Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to the show, Ben.

Ben Checketts:
Thank you so much for having me, Fabian.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, listen, I’ve been wearing your brand for a while now, and then I picked up Entrepreneur Magazine and I saw how you guys bought out your investor to regain control and move at your own speed. That was so cool. Definitely caught my attention. But before we get into all of that, let’s start at the beginning. So you co-founded Rhone with your brother, and I believe there were three others involved. Your brother is now the CEO and you’re the creative director, which also means you are everyone’s favorite on this podcast because we love having creatives on the podcast. How did you all get together and said, Hey, we’re five guys and we want to start a fashion brand? How did that happen?

Ben Checketts:
Yeah, so if you flashbacks at the beginning, the true beginning is that my wife and I were dating at the time, and Nate and I, my brother and these other guys that were involved in the co-founding, we all grew up as athletes, or at least we deceived ourselves into believing that we were athletes. So we played a variety of sports from lacrosse to football, golf, running. And so we just always kind of found ourselves wearing, before the term was really coined, athleisure, if the option was there, we were wearing athletic stuff because it was more comfortable, it was more suitable for our lifestyle. You kind of never know at my house when a game of pickup soccer or basketball is going to happen because there, there’s four boys in my family and my dad grew up playing basketball, so you kind of just never know when a game’s going to break out.

And so we were always wearing athletic stuff. And the reason I mentioned my wife is she was from Canada and Lululemon, she’s from Calgary, Lululemon had their second store in Calgary and she kind of caught onto this idea of like, oh, all you wear is athletic stuff. But she knew that I didn’t know about that brand. And so she brought me some back as a Christmas gift when we were dating at the time. And I was like, wow. I was blown away by the quality of how subtle the branding was, but I didn’t really know anything about the brand. And as I started to uncover more about the brand, the less comfortable I felt wearing that gear because I said to myself, I’m not a yogi,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Not a woman,

Ben Checketts:
Not a woman. These manifestos that they put on their bags kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t know, it wasn’t a brand for me, but I also couldn’t find products of a parallel quality or branding kind of out there in the market. And so I said to my brother, Nate, and we kind of came up with this at the same time, we said, we should create a brand that does this kind of quality clothing, but with a brand that and love and aspire to wear the same way that we grew up. I always tell the story, I remember putting on my first pair of Nikes and convincing myself that I could run faster, jump higher, that sort of thing. And I wanted to have a similar effect on our customers, but with a clothing brand and a product of a certain quality that inspired them in their own lives and at that time in their lives too, because you quickly realize, oh, I’m not going to be LeBron James. I’m not going to be a professional athlete, but I do just want to live a healthier, better lifestyle. And so all of this was kind of rolling together at once in the beginning,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And you have absolutely no background and no business being in fashion. Is that correct?

Ben Checketts:
Yes. I think that’s even understating it a little bit. My wife, my wife might say it stronger, but I was always interested in kind of the intersection of sports and fashion and paid very close attention. I’m a little bit of a sneakerhead, very into the idea of pairing sports and fashion performance and lifestyle. That intersection has always kind of fascinated me. So I’ve spent a lot of time in that space now,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And I said that on the podcasts in the past, and I myself founded a startup on the side where I have no business to be producing products and hardware. It’s not my thing, I shouldn’t do it, but yet I do it. And because we do that, we have on the one hand a huge disadvantage because we don’t know anything about the marketplace in the beginning. There’s lots of research and lots of learning and failing forwards, but if you do that, you have ideas that others would never have. And you go in with that idea that you can do things that others already know that can’t be done because they haven’t been done ever, but you think you can do them. And so I think that that actually to me is the best way to start a company, go into a business that you have no business being in, but you really have a passion and you feel like things could actually be flipped on their head, and that’s exactly what you guys did. And being inspired by Lululemon in a very strange but functional way.

Ben Checketts:
Yeah. Well, I think that that is, if you take a step back and you view it from a macro lens, real breakthroughs happen when disciplines interact that don’t normally interact. So medicine and technology, that’s when real breakthroughs happen and you hit kind of that next level. So for us, it was, Nate and I had a pretty robust background in terms of marketing and sponsorship. He at the NFL myself, at IMG, we had interest in the space. But then you go out and you find people that actually know what they’re doing, but when those two disciplines interact and they don’t normally interact, that’s when we feel like we’re able to see things with a fresh perspective and have breakthroughs. So yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Totally. No, absolutely. And then let’s fast forward to that article that I just read the other month you bought out your major investors. Tell us a little bit about how that went down and what brought it on that urge to go your own pace.

