🦏 TED REPIC // RHINO USA CEO

0:00I'm Sam Rose, and you're tuning in to Commerce is Chaos, the podcast for consumer brand founders who know that building a business is messier than the highlight reel shows. Your supplier just missed their deadline, your top product is out of stock, and your competitors somehow launched the same thing at half the price. Sound familiar? Every week, we dive into the real problems that keep founders up at night, from inventory disasters to supply chain nightmares, because surviving the chaos is what separates brands that fail from brands that scale. Today, I'm talking to Ted Repick, the CEO who joined his son's startup, growing it from an idea and a pickup truck to a nine-figure adventure gear brand.

0:36Now they're building a massive campus in Texas to make sure they never run out of things to test. You did the nicest thing for your family. Your son started something and you're helping him build it. And I always say, you know, the thing that lets you start something is not always the thing that helps you finish it. Not that you're in finishing mode by a long shot, but it is such a different process to come up with an idea than it is to sort of live through the process of building the business and operationalizing and running it. So I'd love to hear the beginning of the story of you seeing your son with an idea and a problem and inspired and how you jumped in to help him actually make it work.

1:19Ted Repic:Okay. Yeah. The origin story of our brand is pretty interesting. So my 19-year-old son, Cameron, well, first of all, I'm a serial entrepreneur. So lifelong entrepreneur. I had a real job for maybe two years as a 19 to maybe 21 years old. And then I started my first business at 21. So the boys were raised in an entrepreneurial household. They were picking up dog poop in the neighborhood, creating jobs in the summer. You know, they never really went out and got jobs either. They just kind of did their, um, they found ways to make money. Um, but you know, so Cameron, um, he's 19, graduated high school.

2:02Ted Repic:He's out there, you know, he rides motorcycles. He's got a diesel truck. He likes to work on stuff and, and I'm building a few different businesses. Um, he, um, he's, he's got some pressure. Uh, he's got a, he's got a high school sweetheart. They were together for quite a while and, um, and she gets pregnant. And so now 19 years old, you got a lot of stress in your life. And I'm not the kind of dad that says, good, you made a mistake. I'm going to take care of you. I'm the kind of dad that says pressure makes diamonds. Get out and figure out how you're going to support a family. So Cameron, I couldn't be more proud of both of my sons, but especially this story is touching.

2:43Ted Repic:It's moving for me because, you know, I basically, I told him to leave. I said, go figure it out. Like I'm not, you know, you, you, you got yourself in this position, go figure it out. You want to be a man time to be a man. This is how you learn it. And, and he went out and did some training called amazing selling machine training was about learning how to sell on Amazon. And, and he just launched what he knew and he was riding motorcycles, dirt bikes at the time. He had some expensive handlebars, was tired of putting the metal hooks on the bars, created this little product called a soft loop.

3:17Ted Repic:and everybody knows what it is today, but back then it was unique. It's just a piece of polyester webbing with two loops on the end to create a soft tie-down point so you don't scratch up your nice expensive motorcycle part. So he created that, instantly was an instant success, started working. His brother, 17, Dylan at the time, is an opportunist. He saw that Cameron's got something good going on. Yeah, Cameron's making money. Right, and that looks like fun. I want to get in the motorcycle. They both love motorcycles and boats and trucks and stuff. So Dylan jumps in with them. So the two boys were off and running by themselves without any, literally without any help from me.

3:57Wow. Wow. Okay. And then when did you feel like, so it sounds like part of the, you know, part of the framework is these guys got to go, got to go learn. And they maybe have to go through some hard stuff to like learn the hard way, you know, like the world is calling. When did it feel right for you coming from that place to say, well, now now you've learned enough that I can come I can come help you?

