How I Built This with Guy Raz - Title Nine: Missy Park

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

As an avid athlete and college basketball player, Missy Park was lucky to grow up during the early era of Title IX, the 1972 law that created new opportunities for young women to play sports. But in the years before Lululemon and Athleta, activewear for women was either ill-fitting or non-existent. So in 1989—with little experience in apparel or retail—Missy decided to launch a female version of Nike. She sent out a mail order catalog of running shorts, tights, and (at the last minute) sports bras; naming her company for the law that had opened doors for her to compete: Title Nine. Over the years, the company kept "hitting singles," eventually growing into a $100 million dollar business without ever taking outside investment. Today, Missy remains the sole owner. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special.

There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place. Looking to grow your business, Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing

through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb. It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city,

made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better your home might be worth more than you think find out how much at arbb.ca slash host so you get these catalogs 15 or 20,000 catalogs and how did you do how many orders did you get from those so we put those catalogs and then i'm just waiting for the phone during Yeah. And?

Waiting. And? Waiting. Okay. And I think we got a whopping, maybe 15 orders, maybe seven of them were from someone that I did not know. Wow. That's for mailing out over 20,000 catalogs. That's the hit rate.

Super sad. Super sad. From NPR, it's how I built this. A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind. behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Missy Park's frustration with bad-fitting sports gear led her to launch Title IX,

one of the very first American sportswear brands exclusively for women. About a year ago, I was riding my bike near the railroad tracks in Berkeley, California, when I passed a clothing store with an unusual name. The store was called Title IX, and, I thought it might have something to do with a law, but a law I couldn't remember right at that moment. So a few days later, I looked it up. Title IX, I was reminded, was a U.S. civil rights law passed in 1972. It prohibited discrimination based on sex in any federally funded school or educational program.

And among the things the law did was to open up high school and college sports to women. colleges and universities that received federal dollars now had to provide the same opportunities for women to participate in sports as they did for men. According to the Women's Sports Foundation, before 1972, just one in 27 young women played sports. Today, the number is two out of five. In that year, 1972, less than 20% of all the athletes on the U.S. Olympic Games, team were women. But by 2016, nearly 55% of the team was female. And much of this is because of Title IX. The same year Title IX was required to take effect in schools, 1976, Missy Park joined her high school basketball team in Greenville, South Carolina. She'd go on to play Division I

basketball at Yale. But after years of wearing bad-fitting sports apparel as a student-athlete, Missy decided to solve her own problem. And in 1989, long before anyone would hear the names Lulu Lemon or Athleta, Missy Park founded Title IX, one of the first brands to make sports apparel for women. Now, today, many of those other brands are multi-billion dollar companies, either backed by venture capital or publicly traded. But Title IX is comparatively small. This year, it will do roughly 100,000.

million dollars in revenue. And unlike its competitors, Title IX is owned only by one person. Missy Park. She bootstrapped the brand from day one and built it very, very slowly. If the company grew by five or even 10% a year, that was considered a victory. And that slow growth has allowed the company to build a sustainable and supportive culture. Missy Park grew up in the 60s and in Greenville, South Carolina, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Her dad was a World War II veteran and became kind of an overnight entrepreneur when he bought the small manufacturing company that he once worked for. And as for her mom? My mom, on the other hand, was a stay-at-home mom, and we always accuse her of being part of a

secret feminist cell in Greenville, South Carolina in the 60s. because she was what? She thought women ought to be paid for birthing babies. Yeah. I would say that was pretty ahead of her time. My mom and dad had separate checking accounts. I remember my mom fighting to get her credit card in her own name rather than in Mrs. Russell Hunter Park.

So my mom loved being a full-time homemaker, but she thought it was a position worth paying for. And this was really, I mean, this was, people don't remember. I mean, the 70s was, I mean, this was, I mean, this. This is the era of ERA, Equal Rights Amendment, and of Shirley Chisholm and Bella Absog, you know, with her hats, right? There was huge leaps and strides that happened in the 70s. And from your description of your mom, she was either secretly harboring those feelings or maybe not so secretly harboring them. Yeah. Well, you know, my parents were so unusual.

Like my mom was in charge of the girls and our allowances. And we had budgets and we had to reconcile at the end of every month. And we had to give money to savings and to offerings. And each year we would take on other responsibilities. It was her expectation that we would go up to be financially independent women capable of running our own finances and our own life. Yeah. And as a little girl, or maybe even a young teen, did you know for sure you were not going to end up living in Greenville, South Carolina?

No. I would say I'm the kind of person that maybe everybody else is for sure about it and no one's more surprised than me. You know, I really loved growing up in Greenville. It was at the time a great place for me. It's a small place. I could ride my bike everywhere. I was in that first generation of girls and women that were able to grow up with Title IX being in effect all the way through high school and all the way through college. And of course, Title IX just kind of opened up sports for women and girls at the time. And you got to play lots of things. Yes, I got to play every sport. You know, I mean, coming up when I did, especially as a girl, you just played all the sports. And if you were willing to play and you were willing to try, you were pretty

good because there weren't as many women pouring into the sports and fields as there are now. So, yes, we will say, Guy, I think that I was a big fish in a very small pond. I think that's what I'll say. Well, I'm curious because here you are, you were in a small southern town in the 70s. being a debutante as a was, some extent still is, but less so, was a kind of a cultural phenomenon in the South. Was there, like, were you a debutante, for example? Oh my gosh, I hate your guts right now. So let's just go on the record right now. I hate your guts.

Yes, I was a debutante. Now you and me and all of your listeners know that. And in my home office here, you could see my little rebellion against that. There's a picture of me, what, about 19 and a white gown with long gloves that actually won't go up above my upper arm and biceps, sadly. And I'm spinning a basketball and I have my basketball sneakers on. So you were forced or kind of pressured to be a debaeton? You know, here's the danger of things like that.

Yeah, I'm just a kid. This is where I grow up. Yeah, sure. And now I look back on it and I see it differently. But it was one of those things, you know, I love my mom and dad and had very quickly understood, like, there's some battles that if you can give in and it's not much skin off my back. Yeah. Then I should just do it because it's going to make my mom so happy. But it is the source of a lot of amusement amongst my family and close friends more because it's so different.

From who you are. From who I am. Exactly. Yeah. And how would you describe yourself as a teenager? Were you, did you get along with everybody? Were you a pleaser? No.

No. Definitely not a pleaser. I would say I'm pretty loud. I speak before I think. I have strong opinions that can change quickly. I think it was an okay student. I think I got along with. well with most folks. Yeah. I mean, you must have been better than an okay student because you went to

Yale. You attended Yale. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I will also tell you this, that we joke about it in my family, but my parents' single greatest failing is that they have a daughter that went to Yale. Because? There's an awful lot of good schools in the South. Sure. And there are. So I think that I think my parents really wanted me to go to one of those great southern schools. All right. You're 1980, I think, about 1980. You get to New Haven. Yep. You played several sports there, lacrosse, tennis, and basketball. You are an athlete. That is your, was that your identity, your self-identity as an athlete?

