What is up DTC pod? Today we have the pleasure of being joined by Kevin Lavelle, who was the founder of Mizin and Maine. And now Kevin is also the co founder and CEO of Harbor. So we're really excited to have Kevin on today because Mizin and Maine was a massive men's apparel business and now he's moving into the baby. You know, Kevin, I'm going to let you kick us off.

Why don't you tell us a little bit more about your background and what led to the inception of Mizin and mate.

Yeah. Thanks Blaine. Glad to be here. Always a pleasure to be able to share some of my lessons learned and experience. We feel like, we transformed the menswear space. And now with harbor, we are building a better baby monitor and pediatric telehealth company. I think there's a lot of opportunity to improve sleep and wellness for parents. So been a great ride so far.

And hopefully some of the lessons learned from company one will improve in company two and share some of those today. So the background in Misman and Maine, I grew up playing golf and watched performance polos take over on the golf course. So I had this aha moment. I watched a congressional staffer run into a building soaked in sweat, and I wondered why no one had ever made a dress shirt out of performance fabrics. The idea stuck with me for many years, and ultimately, after some tinkering in 2011 into 2012, I launched Mizzen and Main in 2012. I expected it to be a smashing success in the first week or two because I just invented a performance fabric dress shirt. And if you build it, they will come. Is not true in the world of DTC.

You actually have to put a lot of work into it and really build a brand and a business that your customers resonate with. So I had an amazing experience, built that company over many years. We've done hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. We have well over 500 wholesale partners, and we've got ten of our own stores now. And then the transition there in kind of mid 2022 started this process of building what is now harbor. We have a great new leadership team at Mizzen and Maine. I sit down a couple of years ago and remain chairman of the board, but I'd had this experience in wanting to build what is now harbor. My son is seven years old, and I'd done a whole bunch of research when he was born and went out and bought what was supposed to be the most innovative baby monitor on the market.

Product called Nanit. And it ultimately is a Wi Fi security camera that you point at your child and you have an app on your phone, and you sleep next to your app, and it's supposed to run audio in the background. But I woke up one morning and the app had just crashed. And I had no idea how long I hadn't been monitoring my son. And upon then doing a little bit of research, I realized this is not a baby monitor. It is a Wifi security camera with an app. And so I went out and bought one of those old school radio monitors so I could have that kind of failsafe capability of knowing if I had lost connection. So, similar to vision in Maine.

I've had this idea for many years. And then ultimately decided I got to take the leap. No one is doing it. And if it was such a good idea, someone would have already done it, is why so many innovations don't take place. And so I am so proud of everything we've done with visit in Maine. We've got a great team building there, and it's a really cool opportunity to build something again. And ultimately, our better baby monitor, we think will change the game for parents. It's a dedicated failsafe local monitor with a camera.

They work with or without Internet. They connect directly to each other, and they both connect to the cloud. So you get the best of all worlds. And then we're building a remote night nanny platform on top of that to take the cost of night nannies from four to $700 a night down to 20 or $30 a night. So some crazy ideas. I am well aware jumping into menswear with no background and then jumping into hardware, software, and pediatric telehealth. But that's how great things happen. And I'm excited to kick off this journey again.

Yeah, I mean, this is really exciting. I'm really pumped to talk about this just because I'm kind of at the stage of my life where a bunch of my friends are starting to have kids and they're doing the whole baby monitor thing and they're buying all these products and baby products always. I always found them super interesting because, like you were saying, there's a lot of hardware components, there's software components, there's UX experiences, there's network connectivity sort of things. There's video, there's audio. There's so many different components. But before we get too far into the product development and how you guys are building out harbor, I'd love to kind of talk about what the company looked like when building Mizin and main. Right. Like you said, you guys have done hundreds of millions of dollars.

You took it from the beginning, where no one even wanted to buy or acknowledge the brand to the point of doing tons and tons of sales. So I'm just really curious, what in the early days was the key, you think, to the success outside of the innovation? Like, what on the business building side really started, where you guys really started to find traction, product market fit and growth.

