Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to the show, Jeff.

Jeff Grace:
Thanks, Fabian. Thank you for having me on. Big fan of the show.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s so good to have you on. And this is going to be all about KENT, obviously. And for the listeners, you are in the right episode, but Jeff has quite this storied advertising background. So I have to get a few questions out of the way. So first, I always though Altoids, the curiously strong mints, were from the UK until I read your website and they were saying that Altoids was a little regional brand from Seattle before people like you helped spread it across the globe. So did the quaint font and the tin can fool me all my life? What’s the story with Seattle and Altoids?

Jeff Grace:
No. Well, it’s partially, both things are true. The brand did start in the UK. This is Altoids: The Curiously Strong Mints started in the UK. And then before my time on the brand, but not too long before, Callard & Bowser was acquired, who was the UK manufacturer, was acquired by Kraft Foods, I believe. And I think they had an initial foray trying to make the product take off in the United States. And the only market that really had traction was in Seattle, which if you can harken back to those days in the 90s was sort of a real countercultural city with bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden and what have you. And so that’s where the brand’s origin started. And when I came on board, Leo Burnett, they had just started the process of trying to unlock what was working so well in the Pacific Northwest and then helping stoke those flames across America.
And then within about five years, they had vested certs and Tic Tac, the original tick.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s tough. That’s a tough one. Yeah.

Jeff Grace:
Became the number one mint in the country with a very small ad spend. I think we were spending like 10 to $15 million a year and our competitors were spending close to 50 to $60 million a year. So it was a real success story. I felt very lucky to get on board a brand that already had a lot of win behind its back and then help it pull off a lot of cool innovative marketing, which was sort of all the money we had when I first got onto the brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And those were the good days of advertising. I mean, holy smokes, when you think about the environment that you just pictured of Pearl Jam and Seattle and the grunge movement and all of that stuff, and then you see the Altoids ads and that… I mean, it was a really cool and fun humor and the whole curiously strong mints and always this comparison between the two different types of Altoids. And there was so much stuff going on that I would’ve never, ever, ever put that into Seattle. I would’ve never even thought about that campaign coming out of Seattle, but it kind of in a strange way makes sense because you’ve got these quaint British tins and then you make something out of it that is so apropos with the time. Super cool. That’s super cool. Well, staying in the world of advertising, your first television role was sitting next to Don Draper in Mad Men.
That’s just so insane. I mean, listen people, He was a creative writer. I know exactly. He was a creative writer and he appears next to the world’s greatest fictional copywriter, Don Draper. How did that come about?

Jeff Grace:
Well, I had a good time at Leo Burnett, but at Leo Burnett, they were nice enough to pay for you to get… You could take classes at University of Chicago or Northwestern. And a lot of my friends were getting their MBAs for free basically. Leo Burnett paid for it, which was so generous. I don’t know if they do that anymore, but I saw on the list Second City, which sparked my interest. And I had just seen Tina Fey and Rachel Dratch and Scott Adsick at Second City just do a live show the weekend before. And I was like, “Oh my God, you can take classes to do that.” And I immediately signed up for that, got the comedy bug, and really it was my kind of ticket out. I mean, it was really my almost like I signed my death warrant in advertising, at least for that chapter, because I just got the comedy bug.
I started doing shows at Second City and an Improv Olympic. And then that led for me moving to LA to write for Henry Rollins and doing writing comedic monologues for that show and trying to figure out how to navigate my way to be a comedian actor in LA. And because I had this advertising background and I love the show Mad Men, it was just after their first season, Carrie Aldino, the casting director of the show was doing a workshop and I was like, “Well, maybe I could get on the TV show because I could tell them I’m really an advertising guy, so I could really be a good actor on the show.” Which now that I’m a more experienced actor, I know that that’s really not so sound of thinking. And I even would tell her, “I actually worked in advertising and they brought me in for a role that was not an advertising guy.
And rightfully it was the first TV role I’d ever had done. So I was basically in the first episode of season two of Mad Men next to Don Draper, and I’m reading a book called Meditations Upon an Emergency. And that book is sort of central to the theme of season one and it comes back to that book quite a bit. But that was my first TV role, but weirdly, still right in the world of advertising there.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s amazing. I have to revisit the entire show again because it was just so amazing. Okay, last one on the life you lived before making underwear and bras.