Totally. Yeah. You get to Yale, your Missy Park, the basketball player. Yes, the southern basketball player when I get to Yale. Yeah. And just to be clear, there were. There were women's sports, right, at Yale. They had been for a long time. Yep, yep. But the difference when you got there was Title IX, which was passed in 172, was in full effect, right?

Right. And so what did that mean when you got to Yale, 1980, as a student athlete? Well, I think a lot with my generation in particular guy, you know, yes, Title IX was passed. Yes, the 70s had happened. But we were still in that place of everything that we gain is a loss for the guys on the other side of it. That was a perspective that you as a woman athlete are taking away resources from me as a male athlete. Exactly. And in some ways, yes, that was true.

It's like all of a sudden the men's basketball team doesn't have the pick of all of the basketball. practice times. They have to share them with the women's team. Do those four years feel like there were battles? Yeah. Well, I think it also, it goes to sort of the genesis of Title IX, the company, is, you know, me and my teammates are getting uniforms that are hand-me-down men's uniforms. I remember my buddy, Regina Sullivan, she wore, I think, like a size six and a half, half women's shoe, but they don't make women's shoes. So she had to go to like the little kids department at Macy's and buy some little boy sneakers. So the sense of having to create the traditions around a team, what it means to get success while at the same time fighting for the good

practice times, marketing support in the community, those were battles being fought on two fronts for sure. And as I said, the genesis of Title IX. I mean, I remember my buddies and I were all like, oh, when we graduate from college, we're going to go get some experience. And then we're going to start the women's version of Nike. Of course, they all went and got really good jobs in investment banking. Finance, right? Sure. Finance. Procter & Gamble, Microsoft. And I was the only one that actually ended up not getting one of those good jobs. So I had to figure out something else to do. All right, you graduate around 84. And from what I gather, you decided that you would go into coaching, that maybe you would like explore becoming a professional coach of some sort.

Right. I was lucky enough to be offered a job at our arch rival at Harvard. And then I found it very difficult to coach against my former teammates and a job opened up at Yale the following year. But I think I realized at that point that coaching a team was never going to be the same thing as playing on a team. Yeah. There's a book by David Epstein called The Sports Gene, and he makes an analogy between a player and a coach. And the analogy is, just because you're a bird, it doesn't mean you can be an ornithologist. And I think that's right. Well, yes, correct. And I think that's right.

All right. So you realize that college or basketball coaching is not the right fit for you. And it's the mid-80s. You're from Greenville, South Carolina. You're living in New England. What got you out to the West Coast? What was it? I knew I didn't want to live in the South.

Okay. I knew I didn't want to be cold. Fair enough. I knew I didn't have any money. Yep. My brother lived in California. So I packed up my, I had a Toyota pickup truck. I packed up all of my worldly belongings.

And my parents had given me a tent for graduation from college because they knew exactly what I would want. A tent. That's a good, yeah, right? Like, who, what southern parent? I mean, like, who would do that? Right? but they knew I wanted a tent. So I, in those days, you had to seam seal the tent to seal up all the little needle holes so it wouldn't leak.

And I'm unrolling the tent and I'm taking off the hang tag. And I look at it and it says, the North Face, 999 Harrison Street, Berkeley, California. Wow. So I moved in with my brother. I'd also led some bike trips for kids. So I really loved cycling. And it was like, okay, I either want to work for a bike company or I want to work for the North Face. Yeah.

So I started just walking into bike shops, asking them, you know, about bike companies that were in California and how I might get a job. And one of those bike shops, I ran into a guy by the name of Michael Phillips, who happened to be a sales rep for some old bike brand. And he's like, you're looking for a job? He's like, well, why don't you come ride with me in my van for a day while I call on customers? I can teach you about the business. Wow. Well, my brother had different ideas. Right.

He was like, this guy's creepy. Don't do it. Exactly. Right. So while that was going on, Michael, and then at the same time, I was kind of trying to find my way into the North Face. And I had heard at the time that there was another young woman about my age. age that was leading up the equipment division at the North Face, a woman by the name of Sally McCoy, who was from Charlotte, North Carolina, and had gone to Dartmouth and was a little bit older than I was.

So I was like, okay, she's the person I need to talk to. Yeah. But I can't get anybody. You know, you're not emailing people. Like, maybe you write them a letter. Yeah. I don't know what you do. Well, what I do is I find out 999 Harrison Street and I walk into the reception area.

and I'm like, I'd like to see Sally McCoy. And I'm like, well, do you have an appointment? No, I don't. But, well, she's busy. I'm like, okay, well, I'll just wait. So I wait and I wait. And I'm there pretty much all day. And finally, this guy comes down the stairs that jump into the front lobby.

And he's like, you know, you've been here all day. long time. Is there anybody helping you? I'm like, well, no, I really want to talk to this woman, Sally McCoy, but she seems to be very busy. He goes, well, maybe I can help you. This guy's name was Mark Erickson, and he was, I think, the vice president of product. I was super disappointed to be talking to him, but he ended up getting my foot in the door at the North Face, And I ended up meeting Sally McCoy and a really interesting group of business women. And that was really my first exposure to a real job. I mean, it's interesting because you wanted to work for that company.

You were a student athlete and you were really passionate. And one of your principles as a leader is hire for passion. you can train people to do the business stuff. Don't worry about skills or training like hire for passion, which I think is a thousand percent right. Like people have to believe in the mission of what you're doing. That's more important than anything else. And then you can train them. Well, I think that was it.

They had this thing that needed doing and it was very entrepreneurial. You just had such a broad range of things that you could do. I mean, they strongly believed in the, it's easier to be forgiven than to obtain permission rule. So it's a great. And right, honestly, you know, I think about it. It was such a good. So the first job I got, strangely enough, was putting together a retail point of sale catalog for them.

So it's going to be like a magazine that was going to sit in their retail stores. I mean, I don't have any skills. I mean, like literally zero skills. listen, there I am. I'm working with a graphic designer. I'm working with photographers. I'm going on photo shoots. I wrote copy about products that I didn't really know anything about. Fortunately, there was a lot of supervision. I really wasn't doing all that, but I was sort of the person kind of making sure everything held together in the end. Yeah. And by the way, I think while you were at North Face, you met someone who worked there who would eventually become your life partner,

your wife, right? That's right, actually. How I met her is Sally had recommended that all of the managers, Sally McCoy, the original woman I wanted to talk to, had recommended that all the managers take a look and see if they had any job openings. And Dana, my wife, happened to have one. So I actually interviewed with Dana for the job that. she had that I really, really wanted, even though I was colossally unsuited for it.

