From Garage to $400 Million: The Portland Leather Goods Story with Curtis Matsko

0:00When we were smaller, we would look at companies that we thought were bigger and better. You just have the assumption that if they're bigger, they're better. Let me tell you the secret, they're not. And our people would always say, let's be like them. Let's do what they're doing, okay? Of those five companies that I used to admire in 2015, 16, and 17, they're all, four of them are bankrupt, completely gone. You have to work frantically. Like your success depends on what you're doing today, but at the same time, you need to hold in your mind that it's going to take five to ten years, right? You have to act like success is all about today, but you have to know it's going to do that.

0:41And can you hold loosely those things at the same time? I went on LinkedIn, just set my MacBook down, started making some videos, and what I found out is... Welcome to the DTC Insider Podcast, where online business owners come to find actionable tips and tactics to grow their businesses. Now, here's your host, Brian Roizentl.

1:10Hey, welcome to another episode of the DTC Insider Podcast. I'm Brian Roizentl, your host, and today we have a super special guest. I'm talking about Curtis Matsko, the founder and CEO of Portland Leather Goods. He started this brand in a garage with no investors, no plans, and a bunch of leather scraps. And today they've sold over$400 million worth of product, and they are still just getting started. Hey, Curtis, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. So, you know, before going and diving deep into, you know, business and the exponential growth that you have achieved at GoldenEtherGoods, I'd love to, first off, thank you for the refreshing content on LinkedIn.

1:56Because, you know, if anyone listening or why not watching this doesn't follow Curtis on LinkedIn, please go and do that. You will do yourself something good. I mean, LinkedIn is a special place, isn't it? Right? Because it's... Thank you so much. It's, you know, a year and a half ago, you couldn't find me anywhere on the internet. I didn't allow pictures of me for like 20 years. And I had all these young people we'd hire to do. Here's social media, here's all this crap. And I'm like, you know, they're young and pretty and they got a lot of caffeine in them. Let's let them do this shit. And then I'm just like bored.

2:33Oh, so I went on LinkedIn, just set my MacBook down, started making some videos. And what I found out is... Number one thing that I did is I'm 100 % me. I tried, you know, maybe years ago to try to be somebody else, but that fucking failed. So being myself is the only thing I'm really good at in this world. So I do that. And that really comes across to I'm like, did I have great people around me? The next thing is I went through a lot to build where we are, to build this on the way to a billion dollar company. And somehow the things that I say by saying them naturally get across rather than the rest of the garbage that some people put out on LinkedIn.

3:14There are amazing people on LinkedIn. I got to tell you, it's been a great year and a half. I've met some amazing people because of it. So LinkedIn, I'm still a big fan. Even the people who bitch about the algorithm, it's a great thing. Yeah, most of the guests I have interviewed here, we are on the, yeah, over 200 episodes here. I don't know, Neil Goyal, you've met him, you know, recently at an event and some, you know, many other great people that we probably have in common on LinkedIn. Yeah, what I see is that everyone is mocking about, you know, the way we all talk on LinkedIn, except for you, right?

3:48But then we go ahead and do that again, once, like over and over again. And when I watch your videos, it's like, I'm wondering, like, is this guy really that way behind cameras? And probably you just answered that. You know, how we do those videos is literally I set this down, my assistant gets behind me and I click a photo booth on my MacBook and literally it goes three, two, one. And then I just start talking about what's on my mind that particular day. And she has to catch it because she doesn't know what the hell I'm going to talk about because I don't know until it starts. So now, yes, I would love to ask you about it.

4:25Like I have a thousand questions as you can imagine, but I'll start by a question that I always have whenever I meet someone I consider successful, right? So I talked to hundreds of brands over the years and many with great products, great intention, focus, yet only a few of them make it. What do you think is the number one reason if you had to choose one? They say, this is why we made it. I would say that the biggest mistake you can make is trying to choose one. I'd say your question itself is the freaking problem, right? It's what six of things together make somebody in a team and a culture and a product do the things you're going to do.

