Gear that goes the distance

0:11Hello and welcome to the Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. Today's program is about a passion for movement as we meet the founders behind two fitness-driven businesses. We'll hit the ground running with the founder of a luxury apparel brand making garments that blend functionality with fashion. Fundamentally all runners have a very complex relationship with running and that paradox in running is what drew me to it and what drew me to it as an entrepreneur as well. And later, we'll dive into the deep end with the CEO of the world's first underwater streaming headset.

0:51We pivoted and focused on the hardware because we think that really unlocks the much bigger potential in Swim. This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

1:08You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Oliver Powell is the founder of Acid Running, a performance-meets-lifestyle brand inspired by his family's historic tailoring business and his own passion for running. After leaving a career in politics, Oliver set out to create gear that goes the distance, tough enough for a marathon, but stylish enough for a post-run coffee. Since launching, Acid Running has gained a loyal following. Some fans have even gone the extra mile, if you will, by getting tattoos of the brand's logo. More on that. from Oli in a bit. Oli stopped by Midori House to discuss the upcoming women's collection, new collaborations and what else is looming large on the horizon.

1:49He began by telling me about the start of the journey. I started off in the dark world of politics so I've been fully rehabilitated now. So started off working for a political consultancy in Soho. I studied political economy at university. That was my sort of academic route. I was always obsessed with culture, brand, fashion. I mean, completely obsessed growing up. But because I didn't study anything creative, I think like many sort of second wind creatives, I had to find my way through kind of struggle to unlock that in myself. My family has a legacy in fashion. So going back to the sort of 19th century, all the men in my family were either in fashion or in the military.

2:31There was no chance of me. I like that medley. That's interesting. Those two things We worked together hand in hand, really. And yeah, there was no chance of me excelling in the military. So eventually the lure of fashion sort of took hold. So my great-grandfather and his brothers set up a tailoring firm in the city of London in 1908 called Hector Powell. And this was a small family-run business. And they served in the First World War. And at the time, the suits were boxy fits, traditional boxy fits. they recognised that the athletic fit that was required to serve in combat when they came home to visit their wives and girlfriends they suddenly got that female validation from their suits that they hadn't had before and they really took that kind of that moment of clarity and took that back to their tailoring and they brought in this athletic cut called the HP Cut and suddenly this tiny family-run business became a kind of household name they built that up to a luxury brand and it came full circle.

3:31They ended up tailoring officers' uniforms in the Second World War, so fighter pilots and in the trenches and in the Navy. And the business ended up being sold to Burberry in the 1970s. It was a sub-label of Burberry until the 90s. So when I was growing up in the 90s, the brand had just been, the sort of sub-label had just been dropped by Burberry, which gave it this resonance, even greater resonance and mythology in my mind because I felt upset that I had never experienced it. So that was lodged as a kind of seed in my mind. And I decided it was a sensible thing to do to quit my job in politics and my financial security and relaunch the family label against all advice from the rest of my family.

4:11So that's really how I got into this world before acid running. I love it. And it's funny, because if people sort of interrogate the brand story and look at how you talk about it, and this kind of thing, the messaging there's all this idea about dualities and kind of suffering for gain and all the rest of it and actually when you can weave in these threads from history it kind of makes it all hang together a bit more a bit more naturally let's talk about that though because you talk about you know this tailoring heritage you talk about fashion brand this is a super functional brand in certain respects and it is about the purity not even of like the pursuit but it's about the doing, the suffering, as you said, very kind of fundamental.

4:51And yet you talk about it like a sort of fashion brand. So how do you ensure you are sort of moving all of those levers? Because it's sometimes hard to put function ahead of form and so on. So how does that work in your mind? Yeah, I think there's an interplay between the brand and the runner for acid running. So we go back and we went back to the original question of what running is and what is a runner. And I think And for us, we felt that the industry was stuck in this understanding, this antiquated understanding of running as a competitive and a track sport. And of course, that has its place in running.

5:24That's part of running. But actually, if you break free of that and you understand running as a lifestyle and a discipline, you are better able to connect with 99 % of runners out there who identify with running as a lifestyle and a discipline. so when you understand that as a runner then you consider how do you serve that runner so you now need to serve the runner from a 5k up to ultramarathon distance you need to serve the runner after the run as well you know are these garments that can perform on a light jog all the way up to a kind of extreme challenge and then can you wear them after the run as well can you go meet a loved one or friends for a coffee or a beer after your run and the garment is still able to perform in that lifestyle setting as well.

