How Launch Finds Inspiration For New Brands In Everyday Life

Over nearly three decades, Ben Fischman has been one of retail’s pioneering entrepreneurs. In college he started the baseball cap retailer Lids and then followed that with e-commerce retailer Rue La La. In his latest venture, Launch, Fischman is partnering with entrepreneurs and bringing his years of experience to help them succeed. We sat down to talk about what he looks for in entrepreneurs, why Launch doesn’t consider itself a venture capital firm, and what led to them competing in workwear with their newest brand BRUNT.

Dave Knox: In your career, you have been at the forefront of the change in retail. How did that journey begin? 

Ben Fischman: A long time ago now I was a student at Boston University. Like most students at the time, I had no idea what I wanted to do, and being an entrepreneur was not on the list necessarily. I was a college kid and I was sitting in the back of lecture halls with lots of other kids and we were all wearing baseball caps and we would often try to go and find a new baseball cap that we wanted, and that was always a struggle. And out of that simple notion came the idea for Lids, which was why is it so hard to find baseball hats you like? I was the consumer and the market didn’t understand what I wanted. So I decided to go out and try to create an experience that had what I wanted. And that was in essence, the nascent beginning of Lids, a business that I launched out of my apartment my junior year at college. And the advantage that I had I believed was that I understood what the customer wanted. I didn’t know a lot else, but I understood what the customer wanted, and focused on trying to provide that customer with stuff that they weren’t being served with elsewhere. When I started that first retail store, the vision wasn’t to create hundreds of stores across the country that did the same thing, that vision came to life as I began and as we began to see success building that business day by day and week by week and month by month and recruiting buddies of mine and in school to come and work in the store and whatnot. It also served as, for me personally, as the training ground for so many of the things that have driven me through the last 25 years or so.

Knox: How did putting yourself in the mindset of the consumer lead to launching Rue La La? 

Fischman: If you look at all the different things that I’ve been a part of, none of them are rocket science. They are all taking existing industries, existing models, and trying to better the experiences. I’m not an inventor, I’m a pretty practical business builder. That is the case with Lids and selling baseball caps, or Rue La La, which was selling off price merchandise online.

With Rue La La, the opportunity was how do you do it in a different way than just lining the racks with clothing as far as the eye can see. How do you create what the internet can provide? How do you translate off price shopping online? And to us, the way to translate off price shopping online was leveraging the digital vehicles for what it was great at, the incredible convenience, the simplicity of being able to come back every day and check it out. You wouldn’t want to drive to a TJ Maxx every day because you knew there’d be new stuff, that’d be a pain. But pretty easy to go visit www. ruelala. com. And so the thesis was centrally, how do we create a business that leverages this paradigm, being able to come back so easily every day? In the off price world, the opportunistic nature of finding stuff is fun, but it’s also a pain because you might go to the store at the wrong time. Well, the internet solved that. You can go to the store every day as briefly as you want and see what’s new. So the business model was centrally built around the notion of that. I think the most common thread from being a junior at Boston university to Rue La La or onto some of the other stuff that we built was the teams that surrounded these businesses, the teams that built these businesses. And it was my greatest lesson at Lids. The only way that I personally have known how to create success is building these teams that are so much more powerful than the idea itself and building these teams that can really execute and create something special.

Knox: How have you carried the focus on teams into your latest effort with Launch? 

Fischman: After we had sold Rue La La, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. Did I want to go off and start a new business again? Did I want to go down the investor track? And while it was my turn to be the investor, I was struggling because I’m a glutton for punishment. I love operating, I love figuring out the pivots of how to make a business succeed. From my perspective, no business building is a straight line, you always have peaks and valleys. And those pivot points are fascinating to me. 

I love working with teams and I didn’t want to just be a passive investor. But once again, did I want to just run one business? But I’m not Jack Dorsey and I didn’t believe I could be the CEO of multiple businesses and have each of those be fabulously successful. Running each of these businesses took all of your time and all of your energy and all of your mind. You never stopped thinking about it. 

And that’s where we came up with the idea for Launch. The idea was to leverage our experiences across the business building world from idea conception and fundraising all the ways to building a team and actually building the business. So we gave birth to this concept, which was that we would develop ideas internally within Launch or people would come to us with ideas. And our goal would be to match those ideas with great entrepreneurs who wanted to build businesses that could benefit from our team, our experiences, and our platform to give those ideas a greater chance of actually succeeding. 

By definition, we are not a venture capital firm. We don’t invest passively and take minority positions and have it be one of the many businesses that we look at. We often create these businesses from scratch, whether there are our ideas or people’s ideas who come to us. And we participate actively in the building blocks of idea creation and of team creation. We certainly provide the initial capital to build these businesses and don’t allow ourselves and our partners to get distracted in those very early days by always being on the road trying to raise capital. We really focus on getting the ideas off the ground and finding some success, which then obviously makes fundraising down the line that much easier. 

And the most important thing is that we historically don’t talk about Launch. Launch is just the vehicle behind these businesses that maybe provides them a bit larger of an unfair advantage. But the businesses and the brands are what matter. Each of these businesses are run by great teams, great CEOs, great leaders, and their success comes from that. In those early days, we can provide opportunities to avoid the classic mistakes, maybe make some new mistakes, and really partner with the entrepreneurs and with the teams to help find success.