Yeah. So, again, outside of the innovation, I think there were a few very key phases, and each phase was very different than the one prior. For the first, honestly, almost two years of Mizin and Maine, it was kind of grinded out for every sale that we could get. I, of course, leaned on friends and family, right. There's a lot of talk in the early days of building anything. You got to go get one customer, then ten customers, then 20, and then 50, and then 100. And as a founder, that's what you're supposed to do. And if you can't do that, then it's unlikely that anyone's ever going to buy your product.

So then I started after some friends and family, then I started just trying to do anything I could to literally just be in front of people and show them the products and hopefully get the shirt on their back. So I talked my way into literally standing in front of Gold's gym in Dallas, where I lived because I knew a lot of people there and I had a rack of shirts and I was trying to talk to people and they were like, sure, you've been coming here for a few years. Well, I guess let you do to. I went to the Dallas Marathon Expo. I went to a bike race expo where you got a lot of fit guys that love performance fabric, and then at the same time just going basically door to door and trying to get any account to carry our product from a wholesale perspective. So that phase one was just like brute force. Door to door, one by one, we were laughed out of every trade show. People told us we were crazy, but all of a sudden we had 100 customers and then we had 200 customers and then we had 1000 customers and we had two wholesale accounts.

So that was very one by one. And then 2014 is when we started to get a little bit more traction. And I'd raised a little bit of angel capital, so now we could spend a little bit of money on Facebook and some of those other things. I feel like being honest, we missed the Facebook arbitrage window where there are some brands that just hacked the algorithm and went from one to 10 million in sales in like 18 months because they didn't necessarily have a great product, they had an unbelievable digital marketing prowess. And so that next phase, we started to be able to actually put ourselves out there in a somewhat bigger way. And that was trial and error. And one of the things that I did was I bought an ad in Esquire magazine because I thought, well, we need to establish ourselves and get out there. That did nothing.

And by the time 2014 rolled around, we had started to get some traction and it was brute force PR efforts. And we had some great PR folks we worked with and some not great PR folks we worked with. But ultimately, most of our great PR was me finding a way to get in touch with an author or a writer and putting myself out there. And in 2014, we ended up having an awesome author. His name is Tim Teeman. I am still grateful to him to this day. And he did all of these freelance articles for the New York Times. Now he works for the Daily Beast.

But the kind of interesting backstory there, I just was looking for writers who are writing about odd things in the world of apparel. Ifashion always turned their nose up at us, and they still do. There are some really prominent fashion writers at Wall Street Journal and New York Times who still will not acknowledge Ms and Maine's existence. Right? Like, we are a pox to them. They will not acknowledge us at all. But with Tim, he wrote these really interesting pieces. Like, he wrote an expose on the puffer jackets that rappers wore in the how that became such a staple. And I thought, this is an intellectually curious guy who is not a fashion guy, but, like, in that world.

And he ended up writing a very big piece on mizzen and Maine in the New York Times. We had a full photography, full color above the full picture. It was awesome. And that kind of led one thing to another, and the other kind of big trial and error that hit was through a PR hit. A guy that I went to high school with, his name is Ian Desmond. He was a very successful major league baseball player. And he invited me to come do a trunk show at the Washington Nationals locker room. And we sold, like, $10,000 worth of product in 45 minutes.

We weren't doing that in a day before, but that opened this avenue to pro athletes, became obsessed with our product. And by the end of that year, that was just after spring training. By the end of that year, I visited probably 15 MLB locker rooms. I think I also kept getting invited because, look, there are some athletes that I really look up to, and it's a really cool experience to be with these guys. But I also didn't know who a bunch of them were. And so I was just in there, like, look, I made these shirts. Do you want them? And I introduced myself to this guy, and I'm like, hey, my name's Kevin. Clearly asking him to reciprocate.

And he goes, Kevin, I'm Bryce. And it was Bryce Harper who assigned one of the biggest contracts in baseball history. He's like, bryce, nice to meet you. I think you look like an extra large. Would you like to try on one of our shirts? So some of those things turned into big wins for us, and that was kind of phase two. The biggest out of that was a sponsorship of Tim Ferriss's podcast, I was kind of poking around and saw a tweet of his saying, I'm taking sponsors for my next kind of batch of sponsorships. And I shot him a note via the form. And I knew someone that knew him well.