So I did not get the job, but more importantly, I got the girl. And the truth of the matter is that my buddy Michael Phillips, who was not an axe murderer, but ended up being a very good man who mentored me. He actually hooked me up with Fisher Mountain Bikes, and I applied for a job there. I didn't get the job at Fisher Mountain Bikes, but my parents raised me right, and they told me to make sure to write thank you notes. And the person they did hire ended up not working out. And they called me and said, hey, the job's yours if you want it. So I went to work at Fisher, which was one of the first, if not the first mountain bike company.

Yeah, I think it was. Gary Fisher, right? Yes. I mean, these are a pioneering. years of like outdoor gear, mountain biking. And I got to work with them. And I'm like 26. Yeah. And I think good job experience is wasted on the young. That's what I think in my short version is that. So I went to work at Fisher and inside sales. And that was me calling on bike shops. But suffice it to say, most bike shop guys were not used to having a woman calling them on the phone.

I mean, you must have really stood out. I mean, here we are talking in 2021. You've been in California since 1985, and, I mean, your accent sticks out, right? I mean, but you really rarely run into people in Berkeley with a South Carolina accent. No, I know. Yeah, I think I stuck out for good or real. And you were, from what I read, I think your brother lived across the bay. south of the airport in Foster City. Eventually, presumably, you moved to Berkeley because you were working for, you would work for Fisher and for North Face.

Yes, I had a job with a paycheck so I can afford to have a room in a house. When you were a student athlete, right, you imagine we're already thinking about the fact that the clothing made for women athletes was not well thought out. While you were working at North Base, from what I've read, you were thinking about this problem, that there was no good athletic gear for women. Yeah, you know, Guy, it's funny because here's the thing I think about a lot. I mean, I'm assuming you know about the narrative fallacy, right? Like this idea that we end up at a certain place and then we make up this really nice story that proceeds logically from point A to point Z.

Yeah. It's just, it's just a lie. So I want to tell all this to you, but it's going to be completely misleading that like, oh, and then I went to you where I found ill-fitting uniforms. And then I went to the North Face and was frustrated. No, I was just, and I guess I think, I used to think, to use an old school analogy,

I used to think I was the person operating the flippers on the, the pinball machine. Uh-huh. I'm the ball. Right. You know, I mean, I think that's, so I'm having all of these experiences, right? You were bouncing around. Right.

I'm just bouncing around. 500 points, free ball. Yay, okay. I'm going to play. I'm going to keep playing. But so I want to make sure, like, that part of it is clear. This was, I mean, I am not foresighted enough to have planned what happened to me. And just to be clear, almost nobody who's been on the show is.

There's no, I can't think of a single story where somebody said, you know, I was 18, I had this vision. Now I'm 55. And, you know, it kind of unfolds over time. And it's like being the ball and the pinball machine. Yes, exactly. And I think that's it. You know, so I can look back and I can see the thread. It's like I can look back on my time as a kid, you know, I'm like eight or nine or ten years old.

And at the time, there was basically one sports magazine, Sports Illustrated. And I would go through every single one of them and try and find pictures of women athletes. And I would painstakingly cut them out and put them on a poster board and have it up in my room. So you could say, like, it was already in me then. I wasn't thinking, like, and therefore I am going to start a women's athletic apparel company. Right. But the seeds were there early trying to create a vision of what I could be. What was women's sportswear in the 80s? I mean, Nike had been making stuff, but what did that mean? Well, it was kind of aerobics, right? I mean, Jane Fonda, it's kind of that kind of stuff. I mean, I think about, you know, for me, when you play college sports, you get all your gear given to you, ill-fitting or not. It's given to you.

It's given to you. They wash it for you. If it wears out, you get a new one. It's not your concern. Then I graduate from college and all of a sudden I'm having to buy my own gear. And there's nowhere to find anything that's built or designed specifically women. You know, there's no Lulu lemons. There's no, there's nothing. Literally there is nothing. And really, I mean, if you think about it, it's just, math, right? Title IX was passed in 72. So I was in that first generation. There was no market. What was it that, I mean, you're 27 and you decide at that age to start your own business. Were you frustrated working in for a bigger company? Did you, were you just one of these people who had to be your own boss? How did you, what do you remember about that? time in your life that led you to that decision? I would say probably that, you know, I think about the North Face. You know, I had great jobs, but I'm 26, and I'm like, boy, these guys are kind of idiots.

If they can run these businesses, then anybody can do it. You know, because I'm 26, and I know everything. Of course you do. You know, so it was frustration. They wouldn't do everything that I wanted them to do. They probably aren't even paying any attention to me. I'm like some entry-level person. They don't, you know, they're busy.

They've actually got important decisions to make where I'm down here seeing how idiotic everything is. Yeah. So I'm so confident, right? I remember that feeling. Yeah. Yeah. And I think my favorite part of it is like, and now, guy, I'm the idiot. But you know what?

Here's the thing, because we're both talking, we're both, you know, older and we're talking about remembering that feeling. And if you are listening and you are 26, it's okay to think that I'm an idiot or Missy's an idiot because that's the fuel you need to do something stupid enough to start a business that will ultimately be a good decision. Right. I mean, those are very, like people say, oh, how did you do that when you were 26? And I have to say it's the only time to do it. Yeah. And this is 1989, I think, when you decide to start the business. And what did you tell yourself? Did you say, you know, I'm going to start a women's apparel company because it's always been on my mind. Like what, how did you describe it to people? And they said, so what are you going to do now, Missy? Well, first I did zero market research. My market research was me and my friends, which let's just be very clear as a very small group of people. You just said, hey, would you use this? Hey, you need shorts that fit women, don't you? Yeah, me too. But I had enough to say, okay, there's not enough people in Berkeley, California to support a retail store just for women athletes. Yeah. So I need to do something that's more national so I can find all

the women who need workout and fitness gear. So I did sort of what is the precursor to the internet is that was a mail order catalog. Did you have, I mean, let's just back up for a second. I mean, what kind of money did you have to start an apparel company? Presumable you had some savings from your job. Yes, I did. Exactly. I had like 30,000 bucks and I can tell you. It's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, that's a nice amount of cash. Yeah. Yeah, okay. But what people were telling me is, you know, this time, right, this is 1989. And I'm talking to as many people as I could possibly talk to. I'm calling anybody that will talk to me on the phone. Asking them what? Hey, I've decided I want to start a mail order

catalog. You have started one. And all of them told me, if you're going to do this, you need at least a half a million dollars. To start a mail order catalog business, because this This was 89. This is how you marketed. You sent out millions of catalogs and then hopefully people would... Or not millions, guy, or not millions. Or not, okay. So people said you need at least a half a million bucks to make this work. Yep. That's intimidating. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, well, I don't have a half a million dollars. I have $30,000. So I call up my dad. I said, so dad, I'm super excited because I've got an idea for. for a business. And the best part about it is that no one else is doing it.