Jeff Grace:
My wife’s getting really upset with all this talk about my non-KENT life.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Seriously, it’s like here you are on the show talking about KENT and we are talking all about you. But this is the last one, I promise. The Vacationers, Julia Styles Spoof videos. Look, I’m a brand guy, so this stuff immediately attracts me. At the very end of these little spoof videos with Julia Styles, which is just so cool, it states the URL, juliastylestyles.com, which is a super cool URL. So what does the brand guy do? I immediately go to the URL. It goes to another fashion brand’s website now. What’s the story? Do you know that?

Jeff Grace:
No. Well, we did have a portal set up there for a while. Vacationeers was one of the first online comedy groups. We were one of the first 30 YouTube partners. Had we known at the time, that was a golden ticket, but at the time all we wanted to do was make independent features. So YouTube was sort of like this almost distraction, but it was where we got discovered as comedians and as filmmakers. It was my buddies, Todd Berger, Kevin Brennan, and Blaze Miller were the guys in the comedy group. And through a friend of Kevin’s, we met Julia Styles one day and she though our stuff was funny and we were like, “Well, let’s make some videos together.” And that started a long relationship with Julia. We did a feature with her called It’s a Disaster. We made Julia Styles Styles was a very viral video that we did with her about her fake fashion line.
We had her playing a celebrity who was eco-conscious, but clearly she didn’t know what she was talking about. She was sort of doing all these things that she thought was environmentally conscious, but actually bad for the environment. It actually led to sort of a beef in the National Enquirer between her and Julia Roberts, because I think she had an aside joke there that she kind of dissed Julia Roberts or something.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh my God. What a fantastic segue, right?

Jeff Grace:
You’re finding all the threads and weaving them together and you’re doing a very good job here.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, you just did too. You just did too. All right. So let’s talk about KENT. So you and your wife started this underwear business and you appeared on the first ever live televised episode of Shark Tank, which of course, now that we know you all of five minutes or so, it makes tons of sense that would attract you. Let’s talk about the brand’s promise, and I’m going to read that off the KENT website. “All of our sustainably made basics are softer and last longer than conventional apparel. We never use any synthetics, pesticides, or plastic. So every piece of KENT clothing, which includes the packaging, is fully biodegradable and compostable, reducing landfill waste and helping to reverse climate change.” How did the idea come about? And I always find it more important to ask how was it important enough for both of you to make this effort into an actual reality?
Because we all have ideas every day, right? Wouldn’t it be great and wouldn’t it make sense and wouldn’t it be nice to have X, Y, Z? But you actually said, “You know what? We are getting into the underwear business.” What was that big fist in the air moment where you both said, “Let’s do this”?

Jeff Grace:
Well, Stacy was super ahead of the curve on all of these things that are now almost feel like table stakes, but she got her master’s degree. I’m probably misquoting the degree, but she studied both Cambridge and in Copenhagen and really studying what it meant to try to make fashion sustainable and environmentally conscious. And that was what she was doing in the mid-aughts while I was being a comedian. When we started dating, she was starting to tell me about her business. At the time, KENT was actually a very high-end silks brand with the same kind of mission of being super sustainable, plastic free, what have you, but it had kind of turned in and she had followed where there was interest into becoming a very premium $400 Camisols kind of brand with this environmental message. But the problem she was finding is that even her friends, she told my mom that she could have a 50% discount on the website.
My mom was like, “Well, it’s still kind of expensive for me.” And that kind of hit a chord for her. She’s like, “Well, I’m making a business where I don’t understand the core customer.” She’s like, “I don’t gallivant with hedge fund wives and celebrity wives.” And at the time we were dating, I kind of like you, come from a world of brand strategy and advertising. And I was like, “Well, what is the original purpose of the brand?” We started dissecting it, going back down to first principles. She’s like, “Well, I just always wanted to be the most radically natural brand on earth.” I was like, “Well, that’s amazing.” She had mentioned out loud that what’s cool about my brand is that you could actually compost all of our products. At the time, we had a friend that was trying to make… Stacy Whitman actually, who was also in Shark Tank the same year we were, she was trying to make compostable toothpicks.
And so the compostability messaging was kind of resonating with us. Well, compostability is this amazing proof point of being radically natural. Let’s lean into that and let’s make this more of a basics apparel business. American Apparel had kind of flamed out with a lot of bad ethos and kind of bad vibes from the founder. We felt like there was a role where we could replace the vacancy that American Apparel left with this basics brand that focused first on underwear, but compostability being the first thrust for us. And then these days, plastic-free is very much obviously a natural part of that. And sometimes compostability can be confusing to the less initiated. People find it… It almost sounds like the word disposable to some people. So it’s still one of our radical proof points. We don’t lead with it as much as we used to, but that was kind of the pitch we made on Shark Tank on that first live episode that they had done in which Stacy was much more calm and composed than me, the actor on the appearance.
And then the business has just been slowly growing organically as a business since then, and now Stacy’s working on it full-time. She doesn’t have another job.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That is remarkable. And it’s so interesting because I would’ve never thought looking at your site and looking at the product that American Apparel played a little bit of a role of inspiring you guys to do that. And it makes so much sense. I mean, I remember I was around LA when American Apparel came out and it was really cool. It was a super cool brand until it really wasn’t. But while it was, it was really exciting and they did a lot of things right, and then obviously tons of things wrong. But as a consumer, until you knew all those stories behind the scenes, it was remarkable and there is nothing like it now. I think it’s really inspiring to do a basics brand that is all about no plastics. And it’s funny how you say compostable has a lot of… It’s got a certain cache with it and some people understand it, some don’t.
Someone to plant it in the backyard and it’s like, “No, you don’t need to do that.” But the no plastics is such a big thing right now where we get more and more educated about how much plastic we’ve been ingesting over our lifetime and not through our skin and through everything, right?