6:08Fundamentally, all runners have a very complex relationship with running. And that paradox in running is what drew me to it and what drew me to it as an entrepreneur as well. Well, tell us about product development then. So obviously, there are certain kind of fundamentals, whether that's comfort in use, breathability, helping with sweat wicking, whatever it might be. You've got to factor in those sort of mechanical and functional properties. What other influences did you use? Was it about, I don't know, stuff that you'd used, brands that you liked, but that didn't quite deliver enough? How did you build the components that you needed to make the product do what you just said?

6:44Yeah, I think the first thing was, again, a rejection of what was already out there. So us as a founding team, we were all runners. We ran every day and we felt that there weren't brands out there that could serve us and our needs. So if you're someone who I'm sure many of most of your listeners are, you know, discerning customers, where you want a certain level of quality, you want a certain fabric hand feel, when you pull on a sticky polyester T-shirt, you feel like you're back playing kind of mini cult sport again and all the trauma that comes with that. And I think, you know, that fabric quality was really important.

7:23The idea of a relaxed silhouette. So obviously from an aesthetic perspective, we like a relaxed silhouette. That is a contemporary trend. That is what most people want. But at the same time, that relaxed silhouette allows runners of all different body shapes to feel comfortable in their garment to feel empowered in their garment and to be able to perform without distractions tell me about what happens when i don't know somebody who doesn't know the brand acquires some garments maybe they go they use them a little bit they get back in touch with you directly or via your the various ways you can contact the business and they say this worked for me or it delivered that and you get that little flicker of validation for these ideas because there's There's lots of complexities in those ambitions.

8:03What's that like as a founder? Is that the moment when you're like vindicated? Everyone caution me not to, but here we are. This person's got it. How profound are those moments? I mean, there's actually less feedback than you'd think. And I think it's a reflection of at the moment we have a menswear collection. We're launching a menswear collection soon. But men are typically quite quiet with their feedback. And actually, feedback from customers, we have less than feedback from non-customers. so this i can imagine if you look at the comments in our um on our facebook ads let's say to new customers yeah there's a lot of there is some abuse there around price point um which you know that that that's natural but i think really for us a lot of our customers are quiet and that's again a reflection of runners i think runners they it's a very personal journey and i know at the moment there's there's a lot of conversation about running having a moment and there's the run clubs and there's the scene and there's the Instagram hype.

9:02But actually fundamentally for a lot of runners, it's just a personal journey and it's a personal experience, either on their own or with friends or with their local community. And I think runners are quite discreet and quiet in that sense. But when we do get feedback, it's obviously wonderful. And I think for me, the most exciting and surreal, I suppose, moment of the last couple of years has been when people have sent us pictures of their acid running tattoos, which is wonderful. and I think that really validates this depth of the philosophy and we see ourselves as founders as not having come up with some idea but we're just communicating this idea that already exists.

9:38No, I agree with that. I often have to remind people, I say, it's called the loneliness of the long-distance runner, right? I don't want to be part of any club without someone like me as a member. You mentioned some of the sort of criticism about price point. It's aggressively priced. Tell me a little bit then about how that comes together. How do you pitch that exactly? Because a lot of people say, well, these are functional items. I think it's crazy. I'm going to spend 100 quid. I'm going to sweat this thing and kill it because I'm going trail running or whatever. Talk to me a bit about how you put together that value propositionally.

10:10Yeah, there's an inherent tension there. And I think obviously price, just economically price is a reflection of quality and the investment into it. And with the quality of our fabrics, the durability, the endurance of the garments and everything being considered, that naturally costs us a lot of money. And we have to pass that on to the runner and they accept that. I mean, sort of to counter the aggressive pricing point, I think, you know, the lovely overshirt you're wearing and the jumper I'm wearing today, they both cost more, I imagine, than our most expensive garment. Kind of you to say. Perhaps not in my case.

