Welcome to DTC Pod, where we take you behind the wheel with the best founders and operators of consumer brands. You'll learn the ins and outs of business from setting up shop, hitting your first million, scaling past eight figures, and even navigating an exit. As founders ourselves, our goal is to help you learn from the best as you build. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter, join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. Dtcpod is brought to you by Trend, the creative solution for your brand. Go to trend. IO to access thousands of creators for content needs such as product photography, unboxing videos, or even TikTok. And IG organic creative. Use the code Dtcpod ten for 10% off your next content purchase. As a D to C brand, you need real time financial visibility to save money and make better decisions. Waiting for books from slow and expensive bookkeepers that don't get ecommerce is slowing you down. Trusted by hundreds of brands, final Loop is a real time accounting service built by D to C founders. For D to C. Founders try final loop. Completely free. No credit card required. Just visit Finalloop.com D to CPOd and get 14 days free and a two month PnL within 24 hours with all the Ecom data and breakdowns you need to crush it. DTC Pod today we're joined by Ethan Didascalu, who is the founder of July. So, Ethan, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about July?

Gabe, can I just comment? Very great pronunciation of my name. Most Americans get that totally wrong, and you smashed it. So the background of July, we're a D to C luggage brand. We started back in 2019. We're here to do some great things in the product space. We're product guys by default. So myself and my co founder, Richard We, are we're product guys. We're hands on and we go deep on that stuff. So for us, building travel, accessories and products that try and differentiate and beat the game a bit is is what we've been about. So, you know, since 2019, it's been an interesting few years, thanks to COVID, but we're absolutely and the products we're splashing and the brand is resonating well.

So, yeah, why don't we go back a little bit? Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and then kind of the inspiration to build the travel brand.

Yeah, my background is in advertising. So I used to work as a strategy director for an agency called Ogilvy, a big multinational agency. And my business partner was a product guy. He was in manufacturing. He used to supply a few other brands back when he was in uni, then went out and did his own thing in furniture. And so we sort of got together, he's sort of this like, manufacturing supply chain guy. And I've always been this the marketing strategy guy. And so we sort of got together, having known each other through the networks and just through the local coffee shop. Actually, it's the one shop that most people went to. If you're based out of Collingwood in Melbourne, there was this one shop called a coffee and that's how we sort of met and we used to just connect and talk about all the things that we were doing. For me, I did the advertising thing and then went off and did coffee subscriptions and a few other entrepreneurial activities that were fun exercises in their own right. But when we got together, we discussed the opportunity about tackling a big, juicy category. And for us in particular for the APAC region, it's 100% dominated by Samsung and its multitude of brands. And so for us and even globally, right, samsung globally is like 23, 24% market share. And then second is LVMH at around eight or 9%, and then everyone else is other. So the reality was that this is a heavily consolidated market with a lot of opportunity to create differentiation and we felt we could create something quite special. Having a guy who knows how to make things knows how to make things extremely well, and then having a guy who, as I like to put the marketing side, just coloring in. So we sort of said, yeah, we can make some really nice stuff together. Let's build a brand around that. And for us, even the name July was that mark. For us, northern hemispheres in summer, it's when you guys will go on holidays, it's when Europeans go on holidays and it's when Australians in particular leave winter to try and go to like, Italy or the Greek islands or more enjoyable, enjoyable places, warmer places. So it has that beautiful travel connotation from day one. And we're extremely lucky that we could turn that into a brand for ourselves.