5:12And can you evolve as that goes along? The one thing like, hey, like, no, Brian, you're right. I've been hiding this shit for years now. But now I feel close enough to you in our interview that I can tell you the secret sauce and the one thing. No, no, no. It is a couple things. Number one, you have to work frantically. like your success depends on what you're doing today. But at the same time, you need to hold in your mind that it's going to take five to 10 years, right? You have to act like success is all about today, but you have to know it's going to do that. And can you hold loosely those things at the same time?

5:49Can you hold loosely in, this is a fun environment to work in. And what the hell? You didn't, you promised you're going to do something. You said you were going to do it. You did not do that. Why not? What did I fail to do to get you to do that? Or are you not the person to do that? Can you hold kindness and responsibility in the same thing? Can you keep in mind at the same time, this product is the greatest product in the world and we need to always get better. And next year it's going to be better. And the next year it's going to be better. And we have to solve that. You have to hold all of these things in and you have to go frantically and optimistically into that.

6:27You have to move into that shit and say, we're going to get this done. and then you got to get a team on there and you got to coach them up and you got to say, we're going to do this together, everybody with me, and then you do it. Now, that is a mix. That is a recipe. That is an hack. Yeah. No, I totally understand and I agree. Yeah, I agree. In fact, I will say that there's no silver bullet. It's a combination of things and then they go and ask you these questions. So I deserve that. Are you always optimistic about, you know, the way things were going in business because maybe sometimes, I guess, even the most successful people in the most successful companies, sometimes when they are starting out in the early, in the infancies, let's say, of the business, they are not that sure.

7:14They have a lot of, you know, energy. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. Okay, I'm going to give you two answers here because nothing's simple on this floor, okay? Number one, I believed I was always confident for the next year, right? Like I knew we could go from a million to 2 million or 2 million to 4 or 8 million to 16. Or I knew we can go from 16 to 32. I had the evidence. I knew we could do that. I was always optimistic in my mind. Now, I always look for the future. If you talk to people, they'll say that 10 or 20 % of that time, I would talk in terms of, but what if and what if and like we have to do this.

7:56but never in my mind did I think, well, this shit's not going to work. No, no, no. I mean, you might've put three days over the last 10 years that at eight o 'clock at night, I could have had my fricking doubts, but let's just say 95 % of the time, of course it's going to work. Now, did I know we were going to go to a billion? No. But did I know we were going to, you know, we'll hit 500 million in sales this year and we're just expanding. We're doing better in every aspect of the changes we've made are substantial. I had the confidence. Part of the reason as a leader, I had the confidence is everyone else relied on me on having that confidence.

8:32They basically said, hey, dumbass, if you're going to be the CEO and the founder and the owner of this company, and we're going to go on this journey with you, can you do one thing? Can you tell us it's all going to fucking work out? Can you please tell us this is going to work out? And I said, I can do that. And I did. And so I always believed, and when I mean always, I mean 95%, 98 % of the time. Yes. And I know before we continue talking about your company, I heard you say once, you know, that at one point when things get tough or got tough in the past for your competitors, I think it was, you let me know, it was 2016, 2017 or something like that.

9:13They wanted to do more of what they used to work in the past, but that didn't work anymore. So it's, I guess, the classic, what got you here won't get you there. So do you feel that, do you feel that during the pandemic, many brands could be in the same, what got us here, won't get us there situation and they don't know? When we were smaller, we would look at companies that we thought were bigger and better. You just have the assumption that if they're bigger, they're better. Let me tell you the secret, they're not. They're just not. That's number one. And our people would always say, let's be like them.

9:46Let's do what they're doing, okay? Oh, my gosh. I am so glad that we did not. I said, well, I'm kind of unique. Let's do it our own way. And we did. Of those five companies that I used to admire in 2015, 16, and 17, they're all four of them are bankrupt, completely gone. And the other one is right on the edge of bankrupt. And I've talked to the owners of all of these companies as they went under and said, what went wrong? and they're like 10 years ago or eight years ago, everything was working right. And we just kept doing more of that. And they never evolved. They never changed. They never got better.

