The Mattress Brand That Built Its Own Supply Chain From Scratch

Speaker A: Every moment where we had bursts of growth, all those things get tested.

Speaker B: In 2010, V. Nguyen took over a small mattress manufacturing company his father had built from scratch. Fifteen years later, that operation is Avocado Green Brands.

Speaker A: We support environmental causes. It's better for the world and better for you.

Speaker B: At nine figures and counting, it's the largest organic mattress brand in the US with nearly 1,000 employees and sold in more than 600 wholesale partners nationwide. V is here to talk about reinventing his family' business, winning customers across platforms, and why sustainability is the company's secret. Sauce, thank you so much for being here today.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Speaker B: Your family has, like, a really wild backstory behind all of this. Can you tell us, like, a little bit about leaving Vietnam and coming to the US with nothing and him managing to build up this business for himself?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, we. We were Vietnam War refugees, so my dad was trained and fought with the Americans in the south. He became a POW in 75. And back then they sent you to what they call education camp. Re. Education camp. So he was in a camp for three years, and then they let him out in 78. And then he had to save up enough to sneak out on a fishing boat, essentially. So, uh, in 79, uh, he took the family, jumped on a fishing boat and snuck out. And back then, I think they had, what, three kids? And then they had another one in the. In the camp in Hong Kong, and then they had three more in la.

Speaker B: You were in la, baby?

Speaker A: No, no, I wasn't. I was. I'm the second oldest, so I. I was born in Vietnam.

Speaker B: Do you remember it?

Speaker A: Yeah. When we got to LA, I was already five, five, six years old.

Speaker B: Wow. You come to the U.S. yeah. Essentially, he's rebuilding from scratch, I would imagine.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: And how is it that he comes to own furniture stores in the neighborhood?

Speaker A: Oh, yeah. He had a military friend that was already here because they came in 75 who owned a, um, little furniture store. He rented a space above the furniture store, like, literally 400 square feet above the store. My dad worked at the store in the beginning, sort of as a delivery man, uh, you know, assembling, uh, furniture. Then he got to the point where he was like, a store manager. And then at some point, they decided they would start a mattress company to make mattresses for their own stores. I think they got up to a point where they had maybe 10 stores. Wow. And then that's. They decided to start a mattress company just to support themselves. And then at some point, my dad decided the mattress business was a lot easier than the retail business. He got into really just running the mattress business. And his partner stayed with the retail business.

Speaker B: Like some true American dream stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah. It's been a journey. I mean, he was able to put seven kids through college. You scrabbled by, wow, fast forward a number of years.

Speaker B: He's ready to retire.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And you decide that you will buy his mattress 2010.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Manufacturing business from him. Is his mattress factory, correct? Yeah.

Speaker A: And that's partly because he was our original investor in our. In the Internet business. And when we sold it, he did quite well. And so he decided he didn't need the mattress business so much anymore.

Speaker B: Is that what also gave you the capital to be able to buy it from him?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay, great. And so you decide that you want to launch a D2C mattress brand.

Speaker A: Correct.

Speaker B: And this is in the days where D2C mattress. I mean, now we take it for granted, but at the time, this wasn't really a thing that existed. And it's like, if you can remember the olden days, right. It's like the whole norm of buying a mattress was like, you go to a mattress store and you lie on like a thousand mattresses and then you make the call. Right. It was like an intensely experiential buying process. Right. What gave you the indication that people would be willing to go on the journey of making the jump to D2C with something like mattresses?

Speaker A: There was a lot of things going on at that time. I mean, you saw more and more categories going online. You started to really see people move beyond consumer electronics. You know, really starting to look at clothes and large screen TVs, and, like, really you started to see consumers started to trust that they could buy larger tickets online. And so I think it was just a natural evolution that was gonna happen. And then I think the other thing that sort of I saw was you saw these old brands, these old legacy mattress brands, very much not able to articulate their value proposition to the consumer, partly because they had just over time, shifted so much of their messaging to be dependent on the retailer. And so they were so dependent on having the retailer tell the story and not spending the money and the effort to tell the story directly to consumers. And then there was a huge disconnect. And when you walk into a retail store and there's 50 mattresses and you're sort of dependent on that one RSA to sort of walk you through why each product is what it is, they're typically going to try to figure out how to probably just upsell you or sell you the thing that they're going to get the sort of most commission on. And so it just became a process where consumers felt very frustrated. They didn't know what brands to trust, they didn't know what, you know, what to believe. Uh, from the salesperson, I could see that there was a wide opening right there for brands who could sort of build trust, be able to message directly to consumers about what their value proposition was for their product and do some great storytelling behind that. And then that's sort of the genesis of really, you know, wanting to start where direct to consumer would be our main channel so that we could talk to the consumer directly.