4:21Ted Repic:Well, it wasn't even like that. I mean, to stick with the name of the show here, commerce is chaos. It was chaos. I mean, so the kids got up and running, you know, early. The Rhino USA was founded in 2026. The point of time I'm talking about is mid 2020. I'm sorry, 2016. The time I'm talking about is mid-2015. So they started a different business called Gorilla Moto Gear. That was the first iteration of Rhino USA. We'll get to the chaos part. There's an animal theme I'm detecting. Well, the chaos kicks in about December. So they do pretty good through the beginning of the year. They start getting some money in.

5:01Ted Repic:They expand to a couple more products. And I couldn't be prouder. I am helping a bit in the background with marketing help. Like, hey, what do you need? Hey, dad, what do you think of this? And I give them help on marketing. I'm doing marketing my own businesses, but I'm not materially involved. December 5th, they had spent, they had raised$40 ,000 over the course of the year they had saved. They had all their Q4 inventory in place. And Amazon, December 5th, they get hit with a trademark infringement on Amazon from a company called Gorilla Automotive. and they lock up all their inventory and they're out of business.

5:37Ted Repic:So it started, it ended, it was over in a matter of six months. Did they return the inventory? Well, the inventory gets locked up in Amazon and then you have to resolve the issue with the trademark holder to get the inventory released. So now the boys don't know what to do. All their inventory is locked up. They have no money. They basically have no business. They came and asked me what we should do. I said, look, let's communicate. Like the number one thing, call the guy that's complaining and find out what the problem is. So we got on a call, the three of us, with the trademark holder. He's a very reasonable gentleman.

6:15Ted Repic:He said, you know, I own a company called Gorilla Automotive. You guys have a company called Gorilla Moto Gear. You launched a tool. It was actually a tire gauge that was like one of the third products they launched. You're infringing and we're not going to let you do that. And I said, look, there's two little boys here, man. literally they're 19 and 17. Um, you know, would you let them sell through their inventory if they paid you some kind of a royalty? So we agreed to like a 7 % royalty they sold through, you know, by February they were out of business. And so this is where the writer USA story starts.

6:48Ted Repic:And so, um, January, February, 2016, you know, they're out of business. The, the inventory sold, they got a couple bucks, but basically it's over. And I'm like, okay, go get jobs. Like it's over. Um, and they're like, no way. Like that was that we got the taste of entrepreneur. We want more, like we want more. So, yeah. So, I mean, we, we, um, I'm a private pilot. Uh, I have, I had, I had an airplane. Um, we had a little vacation home with a boat and we'd go ride out in park Arizona. We'd fly out there and go boating and jet skis and motorcycles. And, um, so we flew out to the river, the three of us for the weekend.

7:27Ted Repic:We sat around talking about the future and, you know, a bonfire and you know some some stars and talking about it we we came up with rhino it was like gorilla gorilla was tough you know what's another something that conveys you know everything we wanted to do we wanted to be bigger and badder than the competitors so it was like rhino was the next it was much better than gorilla right so it was a blessing in disguise guide. Wow. What a story. I don't think I've ever told that part of it, honestly, Samantha. Usually we jump right into the Rhino USA story, but that's the precursor to Rhino USA. I love that.

8:06No, that's so great. And it's so interesting how, so I come back to this idea of sort of the best day ever and the worst day ever is a paradigm that I've relived over and over again. Something great happens, right? Like you get$40 ,000, you buy a bunch of inventory, You're ready to sell on Amazon. That's the best day ever. Especially if you're like, you know, a teenage entrepreneur, you're like, we are in business. And the worst day ever is like always close behind. And I was going to ask you like what the worst day ever was for your story, but you told it like unprompted, which is great.

8:41Ted Repic:That's not the worst day ever. Let's just go into it. Okay. What was the worst day ever? What's worse? I got to know. we got sued again. So this one was serious. So, you know, we named the company, original name for the first month or so in 2016 was Rhino Straps. And then we realized that we had vision to go much wider than that. And so we fumbled around with a few variations. We weren't sure, you know, we weren't quite ready for a, you know, we had to explain what we do. We're trying, and as we look at the Amazon, platform back then. There's a ton of international competition coming in. And so we wanted to use the word USA because it conveyed we were American sellers.

