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Please subscribe in all the usual places and enjoy. Hey, it's Lewis. Welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Awesome, and we're live. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Today being joined by Bradford and Brian from Tube Line Brothers. Where are you guys at the moment? So we're both in central Virginia where we grew up and we sort of fled New York City probably two or three weeks ago, which is perfect timing. Crazy. So it's pretty bad there at the moment. Yeah, we ran away before it could get too bad, but our friends that are still there are telling some very interesting stories about empty streets in New York, which is more eerie than the Halloween parade. Yeah, same in London. Like, I'm used to it being so busy and then you walk around a little bit. We're allowed out for maybe like maximum an hour a day for a bit of exercise. And then you walk around in the airs clean and there's no one around. It's quite interesting. Yeah, no one screaming at you, subway cars wide open. It really, it's a ghost town up there, I'm hearing. It's weird. Yeah, it's really weird. I just can't help but feeling that it's like mother nature just saying to us humans, like you stay in your room for a few months because you've been messing me up so badly and I'm gonna sort myself out. And if you don't behave, I'll make you stay in your room a little bit longer. It's just like, it's just a funny one, right? When you're faced with this natural things, like it's quite humbling, right? It's like nothing you can do about it. Yeah, really our God, Bradford. I was gonna say, I'm really curious to see what the downstream consequences are. I mean, do we change though, we're obviously get to spend a lot more time with talking to our close friends and family. It has you reflect on things that you normally don't get to do. And I'm just curious to see if it changes our culture at all in the way that from everything about the way we sort of approach our relationships to whether we'll go to those movie theaters, concerts and big events in the same way. Yeah, it's true. It's true. A lot of people talk about, they wanna better balance in life, or they wanna spend more time with their family, more time with their kids and stuff like that. I've been speaking to my mates and they're like, I'm spending so much time with my kids, I can't wait to go back to work. It's crazy. But I think if we're off and at home for like a long period of time, like maybe I know six months, then I think definitely like we'll change a lot the way we do things. If it's just like a month or two, you can see people drifting back in. But I think the work from home thing is quite interesting. I don't know about you guys and we'll hear a little bit about how you guys are structured and stuff. But certainly in the UK, there'd been a lot of talk about working from home and flexible working and stuff like that. And this could certainly be the trigger for more people doing that. Yeah, it's been great. I think it's actually given us a chance to sort of step back. And actually earlier this year and towards the end of last year, we were actually working on streamlining a lot of things. And so this, we obviously weren't expecting to be in the situation we're in, but to be able to kind of test, you know, our own ability to sort of work remotely has been very fascinating because it's gone smoother than expected, you know, obviously for some unique reasons on our end, but so far so good. So when did you guys like kind of leave the office and kind of go work from home? Well, I would say probably three weeks ago, probably the first week in March when the cases started picking up a little bit in New York. And, you know, we have an extraordinarily small team. It's really just, at this point, it's really four of us internally. We obviously have a lot of outsourced help as well and different, you know, service providers, but the core team is only four of us. So it wasn't a logistical nightmare for us. Great. And look, they're just circling back. So what are your backgrounds? I, Brad and I both graduated from the University of Virginia and Brad went up to New York and worked in finance where he was at a small private equity space before Two Blind Brothers. I worked in data sales for a number of years before kind of stepping into this crazy adventure. Nice. How did it all come about? So, you know, Brian and I have a rare eye condition called Starrgardt's disease, and it's a juvenile form of macular degeneration where you lose your center vision over time. You keep a lot of your peripheral vision usually. And it's something we've had our whole lives and when we were both living in New York City, we had this, just this day where we were walking around shopping. And if you know anyone who's visually impaired or blind, you know, and especially for Brian and I, shopping can be a giant pain. You can't see the size of the colors, the labels that well. So, you know, what we have done is just kind of run our hands over a shirt that we think we like. If we really like the quality of it and from what we can see of it, it looks good, then we'll do the rest of the work to figure out if we want to buy it. And we were, we happened to be in a Bloomingdale's. We ended up leaving coincidentally with the exact same shirt and it got us talking. We had no prior experience in clothing or fashion, but we thought maybe this could be our aha moment to help the