Meghan Higney - Message

Yep, for sure. So, Message is the next generation of slide sandals. I realized that we've been wearing for many, many decades, the same slip on footwear, and I think uniquely lived that. I certainly felt that as a consumer. Talked to a lot of people about it. My background, I started out investing in a lot of founder run businesses, actually, oftentimes founder run, founded, funded, became rather big brands. And I really, really respected those founders. I always felt like I was on the wrong side of the table, frankly, when I was doing that.

But then I went on to help other founders build their brands and their businesses. And for me, it was a really long journey to get to the point where I let myself be in that seat. Right. So I lived this gap and I felt it was palpable. And I saw other brands taking well worn silhouettes sneakers, the Flat Innovating for materiality, bringing that to market. The consumer really resonating with it. I always wondered, why is this silhouette being left behind? It's the one that you slide on your foot and walk out the door in. More often than not.

I knew there was a there there, but it was a long journey to this is this is something that I can know. I was like, Why isn't anyone doing this? I'll jump on board. I'll help you build the brand. And then I think it was probably my partner who was like, meg, I think this one's yours.

And I'd love to talk about that. So why don't we go back in time a little? So you had come from banking. It looks like you were at Credit Suisse, and then were you in PE at Ta Associates. What was kind of your role before you found yourself either investing or even getting hands on in the D to C world?

Yeah, so I started sort of typical finance. Started in banking, went into private equity, actually really focused both my banking and early private equity days were very focused in the healthcare space at Ta. Found that I loved Consumer. I think I resisted it a little bit, because often in those settings, you are the woman around the table. And so to be the woman who was also opining on the consumer products, I was like, no, I'm going to get into healthcare and complexity. But I loved it. I loved those brands. I loved the immediate connection to the consumer.

So that's really where I fell in love with brand building and CPG. And from Ta, I actually started sort of playing in some of my what now I can connect the dots looking back kind of entrepreneurial endeavors. Started thinking about how can we build different funds to better serve founders? Because a lot of the brands I wanted to invest in were like, Why? I'm super profitable. I don't want to sell a portion of my business to you so that you have to flip that in five years. I started thinking about different fund formats. I started playing with a styling brand of my own and really started to understand web, how to play at the time, what was actually kind of a new world in all of us, moving our shopping behaviors to the ecom environment. And then I met some founders in my fund work, where I ended up meeting the founders of True Botanicals. And I fell in love with that brand.

As a consumer, they were very small, and I had a unique skill set that fit the founders really well. And they were like, Why don't you join us? And that was my official move from feeling and being and living the investor seat to being an operator. And that was so clutch to where I'm sitting today.

It's funny how the cycles in the markets work, because now you're seeing the funds revisiting the structure of profitable companies and everything. And so what happened with the fund once you jumped in? Did that just get paused? What happened there? Are you still investing? And how did that all shape out?

Actually, I was going to say it's funny, but it's actually exactly how it goes. My angel investor for message. My first investor on idea phase. Like I'm responsible for. I have two kids. I financially support my family. Like, I want to go off and do this thing, but I need some support to do that. My angel investor was the person who I was building that Evergreen Fund with.

And so he knew my mindset and how I think about building brands and longevity in brands and what generational brands can mean for the people who are working with them, for the partners in the supply chain around them. So that's pretty special. His focus, I think. I was really focused on the finance side, and he's shifted into more of a community focus. But he has a beautiful community of what we call evergreen founders where they don't have traditional capital on their cap table that says we need liquidity. They're building for the long haul. So he supported me in that. My operating agreement is actually written probably very uniquely for an early stage brand, because it's written with a view of this seed investment is not necessarily going to convert on the back of more money raised, but rather it's just going to convert because when we hit profitability, we could distribute.

We can distribute dollars. This could be a yield play. Yeah. Actually saying that out loud? It just is such a gift to see how all of the pieces come together. Right?

No, Absolutely. And it sounds like you have a very unique position. Not only having sat in the investor seat, having the right partners to launch the brand, but also one thing that gets us excited is when we talk to investors who actually dip their toes in the operating side. Right. Because it's one thing to sit on the sidelines and play the investing side the whole time, but when you're actually in the game and you're the one operating, it's a totally different ballgame. So would love to talk a little bit more about true botanicals your experience there. You said you joined early. Now, I'm pretty sure it's like a household name, right? Like I've heard of it.