Knox: With the importance of the team, where do you find the founders of your businesses?  

Fischman: Through a variety of different mechanisms but mostly it is through our network and our community. When we started Launch, we realized three things. One, is we were going to figure it out as we go and that all the rules weren’t written because we were creating something new. Two was that we would be as good as the teams that we could identify and put together. And three is based on that, how do we acquire talent constantly? Many of the founders of the businesses actually came from our own ecosystem that we brought into Launch as partners of ours early on. Some of our best CEOs were people that were doing some analysis for us or were doing some helpful work in identifying opportunities for us at Launch. 

And other times it was simply leveraging networks that we had in meeting with people constantly. My favorite thing in the world is literally just finding great, interesting people and talking to them. Right away, light bulbs go off as I’m talking to these people, realizing, “wow, this is someone I want to partner with, that I want to go into business with.” I have been doing that my whole life, but it’s become that much more important now because finding these great leaders that can take these businesses and make them their own versus being hired to CEOs, that is the most important part of identifying these talents. Each of the businesses that we have created has a slightly different story for the founders. And it’s not formulaic by nature.

Knox: One of your newest businesses is BRUNT Workwear. Where did that idea come from? 

Fischman: Eric Girouard, the founder of BRUNT Workwear came to work with me almost out of college as my chief of staff. In that role, Eric basically was with me 24/ 7. He was with me all the time and helping to take the work that I was doing and make it that much more digestible for my teams. So he got a lot of exposure from the most unique, highest level interactions to the mundane daily business operations. And the goal that I always had for that chief of staff role was to incubate great talent, identify great people, give them unique opportunities to participate in the highest level discussions and the lowest level discussions and everything in between with the belief that you could help transform those people into great future leaders. And Eric’s a good example of that. He went on to do biz dev and marketing and sales. And then when we created Launch, he joined me and the team and became one of our partners in helping diligence the different ideas that we wanted to create. And he participated in the creation of the first few businesses. 

One day he came to me and he described this idea he had, and it was a no- brainer. And he was a no- brainer entrepreneur to bet on and believe in. I don’t get lost in the greatness of an idea, I mostly focus on the greatness of the talent and if the idea feels commercially viable. And the idea felt commercially viable and the entrepreneur was great, and that’s where the idea came from.

Knox: What was the idea that Eric brought to you for BRUNT?

Fischman: So the idea was simple. It was that there were no modern brands focusing on creating a work wear experience for the everyday, blue collar worker. There was Carhartt and many other of these historic head to toe brands that sold boots and sold jackets. But there were no modern brands that leveraged the power of modern technology, that leveraged the power of modern media, that connected with the new generation of tradespeople to create a brand that they could love. And for him, there were two huge focuses for the business. One was a brand. Not just someone that made product, but a brand that this consumer could really identify with. And two was a set of products that met the needs bullseye of what this consumer wanted, but leveraged the power of disintermediation and of working directly with the customer, tying the supply chain and the customer together with nothing in between, and being able to provide this great product at a great value. I really think of BRUNT Workwear as a cross between a FIGS, which has done such an amazing job of modernizing the healthcare uniform business, and a little bit as a Yeti, which is creating a brand and a set of products that the customer just covet. I think that BRUNT fits right into that mold of a modern uniform for this long ignored class of consumers and a collection of hero products that the customer’s super proud to have and is always looking for the next new thing within that brand assortment.

Knox: What are the other businesses within the Launch portfolio?  

Fischman: The first thing we created is a brand called M Gemi. And M Gemi is a Italian footwear and accessories brand, that works with these incredible artisans in Italy exclusively and provides these artisans with a platform that could bring their unique and incredible capabilities to life and provide them with a place to survive and prosper. And by definition, if we do that, our belief was we could create a collection of products that leverage this unique supply chain that the customer would go crazy for and do it all at a price point that was a bit more realistic than some of the classical luxury brands. And M Gemi, like almost all of our other businesses there’s a bunch of different things that make it unique. Because there’s plenty of shoe companies out there and there’s plenty of Italian shoes out there. So what could M Gemi do that was unique? Our goal was to leverage a supply chain that could create newness at a pace that the world had never seen before and have it be of highest quality. 

The second business that we created was a company called Rockets of Awesome. We saw kids apparel as a race to the bottom. Who could make the cheapest products at the cheapest prices and offer the least amount of service possible. And our goal to better that category? Because moms and dads and kids, the last thing they have is time. They love quality and the category deserved to be better. And we ended up partnering with an unbelievable entrepreneur who had beenlooking at the kids’ category and wanting to do something to make it far more modern, far better, and an experience that moms and dads could actually engage in versus suffer through. 

The next was Follain in clean beauty where we realized that so many of the products making you look better are also causing harm to your body. The initial idea was to create a marketplace where all the products fit the clean standards. Follain has been transformed from not just a platform that sells lots of other safe brands, but also a brand of products based on everything we’ve learned in the space. 