And I said, kelly Starrett is a good know. He'll vouch for us. And lo and behold, he did. And Tim, I sent him some product, and he's like, I love this. I think I could really promote. We. We signed up for the sponsorship. It was a huge swing for us because we had to buy three podcasts up front, which was a huge check for us.

Ultimately, it was net positive ROi within two days of the first podcast for all three podcasts, and we ended up doubling our business overnight and never went backwards. But each of the podcasts that he talked about just, I mean, we were doing like ten x, normal revenue. And I talk about that being a turning point. It also nearly killed us because we were not set up to handle that, which was brutal. But one of the things that came out of that for why I think that really propelled us was Tim changed our business forever. And I had read an article called the Tim Ferriss effect. And it was about, when Tim talks about your book, that it can change your Kindle ranking from like 1002 to 72, and that there's nothing in the world like Tim Ferriss talking about your product. And so I wrote a medium article called the Tim Ferriss Effect podcast edition.

And I shared absolute or percentage numbers. I didn't disclose our revenue, but we had a 1000% day. We had a 300% day. And it talks about the ROI. So then Tim, that's good ammo for Tim to promote from an advertising perspective. So Tim kept talking about Mizin and Maine and the sponsorship on his Twitter because he was telling everybody, look at what I did for this brand. But it was also a continued partnership, and that's a win win in the best way. The last big trial and error from phase two was we ended up signing an endorsement deal with JJ was.

I mean, he's continued to rise, but at that point in time, he was everywhere. And, I mean, I could unpack this story for an hour, but suffice it to say, I knew some agents, and I talked to a few, and there were a couple of big names I was going for, and a lot of them said, you should probably go for, like, a C tier athlete right now. And I was like, I need an a tier athlete right now because I'm trying to grow my business like big time right now. And long story short, through a lot of really great dialogue, we signed this deal with JJ. And for us it was this. Especially after the tim thing, this sort of. You can't not take us seriously because there's no way that JJ would sign this with just anybody. And we clearly couldn't write him a check for $10 million.

So he clearly believed in the product and it put us on the map in a big way. I can keep talking about all this stuff, but I would say the third phase would be okay. Now we're a business doing many millions of dollars a year in revenue. Now it's time to get serious and grow. What growth avenues work? How do we continue to scale? Because you're not going to keep getting these pops where you're growing 1000% from a random viral hit. It was a couple of years of like, we're a legit business and we got to keep growing. And it was in all of the above and figuring out where we need to invest more and where some of those channels started to scale back.

Yeah.

Okay.

So a lot to unpack there. Some really interesting things. One thing I'd love to double click on is the JJ Watt partnership. Right. I think a lot of brands think about partnering with big creators, athletes. And now the landscape has changed a little bit since 2015 or so. What year did you guys do the partnership? Was that 16?

Yeah, I'm 99% sure it's 20 some.

Anyway. Somewhere around there, the landscapes obviously changed a little bit, but what were the dynamics of that? Right. Because there's a lot of people with great brands who are saying, I don't want to partner with someone who's like a C tier athlete or a C tier creator. I want to go for someone who's an a. So, a, what did it take to get it done? And then b, if you could provide some general color on what the deal actually looked like, how did it go down?

So my overarching feedback, and I'm in this process right now where I'm talking to a bunch of folks about my new business, is, I think, the most successful partnerships. You either have an a tier celebrity who gives you a level of credibility and reach that you could not get in any other way, or you need to find the creators or influencers in your space who actually aren't necessarily that big, who have an insanely intense and passionate, loyal following that may bring you more business than an a tier celebrity. And so I encourage when people ask me this, to me, it's like, what problem are you trying to solve? Because if you say, I'm just going to throw an a tier athlete at this or an a tier celebrity, and that's going to bring me millions of dollars in revenue, I would bet almost anything that it won't, because you can't just throw a celebrity at something and, oh, well, look at that. If you are going to work with a celebrity, my guidance is always, how authentic is the partnership? And as I have navigated these conversations over the years, because we ended up doing a second major partnership with Phil Mickelson, which was mind blowing and awesome. Both JJ and Phil, it all came down to, like, I had an introduction, and if you can't get an introduction, it's just not going to happen. But I had an introduction, and then I got some product in their hands, and once they put on the product for both of them, I came to learn it was a damn, this is awesome. There's really something special here. And then they looked into me, they looked into the business, they looked in the social, and when I think about an a tier celebrity, they have to be obsessed with your product, they have to love the product, because otherwise, okay, maybe they'll meet all of the contractual obligations.