Jeff Grace:
Yeah, absolutely.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Super interesting.

Jeff Grace:
I think apparel is the number one contributor to microplastics in the environment. So it comes out of your washing machine, into the water. So really apparel is the primary offender. And underwear was where we started just because underwear was the one product that you can’t give back to a thrift store. T-shirt, pants, you could donate them and at least they have a second life there. But Stacy’s though was underwear was so frustrating because once you’re done with it, it’s done forever. And so that was why we started there because if you could make that a product that you literally can plant your pants is our slogan. If you have a compost in your backyard, I mean, you can even just bury it in the dirt. It will eventually break down. The compost will do it faster or you can give it to a proper composting facility.
But that was kind of.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
But even if you put it in the landfill, no? I mean, even if you put it in the trash can and it goes to a landfill, it’s still going to compost, no?

Jeff Grace:
Well, it will. I mean, ideally it won’t compost as aggressively. I think ideally, we live in a city, Montreal right now that has a composting program, which can take both vegetables and meats. And so you can throw your underwear in there. And LA where the program was in its infancy where we’ve been living a couple years ago, I think composting was just rolling out and I don’t know if it’s still like this. Fabian, you’re in LA right now.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, I’m down in Orange County. Yeah.

Jeff Grace:
Orange County. So I don’t know if it’s there, but it was a little bit like they were figuring it out, but you couldn’t put things like non-synthetic underwear in a compost yet. So it just depends on where you’re doing it. But yes, even if it ends up in the actual trash, it’s way better for the environment than just plastic that’s going to sit for 250 years.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. No, totally. So why the name KENT? How did KENT come about?

Jeff Grace:
KENT was Stacy’s idea and she always was a fan of Superman and she liked the idea, I think when she was trying to figure out a name for KENT, in addition to it just being clean and simple and has a nice resonance to it when you say it. But Clark KENT is the one superhero that takes his clothes off to reveal his superpower. And so it felt like kind of a nice underwear metaphor when she was building the brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that, I love that.That’s such a good story. And it’s so crazy because when you search KENT, you show up before the county of KENT in England in Google results. I’m like, “How did they do that?” I’m like, “KENT, I mean, it must be just three pages about England and then yet no, here you are.” So I was very surprised.

Jeff Grace:
We might be working harder at search engine optimization than the township of KENT. We apologize to the good people of KENT if they’re listening.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Exactly. It’s like we keep taking everything from England on this podcast. First, Altoids and now the entire country.

Jeff Grace:
I owe England a major apology. I’ll send them a nice gift.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, I think all of us as a country, we do. All right. So I’m a brand marketing guy myself, wrote plenty of books on the subject. I worked with startups, Fortune 500s, the Hoshi Bank. And then I took a pandemic idea to production, and I’m now running a D2C product brand. It was extremely eye-opening to see which parts of my own brand building framework that I do with my clients I actually took with me on the journey with my own startup and which I immediately abandoned. There were some pieces where I’m like, “Oh yeah, I just do the thing I do with clients and I do it for my own startup.” And then there were some pieces where I’m like, “No, I’m not doing that. That doesn’t work for me.” So I’m wondering from your perspective as an advertising guy, as a writer, how was your journey from best practices or doing it all the right way to actually running scrappy marketing at your guys’ startup?