I know everyone's pretty much heard of it. So why don't you just tell us a little bit about your experience at True Botanicals and how that unfolded?

Yeah, true. Botanicals was just I look back at that experience with such awe and gratitude was definitely one of those things where the right product, the brand, met the market at the perfect time. Right. We Were Just At sort of that inflection of kind of self Care, moving into Clean Beauty and people starting to Understand what we Put On our Bodies, go into our Bodies. And we were early in that. And we had some beautiful products. When I Joined, we Were in a Couple of Spas our D to C business was very nascent but we knew we had a well retained customer who liked the product and so it was a gift from a D to C perspective because it was like great, we've proven this product market fit. Now, how do we think about building a direct brand? How do we think about our channels? We had early, pretty early on, we ended up typical now, but then I think even still quite typical to think about influence from a perspective of for us makeup artists who's using these products on VIPs, how do we get in front of them? And when we did that, we had some early fans that were big name celebrities and for the revenue that we were when we ended up bringing in Olivia Wilde and when she fell in love with this brand.

And obviously, I can't talk about the structure of that agreement, but the way that we ended up working with her, it was unique and it was really cool because they do have an outsized influence on how we all buy. So I think early days that know something, our founders were uniquely connected kind of with La and the celebrity world and so we were able to foster some of those relationships early and I think that was huge. We definitely saw kind of a step function of growth on the back of that. We were learning kind of as we were going with Meta and the big pay channels, they were changing so quickly. I mean, it's interesting to think now how much time I spent trying to think about attribution in ways that now it's just kind of like 1 hour. We kind of like round numbers. But at the time there was some more tinkering to do there. So that was big.

We really didn't focus on wholesale and that I think relative to the message journeys is interesting because in a lot of ways I think I got to see how the customer evolved. At the time, it was very zeit to say, I'm only direct. And so these random, small specialty accounts was kind of a distraction. And now it's funny because I look at it and I'm like, no, that's know, that's how this customer can discover can be at a spa in Mexico and see that they're using this product on you or you find the slide that you want to wear everywhere on vacation and that they're getting. Over my time at TB, I think I watched the customer get more sophisticated and that they could find you in these various places and still know that they could come directly and get to know you as a brand. And I don't think we because we were the proverbial like building the plane while flying, I don't think we were able to zoom out and really see that nor did we have the resources to say, okay, well, let's try to do all the things. But now hindsight being 2020, I'm like, oh, this is where it's such a gift to be able to intentionally build message with that knowledge. The retention coming off of a profitable acquisition that happens yes, at a lower margin because of wholesale offline or ecom.

Wholesale can actually be better contribution margin than what you're seeing if you're throwing a bunch of dollars at these paid channels. And there's a lot that you need to consider. Again, with Intentionality, if you're going to go after both wholesale and direct in a really pointed way. So I think the TB experience was an exclusively direct lived experience that I think I was able to appreciate where Veering out venturing outside, but always staying to those core values of what we know is so beautiful about a direct brand. Right. We get to storytell, we get to own the relationship, all those things without Veering. From that, there is opportunity in how you can find and how you can show up on that customer's journey in other ways.

I'm curious, what were you drawn to coming from the fund? You spoke about product, you spoke about brand, you spoke about the financial side of marketing and unit economics. Where did you steer to and what part of the business was your favorite?

With true botanicals.

Yes.

So initially I was kind of the business person, right. As often happens when you're coming from finance, it was like a lot of obviously finance, but even operations, logistics, I ended up taking on all of our manufacturer relationships and thinking through supply chain I really kind of had to grow into. And it was this really organic process where then I think partially as a product of finance, sometimes you can eye roll, but really strategic, like SPNA when you understand numbers, you can be so dangerous with so many things, right? So site ownership became something that I started to move into because it was a lot of data, right? And data became the name of the game and data made a lot of sense to me. People ops became like a natural extension of that too. Again, wow, this is such a gift. Like getting to reflect back on this and say it out loud. It was very organic. It started in places that were obvious and that I knew and that I was supporting other companies with in my previous life.