Great. But if it doesn't show up authentically in their life, I just don't think it matters, and it probably won't help you all that much. And then on the creator side, I know a bunch of DTC businesses where they found some random micro influencer, like medium micro influencer. They formed a very mutually beneficial partnership, and that person drove ten times the amount of revenue that one of the big ones. So I think that's really important framing, because if you're just throwing a celebrity at something, look at how many celebrity brands fail themselves, and it's the celebrity's brand. It's like their own thing, and it doesn't work. So how did it work with JJ? I had some relationships at CAA sports where he was represented. And that doesn't mean, oh, yeah, you can get a deal.

It means they'll at least look at what you have, and they'll at least ensure that if it is a good fit in their eyes, that the talent will see it. But usually they have, I don't know, a hundred things that they could be looking at any given moment. And so it started with, I narrowed the list out and said, here are the three people at CAA that I really want to work with. And then I sent something to each of them. I started to make some progress and traction with JJ and then one of the, I'll say, unlocks behind the scenes was, I realized, talking to his agent, who has since become a friend and is just an awesome person. I was telling JJ, you need to bet on me. Like, sure, you love the product, but you're betting on me. This is an unknown, very small startup.

Do you believe in me? And while I would love to say, let's go get dinner together, let's spend some time together. Come on. How much time does he have for something like that? So I wrote to his agent because I hadn't spoken with JJ, a mini autobiography, and I walked him through the. This is who I was when I grew up. And these are like, this is who my parents were, and this is why I made the decision to go to SMU, and this is why I did this first job. And let me tell you about my wife and how we met, and probably is something that most people wouldn't want to read, but it was something that someone like JJ said. I don't know if I can trust him and can I attach my brand to his? And it didn't seal the deal, but it did mean that I broke through and I was invited to then sit down and have a deeper conversation where then we could get to that next level. And so my suggestion there is, if you can't get an introduction to the agent or the talent, you're never going to break through.

And then the second is make sure that it's the right person for what you're trying to do. And then the third would be, are you presenting anything that is compelling to them? Besides, I'm going to throw you lots of money, or I'm going to throw you lots of equity, because those options are on the table for these folks all the time. At that level, it needs to be compelling, but also a way that feels like, yeah, this is a good decision for my time and resources. And, look, I got really lucky. Right time, right place. With JJ, I made some of the right moves. There were other people that I had tried to work with along the way that I never made any traction and never got anywhere. So I'm not saying that I have it all figured out, but when you stack all of that up, that's how we got there.

And your last piece of this was like, give us some sense of what the deal kind of looked like. Ultimately, it was an equity deal because cash was so precious for us at that point in time. It was a meaningful equity stake for us, and obviously meaningful enough for JJ. But one of the ways that we were able to make it work was we were not a conflict for anything else that he was doing. So he was a Reebok sponsored athlete. Reebok did not do what we do, and it didn't compete with anything else in his Rolodex. And so if we had tried to do it with, I'm making this up, an energy drink, I don't know. Gatorade is paying him an astronomical amount of money, so you probably wouldn't have been able to get in there.

But like, men's dress attire, we were this small sliver of his stack of potential endorsements and we made it very manageable from a time and awareness perspective. Like, we did one photo shoot a year and it was, I don't even think we had a mandated number of posts. I was like, I will make this the easiest deal that you have. And he ultimately said, yeah, I can make that work.

We are really excited to announce that DTCpod is officially part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals. And we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show, bringing you guys amazing guests, and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC pod and more shows like us on the HubSpot podcast network@HubSpot.com. Slash podcastnetwork. That's awesome. I think there's so many things that you mentioned that are really important for people to think about. I think you're spot on in terms of, it's not just about the size of the creator, it's about alignment, authenticity, and how they can work with your business.