Speaker B: So what was your value prop in the beginning?

Speaker A: Our first thing we launched was, was Gruntwood Home. And that was really sort of inspired by California living healthy, uh, lifestyle products that sort of brought that, that ethos to you and obviously being able to ship it directly to you, the ease of being able to buy it online, return it if you need to, and really high quality products. So that was sort of the first iteration of what we were doing. And then Avocado really came along as we saw the supply chain start to develop a little bit better. A lot more natural components were being made. And then the partners that started Avocado, or at least came to us to say, hey, we have this concept. We want to start like a product line kind of similar to what you guys have with Brentwood, but even more sort of going into the, uh, deeper into using only natural materials, deeper into trying to find certifications, trying to get you, uh, know, organic certified wool and, and not using foam and, and, and you know, they sort of challenge us, like, hey, can you help us build a product like that? And so we started that in 2016, you know, trying to conceptually put that product together, trying to build a supply chain to do that. By 2017, they launched, uh, the first product, the first pillow, the first mattress. And then by 2018 we, we really decided as a group that we all worked much better together than trying to be more sort of supplier, vendor relationship. So we ended up merging both companies together. And so since then we've sort of put all our effort into, behind really building Avocado.

Speaker B: Brantwood Home was a disruptor in the industry in that it's making the move to D2C from like the regular sort of retail wholesale model for mattresses. And then Avocado comes along and is a disruptor in the industry to an even new degree because they're saying we're going to do something that is more naturally driven and more organic than the market has ever seen. Obviously that leaves you with a wealth of opportunity, but also sometimes that's really hard when you're the first to market. You know, it's like you got to do the convincing, you got to do the persuading. Was it a hit out of the gate?

Speaker A: It was very quickly, pretty close. Uh, I mean we really. Yeah, because I think, like I said, I think there was. We caught a couple of different trends going on. Consumers were in really trying to find authentic brands online and sort of newer brands at that time that they could trust. Avocado did just a great job of telling the story. You know, we're like a B Corp. We give 1% back of our mattress sales to 1% for the planet. So we support environmental causes. All those things really resonate with consumers. And yeah, right out of the gates, I mean, it was pretty good hit. And then not long after launch, we also got rated the number one quality mattress by Consum. And then that really took it off. And then we were number one for about seven years in a row. And so that, that helped propel it quite a bit.

Speaker B: Can you take me back to when you guys first found out that it had been named number one? And what impact did it have on the trajectory of the business?

Speaker A: You know, I'll be honest with you, I don't know if we knew it was number one until a few weeks into it. But what we did see, well, we saw a big spike in business and then we were trying to figure that out and, and, and I don't know if we were tracking consumer Reports so much back then, but, well, but we did get to the point literally, I think back then was, was, you know, we, we, we were probably, I remember we had a scoreboard every day that measured how many orders we had to fulfill that, you know, how many, how many units of mattresses that we were back ordered. And it got up to like 12, 13, 14,000.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: And it was hard for us because we, we were so vertically integrated. We had to scale production quite a bit in order to, we couldn't just call some factory and say, hey, you know, send us more. Which, you know, a lot of, lot of people who sort of just buy from third party places, it's, it's easier for them, but we had to really scale. I mean, we had to build a bigger fact, more people. So it was a, it was a process.

Speaker B: And so in that period of time, are you also saying to consumers like, hey, Sit tight. We gotta scale our operations a little bit.

Speaker A: I mean, it's challenging. I mean, we, we definitely got to the point where we had to send out emails and apologize and let people know there's gonna be longer lead times.

Speaker B: The manufacturing side of things can be really mystifying and daunting for people. Do you have any, you've been doing this for a long time. Do you have any words of wisdom in terms of, especially if you're trying to be vertically integrated and scaling up in those moments where you get an influx of business and you're not really equipped?

