about?

I think. I think that's what it says, right?

Massive brand, just really simple message that just sort of taps into a lifestyle. So I know you mentioned that after community you dove into sms, email, paid boosting, and I want to talk about that, but I first want to talk about how you leverage and made the most out of the community as soon as you saw that potential with the community. So how did you guys approach and push organic as far as it could go?

Yeah, so it's another one that's so boring. But it worked. It was a picture of me holding a dad gang hat, just kind of shot in portrait mode and it just nice crispy photo. That's a hat that says dad gang and it's well shot, but it was just like natural light and happened to turn out well on an iPhone. And that post in it was the introduction of our brand it was like, we're launching dad gang. We're tired of seeing all this funny stuff. We want a high quality product that represents fatherhood for all that it is. And we want to share your fatherhood stories through this brand.

And that post had a long caption that introduced the brand along with this really good photo. Didn't boost it at all for a while, but then that photo kept getting really good organic likes. And so I would boost that post for like $10 a day for profile visits, not website visits, just to boost the following of our page. I was like, as long as the following per dollar is like three or four people, I'm just going to keep spending money on this. And we're talking $10 a day. So if I spent $10 and got 30 followers, then I'm going to spend $20 and get 60 the next day. That was kind of the paid strategy of it very early. But what I saw was like, dads are loving this, kind of like you mentioned, because we're sharing another aspect of fatherhood.

And if a new dad follows us or takes a picture in a hat, let's highlight him and share his story. So I would ask, why do you like the brand? What do you love about being a dad and what does fatherhood mean to you? And I would use that as a caption. Like, I'd take that guy's photo and ask him if it's okay, can I share your story? And then that person would be like, man, my story got out there through this hat page. And once more of the community started doing that, we still, to this day, repost every single story we can that tags us. We repost as many photos as possible. We highlight every Friday we do a thing called Father Friday where I just highlight as many dads as possible in an email, in a text and on Instagram. So like literally take their photos, ask them if it's cool and share their stories and just highlight the community that builds us. Because I say this to our group.

We have a private Facebook group too, which I think is a great add on to any brand you're building. But I think it's their brand and we build it. And I truly believe that. It's like, I'll go into the Facebook, to the business suite of Facebook and see all the comments. And today I was reading, we had like 50 comments that were, can you please make a fitted hat? So it's like no snapback, kind of a stretch fit because some guys just prefer that wear or that fit. So I just went into the Facebook group. And I was like, hey, guys, I saw a lot of comments today about fitted hats. What would you want them to look like? And in like 3 hours, I got almost 100 comments of just feedback.

Let's build this hat together. We're not going to just the three of us, sit in our text thread and think of what you want. Tell us what you want. This is your brand. Let's build the hat for you. And we just do that in groups all the time. So I want to say it's sharing their fatherhood stories with a mix of involving them in the building of the company rather than, hey, we're going to release a hat. Hope you like it.

No input. And hope it does. Well, I really want to get these dads involved because they're so fired up to the point where they do feel like they're building dad gang with us because they told us, make a bucket hat and it's out in the summer, and they can be like, oh, I said that, and here it is. So it's kind of like this just talk to your audience kind of thing.

It makes it more fun, too. Blaine and I have this company cast magic, and we have a slack community of the customers. There's over a thousand people, and they're sharing constant product feedback. We show them things before we release it, and we release it, and it makes it a lot more fun to build that way and not have to go back and revisit after it's already out. You kind of damage the brand, et cetera. I'm sure that through this, you've also probably have had profound stories shared from the dads or stories that have moved you beyond even the intention you originally thought when you launched the business. Can you share either a really cool story or something that was like, that's moving?

Yeah. The moving stuff is hard to comprehend at times, because fatherhood, for the great stuff that it is, there are a lot of trials and tribulations that men go through on the fatherhood side, whether it's child loss, whether it's divorce, whether it's custody battles, whether it's just self doubt and maybe being in your own head about how good you are as a father. So we see a lot of that. We've had a dad lose children before, lose newborns, and that's really tough to deal with. That's kind of like we're just making great hats for dads. But you realize after a while that the community is really connecting in a sense of like, you see another dad with a dad gang hat out in the wild, you're going to give each other a head nod or start a conversation and end up drinking the night away. Like, we've seen that happen, too. But no, we've seen a lot of that.