9:29Ted Repic:You know, we felt like that was an advantage for us. And so we named the company Rhino USA. Well, part of our marketing, you know, our key, our phrases on Amazon, our titles and things would be Rhino USA, ratchet straps, You know, and if you reverse engineer that, you could we would we would show up for made in USA ratchet straps because the word USA was in our was in our brand name. Well, we got sued by a competitor. We were taking market share from him. We got sued by him for unfair competition because we were saying our products were made in the USA. And we weren't really saying that we were saying we were a USA based company.

10:12Ted Repic:So, but, you know, lawyers will take, you know, most of your money. So that lasted 18 months and cost us$600 ,000. It was, we were bankrupt every month for 18 months. It was waiting for the Amazon payments to come in so we could pay the lawyers, so we could do the next deposition or the next discovery. Literally 18 months of every two weeks getting our Amazon check and just sending it to the lawyers. It was, that is real chaos. So we won. But well, so again, another blessing in disguise. So like worst day, best day compilation keeps going. This guy, we he he almost ran us out of business. It turned out that we we were able to survive longer than him.

10:59Ted Repic:We turned the corner. We started winning the case. And then we pivoted on him with a countersuit where we wanted a reimbursement of our lawyer's fees. and he was forced to file for bankruptcy. He was the number one competitor in our space. As soon as he went down, we immediately took all of his market share. So our business went from small fledgling to immediately grown up and in the number one spot on Amazon for these power sports. Wow. Talk about tactics. I mean, and not that you were even trying, but like, I definitely am glad that we're friends. and well i that's just perseverance right so i mean um i i again i say i couldn't be more proud of my sons imagine these two young boys that at now this is just another year in so you got an 18 year old and a 20 year old they've already been attacked by lawyers twice they've been put almost put out of business twice in their first call it 18 to 24 months in business so if that doesn't scare you away from entrepreneurship.

12:03Ted Repic:I don't know what would, but they stuck in there. Yeah. Well, diamonds, right? Talk about pressure cooker and life lessons. And as I was talking to my husband the other day, but my husband's my business partner. So we're always talking about some family business. I grew up in a really entrepreneurial household. My dad was an entrepreneur and his dad and his dad before him and like five generations or something like that. So yeah, it dies, it dies hard. And Brian and I were talking and it was just a tough week a couple of weeks ago. It just felt like we were kept getting punched in the face. And I said, you know, if someone comes out of nowhere and punches you in the face once, it's like really surprising and it hurts.

12:46And, but you're not walking down the street right now. You are in like the ring and you have to expect that someone is going to punch you. And like, if you sign up to be a boxer, then getting punched a hundred times is like just part of the work. And so just know that like, that's, you know, that's business is like, you're actually signing up to be in a boxing ring and you were going to get punched in the face a hundred times, but that's your game that you're playing. So you can't, you can't be upset in the same way that it would be if, you know, someone like walked through a doorway and like called off.

13:18I felt like that that was a comforting analogy just in the way it's a good one that's pretty accurate you know

13:25Ted Repic:pretty accurate yeah unfortunately it's pretty accurate it's accurate yeah yeah my dad always need to say business is war and i was like i don't get that it's so different like oh it can be i mean it certainly can be i mean um yeah i it it can be tough but it can be um you know i i think it's always uh the the turn is always right around the corner you know when When you feel, we feel like things, I used to have this old adage about golf. When things are bad at work and, you know, I keep focusing and I'm stressing and I'm pushing and pushing and it feels like nothing's moving, I would just go play golf.