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, I mean, I think it's hard. I think you got to, you know, you got to be ready to handle it. We, we definitely had to scramble. We did a lot of things. You know, there was a lot of other brands that came on and took a different approach. You know, you, you started to hear about, hey, we want a really asset light business model and make it, get some other third party people to make it. That way you don't have to worry about scaling it. And we did see a lot of brands do that. But, you know, now we look 10 years on, a lot of those brands are either in financial trouble or don't really exist anymore. And when you're relying on the third party thing, it's very hard to differentiate yourself because whatever that factory is selling you, they'll be happy to put a different name on it and sell it to the next guy that comes along. So building the whole supply chain was time consuming, it was hard, it was capital intensive. But we feel like it's given us a very unique ability to have our product in the market at a price that, you know, it's not, it's not the cheapest thing, but it has great value for what we're putting in there.

Speaker B: Sustainability is a really tough thing because it's, uh, clearly very mission driven for you. Uh, it's also expensive and it's often lengthier in process. In terms of manufacturing, it sounds like it's really paid off for avocado sticking to your guns. But have there been times in the trajectory where that commitment has been tested?

Speaker A: During every moment where we had bursts of growth, all those things get tested because it's so easy in those moments to be like, hey, maybe there's a faster, cheaper, easier way to doing this because, uh, we really need to get more products out the door. And I think it'd be easy to take shortcuts then, but we've had to fight a little bit of that and try to Stay true to what we want to present to the customer. And it's worked out. I mean, that's also partly why we took us so long to expand our distribution channel. Now we're in um, 600 wholesale locations so that we only started that program two years ago because we couldn't support it before. Everything we sold online was all that we could produce. But as we've grown that supply chain, as we've grown our manufacturing capabilities, now we're extending our distribution channel so that consumers can find us in a lot of places.

Speaker B: Now when you've been able to retain so much control over the brand and the brand story and where it's meeting people, right, your D2C for so many years, you've also opened some brick and mortar of your own, which we'll talk about. Then you move into wholesale and like three third party retailers and you can't control it quite as closely. How do you, how do you assess a partnership to make sure that it's actually going to strengthen the brand and not dilute it?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, one of the things we did well is I think we held out long enough to where the brand became an important of draw for retailers to where when we could sit down with them, we could present a program that would fit us and them, what they understand with us is we'll drive you a new customer, we'll bring a new customer that cares about these things that, that maybe wasn't coming into your retail location before. And in return for that, you know, we're asking that, you know, the product, the pricing, the presentation fits what we needed to do so that we could continue to elevate the brand and keep it on message. And I think because we waited enough till the brand matured enough, it's been able, it's allowed us to do that where if you go too early and the retailer has a lot more sort of sway in the conversation and they could dictate the terms a little bit more, you do see that happen a lot where the retailer bring it in, dilute the brand, not present it. Right. And then over time you're just, you're losing a lot of brand value by doing that.

Speaker B: You said you only started doing the wholesaling part of this two years ago.

Speaker A: Yeah, two years ago.

Speaker B: What has it taught you about your business that you didn't know prior?

Speaker A: There's a lot of consumers out there that still want to try beds, which is a good thing. So we feel like there's a lot of space we've noticed that when we open a large regional dealer, it doesn't affect our D2C business. If anything, sometimes it grows the, uh, awareness of the brand. So the idea that, you know, it's, uh, if. If we sell a local dealer, somehow it would affect, you know, how much we can sell online or even our own stores. We haven't seen that. So that's been very interesting. If anything, there's a sort of snowball effect where having more distribution, having more people talk about the brand has helped overall bring more brand awareness. When we go to these markets, and I was just in Florida with, uh, one of our retailers there, uh, one of our wholesale partners, they talk about that we are bringing in such a different customer. We're bringing a customer who's done a lot of research, who knows what they want. They just want to try the bed, and they love it. I don't think it's a customer they would have necessarily had coming in before. It's a customer, obviously, who's driven and drawn to our commitment to sustainability. But, uh, I think they also do a lot of research. And one of the things we do really well is we don't obfuscate anything we do with regards to the bed. We really put it out there where we. How we make it, where we get the components from, what everything is in the bed. And what you see with a lot of other sort of traditional mattress people, they sort of tell you it's a secret formula in there. I can't tell you what it's made out of. I can't tell you how it's constructed. And we've just taken a different approach. We think being radically transparent is much better for the brand and for consumer trust. And we've seen that really, ah, where consumers come in to the retailer saying, hey, I know what I want. You don't have to sell me. I just want to try it to make sure it fits right.

Speaker B: Has it also unlocked a different kind of customer set for you?

