PATREON PREVIEW - Die, Workwear! Inside Buck Mason with Co-Founder Erik Ford

0:03Hey, Peter. Hey, Derek. How are you? Doing pretty well. We have a guest today. We do. We do. And we're really excited to have him. His name is Erik Ford, one of the co-founders of Buck Mason. Hey, good to have you on the pod, Erik. Thank you. Great to be with you guys. I'm really excited to chat. I'm really excited for this. Honestly, this is one of, if not the most anticipated interview that I've done this year for this pod. Definitely one of them. And partly it's because I interviewed you a few months ago, my editor over at Bloomberg. I pitched him this story. I said, you know, I think it would make for a very interesting story to talk about the middle segment of mensaware, because for the last, I don't know, for at least 15 years, I've seen the market bifurcate towards really, really cheap and frankly often crappy clothing and then really expensive designer clothing.

0:56And the stuff that used to be in the mid-market has either completely disappeared, like the companies closed, or the companies shifted in one of those directions, making quite bluntly cheaper and crappier clothes, or they've just raised prices without changing anything, putting those clothes more out of reach. So I told my editor, I said, I think it would be interesting to talk about the few companies that are in the middle that are not only doing good work, but are seemingly thriving. They're growing at this time. And so I interviewed you and a few other companies. And I remember at the end of our conversation, I said, gosh, I really wish we recorded this for a podcast because it was just such, I thought, such an amazing conversation.

1:38And one of your comments during our interview became a kind of a central point in my Bloomberg article, which was this idea of emotional products that in the previous, I don't know, I would say from 2012 to really up until at least, you know, 2020 or more recently, a lot of menswear was kind of defined by or shaped by this business model. where people were presenting, first off, very kind of contemporary minimalist styled clothing. And then it was presented online in this way that, you know, like they'd have a photo or they have a kind of hand-drawn illustration of a factory. And then they have like a hand-drawn illustration of your home.

2:26And they'd show the truck, like bringing a sweater to your home. And they say, we skipped all these middlemen and we're giving you a whatever, like a$250 sweater for now$100. almost direct to consumer. Direct to consumer, minimalist. It's a very simple kind of proposition. Here's something that you can wear. It's really beige and plain and quite frankly, boring. And you can save 50 % of the retail price because of this business model. And you, you know, we had this conversation about it and you brought up this thing that you termed, I don't know if you made it up on the spot, but it became the thrust of my Bloomberg article of emotional products.

3:06Can you describe a little bit of what did you mean by that? Well, okay. So there's a lot to unpack there. I love this topic. I have to probably start by saying, when Sasha and I started Buck Mason, we were a part of that movement in a way. So I don't want to sit here and sort of say that, oh yeah, that time when everyone was trying to pitch cutting out the middleman. I mean, And there was a world where we saw the future as being partly e-commerce and building a really strong online business. And that was really the reason why I wanted to partner with Sasha at the very beginning was because he had built an Etsy for fine art, really cool e-commerce marketplace.

3:55But I didn't know anything about the internet. And quite frankly, I'm pretty offline. And I kind of wanted to build an old school, I wanted to build a legacy brand. And so we had one foot in that arena. And I think that there were a lot of things about that kind of moment that didn't make sense. It felt like people were graduating with MBAs, and they were just looking for different CPG product categories to disrupt. What is CPG? Consumer packaged goods. Okay. So, or, or like, uh, you know, just consumer brand, like if you just think about all consumer products, which is like, um, you know, a massive part of our economy, like it just felt like people were flooding the market.

4:48And if you were like an old school kind of garment person, which, you know, most of us here in LA, I mean, most of the people that I kind of grew up with, we're all, we all kind of consider ourselves garmentos in a way. And, you know, we were just sort of like, wait, what are you talking about? the, you know, the margin structure, you can't cut out the middleman in that way because there's, there's not enough margin to build a viable business. And if you look at what happened with most of those brands, you know, there just wasn't enough margin. You know, they were, if you, if you, you know, build a t-shirt for$10 and you sell it for 20, it's just not going to work.

5:24It's not sustainable. It's not sustainable. Right. So ultimately it's not great for the customer because you're not even going to be able to generate enough cash flow to buy another t-shirt, right? And so the only way to sustain that would be to raise more capital. And I think that's what you saw a lot of those brands do. But getting back to your question of emotional product, I mean, all the brands that I love and all the brands that I look up to have had founders or founding teams that were building product for themselves. And so I think that when we design, we design product for us. That's truly like, we're not thinking about what our customer wants.

6:03We're thinking about what's emotional from our perspective. Obviously we are the customer. So often I think we, you know, we get it right. And sometimes we get it wrong. When we get it wrong, we're usually ahead of the customer, but often when we get it wrong, we're just a season or two ahead. Yeah. I mean, the full, our full saddle pant, which I actually heard you guys talk about how, you know, it's not that, it's not that full, which I totally agree with. And I think is hilarious because at the time that we, you know, really started talking about it, which I don't know, maybe 2020 or something, you know, I don't remember, I don't remember like three of us kind of had the first idea for that pant and we wanted to build, you know, like our 501 and, um, you know, now it's like in the middle of the collection it's it's i i you know i wouldn't use the word slim but it's definitely not uh you know a you know now we have an anti-fit and we have all these other fits but anyway um so back to building the emotion you know emotional product i just think that the brands that i look up to and the companies that i love they build product for themselves and you know the customer is either drawn to it or they're not what year did buck mason start 2013 13.

