827 Kevin Keller: Co-Founder of Fulton & Roark

0:00I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out.

0:14Kara Goldin:So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Today's episode is brought to you by Warby Parker. Buying glasses used to feel way more complicated than it should have been. Overpriced, overwhelming, and full of styles that just didn't feel like you. It honestly felt like you needed a spreadsheet just to make sense of it all.

0:58Kara Goldin:This is why I'm obsessed with Warby Parker. I'm actually wearing mine right now. These are the pair I picked. I wish you could see them. And what I love is how lightweight and well-made they feel. The style is modern, the materials feel premium, and I've gotten a lot of compliments on them. One of the coolest features is their virtual try-on. You can literally use your phone, point the camera at your face, and see how different frames look on you in real time, and it actually works. Plus, these prescription glasses start at just$95, and they design everything in-house, so you're getting high-quality, stylish frames at a really accessible price.

1:40Kara Goldin:They also have everything in one place, glasses, sunglasses, contacts, even eye exams, and over 300 retail stores if you want to go in person. Warby Parker just makes the entire process easier. Right now, buy one prescription pair and get 20 % off any additional prescription pairs at warbyparker.com slash Karagolden. That's 20 % off additional prescription pairs when you go to warbyparker.com slash Karagolden. This episode of the Karagolden Show is brought to you by Grooms. Spring always feels like a reset button for me. It's when I try to clean up my routines and get back to consistency. But let's be honest, when life gets busy, complicated wellness routines just don't stick.

2:32Kara Goldin:That's why I've been loving Grooms. Grooms makes it incredibly simple. It's a daily snack pack of gummies that covers your vitamins, minerals, greens, and prebiotics, all in one. So instead of juggling a bunch of bottles, it's just one easy step I can actually stay consistent with, even if it's just one gummy to get started. And what's wild is how much they pack in. over 20 vitamins and minerals, 60 ingredients, plus 6 grams of prebiotic fiber. That's more fiber than two cups of broccoli. It's vegan, gluten-free, no artificial colors or flavors, and it tastes great. It actually feels like a treat, not something I have to force myself to take.

3:19Kara Goldin:I've found it's just an easy way to support energy digestion and overall wellness without overthinking it. If you're looking to simplify your routine, definitely check it out. Save up to 52 % off with code GOLDEN at grooms.co. That's called GOLDEN at G-R-U-N-S dot C-O. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Cara Golden Show. Today, I'm joined by Kevin Keller, who is the co-founder of Fulton & Rourke, an American fine fragrance brand that's redefining what modern fragrance can and should look like. Kevin and his co-founder, Alan Schaefer, launched the company back in 2013 with just$11 ,000 and no outside funding.

4:09Kara Goldin:Woohoo! Starting with a completely different take on fragrance, a solid portable format designed for real life. So fast forward to today and Fulton & Rourke has grown into a nationally distributed and recognized brand carried in hundreds of retail locations, including great luxury places like Neiman Marcus, hotel properties, all while staying profitable and growing at triple digit rates. And what I love about Kevin's story is how intentional the brand has been from the very beginning and from product design to distribution to building a modern definition of luxury. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro.

4:55Kara Goldin:Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing. Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical. Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job.

5:47Kara Goldin:Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire.

6:27Kara Goldin:Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. It's kind of wild that in 2026, so many small business owners are still making post office runs or paying way too much for outdated postage meters. It's 2026, not 1926. That's why I use stamps.com. With stamps.com, you can mail and ship anytime you want, right from your computer or phone, 24-7. No long lines, no running out of supplies, just print postage on demand and get access to discounts of up to 90 % off carrier rates from USPS, UPS, and FedEx. You can schedule carrier pickups right from your door and get carrier-compliant labels every time.

7:24Kara Goldin:No errors, no rejected mail, no wasted trips. It's perfect for business. Send certified mail, track documents to confirm delivery, and see exactly what you've sent and spent. For nearly 30 years, millions of customers have relied on Stamps.com to make mailing and shipping faster and simpler. I used to block out time every week just for post office runs. Now I handle everything from my desk in a fraction of the time. Stamps.com has genuinely changed how I run my business, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it saved me hours every single week. Right now, you can try Stamps.com risk-free for 60 days.

8:08Kara Goldin:Go to Stamps.com and use code CARA to get 60 days risk-free. 60 days gives you plenty of time to see exactly how much time and money you're saving on every shipment. That's Stamps.com, code CARA. That's Stamps.com, code CARA. Kevin, welcome to the CARA Golden Show. So excited to meet you and to have you here. Yeah, glad to be here. Super, super excited. You have done such an incredible job and I'm such a big fan. So I had seen your products before and I had smelled your products before, but I didn't know how vast it was. I mean, it's a pretty big collection. I always say when you feel like you've discovered something in a brand, then it's probably older than it is, right?