Speaker A: Well, it's given us, I think, coverage in a lot of places that I think we wouldn't naturally have thought we would go. Like, I think, uh, the M. Mid the South, I wouldn't have thought. I was just through Florida, up and down Florida. Our products are selling great. And these wouldn't have been natural markets where we'd be like, hey, let's open. Let's open our own retail stores.

Speaker B: Did you see when sleep became sort of mainstream part of the health and wellness conversation? It have a direct impact on your business?

Speaker A: I think it's been such a slow boil. So I don't know if we've seen. Saw it like, switch one day or another, but we've seen where consumers are with the oura ring and the whoop. So, yeah, people are finally understanding, hey, I want a good night's sleep. I need a better night's sleep for recovery. And so one of the things we did recently, we rolled out two firmer mattresses because I think a lot of consumers, especially athletes, are starting to understand having the right firmness, especially if you're active, is really a big part of recovery. And so those like our extra firm, which is pretty firm, I mean, it's not that much less than that. I always thought this firm, it's selling really well. And so surprisingly, it's one of the, you know, one of our best, uh, new product launches we've had in a little while.

Speaker B: You're talking about the importance of transparency and that, uh, a lot of your customers, they do deep research, right? They want this education. And at the same time, when you're in the world of doing things that are more naturally oriented, sustainable, whatever, it's like you kind of have that challenge of having it not come off as spinach. You know, what has been. What has been your core storytelling approach at Avocado that has allowed you to really resonate with customers in that way?

Speaker A: I mean, one of the things we talk about even more recently is to go beyond this sort of niche approach where we talk about making sure we explain the why. We didn't want to get pigeonholed into something where, hey, this is like, like a super green product that's sort of granola. And somehow by going natural, you're compromising quality. And we've really had to educate consumers on that. And it's almost the opposite, at least in our industry, it's quite opposite that, you know, having these high quality components leads to much better quality product, higher, you know, much higher sort of durability, much less heat retention in your mattress. And so I think if consumers understand that that's the win and that's sort of the why behind the components and the materials we use. Instead of focusing on the hey, it's just. It's natural. We try to educate on the why.

Speaker B: Right, Right. Because there is a psychological association. There has been, at least historically, where you say, like, okay, well, if I'm going to do this thing that's like, healthier for me, doesn't taste good, it doesn't taste as good. The makeup doesn't work as well, like, it's not going to function as well.

Speaker A: The performance is not as, as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And it's kind of the opposite with our product.

Speaker B: I've heard you also say that, you know, obviously we're in this world right now where a lot of people are, are chasing short viral moments. Short form can be really big for brand building. It works for a lot of brands, but you have more of an orientation towards longer form, deeper storytelling.

Speaker A: Yeah, we have real depth in, in what we're presenting. Like there's, there's a lot behind it. We're not trying to catch a little hook and get people at this impulse buy. And this is a very high considered purchase.

Speaker B: It's not an impulse buy.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: We want to make sure there's brand alignment to the consumer. And we think if we explain our brand story, not so much, you know, just romance, uh, uh, uh, one, one product image or a quick little video like that doesn't really explain what our brand completely stands for.

Speaker B: Because you're trying to live your values internally, the ones that you're espousing.

Speaker A: I mean, because they're real values. I mean they're not, they're not values. As a marketing gimmick, you were talking

Speaker B: about an orientation toward the sort of like deeper, longer form storytelling and how that supports purchases that are not impulse. People are doing a lot of research. Where are you reaching consumers with that storytelling? What are the channels?

Speaker A: You know, we put it out, all the major channels, but there's some of the stuff we do is like we write an annual impact report that talks about everything we do to impact the environment, all of our sustainability efforts. And it's a long, long thing that we publish every year. You know, those are the kind of things that we work and I'm sure from that document we'll produce some videos on it. We certainly will have it up on our site as sort of a downloadable uh, PDF. But you know, through that document we'll, we'll make shorts and we'll make long form content and have it on YouTube and stuff like that. But it starts with like a real commitment to like, okay, let's write an impact report that talks about all the things that we do, how it impacts the environment, how it impacts, impacts our products. And so it starts from that. And that's a real commitment. Like it takes a long time to put that together.

Speaker B: There's this other discovery piece which is that like, you know, as you were saying, when somebody's buying something as high ticket as a mattress or now like the furniture that you sell. Most people do a lot of research. I do an obsessive amount of research. Some of the best recommendations that I get are from other friends and people that I trust. Right. That word of mouth component. And then also it's like, going, like, obsessively deep on. On the Reddit threads. The Reddit threads are a gold mine. Like, how instru has that been for the business? The sort of marketing that's happening via word of mouth that you're not even controlling.