And we unfortunately have seen some dads lose children and lose custody, several things like that. And we try to help them in any way we can. Whether it's a conversation or if they do have funds set up for certain things, we do try to help them. It's not something that we advertise publicly all the time because I feel like certain brands will advertise them, helping people to get more sales. And we really do it out of the goodness of our hearts. When we see a situation, there's a lot of that being shared and kids born with certain conditions and trying to help dads deal with that. My wife was actually involved in. She was a developmental preschool teacher dealing with kids with autism and developmental delays for a good ten plus years.

And so have a soft place in my heart for people that deal with kids on the spectrum and autism and all those kinds of things. So we hear a lot of it. And then not to be a downer, I know being a father comes with a lot of great things as I experience it myself. But that is the part that we're here to help with, is the not so great celebrated in tandem with the good stuff. So, yeah, we see a lot of it. Like I said, there's loss, there's mental health issues, there's illnesses and disease, but we are here to support those people and have full on conversations, not just like sending prayers and love. I've made great friends with some of our customers, just helping them get through it and not just a quick combo.

Bart, one of the things that I kind of want to talk about that I think you guys have done such a great job with. Like you said in the beginning, you started with 100 hats they sold, and then you kind of slowly were able to scale up the brand. And not only that, you were able to anchor it around a community and concept that was probably underserved. Like you're saying from all the different dad brands and sort of meme ideas that you see, there wasn't anyone who was really doing this and it's something that people really want. But my question was going to be when you were in the early stages of growing the product, right? Like you said, friends and family, they bought it, but then you started to see it spread out. Who else? What did the initial growth look like? Was it like a bunch of friends and families and community that was pretty local. Where people knew each other, were connected with a couple of degrees of separation? Or did you see it pretty early on, start to get picked up with other pockets that were totally random from what you guys would have expected?

Yeah, a lot of it was local at first. I would, you know, it's hard to remember that one, because EJ and I are in the northwest, here in Washington state, and then Grant is. He was born and raised here, lived here most of his life, but he's in LA. And so our networks picked it up and his network picked it up, but we could still pick out every name and be like, I know that person. I know that person, I know that person. I would say by the third round of hats, which was like 300 hats, nothing crazy, we started seeing orders from Wyoming out of nowhere, like Atlanta and Houston, and they were like, okay, word is spreading. Maybe that local friend told a friend that now lives in Texas. And my boosts were pretty targeted.

So it would be like, men interested in street wear, sports, fatherhood, parenting, but still broad to the United States. And so I think those boosts picked up some new people. But I think it was by the third batch, we're like, okay, these are strangers, let's lean into it. Let's maybe spend some more cash, or let's make sure we have more hats the next time around. It was so sloppy, but fun at the same time. It was just like, okay, we're sold out. What are we going to do? And our lead time on new hats is anywhere. It's like a month or two sometimes.

So sometimes it's just this waiting period. But I feel kind of bad about this sometimes. I would still keep the boosts going, because if they.

You were the agency guy, though, so that's so funny. I'm like, he's got the whole system set up. The agent, the 15 years of agency boost post, $10, let's ride.

Yeah, I would leave it boosted and cause this frustration of like, why the hell are you advertising when things are sold out? Right? But if something's sold out and you visit our site, and you go through an attentive journey of a back in stock text, that's where the trickery and optimization comes into play. Because you visited a site, you wanted a hat, and you click, notify me when it's back. So instantly when it's back, you're going to get a text. So it still works really well. You just got to have a little bit of cash to make sure you can keep some kind of boost going. And it's not a lot like people think you need so much money to advertise, but I don't think you do to try things. But sometimes you do, sometimes you have nothing and you need to figure out a way to be scrappy. And it's kind of what we did.

$10 a day is whatever. People blow that on Starbucks daily, definitely.

Bart, I love what you said about putting it out there, boosting it a little bit, and then once you've kind of got some traction, you're able to work all your agency magic and everything like that. So I'd love if you took us through your SMS flow. How did you set it up? What did it look like? I know you said you just spun up a super simple shopify store, but why don't you take us through the back end for anyone who's listening and being like, oh, I want to do that too. How did you set it up? What were the rules you created? What services did you use?

How did it work? Yeah, I've always been a big fan of attentive for SMS. I've used other services and I've actually seen their service get shit on Twitter pretty often. And I'm just kind of like, you can listen to the noise of Twitter all you want, but if it hasn't done me wrong ever, then I'm just going to keep using it. So I've really enjoyed it. And attentive is what I use for SMS, but I also use live recover for abandoned carts. And this is kind of like, I know attentive has abandoned cart SMS, but same thing. I've loved using live recover for so long and it's great that I just keep using live recover. I could switch, but don't fix what's not broken type of mentality has worked in this regard.