Because I see it myself sometimes you'll think, oh, it'd be awesome if I partner with this really big creator. You look at their socials, it's like they don't even have a relationship with their audience, right? Like they're barely posting. They're not even creating content that aligns. And then you may have a creator who maybe has like 500K followers or a couple of million and is just like going for it all the time, talking about products they love and really has that deeper relationship. The other thing you mentioned that I think is really spot on is how you didn't just approach it being like, oh, here, JJ, here's how much you're going to get. And all this. You said, first, let me tell you who I am, right? I think creators are approached so many times by so many different people that they know in very fleeting sort of capacities and even just giving it the time to be like, wait a minute, Kevin is a real person, someone I can relate to. I know his backstory.

I think that's a really big thing. And that's not something that you hear too often. Everyone's just trying to close the sale instantly and just saying, oh, it's money, money. What's the equity terms? And like you're saying, these creators, they have so many opportunities, especially at the higher end, that you need to stand out and differentiate yourself. And then on the last point, in terms of just finding what the alignment looks like, in terms of making sure that it's a deal that they can say yes to, that's going to be good for you, that's a win win. And making sure that you both feel like it's a win when you're going into it. So, yeah, that's amazing. Those are some awesome partnerships.

JJ Watt, Phil Mickelson, two different markets, but similar overlapping market, and obviously hitting right down the middle on your ICP. That's really exciting. So I'd like to transition the convo towards harbor. Right. Clearly you were able to build Mizin and maine into a really profitable big business. And now taking some of those learnings over when you started on, like, what were some of the first things that came to mind in terms of either things that you did right at Mizin and Maine that you were okay, like, this is part of the playbook and we're running it back, or things that you didn't get right at Mizin and Maine that you were like, okay. These are things that I want to solve for and make sure I don't trip up when starting my next.

So, I mean, overarching. One of the things that's very different this time around is we're building something so technically complex and frankly, mission critical and life critical. With Mizzen, I made my first shirt and I made a thousand of them and I went out there and it was very much MVP because you got to get out there in the world and will people buy it with harbor, it doesn't work that way. Right. We are making a very sophisticated piece. Well, two very sophisticated pieces of electronics, how those interact with each other, the overall ux UI, cloud based interactions, and we are layering in telehealth interactions. And so one of the primary differences this time is the sheer amount of upfront investment, expertise and talent required to do this. We officially started building this in September of 2022.

And we just launched our waitlist in mid February of 24. We'll ship our first units this spring and we'll begin shipping to everybody this summer. I figured out how to make some shirts and find some manufacturers and get it off the ground. And I was out there slinging shirts at the Dallas Marathon Expo with this. I found a truly incredible co founder, Charlie Hill, who is our chief product officer and co founder and now a great friend. We have multiple full stack developers on staff. We've got nearshore and offshore developers we've hired ahead of hardware. I've got multiple extremely sophisticated advisors.

We have been over to visit our manufacturers, which didn't happen for me for a long time. And so the upfront investment here is just a profoundly different experience. Also, just being blunt, the reality of this is I could not have done harbor bootstrapping. Right. I've raised venture capital, we brought some great angels on board and it's a very significant investment upfront to then be able to go sell something. So the biggest difference there is, it necessitates the level of expertise and sophistication that I brought on from the very beginning. I sought out every expert. And prior to starting Mizin and Maine, I was very nervous that someone was going to steal my idea.

So I told no one about it. And prior to starting harbor, I have, I think, directly spoken to over 500 people in the last 18 months, almost two years. And it was basically like, if you would even sort of talk to me about it, I was talking to you about it. And that has rapidly iterated and improved our approach because what everyone says in hardware is it's so dangerous because of how much money is required to get this thing off the ground. Small mistakes can cost you millions of dollars. And so I wanted to talk to everybody who has made every mistake and try and learn from know the, the world. When I started Mizin, there were these brands that hacked Facebook and grew in a massive gone, that's gone in every way at this point in time. It's still a valuable marketing channel.

But I just approached this from the very beginning that we would have to do things differently. And so one of the key points to how we will grow this business is putting out exceptionally valuable content that makes parents lives better. And so I have pediatric sleep experts, doctors, I've got amazing resources, science based writers. And so we are pulling together incredible content so that if you are a parent and concerned about, well, first and foremost, sleep and bringing a child into your home, that we are the place where you can get science backed answers that are clear and unambiguous and then layering out into additional realms of all the questions that you have as a parent. And a lot of people look at content as, oh yeah, no, it's good for SEO. I look at it as we're going to create incredible value for our customers who are going to share it with their friends and their lives will improve. And that flywheel will be something that we just have never really done because I just didn't invest in content from the beginning. And I think we have a good blog now at Mizzen and Maine and it's good, but like content as a pillar of the operation that we're building.