And then it extended into places that just made a lot of sense based on my skill set. And eventually that was essentially the entire besides brand. And that was such a gift. And it was where I realized now in this message journey, there was still something missing. And I think it's because I didn't that creative piece, that idea generation, the visual, the storytelling, how you bring this to life that should I mean, with a good founder that should live with the founder, it's like your baby. You bird this thing and you are uniquely situated to see opportunities in product and in lifestyle and how this fits in consumers lives. You're just uniquely able to see that. And I was still hungering for that.

And that was my own journey. That wasn't because of something that was missing with the founders or with the brand that was inside. That was like, wait, what about mine? There's something there. And for a long time, it was like, I would whiteboard so much from my head. Like, beauty is beautiful from a margin perspective, right? It's love the replenishment cycles and beauty. And so I was like, okay, where's a brand I can build in beauty? And it was like I was over trying to construct something. And when I came to message, it was actually people often ask, so what was the final? Why did you decide to do this? And for me, it was more like, I just had to stop avoiding it, if that makes sense. It was a passion.

I was so interested, but I didn't know footwear. And there were certain business kind of like my investor brain coming online, being like, well, I'd rather not have to deal with the returns and this, that and the other. But it was passion. It was me. This was the thing that I had that unique lens that no one else had, to this consumer, to this product, to this part of the market. So, yeah, the true botanicals journey, I think, is what informed my ultimate, like, oh, yeah, this one's mine, I've got to say. Yeah.

And I think that's so important, what you just talked about, about really establishing founder Market Fit and Founder Product Fit instead of Product Market Fit, essentially, because at the end of the day, this is what you're spending the vast majority of your waking time thinking about and doing. And I think in the early stages of being an entrepreneur, you're just looking for any opportunity that makes sense from a numbers perspective. You're like, oh my God, I found it. I can use this, and this is going to get me rich.

Great.

But as you start to mature as an entrepreneur, you have a life going on. Like you said. You have kids, you have a partner, you have a life going on. And when you're spending your waking working moments, you want to be focused on something that aligns with what it is that you want to do. And I think what I find really compelling about your career trajectory is starting on the finance side, maybe dipping your toes a little bit closer to consumer, operating in consumer before being called in, being like, this is the brand that I want to build. So before we go all the way into message and I want to hear all about now that you've kind of got the brand that you want to build, you know what the product is and you want to take it to market. I want to talk about what were some of the hardcore learnings that you had from true botanicals, from an operational perspective? Right. What were some of the things that you learned at True Botanicals that you really wanted to bring with you when you started message?

How long do you have? So many things, I think let's try to boil down a few. I mean, look, at the end of the day, all of this is about people. All of, right? Once you get over the hump of like, great, we've got a product that people want, building up the brand and becoming whatever size brand you want to be is all about the people that you bring around to do this thing with. And we were so lucky to bring incredible people around the brand. There were so many learnings about how growth can mean that one person who's right for something at one time and that you're celebrating and they're like, you're a unicorn and I could have never done this without you at another point isn't in the right spot. And that doesn't mean anything about them. That could mean that you get really creative and you ask yourself the question, like, where do you fit? But the people operations piece, I think far and away, all of the other stuff, it's like we're smart people. It's not that complicated, and sometimes it is.

But the people piece, I would say, is the biggest part that I brought with me. The importance of staying curious, of bringing experts around, of asking the questions, of knowing what you know, of knowing what you don't know, opportunity, cost of time, where should I really be focused? The importance of being able to be single, complete guardrails, and then also understand how to let those guardrails move for creativity. So it's like wavering guardrails or something. Just the nuance of it. There's no black and white, right? Like as soon as you start to get into black and white is where you've missed something. So I think that in addition to the brand I went to afterwards, where I joined them when we were about the size of when I left TB, and then we scaled that like five times in 16 months. I mean, it was insane. I think it drove similar points home because being 100 million dollar plus brand, you're still going through the same things from an operation perspective, just at a different scale.

So it was like I had those learnings.

Can you break that down? So you're going through the same operational challenges, but at a different scale. At a bigger scale. So what do you mean by a bigger scale specifically? So I assume bigger mistakes just cost more money. What does bigger scale mean in that scenario?