Ben Checketts:
So I always have to say this, and it’s not a PR story. We are incredibly grateful for our private equity investors, A, for helping us get to where we are today and B, for having the flexibility to see our vision and respect it and allow us to reclaim it in a certain sense. And so throughout our journey, we did the typical kind of friends and family investment round the angel investment round, then a series A, series B, and within that timeframe we took on a private equity partner. And what we ultimately realized was in the beginning it was, Hey, let’s build this thing and sell it. Let’s just sell it to the highest bidder. We will kind of catch this wave and then we’ll be on to the next thing. And this is where I say, Nate always had that vision because he is just a serial entrepreneur.

And I was more of the attitude of like, let’s just focus on this at the time and let’s build this and we’ll see what the next steps are, not even knowing what this next steps are. But we came back together and we said what happened was we both fell in love with this business and we fell in love with the brand that we had created and the team that we had built. And so reclaiming that control of those shares of the company in general was important to us because we said, we want to build this for the long term. We want to build this not with necessarily a quick end in mind, but we want to build this because there is value to working with people over the course of a long term. We’ve only been in business for 10 years, it will be 10 years this September, October is kind of the time that we celebrate our anniversary.

And just having people that we’ve worked with from day one, and we still have a few team members that we’ve worked with since that time and up until now, it’s just so rewarding to look back together and say, look at what we’ve built and how we’ve controlled the direction. And so that’s really what it was all about, was shifting that mindset from, Hey, we’re going to make an exit here. We’re going to be successful and sell to. We want to do this maybe for the rest of our lives, maybe until they change the locks on us and one day we can’t open the buildings type of a thing, which depending on who you ask on the team, I think is coming any day now. But that being said, we just want to do this until we feel like we’ve given it absolutely everything we’ve got and we can’t take it any further.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s so cool to hear. Usually it goes the other way around. You actually find success so quickly that you’re like, perfect. I achieved my goal, but you actually, you found that passion and you built this family of people who you can trust to do great stuff day in, day out. It’s amazing. It’s really cool.

Ben Checketts:
Thank You. Yeah,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Forever forward is your tagline. I guess that’s a good transition into marketing, messaging and branding. So really forever forward, I interpret it as it is for the driven individual and it’s by an innovative company. Is that kind of the brand’s philosophy?

Ben Checketts:
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s kind of the summation of our perspective of every day is not going to be up, but it can be forward. You can make progress every single day, even if you’re failing, maybe even especially if you’re failing. It’s all about learning and growing on the journey. And I got to admit any good art, it’s stolen. It’s stolen right from the pages of Walt Whitman in his poem, A Song of the Open Road. Now, I studied poetry and literature as an undergraduate, and I remember reading that line in that poem, and that poem means so much to me personally, but I just remember writing that down and saying, man, I just love that perspective of the whole poem is about this idea of setting out on your own, on this open road with an unknown destination and not necessarily focusing again on that final destination, but on the day-to-day interactions, experiences that you gain, not necessarily hoping or wishing for more, but understanding that you are enough on your own and taking those learnings, taking those experiences, and creating what is this overarching theme in Whitman’s work, which is just, he’s so hopeful.

I think that’s what I loved about him. It’s just so full of hope. He sees beauty in the everyday, maybe even sometimes in the dirty and the mundane and the unpleasant stuff that we just deal with day to day. He was able to look at that and see beauty, and so it’s kind of ripped from that poem, but we do try and pay tribute to him. In fact, I named one of my children after him, so I hope he is not too upset about it. But it does represent that kind of perspective that every day you set out to be a slightly better version of yourself, whether you’re at work or you’re working out or you’re with your family being a better husband, father, et cetera. So yeah, it’s all about that idea of progress.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And it’s radical optimism, right? Yes, exactly. And I think your PE firm saw it coming when you said forever forward, you’re like, well, maybe we keep going forward. Yeah,

Ben Checketts:
They might have.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And on your own side, you state that as the only performance lifestyle brand that champions mental fitness, we serve the active individuals who pursue progress and care for their body and mind. It is something that you talk about a lot, mental health, mental fitness, and it helped listening to some past interviews of yours, it helped put your brand a little bit on the map. It resonated very quickly with influences. They really liked that they could grab onto it, that there’s something deeper in the brand than just the surface level of Alecia wear, et cetera. Can you share a little bit about how Rhone actually supports and encourages mental fitness?