organizations that we're so passionate about as it relates to retinal eye disease and looking for potential cures for these conditions. And one of the things that they really struggle with is to put a consumer face to make tangible these scientific achievements. And this was our way of kind of bringing that into a more tangible consumer facing experience as well as being able to make the softer shirts in the world that we possibly could. So that was how we got the initial idea. Also, and then so your profits go to charity. So you donate them to the charities that you support? Yeah, so 100% of our profits go back to, you know, these organizations that are focusing on early stage retinal researchers. And that's, that's, and we really like these early people because as anybody knows, or one of my favorite examples, you know, if you gave 20 grand to Coca-Cola, they probably wouldn't notice. But if you gave 20 grand to a soda startup, that would mean the difference between them being able to actually grow and succeed and fail. And these early researchers are at a lot of great universities and institutions who just need a little capital to get the proof of concept of their treatment, of their methodology, of the drug they're working on so that then they can go out and seek big grants from, you know, larger institutions or, you know, big pharma companies so that then they can do all of the additional work. But we like really focusing when they're young, when they're hungry and when the dollar goes as far as possible. Awesome, that's really cool. So on the entrepreneur side, did you, did you always want to start a business? Yeah, I mean, I think we've always had entrepreneurial tendencies. You know, one of the funny things about this project is we had no business aspirations for it when we started it. It was purely out of fun and a commitment to help, you know, organizations like the Foundation fighting blindness. We figured we'd make a couple hundred shirts with some help from friends that worked in the fashion industry and we'd sell them to our friends and that would be it. We've been very pleasantly surprised by some of the momentum that we've gotten on it but for us, from an entrepreneurial perspective and from a personal perspective, you know, it felt like a success from the day that we started working on it because it was just all about, you know, having fun with each other, empowering the community and trying to give some good will back to these organizations. So it's been a very interesting experience in that sense. Amazing, it's the journey what you expected like founding a company, building something like this. I mean, I guess what did you expect going into it and what's it actually been like? Well, I'll tell you, as Brad said, the expectations were very low going in. We were just, it was more of a nights and weekends, you know, learn a little bit about fashion, learn a bit about retail, learn a little bit about e-commerce and marketing. So the expectations were so low that every success felt like a huge win but along with that, every time that we were successful and we grew, the business would absolutely break down in different ways every single time. We were first shipping packages out of the apartment where we were running the office and doing everything which just turned into an absolute disaster. So then we had to find a fulfillment center and then we had to find, you know, then we were selling more shirts that we possibly could keep up with. So then we had to find a new cut and sew facility, then we needed more team members, then we needed more ideas it's just every three months, every time the business would double or grow substantially, something would break. And, you know, onto the entrepreneurship front, everyone talks about it all the time but when you go from working at a big corporate environment, you have a really, you have a swim lane, you have, hey, here's your job, here's what you're supposed to do, here's what success is, here's what failure is, you know, go out and do it. But when you're running a business, as you know, every job is your job and every job is important and, you know, prioritizing time, prioritizing tasks becomes really hard because everything is inside of the realm of possibility and, you know, forcing yourself to do stuff you don't like to do just cause it has to get done. It was one of like the more slap in the face lessons that you get. Yeah, it's funny like when you start a business, you end up being everything, right? You're like finance, sales, HR, the cleaner, like, you know, everything, right? And you just have to like roll your sleeves up and get stuck in. And often you can be working longer, harder and for less money than you were before, right? You know, and you're big company. Well, I'll tell you, I think paper box faster than probably anybody in the country. Hold still. You just gotta do it, right? It's, and that's what you gotta do and then obviously as you start to build out and assign jobs to different people and organize yourselves, then it starts to get a little bit, I say proper, but you know, it starts to kind of establish itself, I think. Yeah, you're repaid with satisfaction a lot more than anything else. Definitely. Why were you guys manufacturing? Is it like all the US or? Well, we've changed several times and it kind of depends on our products. We do some manufacturing in Los Angeles. A lot of our manufacturing comes from Los Angeles. We do some manufacturing in China, but