14:01Ted Repic:And just getting away from it, getting out of the office, taking your eyes off of it for a minute, it seems like things turned around. Like just when you stop pushing, it feels like, you know, the light at the end of the tunnel kind of story. It's always there. Maybe that's your, you know, it's kind of the analogy of your good day, bad day. The good day is always right around the corner if you can persevere through the punches in the face. Yeah. And, you know, maybe sidestep a few of them. Hopefully. Because it's going to be wet on your feet. Now we're dancing. That's ideal for sure. Okay. Let's talk about some good things.

14:36Let's talk about some happy things for a second.

14:38Ted Repic:Good. Yes. I'd love to hear the story of just the product line itself. You know, it starts with this first strap and then you're expanding. Like, how are you making those decisions? And are you reverse engineering from opportunities that you're seeing on Amazon? Or how do you know when an idea is sort of like good enough that it's worth investing more money into? Well, you know, today we have a lot of tools with AI and things. It's making it easier and harder because it's leveling the playing field. Now we all have the same tools. There are very few competitive advantages. Everybody can create great content.

15:17Ted Repic:I mean, you know, I think we can talk about that at another point. It feels like everything is noise. But back in the beginning, you know, I think we were running kind of a twofold strategy. My son, Dylan, was our NPD specialist. So he would develop the new products specifically for Amazon. So we started out as an Amazon-only business. But early on, I knew that I wanted to own the customer. And so that was a realization that maybe my 20, 30 years in business were helpful to understand that we were borrowing customers from Amazon. And that's not a real business. That's a temporary business. So we made a concerted effort.

15:55Ted Repic:We used to say we wanted to build a brand. And so at the time, there was a lot of opportunity everywhere on Amazon. We could have sold RFID sleeves and insulated cups. And we could have done all that. And we called it Joe's Warehouse Deals. We did not want to be a Joe's Warehouse Deals. We wanted to build a real brand with a story. We wanted it to be about family. You know, all the things that were important to us. We're a big Italian family. We have dinner as a family every Sunday. We hug and kiss each other. We say, I love you. We believe in family values. And so we wanted to, we thought business needed more of that.

16:37Ted Repic:It really felt like that at the time. And so we would innovate products for Amazon, but we were on a mission to stay within our brand guidelines of who we were and what we believed. And we developed products and what we used. So that's how we would look at Amazon. But we would also, we're going out every weekend, boating, trucks, motorcycles, airplanes. I mean, we were doing everything at the time. Hiking, we're going rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park. And as you go out and adventure and you do those things, you find needs. So, you know, so that we developed the products based on stuff we were using in the real world.

17:13And you're kind of doubling down on that. Now, I want to talk about community and maybe as a way to get into that. Let's talk about Rhino World, because you're actually like building this like live test environment, your own massive Petri dish for all of this. And I want to be I want to come adventure. Sure. Cards on the table. Your tech stack is held together with duct tape and prayers. If you're a brand founder or COO juggling Shopify, your 3PL portal, three different inventory trackers, and yes, that one crucial Google sheet, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Orders get lost, inventory counts are fiction, and your seamless integrations break every other Tuesday.

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18:27Ted Repic:Yeah, we would love to have you. I mean, currently it's not open to the public. It's by invitation only. You certainly have an invitation if you ever come to Austin. Where are you at? I never even, I don't know where you're at in the country. Oh, I'm in LA, but I love Austin. And, you know, it's a 30-hour drive away. Well, even less than that. It's only like a two-and-a-half-hour flight, so really close. Yeah, I can do better. So, you know, we're from Southern California. So I was born in Anaheim. My kids were, my boys were actually born in Arizona. But we started the business in Murrieta, Temecula area.

19:02Ted Repic:And so, you know, out there in that area, there's a lot of public BLM land. And on the border of California and Arizona, we spent a lot of time on BLM land, which is public land. You can camp. You can shoot guns. You can do off-roading. You can be free. And that's how my boys were raised. And we love Texas. We love Austin when we moved here. But one of the things we found was more private land than public. And we were looking for a place to do the things that we had always done. That was our secret sauce, like where we developed our product was being out in the real world and breaking competitor stuff and realizing how to make it better.

