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We didn’t have a lot of money, sometimes none, so our personality and our perseverance and our product had to come through. We were relentless to get our product onto people.
It was the original social influencer model. Now there’s Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and people say – well, let’s get this person because they have 100,000 followers. Kevin did that the old-fashioned way with professional athletes and professional teams. And he was relentless at it. He innately understood it.
If you’re doing it with 10 people, but that one guy throws the winning pass in the Super Bowl or the one guy has the catch, or the one guy gets signed the next season for a big contract – you didn’t know which one it was going to be. So you had to do it with all of them.
So that underdog mentality in marketing was, ‘Who cares if they say no? We’re still going to try to get them to wear our shirt. Who cares if they say they wear Nike? We’re still giving them our product, and we’re going to show them passion by hanging out, and they’re going to fall in love with our stuff.’
Were there any instances when you took on the big guys directly? Did you ever poke the bear?
I think one of the more visible ways in the early days is that we were getting our product on NFL players, and we were not an NFL sponsor, we were not an official licensee. But we were in the locker room
148 Feisty Underdog