Ben Checketts:
Absolutely. So a lot of the conversation around mental health is in kind of a disease state. It’s addressing people that have anxiety, depression or a serious mental health challenge. And we view our position in the market as being this idea of being a champion of mental fitness. We purposefully don’t use the term mental health when we say we’re a champion because mental fitness to us are these kind of small everyday things you can do to help you on your journey of mental health. And so I think on a previous podcast, I compared it to flossing, the idea that you floss every single day so that if you get a cavity, it’s not that bad or so that if you do have true challenges with your dental health, you can overcome them pretty easily because you’ve done the maintenance, you’ve done the kind of small everyday care.

Yeah, you’ve done the small everyday things to prepare for those serious challenges. We view mental fitness as the same way. And what we did was we looked around and we said, everybody is talking about performance in one way or another, physical performance, and they’re really, they’re not addressing the mental side of things, which is more increasingly important. And so the idea of championing mental health is this idea of pairing the physical, which is a huge component of your mental health, pairing the physical with the mental, with albeit the spiritual or however you want to say it, but looking at health and wellness from a more holistic standpoint and saying, okay, what can we do as a brand to inspire people to uplift people? So we kind of uncover new methods to take care of your mental fitness. We give you workouts, recipes, this is more or less late breaking news, but we once had a blog that was called The Pursuit, and it shared a lot of these tips and daily recipes, daily inspirations for bettering your mental fitness.

And we’re actually bringing that back in 2025 in a way that’s not just a blog. It’s going to permeate our social media presence. It’s going to be on emails, it’s going to be in events, it’s going to be this really great large scale rollout because it will answer the exact question that you’re asking. We have supported that through events and through charitable donations in the past, but we know we can do a better job at that, and it will allow people to place us, as you said in the marketplace, in this unique position of being really the only brand that addresses this on a consistent level.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I think it’s great, and it is very smart because obviously fitness and mental fitness, and it’s also very, very current. It’s a need that keeps so fantastic. And I sense a bit of irony that you started Rhone because you hated Lululemon as it was all for yogis. And look at you now a brand that encourages man to find balance,

Ben Checketts:
Right? No, and I think that’s important to point out is I would love to chalk it up to this, oh, this is this brilliant brand strategy that I’ve had since day one. We found our way here, and what we found was even if we don’t have significant mental health challenges, it affects the people around us and ultimately affects us. And yeah, yoga can be a really important thing in that deck of cards, if you will. So yeah, absolutely. I noticed the irony there too,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
But it’s also great to see your brand go back to what inspired it in a different way. And like you said, it’s like, Hey, I’m not proud that my brand strategy started this way because it evolved. But that’s kind of how it works with brand strategy. It’s not something you do one day and then you just keep rolling for five years. It’s something that’s organic. I mean, a brand lives and breathes and it’s exposed to the outside and whatever that is, you just have to adjust. And I personally, as someone who builds brands and works with brands, I totally love that, right? That every day you wake up and you’re like, oh, you got to react a little bit, but yet stay your course.

Ben Checketts:
Absolutely. Yeah. I think that that is one of the things that surprised me about branding and marketing was this idea that we didn’t have to launch it perfectly. It could be an ongoing conversation, a living, breathing part of who you are. And as we developed as human beings, we developed the brand and made it kind of more suitable to what we believe in and what we’re adhering to in our own personal lives.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And since you’ve seen all these changes with the brands over the last 10 years, it gets you excited to see where it can go the next decade, right? Because you keep growing and you family of team members keeps growing. And so I can totally see how that just puts you on a high, you just want to keep going and see what fits around the corner, right?

Ben Checketts:
No question. And we had an interesting challenge this year with introducing women’s because what we’ve previously said and stood for is that we are leading the conversation of men’s mental health, which felt in a certain sense, radical because men weren’t willing to discuss mental health, or at least that was the stigma. And we still view it as we are a champion of mental health for both men and women, for everybody. It allows us to serve more and more customers. So in a sense, it was a challenge and another sense, it was a massive opportunity that we were really grateful to have.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And I mean, on that note, jumping into women’s wear, it seems that to me that was huge because I didn’t even know that you did that chump, right? Yeah, it happened not so long ago. I think May was it?