Because if we improve parents'lives, then we've done our job and everything else comes together naturally. The next piece is just it took me a long time before I could work with influencers and social media. Influencers wasn't really a thing at twelve years ago, sort of, but not really. And now one of our core growth vectors is partnering with great moms who put out their own great content so that we can connect with moms where they are. And then we are talking to some really awesome talent about different types of partnerships. So stay tuned because I think we've got some good announcements coming. But with Miz, and it took me three years before, a little over three years before we were able to work with JJ. And so I think we'll be able to do some earlier, cooler partnerships which will help establish that from a credibility.

Then, you know, the nature of what I'm building this time building with our team is with Mizin. We were unique in the DTC boom because from the very beginning I approached wholesale as a critical partner, whereas so many of the brands that were started around that time are like no, online everything forever, any in store, is dumb. Everyone has now realized how dumb that is. But we started building wholesale from the very beginning and I looked at them as a critical extension of the Mississippi main kind of network. With the way that we're building harbor. For the first few years we are going to be direct to consumer only and we will eventually expand. But for the first few years it looks like we will be exclusively direct to consumer and then find those growth vectors and other partnerships when the time is right.

Kevin, one question I want to ask now that you mentioned about the wholesale stuff and how that was part of the strategy at Mizin, a lot of direct to consumer brands now or that started Internet native as they grow up, they're thinking about omnichannel they're thinking about working with wholesalers and retailers now. Could you tell me a little bit about how just having that retail sort of presence maybe helped grow the brand as a whole? Because like you're saying when you're actually working with it, sure. That you have less margin when you're working with other partners or retailers, but at the same time, it does contribute and bring back into the brand as a whole. So could you just kind of characterize what that looked like with Mizin and Maine?

Absolutely. And I have to give so much credit. I still thank him. I see him every once in a while and I still thank him when I see him. Damon John really opened my eyes to this. I had such a cool opportunity to have dinner with him just before I launched Mizzin and Maine. He had this awesome promotion where if he made a donation to one of these charities that he was a part of, you could have dinner with him. And I was like, that's the one person in the world I would want to have dinner right now.

Shark Tank has continued to be a great show, but 2012, it was peak Shark Tank mania. And so one of the things that he said from the beginning, he is the reason that I didn't askew wholesale partners. After hearing him, he changed my mind and I decided to invest in that as a growth vector from the very beginning. When you put on a mizzan and main shirt, especially a decade, twelve years ago, when there was nothing like it, now so many brands have started copying what we've been doing, but when you put it on, it's unlike anything you've ever put on, ever. And as a guy who had worn dress shirts for many years, any guy who ever has this feeling of like, oh, that is nice, is not what you think when you put on a stiff cotton dress shirt. And so he said, you're going to want people to be able to try this product on, and there's no way that you can get this out there to enough people where they could just grab it off a rack and put it on. And the other piece is in the menswear business, so much of the menswear industry is actually decided by small specialty menswear stores that the guy or his son or the grandfather or whatever, they've been running this small shop for 50 years, and the grandfathers used to shop there, their son shopped there, and their son shopped there. And so he's like, they will be excited that you are something new that they can show their customers.

And so when someone comes in they're going to say, oh, come on over here, Tommy, you got to come check this out. They'll get them to try it on. What we have seen in our own stores validates that. I mean, I'd seen it in our wholesale partners, but in our stores, we have well over a 50% conversion rate. If we get someone into the shirt, it's well over a 50% conversion that they will buy it. They've never tried it on before. If we can get them in the shirt, they're going to buy the shirt. And so I knew that I could never get our product in front of enough people, and all that I needed to do was get them in it.

And so, yes, you get fewer margin points, but those wholesalers are providing value and they deserve that margin. And so we've had ups and downs. Some partners have been better than others, and certainly some headaches when you're dealing with other people representing your brand at that level. But ultimately, it has been just an absolutely critical value for Mizzon and Maine overall.

