YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Smith

lines on the record: 98
first: 2026-06-01
most recent: 2026-06-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, it wasn't a technical ski boat. No, it was an after ski boat. Yeah. A boot that you could wear in the snow because the original classic line had an EVA sole. It was a flat piece of ethyl vinyl acetate, whatever. It was super slippery on Snow and Ice. So we created a rubber capsule because it was rubber it was much more sticky on snow and ice. But yeah, that was a big, big change. Made us much more credible in the snow industry.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stocking plan. And if a store would open up with six pairs, I'd give a free pair to the store manager. And now I was in a different surf shop a month or two later and a guy walked in and he says, what are these boots like? And the sales guy says, oh, they're fantastic. I'm wearing them now. He says, aren't your feet hot? No, they breathe. Well, what happens if you get them wet at dirt? Oh, you can wash, you know, I mean, it was just like night and day. And so the guy bought a pair of ug boots because there was somebody to validate how good they were. And so that cost me a pair of boots for each new store I opened, but that changed the trajectory of Ug forever. It was probably the best marketing plan I'd ever executed on.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a couple of things. By being out there with the customers, it was so much easier for me to get a rapport going and introduce the product by having them try the boots on. That turned out to be the biggest factor in closing our first orders was having the buyer try them on. But while I was in the stores, this girl walked into the shop one day, I think I was in Newport Beach somewhere, and she was touching the Ugboots and she obviously loved the look of them and the feel of them. And she was asking the staff guy there, you know, what are these like? Well, I'm not really sure, you know, are they hot? Not really sure, you know, what happens if I get them dirty? The guy was useless, right? Yeah. And I saw that interaction and I came up with what I called the six pair.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the weird thing was I actually loved being on the road selling. And, you know, after we got, we made a deal that from then on they would not tell anybody that I'd sold the company. Okay. Right, so that got that out of the way. I'd already committed that I don't own the company, I don't run this anymore. But my mantra is I'm going to try and get a pair of ug boots on every single person in America. And I went back on the road to all my Southern California guys and I got back to the office and Neil handed me a check for $5,000 and said, that's your commissions. And would you believe that? I think that was the fifth or sixth year. That was the first money I'd ever taken out of the company.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I went, What? He said, Yeah, I called an order in this morning, and they said, you don't own the company anymore. And like I couldn't wait to get out of the store and I went to the Shell gas station next door, to the phone booth, because this is before cell phones, right? And I called up Neil and I said, Neil, what the hell are you telling people? And he said, what do you mean? And I said, You're telling him I don't own the company. And he says, Well, you don't. And I said, Yes, I do. You're my three new partners. And he goes, no, you don't get your stock issued until you finish the trademark law. And I just hung the phone up and I drove from Huntington Beach straight back to San Diego. And I pulled out my contract and I read it and I reread it and I just went, oh shit, I don't own the company anymore.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in my mind, I wasn't. In my mind, they were my new partners, and nothing had changed. They're the ones that thought they just bought the business from me. And it came to a head, we spent a whole week organizing everything up in the Anaheim warehouse and getting the accounting working and everything. And I finally went on the road my first day as a full-time sales rep, right? And I drove down Beach Boulevard to Huntington Surf and Sport and I walked in and the manager's name was Dave. And before I could say anything, he said, hey, Brian, I heard you sold the company”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were bringing in cash the ability to buy more product. We also moved the entire operation up to their warehouse in Anaheim. And I was not going to be involved in the day-to-day operations anymore. I was going to be the salesman. And by now, I loved sales. I was just an incredible ugboot salesman. And so I was going on the road full-time and I was on, not on salary, I was going to make a commission on sales. And they were going to do all of the operations. So their 75% was overheads and running the company.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that from his perspective is exactly how he saw it. But me being a naive, you know, businessman, I was looking at, oh, he's so lucky I'm bringing in three new partners to my business.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business was Yamaha motorcycles, and he was a distributor for them, but he was also an opportunist. And if he saw good deals in the marketplace, especially in the ski industry, he would buy a whole bunch of closeouts and figure out a way to make money out of it. So that was who Paul Bassman introduced me to And Neil came down and looked at our operation and said, shit, I could do this, but then we had to sit down and try and figure out how we were going to do it.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. And he just wanted his money out. And I do remember that there was a period when he was putting intense pressure on me. And I remember I was at home one night with my wife, Laura, and we were watching TV. I was lying on my back on the floor and the show finished. I clicked the TV off and I rolled over on my stomach and got up on my hands and knees and I started crawling towards the bedroom, you know. And Laura, who is a really quiet person, she just looked at me and said, you get up now and walk to bed like a man. She sort of shocked me. And as I stood up, I just was like coming out of a fog. It was like, oh my God, there's so much more to life than this crappy little sheepskin company. And that night I started, you know, how can I get out of this? You know, I literally wanted to just get out.