10:44But that's the illusion I managed to strike. No, but it's a very good point. And I guess, you know, if people like it, get involved. And if they don't, go away. I know social media seems to encourage this sort of dissent that you've just described receiving. But people can just go away if they don't like it, right? Yes, of course. And some people are just offended by seeing something which is more expensive than what they hoped for. And I understand that. But I would say that actually we consider ourselves a luxury brand. I think our runners consider us a luxury brand. Our pricing is actually typically a premium price point, you know, as the industry would understand it.

11:16and for the actual longevity of the products and what they're there to serve you on. We think that's a fair price. Let's have a quick chat through, I think, the bestsellers again. I think some of our audience will know already. They may have, you know, the kind of the two-in-one shorts, some of the kind of signature products. What have you got in the range? What do you add into the range? You mentioned women's wear. That's exciting. Give us a quick sort of summary of where you're at just at the minute. Yeah, so our bestseller since we launched is our two-in-one shorts, really made our name for that.

11:43So they are functional, durable, lovely hand feel on the fabric and also odour resistant. So that's really important. You can wear the garment two, three, four times if you're on the less smelly side without having to wash them, which is really nice. And our T-shirt fabric that we developed about a year ago, so a new T-shirt fabric. So that is a blended fabric. So it has those performance fabrics in there as well, but also some organic cotton to give it a lovely natural hand feel, give it that drape. and again has that natural odor resistance. We introduced a tank last summer. So this is something that we struggled with in terms of the development because we wanted to make sure the silhouette and the cut reflected the brand aesthetic.

12:25We didn't want to have a typical kind of race vest style. We also wanted to introduce a tank for those runners who weren't necessarily the sort of natural person to be showing more flesh. I myself was someone who had never worn a vest or a tank when I was running and I now wear it all summer. So I'm validation of that. And in terms of what's coming next, obviously we're working on the women's wear range at the moment. We have a collab with Percival coming up, a sweatshirt. We're introducing some base layers and a hydration vest in the winter. Oh, exciting. Where are your customers at the moment and where's the business doing most of its work?

13:00And what does that next stage of the journey, I guess, look like you strike me someone with an eye on the horizon. Where does that potentially take us, give us a bit of a sense of that journey? Yeah, so the majority of our runners are based in the UK. You'd probably imagine that from big cities, so London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh. We also obviously have lots of rural runners as well. And in terms of beyond the UK, lots of customers in Germany. Seems to be one of the few territories where the runners, well, they won't be runners, some customers, they will message us saying, I don't even run, I just want to wear this.

13:36I want to wear this to a techno gig this Saturday night. You need a lot of sweat wicking if you're really giving it plenty. So the Berlin scene is pretty good for us. So Germany, the United States and Scandinavia outside of the UK. We have a stockist in Singapore as well. But yeah, predominantly Europe and the US. And do you mind about that? Because there is a sort of a purity to the concept originally and the sort of intentionality of your dream to deliver this product for runners and to get into this sort of philosophical idea of what it is to kind of suffer and then to reap the rewards. if people say yeah i'm just just wearing it on the couch because i like it that's fine that's fine right how do you feel about it no i don't mind that at all i mean i think at the end of the day if people you know this is it when we say that running is a reflection of the human condition so for us these garments are there to serve runners but they can be worn in any context and actually people will buy into this based on the meaning behind the brand and the quality of the garments but actually at the end of the day if we can inspire people to take up running because of the garments because of the messaging you know that's probably the greatest victory and i think it's really interesting to keep to that message and keep that that sort of purity of vision but it is interesting if you zoom out and look at trends in the in the wider business one of these big narratives is look oh these disruptor brands have come in and even when it's you know you look on the world stage like performance events or like commercial tie-ups or athlete endorsements and you have now On or Hocko, whoever it might be, do you think, oh, actually, I would love to see, you know, this person in an acid running vest or jersey or actually, I don't know.

15:15Does that interest you? I'm sure it's probably an annoying question, but I'll ask it anyway. It's a good question. And I think, you know, I'm sure that down the line, we will have partnerships with professional athletes. I think you know we don't see the elite running as the pinnacle of running I think that's a really important distinction for us because for us we see the pinnacle of running to be separate for each individual runner and I think if you actually look at it anecdotally if you asked you know 10 runners on the street what their 5k PB was I'm not saying performances is the be all and end all but they'll all know it if you ask them to say who got gold silver and bronze in the 5000 at the olympics which is the pinnacle of running one of them might get a name and if you looked at something like football let's say if you ask them on the street who's top of the premier league they'd give you the answer if you ask them where they are in their five-a-side league they wouldn't know so it's the converse of that so for us if we find athletes that we feel embody the acid philosophy and there's a storytelling element there that we think can inspire our runners on their everyday journey, then we will work with them.

