Your Big Break

If you check out the stories of successful startups, you will often hear about a time they got a big break. Swell water bottles were featured in the Oprah Magazine and sold like crazy. Tristan Walker got his Bevel razor into Target stores. The list goes on and on. If all you listen to is the soundbite, it sounds like magic. A big celebrity supports your product, or a major retailer or partner does, and boom! The business is off to the moon.

The truth on these big break moments is often very different. Smart founders put serious time and effort into imagining what a big break would look like for their business. They plan for and chase these moments by putting their company into the best situation to help them happen. And they usually have many, many fishing lines in the water hoping for one big fish to bite.

Let me share a recent example from one of our portfolio companies, Sock Fancy. Historically they were a fashion sock company. When the Coronavirus pandemic hit, they worked with their design team and factory to launch a high quality, fashionable, cotton mask product. The product saw great sales, and recently Sock Fancy did a collaboration with a popular street artist Greg Mike. It turned out that artist was able to get Justin Bieber a free mask, and Bieber posted multiple pictures of this mask on his Instagram account to over 140 Million followers.

You can imagine what happened to sales from this post. But understand, Bieber wasn’t the only celebrity that got a free mask, lots of others did too. And none of that happens without the collaboration with Greg Mike, who was not the only artist that Sock Fancy worked with. For this big break moment to happen, the company had to put themselves in a position where there were lots of potential big breaks, and then the magic can happen.

Thanks for reading today’s post, hopefully this will help you find the big break you need to scale your business.