Ben Checketts:
Yeah, it was May, and it was very much on purpose that our core customer, if he did know about it, it wouldn’t feel like a complete departure from what we had done as a brand. And if he didn’t know about it, that was also seen as, oh, maybe this is an okay thing. If it’s kind of slowly boiling the frog, so to speak, turning those, turning that heat up in degrees rather than an abrupt change. Because the one thing we really didn’t want to do is tell our core customer, Hey, we’re alienating you. We’re leaving you out of this. Like I said, we view it as a way to make progress together and together we get further, which is very much core to our message as a brand. Yeah,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And this is interesting because we just talked about organic and you kind of have to go with the flow, but this was something that you carefully planned. I mean, you had time of how do we roll this out and how do we integrate women’s wear into a brand that already is known for man’s wear? Right? And that was kind of the whole idea. Super interesting. I mean, was there anything that you learned along the way that might be of interest to us? How you created that cadence, that rollout, and how you maybe hoped that partners would start being excited to tell their significant other about, Hey, this is now also for you, or how did this thing go? I mean, any insight would be super cool.

Ben Checketts:
Yeah, absolutely. So we started, I would love to tell you that we started with kind of answering a brand question. What we started with was the product. We hired Kelly Cooper, who’s our chief product officer approximately two and a half years ago. And one of the first things that she said to Nate and I was, when you’re ready to make women’s, I’m going to make you the best damn women’s line that exists. And that made us so nervous, I will not lie to you, but it also made us really excited because when you start with really rock solid product, it makes a lot of the other questions easy to answer. And I think she took a very smart approach in the way that she merchandised and selected the products to make and selected the fabrics. It really felt as though it was a compliment in the truest way to our men’s brand.

And what I mean by that, a lot of people might hear that and say, oh, it’s the same as our men’s brand just for women. I don’t mean that at all. I literally mean it is exactly. If our guy is wearing something, it is the perfect compliment to what he’s wearing in the sense that his partner can wear it and feel just as comfortable, just as confident as he can. The most interesting insight for me from the whole branding experience was I was a little bit concerned about our logo. I was concerned that it was maybe overly masculine, that it was overly that it had been done for men’s for so long that women might not be interested in it. And so we held plenty of focus groups and we asked women, do you want the logo? Before they understood what the logo meant, they wanted it because they said, yeah, we’ve seen this on our husbands, our boyfriends, our brothers shirts.

We want it too. We want it for us. But then once we explained the significance and the meaning behind the logo, they were even more interested and more devoted to it. And so we kept the same logo, albeit we gave it a slightly different treatment on the products, but we kept the same logo and very much made it, again, a compliment, not the exact same, but a compliment that would sit nicely next to our men’s line, whether that’s in store or online. And there are other brands out there that do kind of the exact same tones and colors in men’s and women’s products. We really looked into that too and considered, no, it’s all right if these lines have a slightly different feel to them, but the brand should be cohesive. And so that was, I won’t lie to you, that was a delicate dance and it feels like it’s not over. It’s every day that it’s a delicate dance and something new comes up where we ask, is this the right move? Does this feel cohesive or does it feel too disjointed?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, two pretty logical follow-up questions. First, what is the significance behind the three stitched logo mark? Because it is so cool, I wear it so I know that you can incorporate it into the garments. You can literally stitch the three exo stare and it’s really cool. So what is the original meaning behind it? And then how did you adjust the logo icon for the women’s line? For

Ben Checketts:
Women’s? Yeah, so the meaning behind it is inspired by Aesops fables and this particular fable about three corale brothers. Now it’s important that our dad is very into fables and poems, so that’s really where this literary background comes about. And between Nate and I is another brother. So there’s three of us very close in age. Basically within five years, there’s three boys in our family. And the story talks about three coring sons, which as you can imagine with three boys in five years, we qualed quite a bit and we fought and hit each other and that sort of thing. And the story tells about a father who takes them out into the field, and they were farmers. So he said, go and pick two sticks and bring them back. And the boys take two sticks back to the father, and he says, okay, take one of the sticks and break it over your knee, which they all do very easily, and it’s very satisfying to break a stick.

Then he says, okay, now each of you your second stick, and he binds the three sticks together with some strong cord and he says, alright, do the same thing, try and break the sticks. And they can’t, the three boys. And he says to them, something along the lines of together, you’ll be more than a match for any enemy, but apart you are vulnerable, you are weak, you’ll be broken easily. And it shows these boys that instead of coraline, it’s much better if they cooperate, if they work together despite their differences. And so it is this idea of being stronger together. That’s what the stitch has always kind of stood for, that we don’t need to be the exact same. In fact, we can be very different, but when we come together and those overlapping lines on the stitch represent that idea of holding hands and cooperating, when we come together and we work together, we’re something much bigger, such something much stronger than we are when we’re apart. And we believe that loneliness is a real part of this mental health challenge for a lot of people. In fact, especially for men, loneliness is named, it’s identified as one of the biggest causes for anxiety, for depression, for suicidal thoughts. Men feel lonely now more than ever before. And I think the digital age has just accelerated that loneliness and a global pandemic Sure didn’t

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Help. Sure, didn’t help.