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that partner investor that gave me the line of credit, he was used to finding an idea and doubling his money overnight. That's why he had the computer business that nobody else ever saw, you know, stripping out the gold. And he wanted to double his money, but he had no concept of advertising, cost of samples, cost of communicating with the sales for him.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was one of the founders of the ski industry association, what became this humongous trade show in Las Vegas. And he came on as a sales rep for me industry. I wasn't looking for a sales rep, but he came and convinced me that the ski market was a totally different market to the surf market. And he was right. And so he had a group that was already selling gloves and socks and everything to all the ski areas and all the ski shops. So he added ug boots to the line.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I went to them and I said, Hey, listen, guys, I'm going to have to give up the Ug name and we're going to call him Jackaroo. So you'll be riding for Jackaroos. And I went, no way. That's a dumb name. And I realized how passionate they were about the Ug brand and just made me forget all about changing the name. And I said, damn it, I'm just going to go to court and fight this because that name is really powerful.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Australian cowboy jacket. And Jillaroo is the female version. Had these young kids that I knew their parents, and they were riding for the UG surf team. They had ug logos on their surfboards. They like all the brands had surf teams. And so they wanted to be on the UG surf team”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I was always trying to get financing from someone who had cash. It wasn't like a well thought out business plan or anything. And always in September, October, where I had these humongous orders to fill and no product. So I was in the worst negotiating position of all time. And this happened two or three times during those early years where the old investors didn't have the money to buy the new product. So I had to do a deal to get them out and bring in bigger investors. And that was a really horrible cycle.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's correct, yeah. And, you know, when I look back on my experience of ARG, the greatest weakness I had was my lack of financial knowledge, right? I was an accountant. But finance is not the same as accounting. Accounting is what happened last year. Here's the balance sheet. Finance is forecasting what am I going to need over the next one, two, three, five years in a company that was growing pretty fast. So I was always in a position of the sales exceeding my ability to finance the production. And the more sales you get, the bigger your problems get in supply. And I never really understood that. My accounting thinking was we just sold a million dollars worth of product. We're broke. What's the answer? Oh, so two million next year. I think we'd have more money, but you don't. You're twice as broke.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I'd registered a trademark, but they claimed that in Australia, the trademark lawyers, if you're the first guy in with your $10 and you fill the form out, you own the trademark. The rest of the world, you have to establish first use and continuous use. And I was able to do that with this woman. She came in after me and I had advertisements. I had lots of public information that showed I was in business before she even came to America. So I knew I would always win a lawsuit.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, 30 to 50,000 per year. The immediate jumper is like 200,000 dollars. Wow. And it was because I finally connected the image that kids would want to be in the photographs, like they would be dying to walking to Black's Beach with Mike Parsons or to trestles with Ted Robinson, you know. And that reality really taught me everything I learned about sales and marketing.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had a buddy who was a former World Serf champion, Pete Townend, who worked for Surfing magazine, and he was running a scholastic surf team at the time. And I called him up and said, hey, do you have any young kids who are about to turn pro? And he gave me Mike Parsons and Ted Robinson as two people to check out. And so I hired them in boots, you know. I just took my own little Canon Sureshot and we went surfing at Black's Beach in La Jolla and trestles up in San Ana Ofre. So when I ran those ads, the sales which had been around”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much all just said, Oh, there's ugs, man. They're so fake. Have you seen those ads, those models? They can't surf and instantly I realized that not only was my ads not working, I was actually turning people away from Ugbirts because of the images that I portrayed the man. So it was a huge learning thing.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But over the summer, I realized my product's so expensive it needs a huge inventory because you never know if someone's going to walk in the door of their size seven or a size 13. So it was a very hard product for retailers to stock because of the cost. Americans still didn't understand sheepskin. They thought it was hot and sweaty and prickly. So I've got that against me. By a pure fluke was having a beer with one of my good retailers in Ocean Beach in San Diego and at his store. And I was talking about how hard it was for me to get traction in the advertising. And he called out to the back and he called it half a dozen of these little kids, you know, the 12 to 13-year-old Grommys who store their surfboards in the shop. And he says, hey, you guys, what do you think of Ugs?”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually loved that golf. That golf course job is probably the best job I've ever had in my life outside of Ug, you know?”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I thought I was doing a brilliant job, you know. Telling you about one of the biggest mistakes I ever made, right, which was hiring these two models, really good looking. We posed them on the beach. And I'd run those things in the sales at, let's say 81, 82 was about 30,000. The sales went to 35,000. Like it was like my ads were doing nothing. Again, summer job and then come back to it and I used good looking models again. Sales went to, I think it was 45,000 that year. And it was like just getting nowhere. And it was probably the fourth season of me being in business. I really wanted to give up. I was working on a golf course in the summertime, right?”