And one of the other interesting things that I think I'm noticing between both of these businesses is you need to kind of look at each business and each product and think about who's the customer and what's valuable for that customer. Like you're saying for Mizin and Maine, you realized very quickly that it was about aligning yourselves with the right creators who could have an outsized impact on the business. And then also because the product spoke for itself, at least in how you wear it, how you feel it, and how it's differentiated from everything else. So you wanted to optimize for getting people into the product, whereas you said you're doubling down on content for harbor because, like you're saying these people have an underserved market. They're trying to learn. They don't have sources of education like this, and they're looking for creator partners like moms that they can trust. So creating a content engine where now you're essentially doing, you're doing a similar thing, but it's a different product, it's a different market, it's a different need, and you're meeting those customers where they need to be met to step into and find your ecosystem, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So my next question about building out harbor, I know you said there's a lot going on. There's a lot that goes behind the scenes into the product development side and the launch side. But one thing that you said is you guys are running a prelaunch. Could you talk to me about knowing that you've got all this product development and you're getting ready to scale up and you're going into TDC, how did you guys strategize or plan your waitlist and your pre launch with your customers?

Yeah, so the process, and here I've got one of our cameras right here. The process of building physical electronics is incredibly complex. It is a very long time to get to the point where you say, we're ready to turn this production line on. And so shortly we will be kicking off that actual full production. And so our approach was, with something as complex and as expensive as electronics manufacturing, getting an indication of demand is helpful for helping predict that we don't get into an upside down supply and demand where we just cannot get enough product out the door. There's a very delicate dance. You want some level of excitement about the product, but there were some businesses, especially during COVID where it was like a 16 week wait time, and you have to put all of your money down up front to reserve your spot in line. And that's not a great experience as a customer.

And so ultimately what we decided to do was not the Kickstarter model where it's like, hey, I have this idea, give me some money, I'll definitely go build it. Because I think people have somewhat soured on how many Kickstarter projects did not end up coming to fruition. And that's through no fault of Kickstarters. It's just the nature of how difficult it is to make products. We have this product, we have people using it in their homes right now. Our own employees are using it. We've got some beta testers using the product. It's now just about standing up that production line.

So we decided to do the waitlist so that we could try to get ahead of some of the demand that will come later in the year with some sort of indication of how many people are telling you that they actually want the product. So we did a $25 refundable deposit. I think, like any great leader, you have to take inspiration from other things that have worked. Tesla, they put the deposit down, it's refundable. And for them, the amount of money that that was, was a really nice cash infusion. But ultimately, it helped give some sort of indication of how many people want the model. Three. How many people want the cyber truck? And so we took some inspiration from that waitlist model and ultimately tried to steer it in a direction where people weren't feeling like, I gave you my money a year ago, where is my product? So we will have our first batch of units that will ship this spring, and then the full production line will be throwing off the full production quantities later this summer.

And it's an interesting balance when you're building a physical product. The cash cycles are very difficult and so you have to manage. You don't want people to wait too long, but you also need to know what the demand looks like. So this, we felt like was a nice compromise. And there have been some other great products over the last couple of years that have built really interesting waitlists like Opal camera. I've got their camera as my webcam. And when you do it, you got to make sure you follow through and keep your customers up to date and deliver a product that they love.

So is there a specific way you built it? What's your site built on? Did you guys build on Shopify? Did you build custom? And then how did you actually. Okay, great. And then for this sort of thing where people put the money down as a deposit, how is that processed?

We've used some Shopify apps. There's some kind of native apps that are helpful from a credit card processing perspective because we don't want to be credit card processors. But then we worked with some developers to build some custom extensions around how to make sure that the right information is attached to the right person. And harbor will be a membership model similar to WHOOP. I'm obsessed with my WHOOP. And so there are some very complex behind the scenes mechanics to set your customers up for success and give them the right information. And when is it charged and when does a membership start? So we've done some custom work behind the scenes, but thankfully we have a camera and a monitor. I think I've got the monitor over here.