9:05Kara Goldin:You're probably not. It wasn't just created six months ago. But anyway, for listeners who may not know Fulton & Rourke yet, how do you describe the brand and what makes it different? Yeah, so we call it what we do, American Fine Fragrance. And the backstory there is not like a really a American superiority kind of story or anything like that, but rather we just saw this interesting arc when we were getting started with fragrance in a lot of other creative endeavors. We saw it with wine, we saw it with beer, coffee, chocolate, music, where Americans, we have this little sense of insecurity, I think, that comes from being a relatively new country.

9:45And so when creators get started, they often mimic the European status quo. So you think about wine and you think about New York wines from the 1950s with the fake Italian or French label on the front and it's not very good. Or you think about Budweiser beer, it's kind of this knockoff of a German beer. and we go along our way, but eventually when Americans do their best creative work, I found is when they stop with that. They've learned all the rules and then they choose to break them. And that's when you go from the New York fake Italian wine to the California cab that is distinctly American.

10:26That's its own thing. That's how you go from Budweiser to the Imperial IPA that's bourbon barrel aged and really eccentric. we've done it in so many things but in the fragrance industry we found when we were getting started 13 years ago that that that feeling still persisted that that even american fragrance companies were still really uh mimicking the the french way of doing things and we love the french maisons we think it's really cool what they're doing but we wanted to look to different formats to different ingredients and and just kind of looking uh to do fragrance in a distinctly American way.

11:04Kara Goldin:Today's episode is brought to you by Warby Parker. Buying glasses used to feel way more complicated than it should have been. Overpriced, overwhelming, and full of styles that just didn't feel like you. It honestly felt like you needed a spreadsheet just to make sense of it all. This is why I'm obsessed with Warby Parker. I'm actually wearing mine right now. These are the pair I picked. I wish you could see them. And what I love is how lightweight and well made they feel. The style is modern, the materials feel premium, and I've gotten a lot of compliments on them. One of the coolest features is their virtual try-on.

11:42Kara Goldin:You can literally use your phone, point the camera at your face, and see how different frames look on you in real time, and it actually works. Plus, these prescription glasses start at just$95, and they design everything in-house so you're getting high quality stylish frames at a really accessible price. They also have everything in one place, glasses, sunglasses, contacts, even eye exams, and over 300 retail stores if you want to go in person. Warby Parker just makes the entire process easier. Right now, buy one prescription pair and get 20 % off any additional prescription pairs at warbyparker.com slash Kara Golden.

12:27Kara Goldin:That's 20 % off additional prescription pairs when you go to w-a-r-b-y parker.com slash Kara Golden. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Grooms. Spring always feels like a reset button for me. It's when I try to clean up my routines and get back to consistency. But let's be honest, when life gets busy, complicated wellness routines just don't stick. That's why I've been loving Grooms. Grooms makes it incredibly simple. It's a daily snack pack of gummies that covers your vitamins, minerals, greens, and prebiotics, all in one. So instead of juggling a bunch of bottles, it's just one easy step I can actually stay consistent with, even if it's just one gummy to get started.

13:18Kara Goldin:And what's wild is how much they pack in over 20 vitamins and minerals, 60 ingredients plus 6 grams of prebiotic fiber. That's more fiber than two cups of broccoli. It's vegan, gluten-free, no artificial colors or flavors, and it tastes great. It actually feels like a treat, not something I have to force myself to take. I've found it's just an easy way to support energy digestion and overall wellness without overthinking it. If you're looking to simplify your routine, definitely check it out. Save up to 52 % off with code GOLDEN at grooms.co. That's called GOLDEN at G-R-U-N-S dot C-O. So how did you know you could do this?

14:11Kara Goldin:Did you come from this world I mean, this is a big undertaking. No. And speaking of feeling insecure about it, I'd been a reporter and then I'd gone and first hard news, later worked in the music industry for a magazine called Paste Magazine. My partner had been a coffee importer and roaster, like really great high-end coffee. And we were both totally fascinated by fragrance. We were interested in the category. And we really started with more of a focus on men's because we thought it was just so little out there. We thought it was not very thoughtfully done. And so we thought, okay, you know, if we were going to create a men's line, how would we do it?