But welcome series. So if you go on our site, you get 10% off. And if you enter your text, you're going to get a welcome text. And through that journey, you will get simple, like, make sure to add our number and here's your discount. So I don't like to welcome people for too long through SMS because it's like, all right, dude, I gave you my number, you made me put in the contact, you made me lock you in. And here's the code. I think that's enough talking for a while through a phone, but I do have browse abandonment and then back in stock journeys set for attentive. And those are like the three main ones.

So welcome. Browse abandonment and then back in stock journeys. And then I do like to set up keyword journeys for something that's coming soon. So if you text us the word beanie, because beanies are on the way, once they launch, you're going to get kind of a campaign out to you that says, hey, you wanted to know when beanies are available. Here it is. I think that creates this kind of trigger of people like, oh, I texted that word because I wanted to know the availability. Okay, here's that text I've been waiting for. I think that's always a good idea with anticipation of a product launching.

So that's those. And then abandoned cart is just live recovery. You abandon a cart, you're going to get a text from somebody named Sarah. I believe it says, hey, what can I do to help you complete your purchase? You might get a discount along the way, like those kind of things, but still very simple. Not too many intricacies in the flows. Quite.

Yeah, no, it's simplicity wins.

Right?

But from an operational perspective, I know you described what takes place in terms of how you feature different community members in terms of when they're a dad and telling their stories and all that sort of thing. But in terms of operationalizing the community in the Facebook group, how did it work? Did you bake it into your email flows or your sms flows? How do you get people in the community? And then how do you get people telling their stories like you've just alluded?

I am. So you guys know Greg from. Yes, yeah, the gaming company. Yeah, I think it was Greg that was like, we were chatting and he's like, okay, you have a big community, but where are they? And I think I said, this is verbatim a conversation, but he's like, where are they? And I'm like, well, they're on Instagram, they're on TikTok, they're an email. He's like, okay, yeah, but they're not there. They're your followers and they exist and that's your CRM. But where are they? Like the one place you could go talk to them. And I was like, well, I guess nowhere in a sense.

And he's like, you should really think about starting a private Facebook group. And so I did. That day, he sent me an article on how to, I know how to build a group, but how to really do it well, how to set certain rules. You don't want to just approve everybody because you're going to get spam accounts and all these things. Let me backtrack a little bit. Customers are still mad when things are sold out and I was running ads, so I started the group for back in stock updates so that if you're waiting on a hat to come back, if you're in this group, you'll be notified right away when something's back, even outside of texting, because not everybody signs up for that. So I put that in the footer of our emails. Like every single campaign, every single flow has that.

Join our vip group for restock notifications and exclusive codes and that kind of stuff. So I put that in every single email, in our flows and campaigns, I put that group into our instagram bio where most of our social interaction happens. I put it in our stories sometimes, like, join our group, just a random story post and then I believe it's in one of our attentive journeys. So I just let it live in the places where we're already messaging. And then, yeah, the community is great because it actually does live somewhere. Now, I think we have like 5000 dads that are in this group. And not just dads. There's also moms that are gift givers and stuff.

I kind of battled with the whole, like, do we make it dads only? I just want people that support the brand doesn't necessarily have big dads only. And I don't want to get in trouble for leaving moms out of it. I don't want that battle. And so, yeah, anybody that supports the brand and wants in, I let them in, make sure the account is not anything spammy and just ask questions. Like today, literally, it's just like, hey, we've heard you want to make fitted hats. What would you guys like these to look like. And people are going off in comments, and people post into the group super often, like, my son was just born, I wore the hat. I'm at the hospital, or I'm about to have a kid and look at these birth announcement photos.

The group was started, I posted a couple of things, and now dads can't wait to post when they get a hat. And then every once in a while, I'll chime in and be like, I remember this. When my daughter started, like, a pre k Montessori school, I kind of had this feeling of like, man, is she going to be okay? Is she going to like it? Is she going to cry all day? Will she miss us? I had all these questions I kept asking my parents and people close to me, and I was like, screw that. Let's go ask all these dads how to deal with it. So I asked them the question. I got so many replies and I feel like I've seen some dads do that, too, where they just ask a general fatherhood question and get a device on it. But you put a bunch of dads together, like in a bar, what are they going to talk about? Probably their kids and sports and some other things. But, yeah, you can think of it as, like, if you were to go to a park or a bar or a meet up or a game and you ran into a bunch of other dads.