So take supply chain, right? Supply chain and beauty. Supply chain and food. Different, very different. And also a lot of similarities with how you think about your Raws, how you source those Raws, how you make sure that you dual, triple, whatever source those raws because ultimately they're natural resources at a smaller scale, what you're solving for there and quality of production and how you build a network to solve for that quality of production. Again, all people problems. But working with the suppliers, putting in place the right checks and balances, that looks like one thing when you're call it under a $50 million business, when you're $150,000,000 business. And by the way, what you're selling is a small price point, not a high one. You are moving a shit ton of product.

Now you're talking about when you're buying raws, you're a market maker of price for those. Right. It's a different question, but it's applying the same learnings, if that makes sense. Right? It's a different problem. But I actually didn't find that to be the most challenging part because I already had a lot of learnings of how to solve for some of the similar issues, just a different scale. I have a lot of friends that run very big brands. And in our minds, we tell ourselves, like, oh, well, once you're there, then and every time it's a sobering conversation because I'm like, you're running a billion dollar brand and we're still talking about the same shit you're just so far removed. Because you're talking about this layer of direct reports that are a bunch of C's.

Yeah, I love it because it's like we can zoom into every problem as a founder, but it reaches a point where you just can't. There's just not enough bandwidth to do that. And it's good to take the step back and say, what is the principle here? Is this a people problem? At the end of the day, what principles do I have established that I can just apply to this and look at it? Oh, wait, this is the same as like X problem long time ago. It's just showing up in a different form at a different scale and size. But it can be solved without getting into the weeds of things.

I think that's right. And that's not always easy, right? Oftentimes I really respect founders who are just so self aware in that they're like, yeah, I liked solving those other problems in that other way. This is less fun and less interesting. Yes, totally. It's different. So, yeah, it's a trip, but definitely has meant so much to have some of those reflections and to know with my team now when there are bumps or questions or relative to, again, going back to supply chain, I can take it all with this. I can be more even about it. I'm like, this isn't the end of the world.

We're going to figure this out. And by the way, we figure it out and then everyone celebrates and I'm all for celebration and somewhere in the back of my mind I'm like, yeah, it's just going to be another problem in a different way in however long. And the more that we can keep our eyes, be head on the swivel, be super aware about that, try to solve for all of the pieces that we can solve for, and then appreciate that there's going to be ones that we're surprised about, and it's how we respond to those not having to predict them all.

Yeah, I love that because I think a lot of entrepreneurs, when you first start everything is a crazy problem. But that's kind of the reality of entrepreneurship. There's always going to be problems, there's always going to be fires to put out. And even this is something that resonates with me and Ramon because we've been through our fair share of companies right now, and it's kind of like the further on you go, the more calm you can be as an operator, and that makes a lot of difference. Megan the next thing I kind of wanted to talk about is you've kind of been through it all, you've seen it all from, like we said, from the PE side, from the investment side, from the operations side, scaling up a brand like True Botanicals, other brands going to ten plus figures. So talk to me now about starting Message, right? And walk me through the we've already understood what the formation of the brand looked like from a conceptual and a message and what you wanted to create with the brand. But now let's talk X's and O's. How did it actually unfold besides the fundraising part? Let's talk about what did it require you to do? What were the skills that you needed to learn and apply? Like you said, you knew supply chain, but you hadn't really worked in Footwear.

So let's talk about what were some of the first orders of action for the business? What did you need to do first and how did Message kind of come into existence?

So when I set out to build Message, I didn't set out to build Message. I set out to build the best slide that I'd ever worn. Because I was like, I know I can build a beautiful brand. I don't know if I can build the best slide. And so that was my exclusive focus. People asked me, what is this thing called? I called it my slides project. I was like, I'm not spending time branding this thing. Like, I will go down that if I get this product right.

So what it looked like was, I mean, first, and I don't know if this is interesting to you, but it's definitely a truth relative to my story. To get to the point where I was buying comps. So, like, buying everything from Burke to addilets to bottega and slides, like, before I got into my garage and started tearing things apart, which is a very key part of the story, there was a big hurdle just in my own internal experience, as I alluded to, in order to say, okay, this is mine. I'm doing this and even questions that I had around do I want to put more product into the world? Like, is this my calling? Right? And I started doing a ton of research on material science. Like, do I want to make a compostable shoe or do I want and so I did a lot of work there when I got the clarity that I believe from a demand side. If we can give the customer something that's uncompromising in comfort, in style and is done responsibly that we will be able to move the needle relative to how we are producing that from I like to talk in responsibility versus sustainability but common parlance in a sustainable way. And when I got that clarity, what I did was I said, I need to understand the things that work for me personally, and then I need to do a shit ton of research relative to what feet need want, what has worked for them and what hasn't. And I was actually talking to someone about this yesterday who asked if I had pause because I'm not a podiatrist.