10:25And when you talk to them about what's happening right now, they would talk about five or 10 years before. And I'm like, dude, right now means right now. It means the last month and the next 12 months. It does not mean, yeah, you were once in a fancy store or you used to have retail where this used to work. The world changes a little bit faster than that, right? And so you have got to be up on that. Most things in business, and the reason I'm optimistic is I'm not optimistic that I say, I'm gonna do this and I do all the steps to achieve that. I'm never optimistic or all in about that. What I'm optimistic about is if I'm here and I wanna go here, I will come up with a way to at least get into that level.

11:09maybe we've come up with a new product or a new angle or a new manufacturer or a new channel or something different but by the end of the year we're going to reach my goals just won't look exactly like what we thought it was going to but i believe if you go on that journey we'll win you say you focus on the inputs more than on the outputs is that it no i no no no absolutely not I rely on picking up the cues of the journey and figuring shit out and knowing without a doubt that there will be opportunities if we just keep going forward. But what if, what if, what if everyone's always got all the reasons shit's not going to work?

11:49Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. I get it. Not me. I have people around me sometimes. I used to. Then every time I'd say, I got a great idea. Let's do this. They'd say, well, let me tell you 10 reasons that shit's not going to work. and I'm like, that's awesome. Thank you for being a very wonderful negative person. Why don't you go work on the other side of the building or in another company? I want to surround myself, not with yes people, but damn straight we can do that people, right? Not we're going to say yes to every one of your ideas, but we're going to say yes to the concept that we can freaking do this.

12:21What were the first team you had, the first people you surrounded yourself with? what did they look like in the early stages of the company? They were Portland hipsters. That's what they looked like. I still do the same thing with all the people that I work with. I get together with people, number one, number one, do I like them? If I don't want to talk to them on a day-to-day basis, if they're like, well, they're a little weird, but they're doing a good job, when I want to talk to them, I won't call them up. When I need to dig deeper into what they're working on, I'm going to hesitate a little bit, right?

12:58Oh, let's sit down for 10 hours. Let's figure this shit out together. I don't really like them that much, so I don't want to. I'll ask somebody else to dig deep into that. If you don't like being with them and talking to them, if they're not like your first wall when you want to talk to them, something's wrong. Does that make sense? Like you've got to say, boom, I'm sitting here in a room with my CFO. The text message chain we have and the calls we had just yesterday would stagger you about how much we talked yesterday. If it was a CFO I didn't like, which I'm going to tell you, most accountants and CFOs I do not like, I would not have spent that time.

13:36We would not have dug deeper. We would not have found the solutions that we did. But I like Morgan. She's awesome. Yay. So I call her up. We figure it out. We work it out. You know, different companies, different policies, different companies, different policies when it comes to, you know, hiring team members. what do you look for besides you know the feeling and and everything that you have mentioned what do you look for in a team member i look for a chip on their shoulder something that's happened in their life that threw a loop at them that didn't break them right i don't have broken broken people but broken people break companies right just like khani said hurt people hurt people broken people will break your company right but people who have a chip on their shoulders say my world is going to improve and I'm going to be the person to improve it.

14:27I am going to take that forward. I can work with that person. My optimism, all the things I have are going to give them a boost. And then they're going to start getting pattern recognition. I'm going to start saying, did you see it? You did it. I asked it. You did it. You did it. You did it. You did it. All of a sudden, these bastards get so confident they can do it without me. And then they get even cocky. And then they do even bigger things and better things. And pretty soon I don't have to work with them because they're so damn good. Everybody else in the country wants to hire them, but they're not going to go work for somebody else.

14:57They're going to stay working for me. Talking about your team members, how did you meet Mariana? She's like, you know, I think I once commented in one of your posts, like you are like the DDC Alex and Lita Hermosi. So I think like you two come together, at least on LinkedIn. And she seems amazing as well. So how did you guys meet? She is vibrant and energetic. I was spending time in Mexico because we moved our manufacturing there. We now have 1 ,180 employees in Mexico. And I found a really beautiful house. A former soccer player owned it. And I'm like, wow, this is beautiful. But you can't buy a house because I have no one to watch over the house.