Ben Checketts:
Yeah, sure. Didn’t help in that endeavor either. So we feel like addressing that and being a brand that’s really focused on being unified is important.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And that story resonates with your female customers as well?

Ben Checketts:
It sure did. Just this idea of we can be different, but we also can be work together. And so you asked about the treatment. Treatment that we did on the women’s line was we actually, we kind of adjusted brand guidelines before I was very, very stingy about flipping the stitch horizontally for whatever reason, I just felt like it’s stronger, or sorry, vertically, it always shows up horizontally on our products. And I was very particular about not showing up vertically, and our chief product officer showed me some of the lines that she was thinking of flipping it vertically and then making it this beautiful gold color, which is a color we’ve introduced as an official brand color. But it felt feminine, but not in, the one thing we wanted to avoid was the classic Kevin Plank from Under Armour line of Shrink It and Pink it. When someone asked him about a women’s line, that’s what he said. He was like, oh, all we have to do is shrink it and pink it. We wanted to do the exact opposite of that. So we wanted to give it a unique identity, but also have it completely tied in with the brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s nice. I never heard that quote As someone who talks about brand day in and day out. That’s funny.

Ben Checketts:
He got roasted for it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, I am sure. I am sure.

Ben Checketts:
Yeah. And again, I don’t mean to slight him, he’s built something pretty extraordinary with Under Armour, so we all say dumb things. I don’t think people should be canceled over one sentence, but here we are.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And the same thing goes about hatred for Lululemon. It’s not actual hatred. It was just like, Hey, you’re doing something in a niche. Let’s do something similar in a different niche. It was inspirational.

Ben Checketts:
I have immense respect for Lululemon, especially for Chip Wilson and kind their founding team. I make no pretense about it. We wouldn’t be here where we are without them and without some of the foundational things they did. And good artists borrow great artists deal, and I would say we are trying to be great artists here.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, hey, hundreds and hundreds of others, hundreds of others just in that athleisure kind of world, right? Yeah,

Ben Checketts:
No question.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
No question. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, so the brand moniker is taken from the river by the same name that runs from Switzerland all the way down to the Mediterranean Sea, how

Ben Checketts:
That’s correct.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
How was the process of deriving that name and what in the end made you settle for it? Because we know how it goes. There are hundreds of names and then somehow you pick that one.

Ben Checketts:
Well, this was really at the, so what we originally had thought was something very Romans, something very Roman Empire. The original name I think was actually Hop Light, which if you know anything about the Roman armies was a type of soldier that fought in the Roman armies. And we just didn’t love that idea of being so locked in on something that active, something that masculine. We did want something that screamed premium. And what’s funny about it is so many people have suggested that it was because of the wine. Nate and I are actually not wine drinkers. We don’t drink wine anymore, and so we don’t drink any form of alcohol. And so that was not it either. We were aware of the glacier and the river, and what we found out about the river was that it’s not only aesthetically very beautiful as an area and as a valley, but that it was an important trade route.

So it was functional, yet it was beautiful. And that’s exactly what we wanted our products to be like. That was the exact vibe we were trying to go for our products that they were aesthetically, they looked really, really good, but that they were also comfortable and could be active and durable, all of those things that guys really expect from their products. And so that was kind of when we found the name and we found the history, and then this was at the beginning stages of throwing out polls on Facebook and saying, what do you think? And it was the name that continually came back as very memorable and that suggested that it was a premium brand and those sorts of things. The other interesting thing about the name, and again, this is something we, I would love to take credit for this, but I can’t because we found out

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Not on the air, you only do it off air.