16:23But at the moment, that's not something we're rushing to do. That was Oliver Powell, the founder of Acid Running, and you can find out more by heading over to acidrunning.com.

16:43Shira Gorin is the co-founder and CEO of Zygo, a company making waves in the swimming community with the world's first underwater headphones, featuring live streaming and coaching. Unlike the typical waterproof MP3 players, Zygo's innovative underwater headset lets users stream content directly from their phones, a game-changer for swimmers. It's an impressive feat, especially since neither Shira nor her co-founder, Charlie Melvoin, have an engineering background. I caught up with Shira to hear about the innovation behind the products, the unconventional path they took to develop the tech, and the impact it's having on customers.

17:21Shira began by telling me about the moment when they took the plunge. Charlie was working in business, I was working as a lawyer, and both of us on our separate journeys post high school were hyper-consumers of boutique fitness. So his favourite was Barry's Bootcamp, my favourite was SoulCycle, but we did everything in between, whether it was boxing, Pilates, yoga, and we reconnected at a mutual friend's wedding and we were talking about wanting to do a triathlon. And so running, we both have done. Cycling, both of us had done. And swimming really was that unknown. And neither of us had a lot of experience swimming.

18:00I mean, we know how to swim, but not for fitness. And when we looked at the category, there was no options on class pass. And really there were no classes to take that injected that same level of fun, charismatic instruction like we've seen in every other fitness category. And so we thought, why not pull the thread a little bit further and create our own 45 minute swim class? You know, that's different than the two options in the space for like aquaerobics that my grandma would do or a more intense sort of master's class where you show up at 5 a.m. And it's like an hour and a half of lap swimming, which is really intimidating for anyone who wouldn't consider themselves a serious swimmer.

18:46And so we really thought that the playbook for boutique fitness isn't rocket science. You know, you have your fun instructor. We found we were in L.A. when we started. So we found actors who had swim backgrounds and then you have like a warm up. And then there was a little bit of like circuit training. You end with a sprint set. And then we called it a swim asana. That was kind of like a shavasana in, in yoga. So that mindful moment at the end, and we just iterated and created this 45 minute boutique fitness class. And our theory was that people would like it and enjoy it the same way they liked every other boutique fitness class option.

19:24And the operational costs were quite low for that business. And so we were like, if no one comes or people like it, and they don't come, then it doesn't exist for a reason. But if they do come and they do like it, then it's really interesting to kind of stay in touch and see where it leads us. That was the genesis. Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And obviously, tell me a bit about how you guys kind of hacked this solution to deliver, you know, coaching and playlists to those participants. Because, I mean, listen, that really is the origin story of the products you've gone on to develop, was that you got to try all these.

19:56And people were incredibly enthused by the idea of what they could confer. So was it really like one of those classic entrepreneurial origin stories where you're kind of tinkering away, you know, in the garage or whatever, putting these things together? Is that how that started? Yeah. And again, as we were as we were creating the class, we were trying everything that already existed. So there were above water speakers, below water speakers. In terms of listening to music when you swim, the only things that existed were MP3 players, which wouldn't work for what we were trying to do. And so we found a small factory in China that had this headset that could communicate.

20:32And we ordered some and we started tinkering with a splitter. I learned not all splitters are created equal. Again, none of us had engineering background, but we just kept trial and erroring. And so the first iteration really was we had this headset. It came with like a big radio shack transmitter that we put a splitter in. And then we like we pulled apart two microphones. So we had one microphone going to the phone of the coach so that they could play music that was then held in basically a fanny pack. And then a microphone going to the coach so you could hear the music and the coach as you swam.

21:09And so these initial headsets were, in our opinions, like so janky. They were not like brandable or sellable. And later on, when we reverse engineered it, they weren't super kosher anyways, in terms of like FCC and CE approval. But for the purposes of the classes, the consumer could put this headset on and hear the coach and music as they swam, which we thought was like, you know, that was our business. And then when we were running the classes, a lot of people kept asking us if they could buy the headsets on their own because they wanted to listen to music or a podcast or an audio book as they swam.