14:56And eventually we thought, you know, despite not having experience in this industry, we do feel like we've got something to offer here. And so for, we were in business school and we had our internships over the summer. And then it was such a weird time because every night after my internship, I'd go hang out in Alan's basement for hours. And we were pouring over every book we could get our hands on about fragrance. We were playing with essential and fragrance oils, trying to figure out how it all worked. and we were just voracious for a year and a half and eventually thought, yeah, I think we can do this.

15:35Kara Goldin:Today's episode is brought to you by Warby Parker. Buying glasses used to feel way more complicated than it should have been. Overpriced, overwhelming, and full of styles that just didn't feel like you. It honestly felt like you needed a spreadsheet just to make sense of it all. This is why I'm obsessed with Warby Parker. I'm actually wearing mine right now. These are the pair I picked. I wish you could see them. And what I love is how lightweight and well-made they feel. The style is modern, the materials feel premium, and I've gotten a lot of compliments on them. One of the coolest features is their virtual try-on.

16:14Kara Goldin:You can literally use your phone, point the camera at your face, and see how different frames look on you in real time. And it actually works. Plus, these prescription glasses start at just$95 and they design everything in-house. So you're getting high quality stylish frames at a really accessible price. They also have everything in one place, glasses, sunglasses, contacts, even eye exams and over 300 retail stores if you want to go in person. Warby Parker just makes the entire process easier. Right now buy one prescription pair and get 20 % off any additional prescription pairs at warbyparker.com slash Karagolden.

16:58Kara Goldin:That's 20 % off additional prescription pairs when you go to warbyparker.com slash Karagolden. That's amazing. So did this start out as a business school project then? No, it was funny. I mean, we were in the middle of business school and we met each other or got to know each other well in school. But it was really just kind of a fascination. We found we worked really well together. And we just took the opportunity while we were in school to, you know, poke all of our professors to leverage everything we had at our disposal at business school to do what felt like a very un-business school thing, to make things in a time where everybody wanted to do subscriptions and services and tech.

17:49But yeah, it was just really kind of a passion project.

17:53Kara Goldin:Did the two of you, you know, thinking back, I guess, what, 14, 15 years when you were sort of incubating this idea, did you want to do a company together? Did you feel like, you know, you're co-founders of Folden and Rourke. So did you look at like skill sets and, or did you just, did you have the idea and then say, hey, you want to do it? Or Like, how did that all work? Because I know often when co-founders are coming together, there's two different ways to do it. I mean, maybe you're both kind of thinking about the same sort of thing, but then you have the exact same skill sets and often that doesn't work.

18:33Kara Goldin:But I know you two have very, very different skill sets and that's probably a big, big plus. yeah and it was funny i mean we we really are one of those opposites attract kind of uh duos in business but we had a lot of shared um aesthetic principles um i think just general character kinds of things what we thought was important in a lot of ways we we really synced up had a lot of similar fascinations on the music side, culturally. And so we had a lot of common ground. It wasn't just, hey, we're both complementary. There was a lot that we shared, too. So you launched the company with just$11 ,000.

19:20Kara Goldin:Can you take us back to those days? Because that number is, you know, still a lot of money. And certainly if you're coming out of business school, but it's probably kind of doable for a founder, like hearing that story that's so inspiring for somebody listening who's thinking, okay, I've got this idea and Kevin just went with$11 ,000. I'm sure there was a lot of add-on money after that to get it going, but what was kind of the thinking and maybe what did you spend the money on initially and how far did that get you? Yeah, so it was a difficult thing Um, I had been a reporter before, like I mentioned, uh, reporters, as you know, uh, are not pulling down huge amounts of money.

20:08So I had just taken out a hundred thousand dollars to go to grad school and student loans. Um, and so I was, um, I was, you know, my, my wife and I were, were doing our best, but we were pretty broke. Uh, and, but also because of, I think my background and, and Alan's too, we were scrappy. and we also had some great advice along the way. And so, you know, thinking about a company like ours, Kickstarter was pretty new, but, you know, I thought it was really important that we not launch our company as though it were some sort of experiment. You know, we really did want to have a perspective, a finished product.

20:50We thought in fragrance and in the beauty industry in general, it's, you know, it borders on art in a lot of ways. And so this idea that of it just being a concept, we just didn't think that would do. And so the real problem for us is that we were making things. And so, you know, you need money to make things. Luckily, we had a friend of mine who was not a close friend and something I think a lot about those those loose connections. You know, I knew Brandon, who became our packaging designer, just kind of tangentially a friend of a friend, really. But I called him and I said, hey, we've got this idea for a solid wax based fragrance.