Ben Checketts:
Yeah, exactly. We definitely found it out later was this idea of when you say it, people say, oh, Rhone, and then you have to spell it back to them, and that device allows them to have the name of the website. So we went, originally, our website was Rhone Apparel, and we went after and had to pay for ultimately the domain name rhone.com because it was so important to us that people literally spelled out the name of the website as they were discussing the brand. So people repeat it back to me all the time, oh, R-O-N-E, you say? No, it’s R-H-O-N-E, and then you have the name of the brand. You have the name of the website right there in your head because you’ve had that discussion. So it’s kind of a funny little device and something that was definitely not intentional, but something that we found as we’ve kind of developed the brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So with that name Rhone, you said that you did some focus groups and just threw it out there on Facebook and said like, Hey, how do you like this? There’s this stigma in branding, and to a certain extent, I subscribe to it where we say, ah, when you start focus grouping anything that people are not familiar with, it’s like the whole Henry Ford thing. Faster horse. Totally, yep. But you being a modern digital D2C company, you have reach, you can just quickly throw things out. Where do you draw the line and is it a positive for you to tell others, Hey, if you have an idea and you’re looking for a name, just throw it out there and see what sticks?

Ben Checketts:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think where you draw the line is ultimately when you have a distinct impression of what your identity should be or what the feeling of the brand should be, where feedback is sometimes not helpful. I think on those specific applications, I think feedback can be incredibly, incredibly helpful. And we have really tried to listen to our customers. I think customers, particularly the younger customers, just expect that of brands now that you are interested in what they think that you are willing to change based on feedback, and that ultimately you are willing to ask and be receptive and maybe not. So coincidentally, it’s part of our brand message. If our brand message is about progress and getting better, if you’re resistant to feedback, there’s no way you can get better. And I think that, again, it’s good to have instincts, it’s good to have opinions, but I think ultimately I love asking what they think.

And then I always go back to this thing that my manager told me at ESPN when I was an intern, I was supposed to comb through, I think it was something crazy, like 4,500 comments that were on this one ES PN article. And my manager said, look, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to listen to everything they say, but you would be really foolish if you listened to nothing they said. And so trying to take overlapping themes away from 4,500 comments while not also sacrificing my own mental health during that journey was a balance. And I think that’s what it’s all about.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s a really wise thing to say of his, and I think the way that you follow it makes a ton of sense. The only question is how do you create context? Because I always say, well, you can ask your wife’s friends, but they don’t know all the thinking te row. They’re like, well, that has to do with wine and it’s in France, and that has nothing to do with you doing this here, right? Yeah. How do you create that? Just a little? Do you give a one sentence of here’s why we like it, do you like it or do you give nothing, no context?

Ben Checketts:
Well, in this day and age, at our present stage in the company, it’s easier to give context because we really only ask for people’s opinions when they’re our customers and when they’re on a list that certifies that they’ve actually purchased something,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
how are users basically,

Ben Checketts:
Yeah, they’re not just people popping off on a paid ad saying $68 for shorts is ridiculous. That person will never be our customer, and we’re okay with that. We’re more than okay with that. So certifying that they’re our customers gives a little ground for, they have some of the context, at least they’ve interacted with us before they’ve checked out, they’ve purchased. That sort of thing is important to us because it does lay that groundwork for context. In the early days, we gave a brief synopsis of, Hey, we’ve got this project and we’re lucky to have come from a big family. Our parents come from big families, so we have a focus group built in our first cousins, just among our first cousins and aunts and uncles and that sort of thing. Not to mention all the people we interacted with at college and throughout our career.

So we did definitely have to set up a little bit of context. To your point, probably the most difficult thing to do with focus groups, and I think even just the dynamics of a focus group could be a study in and in and of their own where it’s like there’s clearly alpha dogs in there and they want to talk and they want to hear their own voice, and they’re going to overshare, and definitely you can leave and say, oh, that one person was really vocal about this, but do they actually know what they’re talking about? And then there’s people where you have to really coerce them to talk. And often those are the people that I feel like have really great insights. Honestly, that is what I’ve found in my very limited exposure to focus groups is when you get the people that are listening the whole time to actually open up and talk, they’re the people that have just a ton of insights.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I’ve got a friend of mine, he’s a CMO, and he’s always super quiet in meetings. He sits through the client meetings and he’s just on the side. You think he’s checking his email and he’s kind of goes off, and then he says one thing, and it’s just brilliant, and it’s just at the right time, at the right moment, the important thing. And so very often, and this comes from you and I and we’re talking talk and talk and love hearing our voices, but very often those are the people, like you said, those are the ones you have to tap into because just progress things differently. I process things differently. Yeah. Cool. Well, looking back, so 10 years of R, looking back, what was the moment where you felt like that’s the big breakthrough? Was there one moment where uni brother looked at each other and you’re like, whoa, I think this is turning into a brand. I think things are happening here. I know that there are thousands of macro moments, but is there one that you can hone in on?