Jeff Grace:
Well, you worked at advertising and so one thing that I think I did appreciate, you work with brand managers all the time at the big companies like Google or Kraft Foods, what have you. And it’d be very easy to forget that advertising or marketing is not the number one thing they’re working on all the time. Often it’s dealing with Walmart and making sure they have the right shipping supplies and they’re just more in the weeds of the actual business. And I think once I started partnering up with Stacy and she invited me to be a part of her business and we kind of became co-founders on the reboot of the brand, I wanted to hit everything with the hammer of advertising. And one of the great ironies of the brand, I think we’ve done a lot of branding work together, brought a lot of that to it, but we really have almost never advertised this product, which is kind of crazy because we had met a lot of founders who in that kind of Zirp era where there was a lot of VC money floating around and Stacy had actually worked at a business called Sheertex, which actually had grown incredibly fast through paid advertising, but it was this kind of leaky bucket.You’re spending $800 million a year to make 750 and weirdly you could almost…
And seeing that kind of parable of what could go wrong with a lot of the brands that have… I mean lately, we’ve seen Allbirds is kind of toast and Bonobos.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Aren’t Allbirds an AI brand now?

Jeff Grace:
They’re an AI brand right now, but I mean clearly not chasing their original mission of sustainable footwear. And I’m forgetting a lot of the other kind of key examples, but that… And there were some changes in the efficiencies that we survived too, which was when Apple increased privacy measures on a lot on the iPhone, it really made the cost per thousand on advertising so much less efficient that for us it wasn’t penciling out. And so we just kept chasing some good advice from some of our advisors, just keep optimizing our website, keep focusing on the business until you can’t squeeze any more conversion, so to speak, out of the people coming to the site. And we’ve been doing that now for five, six years of just constantly squeezing more conversion out of our website and trying to find ways that when someone shows up, they get from showing up to purchase more…
Because there’s so many times in a distracted world we live in where people just drop off with, “Oh, I do want to buy compostable underwear. Oh, but there’s also a New York Times article about this,” and people drift off. And really we just now are for the first time, we’ve almost hitting a million dollars in revenue and we are just now thinking about ads because we feel like we have kind of done all the optimization to the website that you can do and reduce product lines that aren’t working so that if we do spend money in advertising, it’s not going into a leaky bucket theoretically.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That is really, really great insight for a lot of other entrepreneurs that the advertising guy is not spending on advertising. It’s a very different advertising too. It’s not the advertising that we talked about with Leo Burnett. I mean, this is throwing a boatload at Meta and hoping that most of it comes back and it’s a crazy game. And with my D2C, I’m in the same boat where I am actually doing this, but the ROI is always questionable. I mean, it goes up, it goes down. It’s not like this sure shot, but you spend so much time on optimization with your website, that’s why you are ahead of KENT in England. So it all worked out.

Jeff Grace:
Well, no, I mean search engine optimization, Stacy’s really been focused on that. And then website optimization, I know AI isn’t the thing that everyone brings cheer to people’s minds, but for us, it’s really enabled this. I mean, we’re basically a two to three person business. We have a few permalancers and myself and Stacy, and I’m not really working on it as much as she is. So you could say we have 1.5 full-time employees and Claude and OpenAI, a lot of these tools are just so good at helping us squeeze a lot more efficiency out of our website, even enabling us to do a lot of the conversion work on the site. And then we have our design partners that will make it look pretty and beautiful. But it’s a different world out there, and you’re 100% right. I come from a world where digital advertising didn’t almost exist when I was at Altoids.
And now I personally think for a D2C brand, the order of priority should be your email. Email is such a big thing for us. We spend so much time trying to make the best emails we possibly can. And then it really is our social channels, which I think feels neglected to us. PR has been really effective for us. And then last but not least, I think when we are going to spend money, I think it’ll be on influencers first because you get, instead of hiring an agency, each influencer is sort of their own agency. It’s like they have a built-in media plan, which is their audience. They have a deep connection and infinity with that audience, and then they actually will make the content for you and you have to give up a little bit of control in the process, but it is so different than the world of 20 years ago.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s really interesting, and I’m sure that now that we record this end of October 2026, I’m sure if you listen to it, end of October 2027, it’s already a totally different world too. I mean, things are moving so quickly now. And with AI, I mean, I use AI constantly to optimize the website, and I have one AI agent talk to the other AI agent, and they’re all making it a better website, which is fantastic. And another thing about AI that I thought was interesting when you mentioned how important AI is now doing this entire journey of brands, I had two customers of my startup write me, and they were so excited that they found that the product was recommended via AI. They uploaded a picture of the room and saying, “Hey, I’m looking for a cool record storage that fits this design.” And then they sent them to our website and I’m like, “Wow, AI recommends our website.” So it has nothing to do with Google search results.
It has nothing to do with advertising. It’s just about optimizing your website and answering the right questions and having a lot of the images and super interesting.