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody was calling. I mean, I was like a non entity for the first three to four years. And every time I'd go into summer mode, I wouldn't think about Ugbert's for four or five months. And then it would be July, August, September. I'd start thinking, oh shit, I better figure out who I'm going to sell to. How do I get more sales? I learned early on that trying to walk into a surf shop with sheepskin boots on a hot day was like pointless. So I learned to wait for a really shitty day when the storm would hit. You know, then I'd go on the road and sails. I would open up half a dozen pairs in lots of different little surf shops. So like in the off season, I was fully into... Making money to stay alive, and then I would have to backtrack and get the Ugboot business started up again.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was at the time when all the big mainframe computers were being replaced by desktop computers. And nobody knew is that these big refrigerator sized mainframes, every connection where one wire touched another wire or a motherboard touched, plugged into another board, it was gold connections. And so he arranged to buy up all of these old mainframes, which most accountants were paying to get rid of them, right? Not knowing they were full of gold. And so I was given a bunch of cash and a pair of snips and hammer. And I found out when I got home that I'd made $3,000, which was a fortune to go on the road for a month, you know. But I realized I'd shift over $300,000 worth of gold back to San Diego. Not really knowing that I was doing it.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ski market was even harder than the surf market because their attitude was, well, we have marden, we have slush, and we need rubber, you know, we've got to have sorrels, and they couldn't see sheepskin being strong enough or waterproof enough to work in their areas. So, yeah, the ski markets were very, very difficult to get into.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my dad, who'd been a contractor, you know, absolutely did not want me running my own business. And I think it's probably because he had such a hard time of it. That's why I got into accounting. He wanted a safe, secure job, you know, work your way up to chief accountant. I couldn't think of, that to me was like going to prison”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did probably the smartest thing I ever did in that business was I did a search, a trademark search that it cost me $600 at the time, which today is probably four or five thousand bucks, you know. And I did a search of the world, especially the US, to see if there'd been any prior use of the trade name UG and there had not. So that opened up the gate for me to do the registration of the trademark”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Relative to how much money I had, it was very expensive, yes. But back at that time, the Surf magazines didn't want money up front. So I was able to get $30 to 60 days to pay the advertising bill. So I was totally gambling that if I ran these ads, I would get enough sales to be able to pay for the ads.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had the most interesting motivator, which was that at least one in two Australians owned some sort of sheepskin footwear. So it's not the product's fault, it must be me. And I've had that mantra for like 10, 15 years. Every time it's not working, it's not working, I would come back to that thought that, well, how come everyone in Australia owns a pair? Yeah. And so with that attitude, I was able to stay in the game a lot longer than somebody who'd never seen them in Australia.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of the above, yeah. And so I did go participate, but nobody understood what I had. So, the bottom line is in March I just shut it down and my first job in the summer was scraping boats at Marina Del Rey. Then I switched over to construction firm, a buddy of mine owned a contracting company in Bel Air and I was working in Beverly Hills and Bel Air on construction projects and that filled up the summer.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, these questions you're asking were asked by every single surf shop owner and every consumer. What the hell, why are they so good? And the answer is that all Australians know this, is that sheepskin breathes so you can put them on with freezing feet and they will insulate. And if you've got wet feet like after surfing, it wicks the moisture out towards the surface. And so within 10-15 minutes, your feet are dry and warm. So there was a very, very practical side to wearing them after surfing. And so that's what I wanted to tap into.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I used to go up for a surf in the morning, and afterwards I'd grab a coffee in the newspaper and I had my van full of product and I would just sit there with the doors open. I made steady money.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Doug decided to go into the video business, which was just starting at that time. We knew we couldn't make a living out of no sales. So, you know, I wanted to give up, but I couldn't because I got 400 pairs in the bedroom and all my investors' money is tied up. I started doing swap meets and street fairs and basically anywhere I could get a crowd and over the next January, February, March, I ended up selling about $6,000 worth of product.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's super expensive. That was one of the worst facets of the entire project for 20 years was the lack of margins I had because the pressure of the retail price kept us way, way down. So it was very hard to make money.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember going back to concerf boards and the owner goes, oh, well done, Brian. You are going to be so successful, but we couldn't sell them out of our store. We just sell surfboards and trunks and flip-flops. But you're going to do great in the shoe stores. Good luck, you know. And I walked out without an order, right? And this happened in about 60 surf shops all the way down the coast From Malibu down to San Diego. And the total sales for the first year was 28 pairs.