actually the most interesting part of our manufacturing process are our blindness related organization partners, like Industries for the Blind and previously Dallas Lighthouse for the Blind. Once we started to get a little momentum on this project, we had a couple of these organizations reach out to us and we didn't actually believe that this type of thing existed and it fit 100% perfectly into what we were trying to build. There are some charitable organizations here in the US that do production. A lot of it is government contract work, but the organizations have a majority or up to at least 70% visually impaired and blind workers. Oh, wow. So we were able to negotiate with them to be our production partners. So when you get some of the products from our line, they're actually assembled, constructed and put together by folks that come from our community, which was just a total win-win for us. Very cool. Did you know that before you started or that you just ended up kind of bumping into them as you got going? No, we didn't. We had no idea. Once somebody said, hey, we'd love to help you manufacture. We're like, great, we do need help. And they're like, oh, by the way, our workforce is all blind and visually impaired. We're like, you're hired. Amazing, amazing. So most of it's that in the US and then China, you just see you've been manufacturing there as a slightly different support. You know, whether it's some of our accessories or labels or tags, you know, there definitely are some good partners over there for things that are part of our line. I'll tell you, the button manufacturer market in the US is not substantial. Right. It doesn't necessarily exist. Fair enough. And then are you selling all online? Or are you also selling wholesale to retailers and stuff? We are entirely online, which we truly, we love for a lot of reasons, but most is that, you know, a lot of our products, they are soft, they are incredible. They are amazing, but they come with such a story and such a sense of community and purpose. And when you're on a rack at a store, some brands can do a really good job at this, but you know, we like people knowing what they're buying and having that experience of shopping with us and understanding the story and the good that the product they're purchasing is doing. And that can lose translation when you're just another shirt on the shelf. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. And how have you found selling online? So in terms of kind of the marketing and it's quite competitive there. We've been very, very lucky early on in our project. We had some friends that were pretty sophisticated at a lot of social media advertising. And you know, essentially a lot of our content and marketing doesn't really mention the products in great detail. We are oftentimes talking about the story behind the brand or a particular kind of shopping experience that we've created called the shop lined experience. But it is extraordinarily competitive, but it's actually forced us to lean into what makes us unique. And what we do find is what is really competitive are the companies that hire big brand name ad agencies, do these overly produced commercials or motion graphics. But being able to sort of tell your story in an authentic and raw way is a way to out compete in a certain respect. 100%. No, 100%, 100%. What's been the hardest thing you guys have faced since you started? Working with each other? Really? That's a, I'm just kidding. That was my next question. Well, I like being a little preemptive. I would say the hardest thing that we faced, I would say two things. One is a little bit of the unpredictability of what's gonna break next and just then needing to clean up that mess or fix that problem as swiftly as possible. And two, I would say is frankly, we've just had a problem with selling out and just having really, really challenging. I think a lot of early brands have this, especially when you're growing a lot, how to predict growth when you don't have a ton of data behind it. You know, like if you're Coke, you know what you're gonna sell next month. But if you grew X% last year, there's no indication of if it's gonna be double that half that or 10X that next year. Yeah, that's true. And how has COVID affected you guys so far? You know, truthfully, we've held up pretty well by nature of the fact that we are all online and we do a lot of advertising on social media networks which people are spending a bit more time on. We have been quite concerned that our fulfillment center where we ship all of our inventory would shut down. But I think so far, so good. And so fingers crossed, we've held up fine during this time. Brilliant. So you haven't really had to kind of pivot too quickly or change the strategy quite yet. You know, we're kind of always on our toes because what do we do or what's the messaging if the fulfillment center shuts down? What happens if people stop purchasing because the economy is sort of falling out? I mean, to be fair, our business, buying clothing that's attached to a cause is not as important to some people as paying rent or feeding their family, you know, go figure. So right now we're sort of in strategizing and putting in backup plans in place. Luckily we haven't had to pivot that hard but that's what we've been up to recently. Yeah, no, no, that's brilliant. That's brilliant. And just going second back, you joked about, you know, the hardest thing being working together. And I speak to a lot of people