Jeff Grace:
That’s your business panopic? Is that the…

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s right, that’s right.

Jeff Grace:
Yeah. No, that’s such a satisfying feeling. And I think for businesses that were not built on Meta, we saw a huge surge last year when I think when you saw people were replacing Google with ChatGPT. And I think it’s because if you spend the money on PR and getting your brand authentically reviewed and integrated with, that stuff lives on forever. But if the money you’re spending on a PR agency might go to Meta ads, there’s no crumbs of that left once those ads run. And it’s almost like it kind of evaporates instantly. So I think that’s why, first of all, when you have an amazing product that gets great reviews on Reddit and real forums, AI favors that. So I could see totally why, particularly in a niche community, like people that collect records, if you have a great product, it’s going to emerge very quickly in Reddit and places of that nature.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, knock on wood, I hope so. And you’re absolutely right, and you make me question our ad spend and maybe pushing it again a little bit more towards influences and PR and optimization and all of that stuff. So it’s very good. It’s a very self-serving podcast I’m running here. So thanks everyone for listening.

Jeff Grace:
As you should.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
As this is good therapy for myself here. Listen, with KENT, I mean, congratulations on the million. One million, it’s a nice place to be, to break through that ceiling. Was that the biggest breakthrough moment so far, or was there a certain press piece that you got where you looked at Stacy and Stacy looked at you and you’re like, “You know what? KENT is growing up. It looks like KENT’s going to be a real brand.” Or was that during your TV appearance? When was that moment where you felt like, “Hey, we’re turning into a brand here?”

Jeff Grace:
Well, I think there was two breakthrough moments. I think one was Shark Tank for sure. I felt like a big validation of the brand. I think anyone that’s done Shark Tank, I know you’ve talked to some Shark Tank founders in the past. I don’t know if their experience was similar to us, but you have to do so much work to kind of… At least for us, we were in the middle of raising money. This is in the year 2002, or I guess 2020… Wait, what am I trying to say? 2022.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Hey, they’re 20 years different.

Jeff Grace:
Second year of the pandemic. I feel like I’ve blacked out that entire period of our lives. And the business was having some success and definitely catching on with the press. And struck a chord with the producers at Shark Tank. But we also were raising money and they had asked us to pause that process to go on air. And what we didn’t realize was that kind of the end of the Zirp era of super low interest rates and a lot of venture companies investing in D2C businesses, it was like that tide was receding almost the exact time we were holding off and saving all our powder for this Shark Tank appearance. And so the Shark Tank appearance did bring us a lot of attention, but we found that a lot of the tide had gone out on people investing in D2C businesses. They weren’t seeing the returns they had hoped for, things of that nature.
So it was a big validation for us. It brought a huge global audience to our product. And then I think another breakthrough was then Stacy also got asked to speak at a company called Sheertex, which I mentioned earlier, which brought us to Montreal. And she had become really close with the founder Kat there. And we moved our whole lives from LA to Montreal and she was going to be the chief of staff at the company and still trying to run KENT. I was going to do more of the KENT work. She was going to kind of back burner it a little bit. And it was really, that was a turning point for her because she realized that working for someone else’s business, it made her feel like she reinvigorated her to want to double down on KENT. And what was also happening is that Sheertext was sort of going through a lot of pain.
Ultimately they ousted the founder and they had brought in some auto execs to run the company. And the company basically was out of business in six months after we moved to Montreal. But then it also gave, it was a very clear moment for Stacy, “I’m going to just redouble my efforts on KENT.” And she’d learned a lot from Kat about what it takes to grow a business into something substantial. I think Sheertext had its own factory in Montreal and it was doing something like $300 million a year in business. So it was a really big business, but it was also built on that meta house of cards, if you will. And it’s a business I think honestly should still be around, but it got acquired by someone else. But I think those are the two big key turning points for the brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. But yeah, I’m sure that she got the itch while being there. And it’s also, it just kind of retells the story of like, “Hey, if she can do it, I can do it. And if they can do it, we can do it then.” There’s a little bit of that wind in your sales of helping someone else achieve something and you’re like, “Well, why don’t I do it for myself?” I think we all have that. And with branding and marketing and all of us always being agency side and helping clients and it’s just too choosy not to take a bite and do it yourself at some point. So little do they tell us how hard of work it is because I’m going to, after this episode, get a Home Depot truck and move some aluminum through Los Angeles from one vendor to another. And no one told me that, but that’s what happens.
You want to make it in the US, you got to be the one doing the stuff in the beginning.