Yeah. And he's quiet for a second. And he said, there might be a good reason for that, Missy. When we come back in just a moment, how Missy struggles for months and then years to get Title IX going. And how she discovers the one item of clothing that will give her. the business a much-needed boost. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1989 and Missy has decided to quit her job and put $30,000 of her own money into launching a mail order

catalog for women's sportswear. And that $30,000 is pretty much all she has to spend on everything, including the clothes. But the good news is there are all these big manufacturers and small manufacturers who are starting to think about the coming women's market. Now, the retail stores are not necessarily buying the stuff because, obviously, they're worried about that a customer coming in today. But these manufacturers have to think about tomorrow. So lots of manufacturers were starting to what they used to call shrink it and pink it.

And I think they still call it that. They take their men's stuff and they do it over in pink and call it a day and make it smaller. So, but the good news about that is there were a lot of also small brands of women my age or a little bit older who were also starting to design and manufacture women's athletic apparel. So the idea was that you were not going to manufacture your own stuff. You were going to find. Couldn't afford it. Right. You can afford it.

You're going to find manufacturers. buy their stuff and then put it in the have a catalog and that that would be it. And eventually, I'm assuming you got connected to probably smaller manufacturers. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So yes, we could have gone into manufacturing and that probably would have cost me a half a million dollars, more, an unlimited amount of money. But what I realized pretty quickly is there were enough of these small brands, you know, Pearl Azumi, moving comfort was like the first women's running brand. So I started calling on folks like that. And, you know, mostly what I did is, well, one, again, I don't, I'm operating out of a garage in the house that I have a room in. You're living in like a group house with other people?

Yeah. I'm living in a group house. And I wanted the cheapest rent. So I got the room that was actually the garage. Nice. So, yeah, nice. So I have to go outside to go to the bathroom, come back in the house, go to go, yeah, whatever. And I'm trying to get these manufacturers to talk to me, but they're not going to talk to me if I'm meeting them in my garage. So I would go down to my brother's office in Foster City. I can't remember where he was. And I would meet people there in his office.

So it would be like official, right? This is pre-weework. You could, you are right? Yeah, way pre-Starbucks, really. Exactly. It was pre everything. So how am I going to fake this? Yeah.

And then finally, one of them asking, it's like, so what's going on here? And it ended up being the sales rep for moving comfort. And so then I just said, well, I'm starting. And I don't have an office. This is my brother's office. And she was very kind to me. She said, well, look, I'm going to, I've met you. I can see you're real.

Why don't we just come? I'll just come and show you the line. I'll show it to you. in your living room. And moving comfort was one of the first businesses that, I mean, they became our bank. And they were a manufacturer, Moving Comfort. Yep, a brand like Nike, but a small one. And they were like, okay, we're willing to work with you. Yeah.

And at this point, I know it's mainly you by yourself, right, actually running the company. But, I mean, did you have any help or support? Yes. I just was surrounded by a whole bunch of people who were willing and fired up about this idea. Who were they? My teammates, right? I was playing Ultimate Frisbee. My teammates were my early models.

And then one of my teammates happened to be a woman who was an editor at a women's sports and fitness magazine. So she became my first copy editor. She had a friend who was a graphic designer. So she designed the catalog for free. I had another friend who I met playing basketball. And she designed, because you had to have a corporate package. I don't know why, but that's what you needed. A corporate package was like a logo, letterhead, envelopes, all these things.

A brand. They call it a brand Bible now, I think. Yeah, you had to have that. So my friend Lisa did it all and threw in a table. t-shirt for $90. So I'm like, okay, that sounds like a good price. And the name, which is a great name, was it, had you thought of that name? Yeah.

That was the thing that was kind of hanging me up is I couldn't come up with the name. I come, I've gone through like four or five and somebody had all of them. You know, it's like, oh, it'll be cheetah sports because the female cheetah is whatever. Yeah. Yeah, faster. And then I remember I was up on telegraph, maybe walking. walking around Mo's books or that other bookstore that was right next to it. Yeah.

And I was just looking through books and I picked up this book and it was writing about the history of women's sports in America and I started reading it. And I was like, oh, Title IX. That's what I'll name my, and that was it. You know, no one wanted that name, unsurprisingly. So I named a Title IX after that piece of legislation that ensured that I got to play sports all the way through high school and college. And you were, the idea was you were going to sell like running shorts and tights and things like that? Yeah, well, remember, the customer was me.

So very narrow group of people, but it was me. I had, we had tights, we had running shorts, we had cycling shorts. We really didn't have much in the way of tops because you got all your tops for free at the races and the tournaments that you went to. Oh, okay. I was not a merchant. I mean, it's interesting because today, you know, Tauline is very well known for sports bras for women. But that was not like you weren't thinking, oh, we're going to sell sports prize. Well, so I put together this assortment of stuff, and it's a tiny little flyer of stuff.

And I really do not know anything about. the apparel industry. I knew what I was able to glean at the North Face, but I'm just assembling a group of merchandise that I can get people to sell to me on credit. And then at the last minute, I got in touch with the sales rep who was representing two women who had invented, I didn't know this at the time, but it invented the first sports bra. And I'm super flat-chested. We're going to say, double A on a good day. So that's an afterthought for me. me, but this guy, it was a guy, because most of the sales reps at that time were guys. He says, you know, I really think you ought to put these sports bras in there.

And by the way, were sports bras widely used in 1989? No, no, no. So what did women do who were women athletes do for support? They'd wear two and three bras guy. Oh, wow. So anyway, it's almost an afterthought. We bought some sports bras and we'd done all the shooting. It was all in color.

And so I just had time to take some real quick black and white photos, and we put them on what was then called the order form. This is in the catalog. Yeah, in the catalog. And then there's an order form in there. And so I put them in there. And I think we sent out like 15,000 catalogs. And by the way, I'm looking at some photos from that first catalog. And it is not a slick production at all.

It is – I mean, it's cool because all the – all the – the models are women athletes and they're not like glamour shots or some action shots, but they're very authentic. And these were like, these were your friends. Yeah. Yep. I'll like people, mostly that I played Ultimate Frisbee with or went road riding or mountain biking with or that I worked with at the North Face. So you've got the catalog up and running. And I'm assuming you had to order a bunch of stuff with your, the small amount of capital you had. had and just hold it in your, in your, where you lived, in your room. Yep. Okay. And hoping that some, that it would all be sold. Yeah. And our suppliers were our

bankers. So I would order stuff, let's say, in November. And then I would say I'd like for you to ship it to me in May. And then I would like to pay you in September. Wow. I mean, it's a little bit of a Ponzi scheme that you hope works out. You're just hoping some. All right. So you get these catalogs, 15 or 20,000 catalogs. And how did you do? How many orders did you get from those?

So we put those catalogs and then I'm just waiting for the phone during. Yeah. And? Waiting. And? Waiting. Okay. And I think we got a whopping maybe 15 orders.

maybe seven of them were from someone that I did not know. Wow. That's for mailing out over 20,000 catalogs. That's the hit rate. Super sad. That's crazy. Super sad. But that makes statistical sense.

You got to, right? Your hit rate is going to be... It did not make statistical. It didn't make any sense to me. You're correct. But one thing that I did notice in this, that all of the people that I didn't know, and many of the ones I did know put a sports bra on their order. And so while I may not have been the quickest study, you don't have to tell me twice.

And I realized like, wow, sports bras, that is probably now I know the most essential piece of sports equipment for the average American woman. Yeah. This is 1989. the year you start, I know that the first four years it was like really rough. But that first year, not only did you have, you're dealing with like cash flow issues, but that was the earthquake, the big Bay Area earthquake. I remember, you know, I remember exactly because I was so relieved there was an earthquake because we were going through the financials.

Not to make light of the earthquake at all, but I just, I mean, it just is how much the finances weighed on me. Because you were watching not only your bank account window, but you owed people money. Right. And just kind of, you know, the ways you think about. So we did the first catalog, it went poorly, saw a little opportunity for sports bras. So I was going to make the most of that that I could. I was also even then trying to feel like, okay, how do I kind of get out of this and just go back and get a job again? I can't just quit after one, but I'll do a second one and it'll be super, super cheap. It'll just be like a folded up piece of paper.

Yeah. It's like super cheap. So I did a super cheap folded up piece of paper. And it did a little better even though it was a little worse. You were, from what I read, you would order a bunch of stuff. and then you would sell it and then some money would come in and then you would use all that money

to send out to order more stuff and then send out the stuff to people who ordered it. So you were constantly out of cash. Like every, right? Yep. It was like cash in and then out, no cash. Constantly. Constantly out of cash.

And I remember like two times a year I would be, and even now I sort of have sort of stress reactions around these two times of year. the time when we're building up a lot of inventory. Yeah. And, you know, there are these two times when you have invested a lot of money in marketing, you've invested a lot of money in inventory, and sales are going to come.

You hope they're going to come, but you don't know if they are. And it kind of two times a year, I'd just be done. I was just like. You wanted to quit? Yeah. At one point in those, in the first, I think maybe four years. years, you were like $200,000 in debt. Yes. That was a lot of dough. But you were thinking, all right, what could I do for a living? Right. What could I do for a living where clearly I am self- unemployable? And how did you deal with that

stress? Did you get depressed? Did you get anxious? Did you lash out? Well, Dana actually had a real job and a good job. So her paycheck was supporting both of us. Oh, wow. So by this time, you know, I wasn't taking any money out of the business. She was only your girlfriend at the time and supporting you. Yeah, well, you know, that's a matter of laws or a matter of practice, right? Because we actually couldn't be officially married until, believe it or not, something like 2012 or 15, I mean, which is crazy. So what would I do in terms of the stress really?

And Dana reminds me of this all the time because it's, you never get out of that. I mean, we're always in it for the rest of building a business. You have those times. And my solution then was to call my dad because he was, whenever I talked with him, he always just had like the one good piece of advice that I needed to hold on to. I remember very early on when I was ready to hang it up. And I called him and I was just like, Dad, I just, it's just, it's not happening. I can't learn fast enough.

I just don't think I can do it. And then he would just go to the business. And he's like, well, tell me about your customers. Tell me about how much it costs you to get a new customer now. How much did it cost you to get a customer this time last year? And he would just find the successes. Wow. So I think that's the thing is those little lifelines that someone can offer you.

Yeah. It's not like, oh, and then we're. we got a investor and I got a million dollars and everything was fine. It's like, no, there were a lot of little lifelines all along the road and continued to be. I read, and I don't know how much of a big deal this was, but I did see a reference to a flood that destroyed all the inventory at some point. Was that in your, when you were in the garage? In the garage, yeah.

How did a flood get in there? What happened was we had installed some racks in the garage, and by we, I mean, Dana. She's handy, but not super handy. And they probably weren't installed in the most professional manner. So they came crashing down in the middle of the night, but we're not in the garage. We're asleep, but we don't hear it. And then there's a rainstorm. And, you know, like Berkeley garages, there's just the water swooped up in there.

And I think it was about that point where I decided it was time for us to get real office space. I'm like, this is ridiculous. We need to stop doing this. It's probably shortly after that we moved into, again, another converted warehouse. It was next to an ice cream manufacturer, also a small. small entrepreneurial lead, and every morning it would smell like chocolate when I came in. So everything that we shipped out started smelling like chocolate. All right. So those first four years, there were moments where you really were like very seriously thinking that this was not going to work out. But I guess around 1993, you guys turned a profit for the first time. This is four years in. Probably not a huge profit, but a profit nonetheless. Yes. And what was that the result of? Was it you were just getting sort of better at managing things and more experienced? Did you hire people? What happened?

Well, you know, what I would say is it's just like staying in the game, right? I mean, that's just the best way I can describe it. It's just for me, I'm just like, I'm going to just stay in the game here. I'm going to kind of keep hitting little singles. And I think it's kind of goes to basically, a business philosophy is just sort of fail faster to succeed sooner. And, you know, if you're going to make big mistakes, those take a long time. Little mistakes don't take a very long time. You can make a lot of little mistakes really fast. So I think it was just because we didn't have anybody really until we were over $40 million. We didn't have anybody who had retail experience, apparel experience, marketing experience. We had everybody was just true believer.

products users that are really interested in women's outdoor gear and athletic apparel. That's it. I think that the story of Title IX is a story of hitting singles, which is actually a great strategy, right? And a strategy that you can really only do without having outside investors, right? You can't do that if you've got people who expect a 10x return in five to 10 years. you can't just hit singles because no one's going to be that patient. Right. I mean, we've had apparel brands on the show that have raised venture money.

Yeah. Was that even on your radar? Was that ever even anything you considered or thought about? Or was it just not even something that you thought was an option? I think it always has to stay on your radar because you never know what's going to happen, right? but it's never a real option. I think the time I was most aware of how impossible it would be to go out and get investors as we had a president, the first president we had who came in and Estelle de Muzzi.

She did a great job running the business. She'd done everything. She bought businesses, sold businesses, and she came in and ran the business for a while. And I said, you know, somebody contacted me from one of the big investment banks. I can't remember who now. And I told Estelle of us, would you like you? to talk with this guy, would you like us to talk to this guy? She's like, sure, let's do it, let's do it. So the guy comes, and I'm meeting with him first. I really literally cannot remember his name

anymore, but he comes into the office. And I'm talking to him. And guy literally, the longer I talk, the more nervous he is getting, as if he has walked into some sort of alternate universe that does not speak his language. What were you saying? Just about how we, you know, people at one are riding by the door on scooters. So there's chaos. We play a lot of games at work. So there's a lot of stuff going on around. So he's walked into a foreign country. You know, maybe I'm talking about every year we do something called the Title IX Olympics and we divide up into teams and we play sports together for a day. And people, you know, get hurt, hopefully not badly, but, you know, we play hard. And that just didn't work in his investment banker mind, right?

And then Estelle came in and she sits down and she starts talking to him. And that guy was so visibly relieved. And just talking to her, I just realized, I don't even know the language to talk. Yeah. So to answer your question, do we consider it? Yes. would it have to be someone who is very different from me to really get that deal done? Yes.

But by the same token, what I would say is if you hit singles, which we do and we're good at, you're not going to hit a grand slam. And that's just you need to make your peace with that. And I think I would take the staying in the game of singles to striking out a whole bunch and every once in a while getting a grand slam. slam. Once you became profitable, right? And again, it wasn't like buckets of money, but probably profitable enough where you could pay yourself a little bit of a salary. When were you able to actually hire people and pay them a salary? Every time someone asked me that, I'm taken back to

my own decisions around that and how hard it was. First, we just had people who would help us out and volunteer. And then I remember, and this is probably one of the conflicts and maybe something about being a female entrepreneur, I really wanted to go home to South Carolina for Christmas. And the phones were going to ring and people were going to want to place orders and return product. And I wanted to be in South Carolina. And I couldn't be because of the phones. And this was before call forwarding and all the stuff that you could do now. So I had a teammate and I said, hey, and she lived in California, I was like, would you be up for mind in the store while I go home for Christmas? And she said, sure. And I said, you know, and if it works out, then maybe you can

keep doing some work. And so that was really how I hired my first actual paid employee. She is Renee Thomas Jacobs. We are still good friends. She ended up being our first president. But it felt like a big step. Like there's, who can I afford to do this? Or should I just be working harder myself? When we come back in just a moment,

Title IX keeps hitting singles until Missy makes some miscalculations. And the company suddenly finds it. in a slump. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the mid-1990s, and Title IX has only just become profitable. And Missy is still running the company on a shoestring and still looking for ways to get new customers. The way we did it is the old-fashioned way.

You know, we went to a lot of races and, you know, tournaments and we would sell stuff like our excess inventory. We would sell there and we would build up our mailing list by doing that. And then the hard work of building a customer file, you know, selling people a sports bra, selling a woman a sports bra, she can't do without and you earn her trust on that. And she comes back to you for all of her athletic apparel needs. And to this day, I would say that we are much better at keeping our customers than we are at acquiring new ones. That's just always, and I think that's, again, that sort of bootstrappy hitting singles. You know, our customers know that we get them, that we're product users and product testers.

So once they find us, they stay with us for a long time. But it's not like we're going out there and we're going to do a $100 million marketing campaign that's going to net us a whole bunch more new customers all at one. That's just never been the model. Was it always designed to be a direct, because this was a direct-to-consumer business from the beginning? Was that the model from the beginning? Did you ever think, you know, maybe we'll do a collaboration with, you know, Macy's or something? You know, I think we just weren't sophisticated.

I wasn't sophisticated enough to think like that. I was just, I want to control everything that I can. I know it's a delusion, but I still want to control. it, right? I mean, certainly people proposed them, but I just couldn't again, remember, we're mostly selling other people's brands at this point. Yeah, but with Title IX on it?

No, it's just with whatever brand it was. Whatever brand it was. Got it. Okay. And I guess eventually like eight years in or something, you finally opened up a store, like a brick and mortar store, in Berkeley. Yep. And

what's interesting to me is, today we're looking at the women's apparel market, and it's enormous, right? Like, you really are the pioneer. You really created this category with Title IX. I mean, this is long before Lulu Lemon or Athleta or Outdoor Voices, any of those existed. At that point, eight years in, did people get it or was it still a curiosity? You know what the most incredible statistic about that first store was?

The amazing thing about that store was that overfirm, you know, overfutable. 50% of the customers that came to that store came from more than two hours away. Wow. Who were they? Were they high school athletes, college athletes, non-just women that want to work out? What age ranges? I would say probably we think of our customer is sort of like that 30 to 50 age range. And it was pretty much that then as well. You know, they're They have some disposable income because, you know, at that point, direct or e-com wasn't as big a thing. There were very few people were willing to buy something sight unseen. Yeah. But what we found mostly was people were coming from all over the country.

Yeah. They were flying to SFO and they would come to our store. So we were really looking for that woman who is in the workforce now and is coming into her own, either in aerobic studios or, you know, in the outdoors and needs to find the gear that works for. Yeah. The second piece, though, I will say, is our sports bra business ended up, there was a small piece of that that ended up being a big part of our business to high school and college athletes. Even now, we have a lot of mother, daughter, first trips to buy sports bras happen at our retail stores.

I wonder, you know, one of the, it's interesting, because I've heard you describe a low point in your career as a leader was during your first maternity leave, because obviously you were incredibly overjoyed at the birth of your first child. You were 37. You had a very difficult, long labor, and you just decided that you were the CEO and the founder and that you didn't want to. to take a long leave that you were back in the office pretty soon after the birth of your daughter. Yeah. And I think, you know, that's a little bit of a hero complex there, right? You know, the business was doing well. I was still running the business at that point, but the business was doing well enough. But, you know, I mean, that's the thing about running a business. You get so much positive reinforcement, especially if you're the founder, owner, entrepreneur, you've done every job, you know all the answers. And then I suppose there's something about like, wow, a new

mom, I don't know any answers. I think I'd rather go back to the place where I know answers. I mean, you know, you want me to get into sort of the psychological underpinnings of that choice. You know, I have this picture, it's like a Polaroid of Gilly, so she comes to the office with me. When she was a newborn. Yeah, yeah, really young. And she's all like swaddled and she's on one of those spinny chairs. like spinny, roly chairs. And she's just lying there all swaddled up, like right on the chair. And there's no one around.

I'm like, huh. But I think I needed to have that and realize, like, wow, that's really screwed up. I got to do better. But then I think now when people talk about work-life balance, I think, you know, there's really no such thing as balance. if you want to do something really great, whether that's be a great mom or be a great entrepreneur or a great business person, you're really going to have to dig in and have a lot of imbalance for a while. But it always has to flip back. We're going to write, there's going to be

a teeter-totter. Sometimes it's going to be, I am really digging on work, and sometimes it's going to be, I am really digging in on home. And then for those ordinary days, hopefully I get home in time for dinner every day. I think around 2000, you started to design and manufacture your own stuff. And think today about half of what you sell in the shops and the website is your own design stuff. How involved were you in the designs? I mean, what I would say about us is mostly what we are, and I think you have to be if you're going to be owner-on- operated. We are very opportunistic. So the very first thing we ended up manufacturing

ourselves was a sports bra. And it was because I found a sports bra that someone else was selling. And it was kind of a passion project for her. She was maybe a yoga teacher. And she couldn't find a sports bra she liked. So she made this one and ended up being a top selling sports bra for us for many, many years. But at a certain point, she decided she was more interested in fitness instruction, understandably, than in making sports bras. So she said, hey, I want to get out of this business. Would you like to buy the rights and designs for this, we called it the frog bra?

And I said, sure. And then she coached us up on how to get into the manufacturing. business. Basically, in the 2000s, there was an absolute explosion in women's apparel brands, Lulu Lemon, Athleta. Now, there's Outdoor Voices. Nike and Adidas are making this stuff. We had Chip Wilson on the show. We had Tyler Haney, Outdoor Voice on the show before a few years ago. You started this category. You were the lonely voice in the wilderness saying, hey, there is a market for women's athletic wear. but these other brands, which started after you, became bigger very fast. Yes.

Did that, how did you, what did you think about that? I mean, did you feel like you were under pressure to, like, compete and to grow faster and to, I don't know, was it frustrating to not get the recognition that maybe you felt you guys deserved? So kind of in the nicest way possible, what you're saying is why'd you let all those late players come in and squash you like a bug? I'm not saying that. No. No, but it's spot on. It's spot on. You know, so I played basketball in college.

And I have to tell you, I never played better basketball than when I was having to compete for a spot. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that having more folks in the field helps us all. raise our game. At the same time, I'd say we're, in some ways, we're competing on the same game, but in other ways, we're not. And to be really honest, if Title IX were a publicly traded company, someone should fire me right now. I mean, that's just the facts of it. They should fire me because the fact is the sole purpose of a publicly traded company or a private equity-backed company is to maximize shareholder value in purely financial terms. And plain and simple,

I haven't done that. But I would say that at Title IX, I have, I think we all have always measured this idea of value creation much more broadly. And I think my philosophy, and I think it's all of our philosophy now, can probably be summed up with one of my favorite sayings, not all things that count can be counted. Yeah. I mean, you built a business that didn't, that was bootstrapped, is bootstrapped. You never brought in outside investors. So you didn't have to make decisions that, you know, they wanted you to make.

But there's a tradeoff, right? You don't explode. You don't go on the New York Stock Exchange. You don't. You're not a billionaire. Yeah. I mean, and I think it's, you know, when I think about that guy, I think about how this choice that we made and that we remake every day is informed by our business practices.

And it's everything from the suppliers we choose to who we choose to hire. I mean, probably the most important way is that we have chosen to mentor up and coming female executives rather than some plug-in play C level. Actually, I have to say one of the things I'm still very proud of is that we grew the business from probably zero to about 50 million with not one person that knew anything about retail or apparel or a business at all. I mean, it's just like pure passion about women and the transformative power of sports. And, you know, we have this pitch fest that we do twice a year for up and coming women

run brands. I mean, I am filled up by seeing these women come in and grow. their businesses. We share resources and sometimes even finances with these kinds of businesses, and we're all stronger and better for it. So it's just a different game. You've been quoted as saying that around 2014, the company had climbed out of a pretty, significant downturn, and I'm assuming that that was probably connected to the recession. but you said that it was solely self-inflicted. And I wonder, I mean, it sounds like there were, you know, maybe some personnel decisions or strategic decisions led to some rough years.

Yes, very rough. You know, when I was a kid, something bad happened to somebody and a self-inflicted wound. and I talked to my mom about it, I'd say, well, it was their own fault. And my mom would say, well, those are the worst kind. And that's just, I mean, and I would say that I have a lifetime of the worst kind of self-inflicted wounds. Some of the biggest mistakes are people mistakes. And mostly they are my own failures in leadership that negatively impacted team members or the whole team. And 2014-15, while it had its share of people mistakes, I think it was really a failure on my part to recognize how quickly we needed to shift from a print and bricks and mortar model to a digital model.

To like social media marketing and things like that. Exactly. Influencers and things like that. Exactly. All of that. And it's, you know, I mean, it's one of those things where, you know, if a company's been around a long time, it has a legacy. Yeah. And that's a great thing, but it's also a challenging thing.

I couldn't figure out how to rebuild the organization around digital. And I think I set the team up for maybe the only time in the history of the company where we were not all playing off the same sheet of music. There were folks who were very committed to the print model. You were still a catalog, primarily a catalog company. And you can't be today. No, it's just too late. No, we, it's just, it's not happening. Don't get me wrong, print is an awesome secret weapon to have. Yeah. They're, they're a part of your marketing mix, but in 2014, 2015,

yikes, I mean, maybe they were 80% of a marketing mix. Now, when you consider our digital, you consider our retail, prints only 30% of the marketing mix. Yeah. You know, so a dramatic change in six years. But I remember talking to Dana at one point, and I was like, you know, I think we're going to have to take out a mortgage on the house. And I just need you to tell me that you're willing to go back to work. So you had really, like the fortunes the business had kind of reversed in a sense. Yeah, brutal. And it was, it was, so revenue, sales figures, everything was declining.

Yep. Inventory, way too much inventory. And of course that's going to create stress. everybody. But in those moments, I mean, we have good people. And I wish I could have been the coach that they needed me to be. And I think I'm getting better at it. I would say that the progress is slow. But I think, you know, the lessons that I have to learn now are the lessons of leadership more than they are entrepreneurship. Yeah. I guess those sort of that, that almost a day, as it sounds too dramatic, but the kind of the downturn led you to eventually to bring on a new president of the company, Johnny Lynn, a man, and you had for the most part women executives was hiring Johnny, and he's still, I believe, still the president of the company. Yep. Did you have paused? Did anybody have paused to say, wait, we're a women's apparel company? company, is this the right fit?

Oh, hell yeah. It was a hell of a lot of pause. Yeah. Yeah, man. I was trying to be, I was trying to be gentle on the question, but yeah. Thank you for being gentle, but hell yeah. I mean, you know, sometimes the right woman for the job is a man. Right.

And I think that Johnny Lynn, he was just what, I feel like every time we have had a president leading the business, they have been exactly what we needed at the time they came in. Yeah. We needed a diversity of ideas about how to run this business and Johnny is going to bring that to us. And he is such a good leader and I felt confident knowing that I wasn't going to be leading the company on a daily basis that the next person we needed to lead was someone who could build a great executive team. Yeah. So they could lead long past when, I'm here. You are a retail business.