I didn't work in shoes. Did you ever have a moment where you were like, Fuck, this isn't mine? And I really didn't, because I knew I am good at bringing experts together, and I knew I could thread the needle. And so what became very clear to me is that what I was trying to do was I was trying to exist in this gap I saw in the market, which was between luxury these luxury sandals and performance sandals. And so what I started to do was talk to all of the best designers I could find, pinging everyone in my network that lived in each of those worlds. And what I learned was that they spoke two entirely different languages. The luxury bolus, it was beautiful. It was artful. It was aspirational.

They did not give two licks about how it felt on your foot. Right? The performance folks. I ended up taking this to Portland and working with a guy who used to build sneakers with Bill Bowerman at Nike. He could care less what brand I was building. He loved the idea that I had the question, how can we think about the ride of a slide of a shoe that is only held to the footbed with one piece of material? And he loved that. And we geeked out over it, right? And so working with people who were really thinking about the mechanics of footwear and then working with people who were thinking about the design and the look of it, it became very clear to me, okay, I can actually be the translator between these two, and I can thread this needle. So I guess the short answer is there was a certain level of rolling up my sleeves, cutting up these shoes. I mean, I had to take a perspective to all of the experts I worked with.

And maybe that's like the fact that. I've always enjoyed feeling good in what I put on my body. Like, I dreamed one day my job would involve reading Vogue. I don't know, I probably have some OCD perfectionist tendencies for sure. So I was very able to look at what was out there and what I didn't think was ideal. And then once I sort of internalized that and metabolized that for myself, in addition to the experts, I started interviewing everyone who would talk to me. And I just had some very simple questions. And I wanted to understand how people were buying their slides, how they were wearing them, what the drawbacks were, what they were right.

The brands themselves, how much they were spending on them. And that, I think, was a turning point for me because that's when I realized, and I think a lot of founders have this moment when you almost think you're living this unique experience. It's like a metaphor for life, probably you're uniquely living this and no one else is. And then as soon as you hear it reflected back, like, oh, that's validating. You don't like the same things. I don't like that's bothering you too. That's not working for you either. You don't feel good spending $400 on something that's uncomfortable either.

Those interviews were really key in me having the conviction to go after this. So it was like getting the information, getting the experts, and then looking outside and just basically closing my eyes to what I thought and what I felt and only listening to what other people did. Really trying not to bias those two things to get the conviction to move forward.

The first. So from finding that lab in Portland, we built the last. So the last is like do you know what a last? You've probably seen it's like a faux foot, and it's what all shoes are built around, right? So we built that last. I had gone on a trip and this is where just divine timing and everything comes in. I had gone on a trip to Portugal where I fell in love with cork. It's everywhere there. Learned about the nature of cork the responsibility of Cork, went to the forest, met the people who are harvesting it. So Cork was kind of in the back of my mind, but so was Portugal.

And so I had this last and people asked, where are you going to produce this thing? And I just blurted out Portugal. I didn't really know much, but I felt like there's a quality that is not Italy in terms of price point. I knew Italy wasn't ours, but it's also not like it just felt like this beautiful in between. And it housed Cork. And I had this dream that our supply chain could be something that was really tight because that's a big impact when you start to think about your imprint.

The supply chain to be tight.

Where I produce out in Porto, Portugal, they can drive to pick up my uppers from my knit factory. They can drive. I mean, they're all within a 40 kilometer drive of one another. They can drive to get the outsoles, to get the midsoles. The Cork is literally coming from 45 minutes away. And that's a big it's a whole nother soapbox to get on. But when we talk about materials that we're moving the needle forward and doing better than plastics or otherwise, you also need to think about am I shipping that from Brazil to Asia to be produced to back again? There's a big impact there as well. So this Portugal piece really came to life.