Jeff Grace:
Well, I’ll tell you another big key moment for us because you’re mentioning going to warehouses in LA. Our original warehouse was in LA and earlier this year we flew out to LA to move to a bigger warehouse because we’d actually outgrown it. And I think that was when it struck us that the business had finally… I remember Stacy only a couple years ago was packing orders in our living room. I remember for her scaling. The first thing was we were both like, “I think we got to find some way that you’re not the one doing this at the very least.” We though it would take us a day to move out of our warehouse and it took almost a week and a half and five full-time people because you’re not seeing it every day, the product just started multiplying and the amount of volume. So that was also just a big moment of like, oh wow, this thing’s like we now are a real business it feels like.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s amazing. Walking through that warehouse and seeing your product just lined up, row off the road, up to the ceiling, I mean that is a huge moment. I remember when I got the first drop of our product before we started producing it in the US for the most part, it was amazing just getting this container and filling it up and spending a whole day putting it in the warehouse. It’s real. It’s real. Well, to finish things off here, let’s talk a little more about branding for the next 10 minutes or so. Obviously, this is your world, but now with KENT, it’s a very different way of looking at the idea of branding, I’m sure, as it is more intrinsic and as it is definitely more personal for you now. What does this horribly misunderstood word of branding mean to you? How would you describe branding to someone?

Jeff Grace:
Well, I think there’s a poster that you have behind you that I was reading when we were chatting before the podcast. I don’t remember it verbatim, but it was something like brand is really about the passion of the founder and the passion of the people behind it and the integrity behind it. If you don’t have that, then you’re just a product, which I think is exactly it. There’s the difference between corn on the shelf and corn in a can, that’s where the brand starts to come into play. And I think in this day and age, I think mission-driven product is everything. Do you have a reason for your customers to believe, do you have a bigger mission than just making money? And for us, it’s Stacy’s most radical statement. I don’t know if it’s on our website, but it’s something that we always talk about.
Her goal is to eliminate plastic from the fashion industry. Now, can we ever get there? I don’t know, but that’s what KENT is serving to provide that. Can we grow plastic-free apparel from 0.5% of fashion industry to 30%? That would be a huge mission and better for the environment, better for people’s skin, better for everyone. So I think that’s what ultimately a brand is, is what do you really stand for? Patagonia is a brand that we always hold up very high. Tom’s is one of those mission-driven brands that had a lot going for it in the early days. Whereas even if you look at Coca-Cola today, I don’t really know if people have a lot of heart for Coca-Cola because it’s just sugar water other than Enjoy and some nice vibes, and I have no idea what the hell they’re doing with all this AI advertising, which feels like, if anything, Coca-Cola is about authenticity and they’re making some of the most inauthentic looking –

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And Jeff, that whole thing started at Christmas. Do you remember that Christmas last year and they had this AI ad of Santa Claus and the whole shebang? And you’re like, no, no. That’s the one thing you had going for yourself was Coca-Cola equals Christmas and Santa and the happy times and the polar bear. They invested decades into owning this moment, even though no one drinks Coca-Cola at Christmas. But that idea, it was like you drink hot cocoa and whiskey. I don’t know, but not Coca-Cola. And then they use AI to ruin this one moment that they had going for the brand. I totally agree. It’s unbelievable.