19:41Ted Repic:And, you know, we didn't have that in Texas. We were looking. We went out to Big Ben. We're out in Galveston. And there's some amazing places. You could drive your truck on the beach for 65, 70 miles down at Padre Seashore. I mean, there's some amazing advantages. But public, well, I just land. I don't care if it's public or not, but land that we can go play on and do stuff. So that's where the idea came from. We were missing it so much. I even put a campfire room in our office. And so like we put a fake LED campfire and some chairs and we blacked it out. We put no cell phones on the door. It didn't work.

20:17Ted Repic:We thought we could innovate that way. It was it was it didn't work. You're missing the live smoke and sparks or stars. I mean, we had all the fake stuff, but it wasn't the same, obviously. So that's probably the biggest risk I've ever taken in my career, to be honest. You know, we have a products business going very well. And I just show up one day and I'm like, I want to buy this massive ranch and build something. I don't really know what it is exactly, but just trust me. So our board trusted me with the idea, which was amazing. I honestly didn't think they'd approve it. And it's gone through a few iterations.

20:55Ted Repic:We started out with the idea that it would be an off-road park. Then we went to tours. And now, you know, really what it's always meant to be is, you know, the physical embodiment of the brand. It's everything tied into one. It's where we develop the products. It's where we test them in the real world, where we demonstrate them, you know, live on camera, where we shoot content. We bring people there and educate them. We had all of our TikTok creator friends out there for a community event. It's our spot. It's our magical place now. And it's evolving every day. Well, and to your point, it's like, you know, it's a content factory.

21:38And you kind of, I mean, that's the prerequisite for being an established brand these days. It's like you think the job is, I always say this, you think the job is like storytelling and product development. And it's actually, it's, you know, videography and editing, placement and paid media and partnerships and, and, and. um so uh so i really admire how much you guys have committed to that as kind of just part of the the community enrichment and the growth motion and it sounds like it's a very cool place to be and and is serving a community need as much as it is helping you also you know have a um

22:16Ted Repic:uh channel to to share the brand story and yeah yeah it's you know we don't what we say a lot is we don't cater to the 3 % of the population who are expert outdoor adventure off-road people. It's like we really want to unlock that 97%. People, you know, I think everybody wants to adventure. Everybody wants excitement in their life, but they're afraid. And so really, you know, after talking to, we go to 40 plus live events every year. We meet face-to-face with our customers. We do customer surveys. We do outreach and focus groups. it's really our competitive advantage to stay very close to our customers and build that community and know what they want, what they like, what they don't want.

23:00Ted Repic:And so, you know, understanding that what our customers want is confidence. What Rhino USA sells is confidence. We don't sell toe straps and kinetic ropes and D-rings and, you know, ratchet straps. We sell confidence. And, you know, through our in-house influencers, guys like Wes Wilson and Brad Evans and Lawrence and JJ and all these guys that we have that are out there living the lifestyle, we educate, right? So, I mean, we're giving people, like our magic equation, we say, is competence, which is education, plus preparedness, which is the gear, equals confidence. And confidence gives you the ability to worry less and adventure more.

23:42Ted Repic:And that's our motto at Ronnie USA. That's a good equation. And, you know, you're backing it up too with a lifetime guarantee. which I've lived in the world of lifetime guarantees. It's hard, but it's also confidence. You're like, this is so good that if anything goes wrong, we're just going to send you another one. No questions asked. And it comes with a lot of operational commitment I've found. And it comes with a lot of product development commitment because you have to make sure that the products themselves before you commit to buying five or 10 ,000 of them are going to be good enough to stand up to that promise.

24:15So I'm kind of curious, like, how have you, how have you kind of navigated that piece of it of making sure that like the products themselves can withstand that level of marketplace confidence that you're kind of imbuing into them we've