And I just talked to some friends who have rad brands with beautiful product and was like, put me in touch with every person you can, every production house agent. I first started working with an agent out there. So they basically are your intermediary. They have a lot of the relationships with suppliers. And I brought them something I had mocked up from a footbed I had ripped apart and then a sleeve of a glove that I cut off of my partner's work glove, pulled over the footbed for this elasticity thing that I felt really strongly about and how to hold the foot closer to the footbed. And I literally brought that hideous thing to Portugal and was like, we need to turn this into a good looking was. So that was the beginning. Multiple.

I mean, that was so many rounds of prototyping. This is nothing. Love. I love my factories. I love the people mean, you know, just footwear experts. And they are not used to innovating. They are not used to doing something new. There was so much pushback.

Megan, what are you talking about? We've never done that before. Great. We are doing something new. We are not doing what you've done before. So there was a lot of back and forth and then it got to a point where I was just like, look, we're launching for summer of 23, like hard stop. So we're going to figure this out. And we did. And there's still some tweaks and updates and things that I wanted to have rolled out for that first few POS that weren't that were rolling out for fall.

That was a big learning for me. These perfectionist pieces. It's like, at the end of the day, to put something out in the world, you kind of have to be okay with it not looking like not being the perfect ideal that exists in your head, if that makes sense. Right. As soon as you birth it through the canal, it's its own being. And there were just small things, things that, in fact, I thought were like, I didn't love this, and I've gotten amazing feedback from customers on it. So you just have to some point, there's a go button, and you got to go. So I gave myself the launch date, April 5.

We had to air inventory out to hit that painful. A lot of opportunities there. I knew. We tightened our boxes so that it was as tight as possible so that air shipments wouldn't be as expensive, because sometimes you got to pull on that for celebrity, for early photo shoots, PR and the like. So we pulled that forward, and we went and we got a lot of really good know, Ali's on the line. Like PR converted PR that I thought would be top of funnel. Right. We all know not I can't ride Ali for revenue numbers, but now I secretly want to because I'm like it.

So a lot of really good learnings and just I think the biggest one is this validation that that gap is real. And I think that's why we're seeing conversion off of articles that you wouldn't expect. I think that's why when I test on Meta, there's some ridiculous numbers, even with not big budgets, but numbers I've never seen before. Because we're not in a super crowded marketplace. People are ready for a new option here, and we're pretty clear, and we've gotten the data feedback that we're pretty spot on about who this customer is.

How do you feel about you've been in the hyperscale rocket ship? And so when you see a market that you're seeing numbers you haven't seen before, how do you balance out? And I don't know how much you guys have raised, if you guys have, but how do you balance out, I'm building this profitably and what I want versus the other side, hyperscale. Nobody else is bidding on this stuff, and this is the time to do it because you know the copycats are going to come out of the closet. So how do you balance both of those things out?

Ramon, you hit it on the head. I mean, this is what I'm living right now. It's like the opportunity cost of not just got a lot higher. Right. So you can talk these values that in a lot of ways, it requires some degree of patience. Right. Like I said, wholesale is a part of our strategy that's rolling out in the fall, I could low roll, dial back my burn, wait for that to come online, like, all the things, in order to get to a place where I'm really just gunning for profitability so that I can control my destiny. And up to this point, I'll tell you that I had that angel investor two years ago, that was half a million dollars.

And then I took another half a million before launch. And that's it. In a lot of ways, I think because of my background and a lot of what we talked about, I was priding myself on, like, less is actually success versus what we've seen historically, which is, like, celebrating these huge raisins and I would say feedback to self, like, overly so. Having a little bit of cash right now, I would be able to turn things on that should be turned on based on what I'm seeing. And I would be able to have the person who I've got like a tiny fraction of their time and they're like a unicorn and I want all of their time. I'd be able to have them on the team. That's been something that I've been sitting with in a big way lately and realize that I was a bit short sighted about. It's not money that's a problem.

You can find capital from value aligned partners in a really good way. I don't need to bring on and it's not to say anything negative about traditional BC, but if I know that that's not for me, that doesn't need to be who I go to, right? There are a lot of folks out there. So I've had this reframe and I'm talking to family offices and otherwise, some folks that strategically make a lot of sense and are so comfortable with how I'm thinking about this and wanting to build a profitable generational brand. And they love that. So I think it was just a little bit of black and white thinking that I said earlier, right, that got me. And now I am ready to have a little bit more to play with. Because like you said, it's silly not to when you're getting these reads from the market and you're not going to have forever as your first mover advantage. Well, I believe that at one point, this is going to be the thing that investors are sitting around the table and we've seen this before in beauty many times where they're saying, like, duh.