That's kind of the feeling that I want to create in this group and kind of organically have it.

Yeah. I think there's so many cool things that you can do when you align a brand around a community and idea. Kind of like what you guys are doing. I know we've seen it a couple of times on the dad space, but we've seen some interesting takes in the health space, in the mom space, and even among ethnic groups and that sort of stuff. But I think the dad's one is really neat, and it also opens you guys up to so many cool opportunities where you can fit your product and like you were alluding to. It's like someone has a new kid, a mom probably might want to gift her dad friend a dad hat, right? It's a cool rite of passage. So it even seemed like when you blend in the marketing mind as well, all of a sudden there's so many cool activations that you can do around the community and how your product fits into people's lives.

Yeah, totally.

So as we wrap up here, Bart, I'd be really curious in terms of what you guys have planned for this year, like you said, we started out 100 hats. Now we're at 90,000 and we're boosting real hard. So what do you got planned for the rest of 2024? What's on your roadmap other than the fitted hats and the beanies?

Yeah, we got really lucky where we have two kind of like, holiday seasons. We have Black Friday, Cyber Monday, two holidays, and then we have Father's Day, which is smack dab in the middle of the year. So we're preparing right now to make sure we have enough inventory of our best sellers going into Father's Day, like May and June should be. I'm being optimistic about it, but I want to say May and June will be bigger for us than the holiday season was. So right now, it's like ensuring that we have all that stuff in place and enough inventory. We did one of our first big collaborations last year with Mookie Betts on the Dodgers, and so we released a hat with him. Did super well, sold out really quickly, like a week and a half. Got some amazing content.

And so we want to do more of know with Mookie and some other athletes because that's another avenue that we love is like, taking a famous dad and not necessarily talking to him about why he's famous, but sitting down with Mookie, we talked about dad stuff. I didn't bring up his amazing accomplishments in the MLB and all this stuff. It was like, let's talk about being a dad and how when we sit down and we're on the same level, we're all dads. I'm not a MLB all star.

That should be a podcast. That would be a really good. Yeah, just an idea.

Yeah. And with that being said, so, like, more collaborations with some well known dads, more hats for, um. And then just launching some more different styles. We're still so simple where I don't have these massive ambitions of, like, we're going to go to the moon with this or that. It's just like, let's keep making great hats that look good and keep innovating in the space. We might make an actual fitted hat based on this feedback, and we might make a bucket hat because some guys want them. So it's just like letting this crowd and this community dictate where we move next instead of planning out the entire year and sticking to that, because that's what we think is right. I really want to listen to this crowd and just make whatever they want, if there's enough of that, because you could listen to one comment and be like.

And you're making, oh, we have to.

Make a neon hat because one guy said so. No, there's got to be 1000 comments or something. Then we'll do it. I wish I had bigger plans for you, but it's just Father's Day and more collabs.

I love that. And as we wrap up, where can our guests connect with you? Why don't you shout out your socials, your personal stuff, as well as the brand?

Yeah. So Instagram. I'll just follow dad gang. I keep it pretty private on Instagram, personally. Just follow at Dadgang Co. And then I like talking d to c on Twitter. So it's just the chef. It's just theszef.

The s z in polish is s h. So it's like a spin off that corny. I know. And then dadgang co for the website is just dadgang.com or dad co. We got both domains, luckily, if you want to get a hat, but, yeah, we're all dadgang co for every social and then the chef on Twitter. If you want to hear me talk about random.

Which. Which design is hot right now or is your favorite one for anyone that might want to gift one? Because I go in here, all the designs are sick. So for anyone that might want to gift or be indecisive, which one is the hot seller right now?

Yeah. So our hottest seller actually just sold out, speaking of inventory planning. But it's the black and white horsepower hat. It says hat of the year because it just sold the most. But that was, like, our best hat of last year. But the simple black and white snapback, either the snapback or the trucker are probably, like, the easiest to wear with anything. And then I really like. We kind of made a wilder hat, but it's like a leather front, so it's like a black on black leather snapback trucker.

That one's super cool, too. I love them all. I mean, Dwayne Wade's been rocking our plain d hat all the time, so I really like that one. And for yourself, if you're not a dad and want a dad gang hat to try out, I could send you the d hat, and it could stand for d to c or something.

Yeah, we'll have to do a collab.

Well, awesome. Bart, thank you for coming on the pod. And maybe we'll see Dwayne Wade around Miami repping. Yeah, we call the dad gang. Sweet. Thank you, man.