7:18Am I correct in remembering Buck Mason as in the beginning selling pretty basic kind of, I thought of it as a, if I can just be blunt, as kind of selling like California basics. Yeah. I mean, the very first iteration was, um, you know, kind of like we wanted to be almost like a California APC. Like that was where I, you know, that's definitely where I was, um, you know back then and uh so it was like the first product was a um slub you know like bound neck uh 30 singles or maybe it was 36 singles like slub t um and then our second product was a five pocket jean like within range of the petite standard and then actually we did the uh kind of a sort of a version of the 501 and a version of the petite standard at the same time and then And our third product was a OCBD, like, you know, kind of light blue yarn dye, open-ended Oxford.

8:18And so we were definitely making basics at the beginning. And that's, to be completely frank, I mean, that's where Sasha and I were kind of on our journey style-wise. I mean, we were, you know, we were in our late 20s. And, you know, I think that, I think you're right in saying that we started as California Basics. And we were also making what we could make locally. And so we were kind of bound in a sense to our supply chain here in Los Angeles. And we still use that supply chain and we love it and we're very active. But it was hard to build an entire world. I don't know that we had the vision yet, but also we didn't have the supply chain resources to build an entire world and do full fashion sweaters and outerwear and tailoring and all that.

9:07That makes sense, what you're saying, because from those beginnings until now, you've certainly grown. But I'd like to circle back to that later. Right now, I want to spend just a little bit of time on what you said a moment ago, which is that's where you were at the time. Since then, has your eye adjusted or have your tastes adjusted or have you just been able to expand and iterate some of the things you've always wanted to do? I mean, what is your difference in taste from then until now? Yeah, I mean, great question. I think it happens slowly and organically, but there are these big moments.

9:54I mean, I remember I had to go like find a school for my daughter and check out different, you know, different places that she might go to school or going to like these Montessori schools. And, you know, I kind of thought like, maybe I should wear a suit. Maybe I shouldn't wear jeans and a t-shirt. And, you know, I think there's these different, these moments where you kind of, your style evolves. In a lot of ways, I feel like an outsider to the fashion community. um you know i grew up in a really small town and i lived on a farm until i was five and uh i lived a very provincial life until uh college and um i think in a lot of ways i'm discovering i discovered things late um yeah i was like in my 30s probably before i really got into tailoring i wasn't one of these um guys that you know got into it early and it wasn't a part of my life like when I was young and so um well that's good well then unlike us you didn't waste your

10:57that's why that's why you have a successful brand I'm sitting in a messy room with my cat trust me I'm making up for lost time guys um but I came up as a jean guy like I really my dream was always to build a denim brand and um it's funny that that really didn't happen uh but I always saw workwear and denim and denim is definitely my first love and still the product that I am probably the most passionate about and feel most emotionally connected to. I just think we're really enthusiastic about the perennials. And, you know, in some ways it could be looked at as a weakness with our team, but it is true.

11:39Like we're all really interested in figuring out like what are the sort of styles that have stood the test of time? And then what are the different versions of them? And how can we learn? We typically sort of deconstruct the greatest product that has ever been made and then try to reconstruct it. And so any category, we've sort of slowly gone from category to category, I think. And the more complicated products, you know, usually got pushed. That makes sense. And yeah, in the early days, we just, we started with what we could, what we had the capital, the technical skills and the resources, supply chain resources to be able to tackle.

12:21And so like with the factory that we essentially rebuilt in out in Moton, Pennsylvania, you know, that was, we had been making t-shirts in the US for like eight years before we did that. And I think we'd made well over a million T-shirts, maybe a couple million T-shirts. And we'd all kind of lived in the factories and our contractors that we had collaborated with. So that was, it was a big endeavor. And it was definitely, I think, a really big risk. And it still kind of feels like eating glass every day, to be honest with you. It's like the hardest thing we've ever done. But it's been very fruitful.

13:01And we've definitely built the best product in the history of the company through vertical integration. And so we believe in that as a model. But I will say it did happen very slowly. I mean, we really learned that part of the business. I would never enter a new category with like vertical supply chain strategy or even go big in a new category until we spend the time to kind of learn and evolve our take on it. So the beginning of emotional garment begins with design and it's something that that excitement, that emotion carries through from the design to the pattern to the makeup to I mean, that's how it starts.

13:47it sounds like. Yeah, it's a little, it's funny. Now that you asked the question, I haven't like thought through this in a linear way in a really long time. But now that you asked the question, it actually, the process can be a little different for each product. Because I'm thinking about like the full saddle gene, for example. And that was an example where we kind of knew what we wanted generally, but we had to go out and, um, kind of live with every version of the 501. And so we, we did that. Right. And, um, and we got into the, you know, the 40 stuff, we were into like the, the 44, the 47, whatever that is, where it's a little bit more of a, um, it's, it's a little bit like, um, a little tighter on the, um, the waist, you've got more volume in the hip and it's almost more of an anti-fit.

14:39That was great. We loved it. But then when we got to the fifties, I think that was when we started to find, and in the early sixties, we started to find more references that we felt like were really amazing for us. So that was kind of the process there. And then I'm sure, and then when you send that, when you send that tech pack to the factory. Want to hear the rest? Listen to the full episode and many more other exclusive of episodes over on our Patreon. Visit patreon.com forward slash blammo to sign up and join the Blam Fam. You also get access to our exclusive members only Slack group where we chat about this and a ton of other things.

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