15:37I don't speak Spanish. I don't know how to pay taxes or bills in Mexico. I don't know how to get in and out of parking lot. I mean, I know nothing, right? Right? So, but I own a big company there. So someone says, Hey, we need to get you something. And my friend Fabian said, I think I know the person, right? We had a big party at our house. And I said, your interview is come to the party and hang out and have dinner and see if people like you. You want to know what I found out? Just funny, charismatic, amazing. And I said, guess what? You're on this trade. And she's told people, she's like, I thought you were full of shit.

16:12Like, she's like, you told me we're going to do all these grand things and fly around the world and have this amazing time. She's like, I didn't actually believe it. She believes it now. But you know, but no, she's, she's an integral part of my life. If I go to work and she's not there, I'm depressed all day. I'll go into my office and I'm like, what am I going to do? This sucks. The world just isn't quite as fun without a little bit of spark of Mariana in it. I wanted to tell you what we don't see, of course, on the thing, like you work closely. What do you do all day? You know, besides, you know, Mariana, we're getting to the hurry.

16:50Part of the answer, of course, but what does a day in your life look like? It all starts with my morning routine of getting up and having coffee. Like, literally, that's my morning routine. I get up and I have about two hours before anybody else comes. I have coffee. I think about what I'm going to do. I go for a walk. I jump in the pool. It's totally just relaxed. At 8.30, she walks in and she tells me my schedule. That's it. Like, what are we going to do? Do I have this? Do I have, what are we going to do? She drives me to our big factory. We have the largest leather bag manufacturing in North America.

17:23It is huge and beautiful and amazing. Got a big, beautiful office there. And I run 38 divisions in my company. So I put all of the most important ones near my office. I have a big class office. and right next to me is my personal branding, social media people, the leather people who bring in over 10 million square feet of leather per year, the designers, the graphic artists, the logistics and the operations. I can see all of them out of my class office, all of their offices. And if I don't have something on my schedule, I literally just walk into somebody else's office in the middle of their meetings and just sit down.

18:02And right in the middle of the meeting, it doesn't matter who they're talking to, what they're doing, I just sit down. I'm like, don't mind me. I'm just going to jump into the meeting and see what the hell's going on. And so I'm capturing just information from every area of my company, putting it out, creating the big picture. I'm seizing everything together. And then it's Mexico. So two hour lunch, you always have two hours of lunch. Everybody goes out for two hours. I go home, watch some WNBA. I go home and watch some football. Hopefully it's going to start here in a couple months and live a pretty good life.

18:32What I really, the biggest change I've done in my life is I used to fly back and forth to Portland. and that sucks because it's a day down and a day back, and I felt like I was losing my life. So now when I want to see people, I fly them to Mexico. So I probably flew 50, 60 different employees in for the week, so they arrive, and I've got a big house, so five or six people stay at my house, and so it's breakfast and lunches and going out to dinner until 11 o 'clock and showing them around and working together. Ship them back to Portland and fly a new crew in. Always excited. And you still find time to post on LinkedIn and record a video?

19:11That's what I do that first thing in the morning. That's literally what I do first thing in the morning. I get up, I have my coffee and I take a picture and I either write or when Mariana comes in, we walk over, set the MacBook down, shoot a video, send it up, gone. You mentioned you manufacture your products. Was that always the case or did you start a few years ago? We always made them. I designed and made our very first ones in a garage. Yeah. Then we hired people in Portland. We had about 80 people in Portland until COVID came. We moved all of our manufacturing down there. And now we have literally the best state-of-the-art, best manufacturing in North America.

19:47It's staggeringly great. As I say, as of this week, I get an update on our employees and everything. And just in Mexico, I have what wasn't 100. For those brands listening to these that are thinking about probably moving their manufacturing in-house with everything going on in the supply chain and in the world, what would you say that are the main ups and downs? I won't ask about the one thing I learned the lesson, but I yelled at you at that. What would you say like the main ups and downs are? You've got to be a jerk like me in order if you're going to do it. And what I mean by that is I try to find people who could manufacture report.