Speaker A: Yeah. I think if you committed to building a great quality product and putting the customer first, that stuff naturally happens. You know, we certainly believe in both of those principles. Uh, one of the stats we look at is, like, how frequent a new customer comes back to buy something within 12 months, and it's like over 60%. And so that alone shows you once the customer is believing in the brand, there's. They come back, uh, and 60% of them come back within 12 months to buy another item.

Speaker B: That's incredibly high for the industry.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's probably magnitudes higher than most anybody else in the industry. And that's partly because we've built this whole lifestyle brand, but also this whole life cycle. Products from cribs to kids, mattress pillows, our organic bed sheets, our mattress protectors. I mean, there's. There's a lot that, you know that, that you could come back for.

Speaker B: Right. Somebody might not need another mattress.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, a year later, but they might now need a pillow. You now have 14 stores of your own?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we call them experience centers, but, yeah, we have 14 of our own experience centers.

Speaker B: Okay. That strikes me as so true. The. Your first one was in Santa Monica, which is my local avocado store. And I was telling you before we started rolling that, like, I love. I mean, I didn't think I would ever say this about, um, um, what is fundamentally a mattress store, but I love going there. It's, like, filled with plants, and there's kombucha on tap. Nobody's really, like, trying to sell you on anything. What did you know that you wanted to do differently?

Speaker A: Well, when we set out to build that store, I mean, we literally laid out like, hey, let's look at all the surveys about the pain points of a, uh, mattress retailing and what consumers complain about it. I mean, literally, it was rated, like, below going to a dentist.

Speaker B: Oh, wow. Yeah, it was bad.

Speaker A: It was pretty bad. And so we said, let's do everything opposite. And so, you know, that's sort of the premise we took. And it starts with, you know, people complain that they walk into a store and there's 50 beds. They don't know what you. So we have, you know, the Santa Monica store is probably 3,500 square feet and there's maybe eight beds in there. So there's space in between. People feel comfortable to lay down. So there's not like, you know, you're jumping from one bed to another. We give you plenty of sort of personal space to feel and go from mattress to mattress. We create a very calm, soothing environment. You know, a lot of complaints are like when, when they walked into retail and you got those fluorescent lights and you got, you know, some guy sort of hovering over you all day. So we, we sort of try to just change all that. We really said, let's create an environment where consumers come in, they, they feel comfortable. We work with them to find what's the right fit for them. And we're not trying to sell them, uh, or upsell them. And I think, I think a lot of consumers always felt that in, in

Speaker B: traditional retailing, you want to be a billion, a billion dollar brand.

Speaker A: Our goal is to get there in the next three to five years. So that's sort of the, the marching orders.

Speaker B: And where are you right now?

Speaker A: We're getting, I would say we're a little less than half of that, but, you know, we're on our way.

Speaker B: Okay. What as the leader, co, CEO, leader of this company needs to happen from an operational perspective and a cultural perspective to get you there on that timeline.

Speaker A: I mean, we have everything in place. I mean, we have a very proven retail model. So. But that takes time. I think we're going to open another store in New York this year. We'd like to sort of scale that team to get to the point where we could do five stores a year. Our wholesale team, they'll put in, they'll open another 3, 400 locations this year. So we'll be at a close to a thousand by the end of this year. So I think all the things are in place. We also don't want to rush it so that we fumble on the execution. And so I think it's been very important for us to like, hey, let's do it and do them right. Even with the wholesale side, we've sort of throttled that to a certain amount that we've told the team, like, hey, we only can support 50 new doors a month because you've got to set up training, you've got to set up distribution, uh, logistics. And so we don't want to set a bad precedent by just rushing to market and not executing well. And I don't think we've had any dealer that we've opened in the last two years that have left us. I think, actually maybe one, but they were up in Alaska, so that was a long way to ship.

Speaker B: Have there been moments on the journey where you realized that you were moving too quickly and it had a negative impact?

Speaker A: I mean, during COVID I think everybody sort of faced that. I mean, we scaled from, you know, probably pre Covid, 300 employees and maybe, I don't know, uh, 300,000 square feet or something like that in space. And we went to like a thousand employees and a million square feet and operating and in like five, six different buildings. And it got a little messy. You know, we were rushing to make product and rushing to scale, and we weren't as focused on making sure the cost side of the business was managed well enough. And so, like, post Covid really, you know, sort of hit in the gut where, as you know, the business sort of all that demand got pulled forward. Post Covid, when, uh, the demand dropped. Now you have all this sort of overhead that you gotta manage. And then now you gotta go through a whole process of right sizing and getting to the right cost structure. And that's a very painful process.