That was so obvious. How were there not so many brands like Burke sells over 25 million pairs a year. They've done an amazing job threading this needle. And why is there not a modern brand that's taken a different and style forward approach to this? I think it's going to be a duh. And so I got to push the gaff a little bit.

No, the reason I was saying it is because one thing is to have healthy unit economics and understand a good business can be built here. But when you say there's numbers you haven't seen before and you've seen a lot of numbers, you know that that instinct kicks in of I know an opportunity when I see one and these don't come around often and the FOMO kicks in as well of not taking a totally, totally.

And I've challenged myself. I'm like, okay, am I not being patient enough? But I really think what you're saying is spot on. I think it's like, you know it when you see it and if you see it, why not go, I'm not here to kick my feet up and build a brand that's like paying me and a couple of people enough to have a great life. I'm building a brand to make an impact and if it's telling me the market, the customer is telling me, oh, there's a they're there, there, then I need to make sure that I can go after that.

So Megan, talk to us a little bit as we kind of wrap up here. You guys launched recently, you're seeing great market traction, you're seeing great numbers. I get it too. It's actually funny. I think from the consumer's perspective, I think we are seeing a trend where just in the way people live lifestyle, the products that they're looking for, like you're saying, there aren't those D to C or as many options for slides, like slides, people want them. And I think that along with the brand, with the product, I think you guys are right place, right time. Talk to me a little bit about expectations now and game plan as you've gotten through launch, you're seeing that traction, you're seeing that success. What's on your mind right now? What's the game plan? Where are you guys headed?

Yeah, I guess the good news is the expectations are really mine, right, like I said, because I have investors that are friends, family that are not by any means breathing down my neck on a quarter to quarter basis, but I have certainly upped the ante on myself. So this brand, four to 5 million top Blaine and I can be spitting off dollars on the bottom line. So in my eyes it's like there is a definite sprint to that and I think that it's a single raise of a few million dollars and I think that we're there. And so I think my focus is bring that in, sleep well at night, knowing that in my eyes and the way that I'm going to think about the PNL and building this brand, that's the last money that we take in. And know that it gives me some flexibility to go after these opportunities that, you know, collaborations we've seen a ton mean. I won't name drop them because I don't have images of them yet. But celebrity, we've seen a lot of traction there. I've got the wholesale showroom that's kicking off and I'm so bullish there.

We have a Canadian distributor that just picked us up. International is actually an incredible way to grow your business profitably if intelligently. It's very small from a margin perspective because of what you're giving up but it's also very low lift and it's cash positive because you're getting that all up front. So there's some international markets that I want to talk to. We do a couple of drops per season. So fall we have some upcoming product that I'm super excited about. It's going to really take this from being the slide project that I started and you will really see that this is a footwear brand that's going to be around in a seasonless way for a very long time. So I'm super stoked on that.

So I think next year we should be in a place where we have a very clear path to sustainable profitability and we have an ability to still from the balance sheet, put some dollars to work investing in some of these channels that we're seeing work really well for us. And I think again, if you can do that in a way where it's not all or nothing, it's not throwing the shit at the wall to see what sticks, but it's strategic and it's targeted and it's with learning constantly being iterated. I think that's like the best of both worlds and I do need a little bit of budget to open that up but when we do I think we're going to be surprised by what we see. So I think the answer is that I have rather high expectations. But I would say in the next twelve to 18 months the focus is that we see some nice growth that gets us to this point where we have control of our destiny and that we still have the ability to, within reason, invest intelligently. And that cash isn't being tied up by inventory because my terms are good. And we're in a good way from there.

Amazing. No, we're super excited to see how the brand continues to evolve and we'll have to have you back on once we get through some of this growth and we can recap on all of it. So for anyone who's listening, where can we find more? Where can we connect with you? Are you on Twitter? LinkedIn. Shout out your socials as well? Where can we find out more about the brand and message?

Yep. So message is where? Message. We're at message. That's all of our handles. I'm just megan, higney. And this was such a joy. Thank you for letting me walk. Know the lane of the journey, the path to get here.

I think the journey is what it's all about, right? It's not the destination. So thank you.

Thank you Megan.

Yeah.