Ben Checketts:
Yeah, to your point, there’s been thousands of these little moments, and nothing’s an overnight success and all of that, but I don’t want to harp on that. I remember we introduced a shirt called The Commute, which is now one of our best sellers called The Commuter Shirt. It’s kind of a stretchy button down shirt, and that’s been done a Thousand times.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I think it’s the one that I’m wearing right now. I think so, yeah,

Ben Checketts:
It very well could be. And it’s been done a lot of times by different companies, whether it’s an active stretchy shirt, but this fabric is really just so remarkable. And so we did a big shoot at the factory just outside of Milan where it’s actually produced, and then we did another kind of fun attention grabbing event where we went to the New York Stock Exchange and we gave out a hundred of these shirts, and these guys were literally going into the bathroom changing out of their button downs that they had worn to work into the commuter shirt. And all of them were kind of just like, this is the most extraordinary shirt I’ve ever worn. And it was just cool to be on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and chatting with these guys and talking about our brand. And Nate was kind of out there shaking hands, kissing babies type of a thing, and doing what he does best as the CEO. And it was just this moment where we looked at each other and we said, man’s it. We might’ve done something pretty cool here.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
How Brilliant. Did you work with a PR agency of getting floor space and all of that?

Ben Checketts:
We Did. Yeah, we did. We worked with our PR agency, agency of record at the time, and then we worked with the New York Stock Exchange to make it happen. So it was cool, and the idea was like, Hey, we’ll see you guys in not too long and hopefully be ringing the bell or

Fabian Geyrhalter:
We’ll be back.

Ben Checketts:
That was kind of the idea. It was us planting our flag there and saying, we’ll see you soon.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So good. So good. That’s awesome. Thank you. Well, now that you’ve done this for a decade and you have studied writing communications, English poetry, this is your world, at the very beginning before we went on air, I told you that I’m super excited to have another branding, marketing communications person on the show. And you’re like, well, I’m learning. I’m trying. Well, I think you’ve been doing pretty well. What does branding mean to you now that you actually went through it in every possible shape and form over the last 10 years and actually apply it? All of this wisdom that you gained through university, I guess, right.

Ben Checketts:
To me, it’s similar to my experience with being a parent where you have dreams and visions and goals for your children, and you certainly the type of person that you want them to be and the type of values that are important to you. And so you lay out this plan to kind of cultivate those things. So I want my children to not be afraid of hard work to love the outdoors. And so occasionally I drag them on hikes. I just make them hike with me. And so branding to me is similar, where you put this, you kind of have this thing that you’re responsible for in a certain way, the way you want it to feel, and the important values that are central to that. But you also have to allow it to create itself in a way that’s what I’ve found is you have to allow it to interact with customers and in a certain way, find its own identity.

And then once you find that identity, and again, similar to children, once they kind of find out the important things, the things that are important to them and the things that they love and the things they enjoy and are good at, then you kind of just lend all the support to those areas and really cultivate that. And so I would be lying to you if I told you from day one, we had this idea to be a brand championing mental health. In reality, we wanted to focus on a little bit on performance, a little bit on work, a little bit on the holistic human being. And mental health really just became kind of the output of that. And so we lent all of our support. So that’s a long-winded way of saying having not a perfectly formed idea, but things that are important to you, a distinct identity, and then just giving it all of the love and support and attention to allow it to, in your customer’s hands, create something really, really concrete and firm and reinforcing that with support.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I really love this. And look, I mean, I’ve done this podcast, I don’t know 120 times now, and I always ask that question.

Ben Checketts:
Yeah, I think it’s a great question.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, it’s not the question that’s great. The answer, that’s great because I think that there are so many people say very, very, very similar things. I have not once heard someone do this comparison to growing kids and how you can only give that much and push into certain direction and then you start pulling wherever I love. I really, really like that. It’s a great tool. Thank you. And it goes back to the idea of, well, you create something and you have that philosophy, but then it’s organic. You let them run.

Ben Checketts:
And the toughest thing to do as a parent and as a marketer is to relinquish a little bit of control to the outside world and say, I hope I’ve done everything right. It’s kind of in your hands now as to how it interacts and how it changes and how it comes around. So I think that for me, that’s where the parallel really happens.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Really great. I absolutely love that. As we slowly come towards an end here, what is one word, if you would take your entire brand, you put it through a funnel and out comes one word or maybe two words, a short phrase, not a tagline, but something that you prepared. What is it for?