Jeff Grace:
I think it’s one of the biggest brand mistakes I’ve ever seen. Maybe the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad is close, but soda’s struggling these days, right? Because I think ultimately Coca-Cola is about nostalgia. So AI is anti-nostalgia. And as we know now, a year or so later, people would rather have a nuclear power plant put into their neighborhood than an AI server farm. That’s how much AI is hated. Whoever was working at Coca-Cola when that was going down, and if you can make AI that literally no one can tell if it’s AI or not, well, maybe there’s an argument to be made there, but it wasn’t even passing that test. I mean, they were even bragging about how they made the ads with AI. I mean, it was mind-boggling.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I guess the Chagua car launch was the only other horrible thing that might have been worse than that. Absolutely. Absolutely. So interesting. Let’s go back into your brand for one minute, your and Stacey’s brand, KENT. If you would take… Because we talked about happiness and nostalgia for Coca-Cola, right? I drink maybe one or two Cokes a year, and when I do, it’s like this nostalgic guilty pleasure. And it’s festivities to actually drink a tiny can of Coca-Cola. But for most people, that’s not like it. But if you would put the KENT brand through that filter and out comes one word when people think about the brand or when you internally think about the brand, what would people think about? What Is a word that would bubble up?

Jeff Grace:
Well, for us, I wouldn’t say this is what the brand is about. There’s not the mission of the brand, but the tone of the brand I think is we always wanted to strive for playful. And because a lot of environmental messaging we find to be very self-serious and strident and preachy. If there was a word that meant not preachy, so words we throw around a lot are playful, unpretentious, because we want to expand the audience for our mission, and being preachy is not a way to do it. I think it’s part of the problem with the Democratic party right now. It’s like they’re losing audience because why? The Democrats can come off preachy.
Climate change, I think has suffered from the same problem of people being shamed for not being on the message. We want people to feel invited. We want you to feel like our brand is fun. If you don’t know anything about sustainable fashion, that’s cool. That’s why we’re here. We’re here to educate and we’re here to grow that awareness and grow that mission. So playful, that’s what we strive for. When we came across the line, plant your pants, we’re like, that’s it. That’s funny. It kind of makes people smile. So we try to hit that mark as much as possible.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I always like it when my guests talk about Hitting the Mark on Hitting the Mark. When you said playful, it’s so interesting because playful is natural.That’s how we were as kids. We were more playful. We were more innocent. We had more fun. We enjoyed life in a different way than we do now as adults. And that idea of natural is really what is at the core of your brand, but you would never use the word like that. But it’s interesting. There’s actually an interesting, interesting relation. I mean, you’ve given so much advice and shared so many insights through our casual chat here, but is there anything from a brand perspective, any advice that you might have for founders that are going at it, like single founders or in your case, a couple that says, let’s start our own thing and you’re scaling it. Is there anything from a brand perspective where you feel like, hey, I would watch out not to do this or double down on something else?
You already talked a lot about authenticity. You talked about the Google ads and how that is a house of cards these days or potentially can be at the wrong time of a startup. There is a time and a place for it, but is there anything else that you might be able to share?

Jeff Grace:
Well, I heard, I think his name’s Harley Finkelstein, a president of Shopify, and he just spoke here in Montreal and he was doing a kids workshop for a book he just read, and he said something that struck me. And I think it’s the truest thing. I’m a screenwriter as well, and I think it’s true with stories of all sorts. I think it tends to be a better way to approach developing a product, and I think this is true with screenplays. Is this a movie you want to see or is this a product that you desperately want to be in the world? Not a product you think other people want and you could make money from, but do you desperately… I would imagine this is the origin story of your album storage business, is I wish someone would make this product. And so what do you do?
You make it. And I think sometimes people think, well, if it’s just me that wants it, well, how could there possibly be an audience for this? I remember Lena Dunham, who was the creator of the show Girls, which is a very polarizing show. I always really liked it. And she wrote the more hyper-personal the story, the more people relate to it. And I think that’s true with brands and with products, because you’re probably likely solving something that a lot of people feel. And the more you share and reveal your true emotional state, the more it tends to be that people go, “Oh, I feel that way too, but I’m afraid to say it.” Or, “I want underwear that has no plastic. I want unique album storage,” what have you.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. No, I totally agree. I totally agree. And for me, it’s always about why put a product out there that already exists or why just do it in a different finish or let’s solve problems. The world has enough products out there, and I’m highly self-conscious in the same way that you think about the environment where I know I’m putting out stuff. I mean, I’m contributing to the environmental issues that we have on this planet. So if I do that, it might as well be something that’s completely unique and it solves something that hasn’t been solved before and that’s going to be around for decades and decades. So the quality has to be superb, right? Because otherwise, why do it? And I get inspired by your words here to really push my own story there and that idea because I’m like, “Well, bummer, I don’t have my fist in the air like KENT has.” No, I do.
It’s in a very different vertical, but I have my fist in the air too, and I think people can feel that and it’s extremely important and you’re absolutely right. Well, listen, what are you guys up to in the next six months or so with KENT? I know you just had a really nice milestone, but what’s going to go on until you are the company that eliminates plastics from the fashion world? Until you arrive there, let’s look at the next six months. Anything exciting coming up?