21:47And so we never thought we would get into the hardware part of the business. But once we realized that that was probably a much bigger business opportunity and the problem really came to us, we pivoted and focused on the hardware because we think that really unlocks the much bigger potential in Swim. Well, yeah. And again, that idea of pivoting as you make your learnings is so much of one of those key qualities that successful entrepreneurs have. have. Let's talk a bit about the product then. So you pivot into this kind of product direction, and this is where the, well, this is where the zygo comes from, right?

22:24It's not just a kind of, this wasn't a name cooked up by brand marketers. It's a truncation of, I mean, you're going to help me out a little bit here, Shira. This is how it works, right? It's bone conducted sound. Explain this in a more lucid way than I've tried to do it. Yeah, yeah, no. And bone conduction has been around like you know hearing aids use forms of bone conduction and so that's not really the tech that we innovate innovated on but in terms of sound quality underwater bone conduction was better than in ear so you didn't worry about like water getting in your ear so we liked the idea of keeping it bone conduction and then with our first class company it was called swim team which was very not ownable it's so general and so we're like okay we're gonna make a new name for this hardware where we really want it to be ownable.

23:09And when Charlie and I were doing some research on bone conduction, I remember he was sitting on a couch in his parents' house. And bone conduction works because it vibrates the bone in your face called your zygomatic arch. And so when we did that research, it was like zygomatic. It was like, what about zygo? So we shortened that word and we liked it because Z is a cool letter to have in your brand. And then it had the word go in it and felt very active. And so we went with zygo as a name. There we are, you see. There's a science to these brands often that people won't always appreciate. Exactly, where people are doing things properly.

23:46So listen, give us some numbers. Just tell us about the product then, bringing it to market, what kind of uptake you got. You kind of had run some pretty robust consumer testing because you'd done it there and then people need to go on your website. This kind of changes the way people are living their lives and choosing to exercise from the testimonials, which must be amazing. But give us an idea about the kind of numbers that you guys have been doing and what the growth story has been like? Yeah, I think in the beginning, our ignorance in terms of building a hardware product, we thought, okay, we'll take a year to develop and then we can go to market.

24:19And that was at the end of 2017. And it took us a full three years to develop with getting the patents and the antenna technology. And it's really a to physics to transmit audio through water. So it took us a lot longer to even get our first product to market. We did an initial Indiegogo campaign to kind of test the waters, if you will. And we knew our first production run would be a thousand units. So our goal was to sell a thousand units. So we had like an initial customer base that we could send it to. And we hit that target. We started shipping in September of 2020. And then our first full year, we've always been budget constrained.

25:05We haven't raised a ton of money, especially compared to other hardware startups from scratch. But in our first year, we did a little bit over$2 million in sales. And we were just selling on our website. And it was in the midst of COVID as well. So some of our like go to market strategies had to be pivoted upon as well, just because people weren't meeting in person. So that changed it a bit. And then our second year, we did a little over three and a half million dollars in sales. And then this past year, we basically stopped the first version and we focused the whole year on R &Ding for our second version, which we're calling Z2.

25:44Because as any hardware product in market, you learn very quickly what goes wrong and you can fix some of it. But some of it you just have to put into the next product release. And we felt like it was time to focus on all the learnings we had from two to three years in market to put into a much better product. And we just launched our Z2 really at the beginning of this year. And so we're super excited about getting this one to market the better performance, better range. It doesn't cut out during flip turns and focusing on our app that has guided content. and it'll eventually have lap counting and other features that get us really excited.

26:25So we're really hoping that this year is a big growth year for us. Absolutely. And as you said, you get that sense of how to innovate in an iterative way, and you can do that with new models. Just tell me, in terms of this entrepreneurial journey, and we started off here a bit by talking about that, you're a product developer, right? You're selling products. And that's not, I guess, what you sort of were trained in, in that sense. How do you ensure, other than just learning by doing, which is so much of the journey you've described to us, how do you ensure you're staying at the cutting edge and that you're surrounding yourself with the right people and that you're challenging received wisdom without having a long background in product development?