21:33Would you be up for designing that? I could pay you whatever. And we ended up, he said, look, I'll do it for free. It just sounds like a fun project and helped get that going. And we made up for that with a small equity exchange later, mostly because we thought it was the right thing to do. And he seemed pleased by it. But our designers who helped us get all the branding and packaging right, Jose and Nicole Reyes of the Metal Leap Creative Agency, they were old friends of mine. I'd help them get a startup or kind of a not-for-profit off the ground. And so I went to them and said, I can't afford to pay you what you're worth.

22:15But I thought maybe they had an intern or somebody who could help us with, you know, packaging design, business cards, website kind of stuff. And they said, you're right, you absolutely can't afford us. But what if we set up kind of a debt to equity agreement? So they just said, here's what it would cost for us to do this. And then over time, you can pay it back or we can exchange that at a multiple that we agree on at a later date. And so we were able to move some of those costs to later. And so that$11 ,000 was what it cost us to get our first round of inventory made, to go to our first couple of trade shows.

22:58And luckily for us, within the first few months, we were able to start making some profits and turning that around. And we bootstrapped all the way to now by just, I think, being really focused and disciplined and conservative in a lot of ways, I suppose.

23:19Kara Goldin:I love it. So the brand is Fulton & Rourke. And can you share the story? I love the dog story behind the Fulton & Rourke. So can you share that? Sure. So it was funny. My wife and I had kind of a funny story. We met in Atlanta. We were both reporters and we got married and picked up the moving truck the next day to leave Atlanta and move to Winston-Salem for me to go to school here. and we were desperately homesick and got a dog almost immediately. That thing you do when you're newly married, I think, is like a new standard, right? And so we named him Fulton after Fulton County, where Atlanta is based.

24:06And then my partner, his favorite place to ride his bike when he was at Suwannee, University of the South, was this road called Rourke's Cove Road. And it runs through the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. And I've been there. It's beautiful, too. And so it's kind of funny. We didn't really even think too much about it at the time. But both of our dogs got these names from places. And so when we were creating the brand, authenticity was really important to us. But we also wanted a name that sounded like it maybe had been around for 100 years or maybe it was brand new. It was hard to tell.

24:43And so Keller and Schaefer, we thought sounded both very German and very much like a law firm, our last names. And so I joked like, well, our dogs have better names for this. We should just name it that. And it became kind of just our placeholder name. And then eventually we had to put something on the packaging. We ran out of time and we're like, well, we never did think of anything better. And so it stuck. And so, yeah, our dogs are the namesake of our brand.

25:11Kara Goldin:I love it. So you started with solid fragrance, which was pretty unconventional at the time, versus like a traditional spray. For those who aren't familiar with kind of those terms in your category, can you talk about that and why you decided to make that decision? Yeah. When we started the company, we wanted to have a real focus on all of the little details about your life, thinking about the way you get ready, where you get ready, the size of your dop kit, all these different factors. And when we thought about all the things that we had to offer, we thought, let's just pretend like no grooming or fragrance products exist.

25:55What would we make? And we just thought, you know, in an era where a lot of our customers are getting on a plane a couple of times a week or they're getting ready at the gym, a glass bottle of flammable liquid shouldn't be your only option for fragrance. And so I'd had a bag explode or a bottle explode in my bag when I was traveling one time. So I knew that firsthand. And so we thought, well, I've actually got one here, if that's helpful. It's just we took this metal container and took all that we loved about fragrance and put it in a wax format. So you just swipe on top and apply to your pulse points and you get, you know, the fragrance behaves in a lot of ways the same way it would with a fragrance.

26:37You have a colorless, odorless base, just like you would with a spray fragrance, but nothing to spill or leak or break. And it's a little bit more subdued. We refer to it as kind of an introvert's fragrance. So it doesn't take over the room, but it's easy to reapply without everyone in the room knowing that you've reapplied your fragrance. And so that was our first product. At the time, nobody was doing that really. And so it was definitely an uphill battle to get people to know this unheard of company with unexperienced fragrances in a format no one was familiar with. We made things a little hard for ourselves to start, but it was fun.

27:17Kara Goldin:And how many SKUs did you launch with? We launched with three. And we were just really intentional about, you know, going to every retailer that we admired and just staying in the store asking questions until nobody ever actually kicked us out. We figured eventually someone would say, you got to go. But that was that was the advice we got from retailers where we started was just, yeah, three seems like a magic number. And so that was that was how we got started. And then you moved over to traditional sprays, which you have today. And how many SKUs do you have today? far too many uh we've probably got uh 100 maybe more skews in total we have um we have 25 fragrances at this point um and and part of the reason for that is one of the things that i love about fulton and rourke is we have a really wide customer base we we have a little a bit more women than men, but about 50-50 men-women.