I think you have 14 or 15 stores. I think we have like 18 stores. And you kind of come out of this rough period and you're back to, you know, I think you hit a hundred million dollars and then COVID hits, which was absolutely devastating. certainly initially for retail. You had to close all your stores. I think store sales accounted for like 20% of your total business, and that was it. 20 to 0%. And that's a lot of money.

I read that you guys had six weeks of cash in the bank in 2020. Yeah, you know, we have to shut all of the stores. we have to shut our headquarters. And then probably the most challenging part for me was our distribution center, which, like Amazon, because it's selling goods that are shipping directly home, could remain open. And also, if we shut that, there is literally no cash. So shelter in place comes. Sales drop like a rock.

We're in the middle of what should have been our business. season. We should have done about $10 million in sales, and we lost $5 million of sales in the last two weeks of March alone. Wow. We had six weeks of cash on hand. I mean, how long? I mean, it was March, and it was really traumatic. And I remember people were scrambling for PPP loans, and I know you guys received one. And it was a mess at the beginning. It was in May.

And, yeah, I was figuring out how we're going to get one. And when did you start to see signs that sales were starting to pick up again? Well, I've been pushing for us to move from print to digital for like six years. But COVID pushed us probably as far as we've been in six years in six months. Wow. everything moved digitally, stuff that had been paper-based, was now online. So I really started first seeing the team just step up to the challenge of converting us to a fully, our accounting team went entirely paperless, which again we've been pushing for.

Our design team presented all their decks online. And then sales start to come back maybe in August or, September. Of course, we didn't recover the year. We ended up in negative territory. But I would say we made up a lot of ground on it. So much so that by, I would say, July, we felt confident everybody had taken 25% or more pay cut. We were able to bring everybody back to full pay, and then we were also able to give back to people the pay cuts they had taken. Wow. How have you, has your business recovered now? Are you back to 2019 or even, even higher levels now? Yes. So we are in the women's sports and fitness business, right? We sell workout gear and

sweatpants and stuff to do outdoors. And people are doing that in droves. So retail is still coming back. Yeah. It's not quite there, but our direct, which we were before. COVID, we were about 80% e-com and 20% retail. Then we were 100% e-com and zero-percent retail. Now we've probably worked our way up to about 85% e-com and 15% retail, but a bigger number overall. I mean, Missy, you've been at this for 30-plus years. It's been, I know, incredibly fulfilling, but a grind. I mean, at some point, and I'm sure you've been approached in the past, but at some point, there will be a moment where somebody, you know, says, hey, we want to buy this.

And you'll be in a position to decide whether to do that. When, I mean, what do you think? I mean, at some point, do you think you would entertain that? Well, Guy, you are asking me the question that the accountants and the lawyers have been asking. me since then day one. What is the exit strategy? Right. Which you don't have to answer because it's your company. No, I think it's, I think I'm coming more to what the exit strategy is as I, you know, I couldn't have answered it. It's important. It's absolutely incumbent upon me to be able to answer that question. If I want Title IX to outlast this generation of leaders,

I need to be able to answer that question. And the thing that I know, is that my goal is to get it in the hand of the next generation of female owner operators. I do not need a liquidity event because of the way we have grown it. At this point, we have zero debt. We have zero outside investors. So it is a good spot for someone to come in and be able to earn a seat at the ownership table. And that is my hope is that at some point over the next 10 to 15 years, I'll be able to pass Title IX on to the next group of owner operators who I hope will do it a whole heck of a lot better than I have. So I am not thinking actively about an exit strategy. I am thinking actively about leadership succession.

Yeah, fair enough. Um, Missy, when you think about, you know, this whole journey, what you've gotten to, because, I mean, you had a really tough few years and then there was, you know, kind of stability and growth and the brick and mortar and then this period of stagnation and then growth again and then the pandemic, which was, of course, probably the most trying time of your entire tenure. And now once again, you know, growth. Did you, I mean, just reflecting on that. I mean, did you ever, could you ever have imagined when you started this in the garage in 89 as a 26, 27 year old, that 30 plus years on, it would look something like this? Was that? Could you have envisioned that? Well, I want to say no. And I want to say maybe a little bit yes in only the sort of frivolous way that a 20-year-old might like, we need to start the women's version of Nike, you know? And then once I got around to it, no, I don't think I ever could have envisioned what the work has become and the people, right, that I've gotten to work with. I'm not sure I really had expectations, to be honest. I was like, this is going to be a fun adventure. And I think that's really when I think about business,

It's the great game of business. Yeah. You know, we're not curing cancer guy, I mean. So it can be fun. There can be times when it is hard and you take your losses. But it's a great game. And it's been a great adventure. So I hope I have a few more adventures left in me.

How much do you attribute your success to the work you put in, the really hard work you put in, and how much it has to do with luck? I mean, you had some lucky breaks early on. And, I mean, of course, meeting Dana and that guy who helped you kind of like learn about the bike business and then North Face and meeting the right people at the right time. But also, obviously, there was a grind there too. So how much of those things do you, would you attribute to the success of the business? Yeah, right.

It's percentages. It's not binary. It's not all luck or all hard work. It's percentages. is. And I think, you know, if you want to talk about the luckiest things that probably had sort of the absolutely necessary parts of it, I had to be a young woman growing up in the 70s and 80s, not in the 40s and 50s. That's luck. I probably had to grow up in a family that was encouraging me to be an entrepreneur, even though that might not be something young women in the

South did at the time. That's luck. I had to grow up. and not be battling abject poverty. Yeah. That's luck. So when you look at all those very lucky things, and then you add on to it, all of the things, the happenstance meetings and the people that offered me a hand up,

I mean, I'd say it's 90% luck. But then what I would say is the part that I can control is the 10% that's work. And so it may only be 10%, but I'm going to work as hard as I can to control that 10%. That's Missy Park, founder and CEO of Title IX. By the way, earlier this year, the company wrote the biggest check in its 32-year history, $1 million to the U.S. women's national soccer team,

just to pay their players more money so they'd get a little closer to making what the male soccer players make. And this wasn't for a fancy special. sponsorship deal or anything like that. It was just a straight up gift. A straight path through to the players. We're not asking. I don't want. And I said, like, I don't want to have a beer with the U.S. Women's National Soccer team. Honestly, this is just... I'm sure they would buy you a beer, though. They might buy me a beer. But they buy me a dog. I do have a Budweiser beer glass with Megan Rapino on it. I think that'll do. So it's kind of like I'm having a beer with her. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you're not yet a subscriber, please do subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to write to us our email address is hibt at npr.org.

If you want to follow us on Twitter, we're at How I Built This or my account at Guy Raz. You can find us on Instagram at How I Built This NPR or at guy.ros. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music. composed by Ramtin Arablewee. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Claire Murashima. Our production staff includes Casey Herman, Julia Carney, Elaine Coates, Farah Safari, Liz Metzger, and Harrison V.J. Choi. Our intern is Katie Seifer. Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.