Speaker B: And what was that? Recalibration. You had to shrink things to some degree.

Speaker A: We had to shrink things. We had to do layoffs. We had to do a lot. I mean, uh, you had to sort of do it. It for survival. And we had to do it as fast as, you know, we could. And so it took us a couple years, though. It's right. Sizing never works as or never comes down as fast as you think it could. Like, there's just things that you're stuck in, whether it's leases, you know, even layoffs, like, like, like, it's very difficult to just go in and say, hey, let's just, you know, cut every. It's always sort of these incremental steps that that organizations take. And. And so, yeah, we did that for the better part of, like, two years. It was getting the business, getting the business back to the right cost structure.

Speaker B: You have scaled this company in a really massive way and still dealing with moments where you need to go through a bit of a contraction before it can grow again. Going on a trajectory like that also requires pretty profound growth from you as a leader and a human being. Like, how is it.

Speaker A: It has been a problem.

Speaker B: Who is v. The CEO and leader in 2026 versus 2018.

Speaker A: No, it has, it has definitely been a maturing process. Uh, I think, you know, obviously there's the empathy side of it and seeing what you have to do to keep the business alive and having to do layoffs. So that's always a painful sort of emotional process coming out of that. As we've built a much better organization that understands its mission, understands how to operate the business so that we could achieve our objectives. You know, we always say, you know, with respect to all of the sort of charitable things we do, you know, there's, with no profits, there's no, there's no charity like we can't do. There's no mission without profits. And so, you know, that's sort of the mantra we have. But I've had to learn how to be much more detailed operator. You know, we've brought in a lot more skilled people that have helped, you know, develop budgeting processes and, and expense management processes. Uh, lots, lot. So we're just a lot more tightly organized operation, a lot better organized than we were probably four or five years ago.

Speaker B: What do you wish you'd figured out sooner?

Speaker A: Probably that I think that would help a lot. You know, figuring out that uh, up and down the organization to create a structure that we can manage growth without losing sight of sort of the cost side of it where you know, for a period of time there we were, it was all about, you know, growth and catching up to the demand. And I think we were less focused on the cost of doing that. Right.

Speaker B: And that is a uh, path that some businesses take, especially if they're VC backed. Right. It's like growth over everything, worry about profitability later.

Speaker A: But you've been a lot of, and

Speaker B: you've seen, you've never gone that route, you've never gotten outside funding. Right.

Speaker A: Never got that. And so ah, that probably has helped us to be honest. You like we see even in the mattress space brands that kind of went that route and never figured out the hard muscle of how to make money.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: They haven't been able to make it. We've seen that across the whole, all kinds of industries. I think the D2C brands that sort of were built on this premise of like, you know, growth will solve all problems, faced a real reckoning and so but there's a minute flushing out of that and you have to make a profit in business to be able to achieve everything you want to achieve. And so the organization's got to learn how to do that at some point.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I like what you said too, about profit with purpose. You know, it's like you think about the profitability of the company also being able to unlock these charitable efforts so that you can make a difference in the world.

Speaker A: The charitable efforts to all the B Corp initiatives we do for their employees, like, you can't do any of that stuff, the 1% for the planet. You can't do any of this stuff if you don't have profits.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And so I think our organization understands that a lot more than we did probably in previous years.

Speaker B: You said that as a kid, having the example of your dad, you're not necessarily really understanding the magnitude of it, but it maybe impacts you more as an adult. And you're looking back on what he went through and what he built and sort of what you were picking up by osmosis. What impact do you think it's had on you and the way you function as a human and also as a businessman?

Speaker A: Yeah, look, I mean, I think just see the resilience of like picking up a family, going to a new country, learning a language. I think, you know, that that's taught me just resilience, perseverance. You know, every day you sort of gotta, you know, put your boots on and sort of one step forward at a time. And I think, you know, that gets you places and you know, when you get sort of knocked down, get back up and uh, keep moving forward. So, you know, to, to see him able to do that probably makes my journey seem a lot easier.

Speaker B: V, thank you so much for being here today.

Speaker A: Oh, thank you. Yeah, uh, it was fun.

Speaker B: It's a real pleasure and thanks to all of you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to Shopify Masters so you never miss an episode and we will see you next time.