We got a camera and a monitor. We don't have to worry about colors, and we don't have to worry about different storage or any of those types of things. So it makes the inventory management a little bit easier. It's not like we're going to sell out of the ones in green and all of a sudden find ourselves in a really tough spot. And having built an apparel company with an enormous number of SKUs and sizes and fits and colors, I'm pretty excited about a two SKU inventory business.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. Right? There's a lot of things that are a lot harder about building this business, but at least you won't have to be managing a whole bunch of different SKUs. My last question as it pertains to the product. And the opportunity side of things is what gets you really excited about this space. Do you think there's a bigger opportunity within the parenting sort of space to build other products? Once you've landed with the baby monitor, you're going so far into content. This is going to be a brand that people can trust and relate to. Do you have plans as you scale? What's the broader vision for harbor?

We think we can be the company that transforms sleep and wellness for. Let's start with american families. I'm not worried about the whole world quite yet. Our mission statement is happier parents and healthier families, one restful night at a time. I'm a dad of two young kids. I have a seven year old son and a five year old daughter. And we were very fortunate to have some sleep expertise, help along the way and feel like it changed our health, our marriage, our kids behavior. It's safer when you get in a car and drive.

You can be a better employee. Sleep is so fundamental, and I love using this very bad pun, but people are waking up to the importance of sleep. Matthew Walker's why we sleep. People like WHOOP an aura, showing an apple, showing us what happens when we don't get quality sleep. And there's just this, I hate to say, generally accepted malaise when it comes to as a new parent, like, yeah, I guess you're never going to sleep again. And it doesn't have to be that way. I'm not saying it's easy, but there's a lot of really bad advice out there. And the technology that exists, all the other stuff, is not like ours.

It doesn't make your life better, it makes it more difficult. And as you don't have kids yet, when your kid is one, two, three years old and they cough in the middle of the night, you're awake, you shouldn't have to wake up for a cough, you should wake up for a scream. And so we have some pretty sophisticated chips and intelligence in here that parents can enable a level of audio smoothing for age appropriate children, not appropriate for an 18 week old, fine for an 18 month old, that if you could get more sleep, you're going to be a better parent, you're going to be a better partner, you're going to be a better everything. And so I look at our opportunity like we are starting with a baby monitor. But that is the foundation to change how parents approach sleep for themselves and their children. Our remote night nanny product is a service is going to democratize access to all night sleep expertise. 07:00 p.m. Till 07:00 a.m.

You can have an expert remotely coaching and guiding you and taking responsibility for helping you all night long in a way that's never been possible before. And that is what has excited people that I've talked to the most. Because that's changing a paradigm, right? That's changing an operating system for families across the entire country. 3.6 million children are born in the United States every year, and unfortunately that number is declining. We need that number to be going up. More people is a good thing, despite what some of the nihilists and some of the very sad people in the world have to say. No more people is a good thing and it's a necessity. And so if we can make it easier to have kids, we can have a profound impact on society.

I veer a little into the Silicon Valley show when I say that because I'll never forget that changing society one API at a time. It's grandiose language, but I mean it. We can literally change people's lives. And we have. So we've done a dozen remote night nanny pilot tests over the last year and we had parents tell us, you have changed my life. You helped me out of postpartum depression. You gave me hope to have a third child. These are things that imagine if every person who had a kid could feel that that's what we're working on.

That's awesome. No, I was laughing because I think you hit the nail on the head with that. It's like you've got to have that big vision and understand how impactful it can be. But I love the fact that you are also like, it's ridiculous, but we're also doing it. So I love that. Kevin, for anyone who's tuning in and is curious more about your story, about your brands, where can they connect with you and where can they find out more about Mizin and Maine and harbor?

Thank you. So I'm on x Twitter at kevinslavell. Miziminmain is mizzenamdmain.com also that's our X and Instagram. And then harbor is Harbor Co. And on all the socials we are harbor sleep because we are all about helping parents get more sleep. We launched our waitlist mid February. We are taking waitlist deposits, $25 refundable deposit, and would love to get all your listeners on our list and hopefully one of those first units and devices that we ship this summer because we sold out of our first batch this spring already and look forward to hopefully maybe a year from now we can talk about the success of the waitlist strategy and so grateful for the opportunity to share a bit more about Midland, Maine and Harbor.

Sweet. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Kevin thanks.