that have founded businesses with the co-founder. How have you found obviously you two are brothers but how are you finding working together both as founders? Have you segregated your roles and how have you organized yourselves? Yeah, I mean, it definitely has advantages. I think most businesses, and I know there's a lot of data out there that say businesses that start with co-founders are oftentimes more successful than ones that start individually because we spoke about at the beginning of this podcast. There's a lot of work and if you can split it two ways and you can bounce ideas back and forth, you can end up in usual better places. You know, Brad and I, the nice part is being brothers and growing up together, having this eye disease together and you know, we had run small, very small businesses before together just as larks more than anything. We think pretty similarly and which is really helpful for when you're trying to convey an idea, the other one can seem to get there quickly, not to say that we haven't disagreed but you know, one of the big penances when we were starting this, we sat down and had a long conversation about you know, backing down and letting the other one be right and you know, putting the relationship over the business when necessary. You know, and you have to understand too, as two brothers, we have a lot of practice fighting. That's true, that's right. You know, it's like maybe Brian disagrees with what I project our sales to be but it's not as bad as when he hit me with a vacuum cleaner when I was 12 years old. So that is, so we do have practice. That's true, that's true. I love that. So in terms of like how you organize your day, like a lot of people when they start a business, it's just like so much stuff, right? Like super chaotic and how have you guys like gone about structuring and organizing your day? You know, so it's changed recently. It's so dynamic. The problems change every few weeks for sure. So it's sometimes hard and that played into our hiring. You know, we would bring in people who were just good team players who could be flexible and interested in learning new things. And we would sort of do it around, you know, weekly meetings and weekly agendas, you know, about what we were sort of focusing on. Last year we experimented with a lot of new marketing techniques. This year we've sort of zeroed in on something that's been working really, really well for us. And so that's kind of how we've organized ourselves. Is this year we have some very clear kind of yearly goals. We have sort of a way that we market our brand right now that we're laser focused on and everything sort of revolves around that right now. While we try to move everything else, try to get all the other distractions out of the way. Yeah, brilliant. What are your plans for the future? The next year or two? Cure blindness of course. You know, we're really trying to fast track that one in. Let's see. Are we far away? Do you think or? You know, it depends on how you define it because there's a disease called LCA, Labor Congenital Amorosis, which causes blindness and about 2,500 kids in the US every single year. And they, this past year, they created a cure that turns the lights back on, not even just goes from blind to sighted, but from reading braille to reading print, which is magic. You know, and that took from about 1996 until last year to fully get through all the processes and approvals. But for a lot of these diseases, we are on the five yard line for curing blinds, which is a crazy statement. But you know, there's something like 30 clinical trials going on right now in the retinal eye disease space. And it is really one of the hot areas for scientists, just because it's so fascinating, so cutting edge and so out there that you're getting some of the greatest minds in the world that are dedicating their lives to these diseases and have been doing so for 40 years and we're about to see the fruits of all of that labor come true. Amazing. So it's really been recently then that the funding's gone in and the research has really started to take off. Yeah, I mean, anybody who's following medicine, you know, we're living through a medical revolution right now. The science has come so far, gene therapy, stem cell therapy, gene editing. I mean, these things are just flooding, you know, flooding through right now. And in the eye, for a variety of reasons, happens to be a very good candidate organ for a lot of these new therapies. It's immunoprotected from the rest of the body. Obviously there's two eyes, so you can, you know, in a clinical trial, you can do something to one. So for a variety of reasons, the eye is actually seeing a lot of these advanced therapies early on and it's really exciting. Amazing. Awesome. Well, look, great to speak to you guys. Sounds like you both are doing some great work and keep it up. And, you know, it'd be interesting to touch base after all this has happened and see what's gone on. See where the world ends up. Yeah, yeah. Well, look, stay safe, stay healthy and look forward to speaking to you again soon. Yeah, thanks so much. You know, it's because of people like you and podcasts like this that our projects been lifted up to what it is. So we're grateful to be included and we really enjoy it. So thank you. Pleasure. No, thank you so much. Thank you so much. All right, talk soon, my friend. Awesome. Take care. See you later. Hey, folks, thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places.