The next one we created is a company called Trade or drinktrade.com in the coffee business. The goal with Trade was to really change the coffee business. The coffee business is an incredible industry. The idea behind Trade was to take this massively fragmented market of coffee bean roasters all around the country and provide these roasters a platform where they could reach consumers. In every town there are these small independent roasters that create this incredible coffee that people in those towns swear by. But if you don’t live in one of those cities, you don’t even know it exists. And Trade’s job is to change that, to match coffee lovers to their favorite roasts of coffee from brands that they never would have seen before. 

And then Singuli is the only business in our portfolio that broke our rules. One of the rules that we created day one was that we are going to be involved in businesses that we understand how to create, where we have relevant experience. We’re not just going to be opportunistic. Just because there’s an opportunity doesn’t mean we’re the best people to do it. And so many of our business have so much in common. They’re consumer facing, they’re frequently direct to consumer exclusively, they leverage unique supply chain, and they leverage creating an emotional brand connection, which is everything to us. That brand connection is everything. 

At M Gemi, we realized that we needed to leverage unique data to ensure that this rapid supply chain could really work well. We have this business that could make fashion product in season, but how do we make sure that we’re capturing data that ensures that we’re designing and creating the right product? So we built out a whole suite of tools and hired a bunch of data scientists to help build this demand forecasting system out. And the leader of that part of our business came to me and said, “We’re just nipping at the surface of this opportunity. I’d like to create a new business that really modernizes how businesses think about demand forecasting, leveraging supply chain, and in essence turning inventory into a far more valuable asset.” We aren’t SaaS experts but the opportunity was so compelling that we went for it.  

And what ties all these together is none of them are, “no one’s ever thought of before.” These are all industries that have existed, that have had some level of scale, that have thousands of competitors, which we love. There’s an identified market that obviously already loves these categories, these opportunities. And we just want to do it a little bit different, we want to do it a little bit better.

Knox: When you meet these entrepreneurs, what are you looking for in them? 

Fischman: There’s a whole bunch of intangibles and I wish it was more formulaic because it would make our lives so much easier. I start with just raw horsepower. Do these people have real intelligence that can help them be rapid decision makers and make the best possible decisions? Do they have passion for the idea that they want to pursue? Have they thought about it in so many different ways, not because they’ve done their homework work, but because they believe in it so much? Will they be great leaders? Can they attract great talent and motivate the crap out of that talent? And can they give that talent the room to actually make decisions and run their businesses? 

I learned all these lessons at Lids as a junior in college. The most important lesson was one I learned early on. I understood the baseball cap business better than anybody else. No one understood what the customer wanted better than me, but I had no idea how to build a business. I had no idea exactly what needed to be done to create the type of business that could create success. And so I had to surround myself with a ton of people that knew a lot more than I did. And it wasn’t at a wisdom, it was at a necessity. And not only did I have to surround myself with those people, but I actually had to give them the room to make decisions. And one of the flaws that we see in so many entrepreneurs is this need to continue to prove to themselves and the world that they aren’t just the idea of people, but they’re the brilliance behind what happens. And for me that had nothing to do with it. For me, the only way I could prove to people that Lids could be successful was if I had people that knew how to do a lot of other things that I didn’t know how to do. 

And so when I look at entrepreneurs today, I want to make sure that they have the confidence in surrounding themselves with people that can drive the business and that can make decisions and that they don’t need to be the sole star of the show. Once we’ve done all of the obvious checks of capabilities and experience and whatnot, that notion of their ability to build a business with the team and allow the team to grow and be exceptional is one of the most important criteria.

Knox: Where do you see the future headed for Launch?

Fischman: The notion of trying to come up with an idea to launch a business to me is frightening. I have people come speak to me all the time who have recently graduated from business school and they say they’re in a room on a whiteboard trying to develop an idea. And that to me I wouldn’t know how to do that. But in everyday life, we experience these moments where you’re doing something and realize, there’s a better way to do this. I recently got a new puppy, our second dog, and the amount of lessons that I’ve learned about what doesn’t exist. Everyone thinks, “Well, the pet business has been on fire and every opportunity is taken.” And I have this new puppy and there’s five different ideas that we’ve developed from my experience in having this new puppy. My guess is one of them is something that should come to life. 

Beyond that, I think businesses are going to need to exist in all channels, so we’re looking at developing businesses that don’t just leverage e- commerce, but leverage all different ways of reaching the consumer. We believe building a brand has never been more important. It’s never been easier to launch businesses. I would argue it is not only obviously cheaper and faster, but it’s actually better. You have better tools and a better ecosystem of software developers than anything else that has ever existed. And it’s at phenomenal cost. So it’s never been easier to launch businesses. There are new products and new businesses flying through people’s Instagram feeds. And no one has any idea what they are or who they’re created by. Hence it has never been easier to create a business, but it has also never been harder to build a brand. And for those businesses that build brands that really build trusted experiences that connect emotionally with the consumer, we actually think the opportunities are bigger than they have ever been. So our central thesis is about building brands that truly emotionally connect with a specific consumer base. And if we can do do that, we think the opportunity is endless.