Jeff Grace:
Well, we have a lot of new products that are coming out, which I don’t think I can really tip on the… I can’t give you the scoop on right here. I think my wife would be upset because we seem to have a few copycat brands that seem to –

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Great, that’s good.

Jeff Grace:
Try to replicate what we’re doing, which I guess is a good thing, although it sometimes makes you a little paranoid. But I think ultimately is we have been sort of trying to figure out, this is a tough one, which is do we stay just hyper-focused on underwear and just solve as many of those problems as possible, which has been our current approach. And then what innovations and technical solutions… I think when people hear technology, people think artificial. We were trying to figure out how do we crack the code on bringing more of our technological thinking to create more organic products? And so much of performance materials, for instance, is all about plastics and synthetics. And so how can we use our technological thinking and engineering to create more natural products? So performance might be an area you go into athleisure, but for right now we still are really committed to is our underwear as best as possibly can be?
Are there other little innovations we can do, at least within this totally radically natural positioning we have to deliver for customers?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. And please, please go into performance because it’s the type of clothing that everyone wears because it is so horribly comfortable and they don’t even use it for athletics, but it’s just the most comfortable thing to wear and everyone’s closets are exploding of all of that stuff.

Jeff Grace:
And it’s the product that you’re sweating in the most and opening your pores into the most. So the negative effects of plastics and these chemicals are like… So that’s why we felt like underwear was this first thing itself, and that’s why we can crack the coat on this. Be honest, the technological solution here is not simple. Those materials do have a lot of properties that have breathability, moisture wicking, and it’s harder to find through natural fibers, but that’s I think our next mission.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, if it were simple, everyone would do it, right? But it’s not. So here you are.

Jeff Grace:
This is true.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, listen, I always want to call you KENT, but no, Jeff.

Jeff Grace:
You’re not the first.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Or Jeff Grace, it’s even difficult. It’s like Jeff KENT. It’s like, I don’t know. But listen, Jeff, this was such a great conversation. Thank you for spending a good 45 minutes with us. And yeah, we’re going to follow the story of KENT all the way. Where can people go and find KENT online?

Jeff Grace:
You can find our products at wearkent.com, which is W-E-A-R. I’ll tip it now, but we are going to have a sale. My birthday is Halloween, and I think starting this Thursday or Friday, we’re having a four for one little birthday gift, free underwear. Or if people have never tried KENT before, one thing I always like to tell people is that the first pair of KENT you ever get, if they don’t fit, you keep them for free. So we like kind of the honor code there. If they fit great and you love them, don’t try to get the first fit guarantee comp to you. But we always say, “Hey, try the underwear out. If you love them, keep them. If you hate them and they don’t fit, still keep them.” So check that out.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Makes a lot of sense for a brand like yours. I was not planning on releasing this before Halloween, but now we will. We’re going to hustle. We’re going to get this out on time so that everyone can get their sale going.

Jeff Grace:
Well, you can cut that, but if you have a spot in the schedule, go for it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Nope That’s how we’re going to do it. That’s how we’re going to do it. Well, listen, Jeff, thank you so much. We really, really appreciate it.

Jeff Grace:
Appreciate it, Fabian. It was great talking to you.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I’m a lucky man to do what I do with Hitting the Mark. It’s so enjoyable to have conversations like this, and I hope that you appreciate it and that you enjoy it just as much as I do. If so, take a quick moment. I know I say it every time, but you most likely haven’t done so yet. Just subscribe and rate and share the show with the ones that you think might get something out of it. Hitting the Mark is produced by my consultancy, FINIEN, where we create clarity for brand transformations and integrations. This episode was edited as always by the wonderful Everett Barton and the Hitting the Mark theme music was written by the one and only Happiness One. I will see you next time when we once again will be hitting the mark.