20:26Okay. I would. And what everyone has is you're either too small or too big. And these manufacturers, you go and you're like, well, I'm not sure if this product's going to work yet. Right. So I just want you to make a few of them, but I still needed a good price. I still need it at a good time. And they have to fit this into their lines, right? They have to like design it, do it, schedule it, make it, logistically ship it. You've got to launch it and sell it. Well, if that product works, how are you going to get more? Call up Philippines and order more of that stuff. Good luck, four to six months.

20:59Are you going to order the right colors? Are you going to do the right skews? Is everything going to work out the right way? What we do is I would try to work with Miquela's and manufacturers and everybody. They didn't give me the right price, the right quality, the right timing. So I said, if I want to do that, marketing is what draws everything. Okay. I'm a marketing guy. Marketing demands the right product at the right time. Algorithms don't fuck around, right? They want more of that product right now, right? So what I found out is, okay, these are very important. I have to do these. And I also have to do these.

21:31I have to do this. And I can create new products. We brought out over 1 ,900 new variants last year. New variants last year through my manufacturing, okay? We're going to bring out over 3 ,000 this year. Those are mostly for returning customers who want something new. that if I said, just make this, only make 2 ,000 of these, make 3 ,000 of these. They're like, yeah, we like to make 100 ,000 of things. And I'm like, yeah, my return customers who love my brand, I'm gonna sell out of these things in three days. It's all profit because I don't have any marketing I have to spend, right? They don't wanna do that.

22:06They don't wanna do it on the timeline, the sampling, the schedule, everything that I want. So now I control that. So I believe I'm the most laid back, fun person you're ever gonna meet in your entire life. but obviously I also want shit to go right. And I want it when I want it so that we win. Cause that's the whole game. The whole game is, do you win? And I really like to win. I could have lost the last 17 holes in golf. And if you get at 18 and we stand there and everyone says, Hey, I'll bet you blank on this hole. Not only do I want to win. I know. Do you know if you win in business? Probably a profound question, but probably not.

22:50You celebrate everything every day, right? Like you celebrate every day. Like we did this, we did this, we did this. I accomplished this. Because if you don't celebrate that, you're going to forget. Okay. The next thing is you keep trajectory. Are all the things heading in the right direction? Everyone's like, we had all these problems. Yeah. You're going to do a half a billion dollar company, you're going to have problems, right? My job is not to, my job is to solve problems, not to make people's life easier. Because by me solving problems means we're going to sell more product. They're going to demand more.

23:24We're going to need to do more, right? I don't say, hey, at a certain point, your life's going to get easy. I say, we solve problems. We're going to get better. So you have to keep reminding people of their trajectory. They're mixed up in the day-to-day. So the first thing is, do you celebrate the wins? Are you in the right trajectory? and every year. Are you always saying, I say it's September, year's over. I've already won. I know what our numbers are going to be. I can already project within half a million dollars what we're going to end up with already in August. We're talking a couple hundred million dollars a year.

23:57It's like, that's good enough. How are we going to do even more next year, right? So I'm moving the goalposts. People always say, you move the goalposts. Yep. Celebrate every day, be on the right trajectory every year and move the GoPros and do it again and again. Yeah, I can relate to that. I started a tech company back, yeah, 10 years ago, probably with the business partner. We had investors, all this stuff. And we were gifted a bottle of champagne with two glasses. And then when we closed the business two to three years later, the champagne was unopened there in the fridge. And we were like, we never stopped.

24:36We never celebrated. And the business ended up doing good, but we had a lot of wins during the journey. And since then, both of us were like, we should celebrate even the smallest wins. And people see us as crazy people, but I'd rather look like a crazy person than not celebrating anything in my life. So, yeah, I totally see that. I celebrate all the time. I was standing in Livingston, Montana yesterday on my cell phone next to a car and a woman comes by and says, you're that guy from LinkedIn. You're the guy that owns Portland, London. How the hell do you know me? And she's like, I follow you.