Ben Checketts:
Well, for Ron, I really love this idea of pursuit. I think when you talk about pursuing things, I heard this wonderful the other day of like a plant, if you’re not green, you are ripe. And if you’re ripe, you’re on your way to rotting. You’re on your way ultimately to your demise. And so we, as human beings, we have to be more diligent about that. It’s not as simple as saying, we’re green or we’re ripe ebb and flow between the two. But this idea of pursuing things, learning things, growing, adding skills, that should be a lifelong pursuit, I think we’re so easily contented into believing we’ve made something or that we’ve done our work and we can sit back. To me, the excitement is really this idea of pursuing amazing things, and whether that’s goals in your personal, professional, physical realms or whether it’s just traveling and learning new things.

And I think our parents’ generation, their idea of success was, oh, have a home and then buy a second home in one place. And I told my wife, I was like, I think that’s the last thing I ever want to do is buy a second home in one place. I’d rather go to multiple locations and visit and give our children multiple cultural experiences where they’re seeing different parts of the world. And I think that that’s just also a generational change. It’s more possible now to rent a home for a month, an Airbnb for a month, and that sort of thing. So back to this idea of just pursuit, pursuing things, it’s okay to be ambitious. It’s okay to want things, but you should do it in a way that makes you a better human being. And that’s what our brand is all about, inspiring, and that’s what we’re all about as a team. We’re always pushing for what’s next for us, both on the product line as well as the branding and the marketing.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Totally. And you can lean into this in so many ways, so many ways.

Ben Checketts:
Yeah.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Very cool. Any piece of brand advice for any founders or any marketers listening as a takeaway? Or did you already give us so much because he did? So if there’s anything left than you?

Ben Checketts:
Well, I certainly, I think I alluded to it several times, but I think a lot of people believe that in order to launch something, they have to have this idea fully formed. They have to have it perfect. They have to have the branding, just so I think you are seriously neglecting just how much or maybe overestimating how much people pay attention. And people are busy. They’ve got their own things going on. You don’t have to have a fully formed perfect idea. Just go and trust your instincts and you’ll find your way in a lot of ways. And even if you don’t, that’s a great learning experience too, man. I used to just dread or fear failure so much, and now what I know is that failure is such a powerful teacher that not, I don’t seek it out, but I certainly don’t shy away from it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, no, absolutely. Great message. Totally appreciate you sharing that. So usually I would say what’s next for your brand, but we kind of know you’re really going deep into the women’s part. I mean that you just recently launched it. There’s a lot of work ahead, but what are you excited about in the next six months or so with your brand?

Ben Checketts:
Yeah, very excited about this relaunch of the pursuit. It’s going to be fantastic. It’s going to be a real grounding for our content, for our messaging, for our brand identity. And so it will really help people, I think, engage with the brand in a new and exciting way because we can’t just be another clothing company. And that’s always been our attitude from the Is Rhone is not a clothing company, we’re a wellness company that happens to make really great clothes. That’s kind of our attitude.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Love that. So you’ve got your pursuit figured out for the next half a year.
Where can people, start following everything that you do? Where can they get to know Rhone?

Ben Checketts:
The best place is our Instagram. We’re really working on our Instagram content, going to start building out our YouTube page as well. But again, a lot of that will be linked through the Instagram and what we’re trying to give people. There is a sense of behind the scenes as well as the fun experiential side of things, as well as some product knowledge. That’s kind of the three main pillars of our social strategy.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And you’re currently selling D2C in the US only, right?

Ben Checketts:
Yes, we do ship internationally. We’re working on bringing those shipping rates down by finding international partners. But yeah, D2C in the US we have 15 of our own retail locations, and then we’re in some really tremendous wholesale locations across the country. So Dillard’s, Nordstrom’s, Equinox, gyms, REI. There’s a lot of ways, and you can find all of those partners and all of those locations on our website through our store finder. So we’re probably, if you’re in the Continental us, we’re probably in the store pretty close to you. But if not, rhone.com has our full selection.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Cool. That’s so awesome. Hey, thank you Ben for your time, for your insights and yeah, for everything you shared with us, really appreciate it.

Ben Checketts:
No, of course. I’m honored to be featured on the podcast and I think you’ve built an amazing thing as well. It has to be said.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I appreciate it. By the way, did you know that the founder of JetBlue is following Rhone on Instagram? I just realized that because I am following him because he was in episode 71 of this show, and I’m like, oh, look, he likes Rhone too. So now we know.

Ben Checketts:
So now everybody knows.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Now Everyone Knows. Alright, Ben. Hey, listen, it was a great pleasure and we stay in touch.

Ben Checketts:
Yes, thank you so much