How A-Frame Builds Celebrity-Backed Brands That Thrive in Retail

0:00Ari Bloom:It presents a market opportunity, a social need, you know, doing well, doing good, all those things. When you can wrap those up into one thing, I think that's a beautiful thing. Welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and scaling a business. I'm your host, Serena Smith. Today's guest is Ari Bloom, founder and CEO of A-Frame, a brand building incubator that brings celebrity-backed, socially conscious product lines to major national retailers. They may be on QVC or in Target or in Walmart. A few of A-Frame's brands include Naomi Osaka's Kinlo and Proudly by Gabrielle Union and Dwayne Wade.

0:31Ari Bloom:Certain celebrities, like they touch something and there's an immediate response. But before launching several eight-figure brands into more than 10 ,000 retail doors, Ari cut his teeth in merchandising at Gap and led venture-backed tech companies in Silicon Valley. Ari's here today to share what he's learned about navigating retail, building brands people truly care about, and raising the right kind of capital. Ari, thanks so much for being here. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Serena. It's really lovely to have you. Looking at your history, some of which we just enumerated in the intro, like you have some really heavy hitters on your CV, right?

1:06Harvard MBA, merchandising director for Gap, running and selling a successful startup in Silicon Valley. It feels like there's a fair amount of zigging and zagging. What did you take from your experiences in both retail and tech, which are sort of universes unto themselves in many ways, that led to the genesis of A-Frame?

1:29Ari Bloom:Yeah, thank you. And by the way, when somebody else talks about your accomplishments, sometimes it's nice to hear. So thank you for saying that because when you're in it, the road is winding. But when you're at the finish line and you look in the rearview mirror, it looks a lot prettier sometimes. But yeah. Yes. And it often looks like a highlight reel, right? When, of course, the path to success is just... The 20-year overnight success. Yes. And we'll dig into that. But I'm happy to validate you. Thank you. Thank you. You know, I'm a founder. We need validation sometimes. That's right. That's right.

2:01Don't we all?

2:02Ari Bloom:You know, funny, I'll start with that. Like, I don't think I knew I was a founder for a long time. I think it took me until I was more mature, maybe I'll say, without putting numbers on the board. I started out in retail straight out of college. I've gotten to this retail management program at Gap, which was phenomenal. I don't think I knew what I wanted to do. I was setting to be a hospital administrator. So if that gives you any sense of what direction I was heading in. But I knew that I was a good business person or I had a business mind, but I was really interested in doing something good.

2:29Ari Bloom:And so my dad was a family physician. And I just really kind of liked the idea of running an organization that helped people. I did not have the stomach to be a doctor. Otherwise, I probably would have been a doctor. But that was not for me. And this gap program that I found was actually a great combination for me. And it was a retail management program that was for folks who wouldn't necessarily normally go into retail. They were going to go into banking or consulting. In my case, I actually didn't see any great jobs at my college at this point. This was the dark ages. So they just put the career centers on the internet.

3:01Ari Bloom:And I figured out that they actually didn't put passwords on all of the like really good school websites, which mine was a good school, but maybe not the best. So I was on Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford sites looking in their career centers, finding out what jobs they had available because nobody realized that people from other schools might actually use those career centers. So I thank you, Ivy League, for helping me find my job, which is pretty incredible. And so I actually ended up applying for this job. And I think they were very impressed. If you had a if you talk to some of the recruiters from that program, they were like, who's this kid from Brandeis that's that's applying for the job that we don't recruit for?

3:36Ari Bloom:And well, that's interesting. So I think I talked my way into a job, which is not the last time I did that. And it was a year of essentially transition from college into a professional setting. You don't get opportunities like that because it does take a while to figure out who you are and mature. And I had a great experience in retail and I really liked merchandising. That's where I ended up getting placed. And I think it was a perfect combination of art and science for me. I think at some point in my late 20s, I started to realize, you know, this doesn't feel like it's the right journey for me to kind of keep going straight up.

4:04Ari Bloom:I wanted something different. I just didn't know what it was. And luckily I applied to one business school, high, high risk. I got into HBS and I went and it was great. And I think, you know, I started school on my 30th birthday and it was like, I was the tallest kid on the hockey team. I just, there were, there were a lot of 24, 25, 26 year olds that were brilliant and great people. And I'm friends with, with so many people that I met during those years, but I, I think just had a lot more time under my belt at that point than most students. And I really understood also what I was getting and what I was sacrificing and all the things that matter when you go someplace like that.

4:42Ari Bloom:And so the experience was incredible and it gave me the confidence to become an entrepreneur. Unfortunately, I graduated in 09, which was a really tough year to be looking for a job. It was the worst of times. And so I actually had started consulting while I was in business school and I was working with small retail brands and fashion designers. And when I graduated, I essentially had like five or 10 different clients I was working with and I created a consulting company. So it was really my first entrepreneurial journey. And I did that for six years. And I realized if I wanted to be a good CEO, I probably need to understand technology a little bit better.

5:13Ari Bloom:And so I made a very intentional move to Silicon Valley. I worked on a startup that was one of the first 10 employees. I was there for about a year and a half as the CMO. And then I became the CEO of a tech company that was a retail technology company. And I had 25 engineers reporting it to me. So that was fun. And I learned a lot about problem solving. And that was this thing that I took from tech that was very valuable. Start with the problem mark backwards, just like you're a computer programmer. How do those things coalesce to bring you to A-frame? Yeah, it's a winding long story, but I think the short of it is all of the experiences I had brought me to this place.

5:47Ari Bloom:I think there's the understanding of how to build products and how to anticipate what people want before they know they want it. And I think you have to have that, but you also have to think about the problem solution set. And I think there's a stat that I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is about 40 % of growth in the consumer industries comes from new things, comes from new brands, new product lines. You know, innovation does drive a lot of growth, not surprisingly, but about 90 % of new brands fail. And so, you know, like there's this clear disconnect between opportunity and solution.

6:20Ari Bloom:And A-frame for me was like, what are the problems that I personally know a lot about that I could be an expert in? And Hill and I first started out just talking about being dads in our families. And both of us have very kind of beautiful, diverse families, you know, different religions, different ethnicities. You know, he's a single dad. He's got a son that he adopted. We just, you know, we knew that the experience we were having personally was very disconnected from the experience we had professionally. And we talked a lot about what the solution to that would be. And that led to the Proudly brand, which is a brand that we built between Wade and Gabrielle Union.

6:56Ari Bloom:and it really is centering the needs of diverse families. And we looked at the stats and over 50 % of the babies born in this country since 2014 have one parent who's black, brown or Asian. So you've got like a majority of kids of a certain age now that have diverse families and have different skincare needs. And so it presents a market opportunity, a social need, doing well, doing good, all those things. When you can wrap those up into one thing, I think that's a beautiful thing. That's where I wanna operate just as a person. I'll also say behind the scenes, it was important to Hill and I that we hired a team that reflected the customer we serve, the communities we lived in.

7:29Ari Bloom:And so we've been very intentional about that as well. And I think we have a really great team and it's well representative of so many different backgrounds and ages and gender and, you know, sexual orientation and everything that's important so that you get a lot of voices in the room that have life experience that's different than yours, that makes you a better leader and it makes your company better. And so we've really tried to focus on making sure that we continue do that no matter what. Right. And there's a difference between satisfying those diversity quotas for the sake of ticking boxes versus a deep understanding that diversity of thought will actually lead to better brand building and a more robustly operating company, right?

8:05Yeah.

8:06Ari Bloom:Good, good leadership really. It requires you to have perspectives that are different. You have to be a good listener. You have to be the person that can synthesize all the different perspectives and make smart decisions. But if you just surround yourself with people that have the same life experience as you and they kind of think like you, you won't get a lot of innovation and you get stuck in a certain tunnel. And that's not the best way to run a business. But, you know, this is my perspective. And I think that's the beauty of being an entrepreneur and having a company and organization that you build.

8:34Ari Bloom:You do it your way. And that's what works for me. So I do feel very good about the strategy. And obviously, we've done OK with it. You've been mentioning your partner, your co-founder, Hill, who for the audience is Hill Harper, who most people may know as an actor first, but I would say maybe considers himself an activist even before being an actor. I worked with him years ago, and it was just like very clear that this is a man who's like very clearly guided by his own sense of integrity and decency. And you're talking about wanting to build businesses the right way. We're talking about socially conscious brands, a lot of this can feel sort of nebulous in the conversation from a practical perspective.

9:22What does that look like for you?

9:23Ari Bloom:Yeah, it actually manifests in different ways depending on the brand and the product line. So some of our businesses currently, we do what we would consider operator brands, which are your traditional brands. These are brands we see an opportunity like Proudly. Loved One is another brand that we have with John Legend. And those brands are built based on what we see, you know, the problem in the market. We work backwards. We develop the brand, usually in partnership with either an existing brand or an established person. And we'll build those brands to go to market and they'll sell wholesale. They may be on QVC or in Target or in Walmart, CVS we've also worked with.

9:58Ari Bloom:Those brands tend to have social missions. And I think that's important. And it's because it's a market need. And I think I'm not doing it to make a point and to make a statement. I think that's actually the wrong reason to start a company. If there's a market need and there are customers that need something that you can deliver, you should do that and you should talk about it and you should be consistent about it. And I think great brands know who they are. They're focused on a specific customer. And a lot of people can enjoy it and utilize the product because they identify with that core customer or they aspire to be that core customer.

10:32Ari Bloom:And this is what brands have been doing for generations. Ralph Lauren did a great job of that. He embodied a certain customer, a certain look, and people aspire to that. I think you can do that with any brand. And I think that's actually the strongest brands when they have a point of view and they kind of stick to it and they're consistent. There's also the work behind the scenes, and that's really important. So like we talked about earlier, making sure that the team is reflective of the communities that you're working in, I think is really important. But also how you treat your employees. You know, what benefits are you giving them?

11:02Ari Bloom:You know, flexibility for parents. I think that's a big thing for me, too. I mean, of course, we also started a baby brand as our first brand. You better be walking the walk. That's right. That's right. No, it's true. Like, I'm a dad, you know, and I, you know, my wife was a, for a long time was a CEO of her own company. And I understand that people need flexible hours sometimes, and they need just flexibility generally. So I also try to build a company that is going to be accommodating for folks so that they can still do the things that they need to do. And it's like they have to take their kid to the doctor.

11:32Ari Bloom:We understand that. We get that, you know. In the past, we had veterans on our team and thinking about things that they may need and what benefits we offer. I think it's really important to just build a company that is going to be fair and good to its people. And that goes all the way to the partners, too, that you choose to work with because very few companies at any size, but especially small businesses, do the work all themselves. They always have outsourced partnerships and contractors and consulting and all the things that allow us to do the things that we need to do. because you can't have full-time employees doing it all, especially when you're small.

12:05Ari Bloom:And so also choosing partners that you feel like are consistent with your worldview is really important. Well, to that end, do you have any advice for early stage founders or entrepreneurs in terms of how to build a value system within a company that will also allow it to sustainably scale? So I will say to any founder, early stage company, the best manifestation of the values for your own company live within you. I think this is incredibly important for people to just not try to build something that is not authentic to them. And you are an individual and a unique person. And what matters to you is going to shine through.

12:50Ari Bloom:And so just trying to pretend like you care about something that you don't care about or hide something that's important to you, that never works. And so I think the value system really has to start with you. And I would encourage everybody to really think about what's important to them. And then you embody it in your business. And then as you grow your business, you need to think about where are the gaps. That's something that becomes increasingly important as you start to grow. In the beginning, you're just trying to like plug the leaks. But eventually you're getting to a point where you're like, okay, listen, for me, I'm not super organized.

13:20Ari Bloom:I'm not structured. I need a good COO who's going to keep me structured and who's going to also instill structure in everybody else that we hire. You know, then it's I need somebody to work on product development because they have more sourcing experience in personal care and beauty than I do. It's you think about those skill sets that you need and you look for more subject matter expertise to kind of fill in the gaps. But I think putting those gaps on the table is really important in the early days as well. Just admit what you don't know. It's OK. Yeah, it seems like there's such deep value in terms of also being a strong leader in wearing as many of the hats as humanly possible so that you have an understanding for what the experience will be for other people when you bring them in.

14:02But it also requires a really rigorous honesty at a certain point about what you're just not that great at doing and hiring for those things and allowing somebody else to be the smarter person in the room. Yeah.

14:15Ari Bloom:I actually, I was telling somebody the story recently of how I started A-Frame, which isn't the story I talk about publicly. So everybody's getting a really great, you know, exclusive here. But one of the first things I did, and this was like early, early days, we had decided to start this holding company in 2019. And so we were working on the baby brand. But in the meantime, we had this thing called COVID to happen. and I had been working on one of the first concepts we were going to do, which was a refillable, sustainable soap brand. And it was very well-timed for COVID, obviously. But it was one of those moments where everybody was on lockdown.

14:52Ari Bloom:And so I launched it in April of 2020 out of my garage. We got the whole thing done. I literally managed all the orders. I packed all the boxes out of my garage. I put them in the basket of my bike and I rode them over to the post office. I sent them all out. I had a big wholesale order. It was like, I think I got a 2000 unit wholesale order. I had to actually reduce the order because I couldn't physically pack enough boxes because it was so overwhelming. It was just me in my garage. I'm like, and my kids are like, you know, whatever, one in four at this point. So I'm like, come on, help me out.

15:25They couldn't, they were too little.

15:26Ari Bloom:Their hands were just too little to get the boxes. But anyways, this order was just so big. I literally, I think I shipped it at 1200 units, which was a lot. I spent three days packing these boxes. And so I think, you know, I used Shopify. I built the Shopify site with this little tiny agency that was great. Ludlow Kingsley, thank you so much for your help early days. They were amazing. We did a really nice job of building this little soap brand, but I had to do every single job. And I had to manage the website and manage all the customer service and respond to the emails and the social media and everybody take all the photography.

15:59Ari Bloom:It was great. And so I did wear all the hats, but I also realized what I wasn't good at and where I needed help. so it was it was a great experience um and i wouldn't have traded it for anything and it helped me to do everything after that even sourcing the soap like i learned about i'd met some contract manufacturers and i went through the process of how do they fill where do they fill it on site do they send it to someone else you know what are the right bottle shapes is there a size that fits in the machine that doesn't like stuff you just cannot learn without doing So it was great. Really good experience.

16:30The devil in the 12 ,000 details. Now at this place in your trajectory, you have the privilege of working with these celebrity-led brands. And oftentimes it sounds like you're not even the one seeking them out. They're coming to you. But you don't partner with just anyone. So what criteria are you using to vet potential collaborators and their ideas, especially when they're this high profile?

17:02Ari Bloom:You know, it's interesting because in 2019 and 2020, we were just getting started. It was 21 as well, like a great time to be doing celebrity brands. It was a lot less saturated at the time and it was integrated into the culture and it was new. We hadn't had so many out there. And then this other thing that I think people don't talk about during COVID is that a lot of celebrities were out of work, right? And so they were not touring or playing sports or filming. And so there was a combination of some folks were bored and were looking for something to do and now had the bandwidth to be like, I want to start a brand, which was like, that's great.

17:41Ari Bloom:Some folks were like, I actually need to make some money because I'm not doing my day job right now because everything's shut down. I think I always look for a really good problem to solve, as we talked about earlier, and then the solution. And I think starting with the I want to do something because I like it and I'm passionate about it is good, but it's not necessarily what's going to be successful. And I think I've had a conversation with a number of celebrities where they say, well, listen, I really want to do a men's fragrance. And I'm like, cool. What else? Well, I think there's nothing out there like this.

18:14Ari Bloom:And I'm like, that's definitely not true. would you fund it? Like it probably costs three to five million dollars to get the brand like really to be successful. Are you willing to to spend that money? And inevitably a lot of folks are like no I'm not. And I think these are like important questions and sometimes you just have to be like listen this is a lifestyle brand for you and if you want to do it and fund it you should do it and maybe it will be successful. I can't tell you yes or no it's going to be successful or not but like I think if you're really passionate about something go out and do it.

18:44Ari Bloom:That's what any investor would tell an entrepreneur. They said, go get this started and come back to me and show me what you can do. And so I just try to level with folks and be honest. And also because I have no horse in the race with them. And usually I really like people. So like I meet a celebrity that I admire and like and I'm a fan of. And I say, listen, I think you're great. I don't think you should do this. I don't think this adds anything for you. Or why don't you spend the next year like building up a presence for this thing that you want to do? And then let's talk. And then we'll see if it's the right time for you.

19:14Ari Bloom:And maybe it's me that will work with you. Maybe it's somebody else. But I want you to be successful. And nobody benefits from us building something that probably won't be successful. And you've got to think about building your brand. And everything you do has got to be creative to that brand. And so I'm a big fan of saying no impulsively to everybody in a kind way and obviously kind of a constructive way. But I think it's important to hear no a little bit. And some folks just don't hear it that often. And so if I have to be that person, I don't mind that job. it's enjoyable sometimes. Yeah, I think like the landscape vis-a-vis celebrity back brands has changed really dramatically, right?