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's correct. We're going to be partners. And the interesting thing about that road trip we both did, neither of us realized that we hadn't asked for an order, right? Now we knew we needed inventory. And by a pure fluke, my roommate in Santa Monica overheard us talking and said, oh, there's some guys at my office looking for other new investments. And let me take it to them. And he did them. And we were able to raise $20,000 from them as capital. And we didn't even have a business plan. It was just the enthusiasm of me talking about how big it was in Australia and everything. So we raised this $20,000 and we knew we would never, ever, ever need any more money than that for the rest of the business. Right. I see.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can remember walking at a con surfboards, which was in Santa Monica right near where I lived, and I was so embarrassed to open up this bag of samples. I pulled them open. He goes, oh my God, Ugboots. He says, they're great. All my friends have got them. What are you doing with those? And I said, well, you know, we're thinking of importing them into America. Oh my God, you're going to make a fortune. And so this happened in all the surf shops that I went into. And the same with Doug. And we thought we were going to be instant millionaires, no doubt about it. Yeah.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we ordered six pairs of samples. And after they arrived, Doug was going to be the salesman because I was an account and I was terrified of sales. And he went on the road and visited every single shoe store in Southern California. He came back with about 150 business cards of all these retailers and not a single order. He said, Brian, they tell us we're crazy trying to sell sheepskin in California. And that sounds logical, but Australia's climate is identical to California. So that wasn't the real answer. And so, you know, as an entrepreneur, you have to pivot when you hit a wall like that. And I thought, well, maybe the surf market's the way to go. We looked up, you know, the yellow pages. There are probably 60 to 80 surf shops. And so Doug and I changed gears. And now he insisted I went on the road.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes. And Doug and I, we didn't have a lot of money, but we decided we've got to get some samples, so we pulled 500 bucks together and caught the guy who ran the advertisement. And we talked him into being distributors for the US.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether it was slippers or little booties or scuffs or whatever, you can imagine Australia being a sheepskin country and every little town, there is someone with a sewing machine and they're making ug boots and every town would spell ug a different way. UG, UGH, UGHS, UG, you know.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, yeah. Well, I was sitting around my house in Santa Monica with my buddy Doug and... I was reading Surfer magazine and there was a photograph of this guy and a girl in front of a fireplace with all you could see was their legs with these white boots on their legs. And the instant I saw it, I thought, oh my God, you know, one in two Australians has some sort of sheepskin footwear and there's none in America. So I just thought this is like the ultimate no-brainer. And I looked at Doug and said, man, we've got to go into business. We've got to be instant millionaires, just like that.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I was, you know, every day I'd look at the Wall Street Journal and I'd look at billboards on the way to everywhere and I'd look at shop windows and see what was, and I was really literally on a search for something to take back to Australia. I had no desire to stay and live in America”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the trends all came out of California, Levi jeans, waterbeds, you know, all the surf brands and skate brands, all the vibrancy was coming out of California.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, the house was rumbling with noise on fire. And I got up to the front door and I was fumbling with the lock and I couldn't get it open. And the weirdest thing happened. I remember slumping to the floor and I just said, oh, I'm going to die. And this voice, this is going to be hard to believe, but this voice that just said very calmly, you haven't done enough with your life yet, Brian. And I stood up and I worked my way all around the house, punching all the windows out with my fists and screaming out. And eventually a workman who'd been a couple of houses down came up with a crowbar and got the bars off my bedroom to get out. And then, you know, it was just one of those weird, unexplainable moments.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, $200 a month for this little house. But all my friends told me it's such a bad area, Brian. Don't go there. And I'm this dumb Australian thinks, ah, they'll like me. I'm an Aussie, you know. But it turned out that all the houses in that area had bars on the windows. And, you know, the first night I was there, I bought a pizza and a bottle of wine and this big tall candle about 15 inches tall. And I stuck it on a shelf in the living room and lit it and then, you know, drank some wine, listened to music, and went to bed. And the next morning I woke up in bed and everything went black and I ducked underneath. Oh my God, the house is on fire because the candle didn't have a dish under it. And I just let it burn through.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One afternoon I was driving along the highway. This music came on the radio and there was a song there that was called Time and the words were, and then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun, and I just thought oh shit he's talking to me. And as soon as I heard those words, my body just got covered in goosebumps. I thought, oh my God, all of my friends were tracking off to partnerships in the accounting world and other friends who'd started business out of high school. And I felt like I'd been running on the spot for 10 years. So it was literally, it was so powerful. It was only a matter of weeks before I arrived in Los Angeles. And I had my surfboard, so I just started going up to Malibu. I surfed that place for nearly a year.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could see it coming so clearly. In fact, the preseason orders looked like the company was going to be destined for 18 million, maybe even $20 million. But I knew I would not be able to finance an extra five, six, seven million dollars in product.”
2026-06-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · UGG: Brian Smith. How an epiphany, surfers, and $500 launched an iconic sheepskin footwear company. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT