YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike O'Donnell

lines on the record: 139
first: 2025-10-13
most recent: 2025-10-13
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

“Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter on substack or at guyroz.com. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Nor Gill. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Chris Massini, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Ceypher, Ramel Wood, Andrea Bruce, and Elaine Coates. And you've been listening to How I Built This.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's Alex and Mike Fairty, founders of Faudi brand clothing. By the way, remember their beach house on wheels, the mobile pop-up store that they drove across the country in the early days? Well, they continue to take it to events and concerts over the years, but sadly this past summer, it was destroyed in a fire. Nobody was hurt thankfully, and a replacement beach house on wheels is now in the works.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I attribute it for the most part to the grind. I think it's an attitude that we have that no matter what happens, we're going to figure it out. The power of positivity. And so I think in a business like ours that so many things can go wrong and you're starting up, if you're just positive every day and you're like, we're going to figure this out. We're going to get on the other end of it. We're going to motivate our people to be like this good vibes, positive energy. We can figure this out. We can do it goes a really, really, really, really long way.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The grind guy. It's the grind. And as you talked about it, we've done it the hard way. And fashion's like a hamster wheel. It's like Groundhog Day. I mean, in a way, it's like you live Groundhog Day every year because it's like, all right, we got fall coming up. All right, then we got winter. Then we got spring. Then we got summer. All right. Let's do it again. And you just sort of keep going and going. And every season something gets a little bit better and people are like, wow, I want more of that.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about the journey that you guys took and how long it took, how much of that journey do you attribute and where you are now to hard work and the grind and how much do you think had to do with luck where you are now?”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good question. I think Probably like a lot of families were not as good as communicating as we should be, but that's, you know, that's a wrinkle that we added to an already hard thing to do, which is start a brand, you know, adding a family dynamic into all of it. But at the same time, when you're just getting started out and you don't have many people and you got, you know, four people that whole livelihood. Depends on making this thing successful. That goes a long way and each one of us brings something else to the business and it adds a lot of value.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Race car beds was real. You guys really did have twin race car beds in your bedroom. So, Alex, how do you guys, when you have conflicts, the four of you, because your family is a family business.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly, but I think it goes back to Beginning of our talk, which is like two twin brothers in race car beds. I'm getting emotional about that type of feeling We have each other, so even though there's important people around us who matter, it still is like we have to always be here because this is like still, you know, a couple 12-year-olds dream.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't get too much into this, but I think it's worth just noting your wife is part of this business, Alex, and then Alex and Mike, your mom is a big part of this business. And, I mean, there have to be moments where that dynamic does create some, I'm not trying to like create conflict. I'm just curious. Because I'm more interested in how these conflicts are resolved, not how the conflicts happen. But there must be conflict at times that have to be resolved.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's not a world if we had it in our own control that we would sell the business. So Mike and I want to do this until we can't work anymore. I think we both made that decision. We feel really confident about that decision. We've already sold some of the business to some different investors. So, you know, we'll have to figure out ways to, you know, be good partners to them. But Mike and I, you know, no different than Ralph Lawrence still owns a meaningful stake in his business. Like I think there's people who've done this before us. Kept the integrity, kept running it until they were older, you know, and whether the family joins the business or not. I don't think we're thinking about that far. But there's people who've been able to do it. And so why can't we?”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned a few times that this was started as a family business and that you don't have the same pressures that the other e-commerce or DTC brands started around the same time do because you don't have really have many outside investors. But I have to imagine that at some point there is some exit or something. I mean, is there a world where you would want to be acquired by a WHP or one of these conglomerates?”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We own the fabric recipe. We own the yarn materialization of it, the customization of our product. So the makers become less important for us because we own the true recipe of all the garments so we can have that flexibility.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we've just been dealing with different versions of economic issues in some way, shape, or form. So I think Tamike and I, like, we pay attention to it, obviously, but shit's going to happen. Bad things are going to happen, good things are going to happen. So as long as we keep doing our thing, we'll be okay. But we've had to create a profitability model that gives us that margin of safety And the other thing that it's really done, you mentioned the tariffs, is, and I'm thinking from a supply chain perspective, it's been wild, right, to sort of watch. Our supply chain now is so global because it has to be. So I have an amazing partner on the supply chain. And so we're like able to with tariffs. Like just be ready to move.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is, I think it's fair to say, a tough time for retail and apparel in general from everyone I'm hearing. Big brands have been on the show. It's a tough time. Obviously, tariffs make it even more complex because a lot of these products are manufactured in Asia. How are you guys navigating this economic moment? I mean, I think probably you're doing much more direct-to-consumer sales now, given that you've got 80 stores and probably a lot less wholesale than you used to. But on the other hand, I have to assume like for everyone, it's been things have slowed down.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. If I go back to we got through COVID, we saw this huge increase in business. And I definitely became more focused on revenue growth than profit margin. And my survival mode went from how am I going to sell enough things to survive to how am I going to grow this business even faster because we got this great momentum finally. And, you know, I got to build an executive team. I got to build an organization so it can really stand the test of time because we've now gotten the business to this level of sales that is bigger. And then all of a sudden, you know, in 2022, when the COVID, you know, wind in our backs kind of Slow down”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay. So again, somebody might have said to you, very wanting to give you good advice, hey, Mike, you know, Alex, this is not the way to go. Like you're going to expand too quickly. You're going to get over your skis. And you're going to see that all of a sudden you're saddled with all these costs overhead employees. You did have to do some layoffs. I mean, there have, and this is normal in any business cyclical, but you have, was that, do you think that was connected to this expansion?”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we at the time, you know, we only had 11 stories, but my mom, who had been working with us since the beginning, she at this point was running our store design and construction part of the business. She was an interior decorator. And so we had this warehouse in New Jersey where we actually had two people on staff who were building fixtures for us. And we were able to build kind of our fixtures and all the interiors for good prices”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit of it's my mentality of it, you'll figure it out. And at the time, too, with COVID, which helped a lot was, you know, landlords were giving a lot of tenant allowance. So it actually wasn't, you know. Amount of capital we had to put in in a lot of these locations was relatively minimal. Also, clothing brands that have dressing rooms and really nice spaces were just walking out of stores. So you didn't have to come in and do a ton of construction. These stores were sort of ready for move-in. We just had to build the fixtures.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we went, I have this amazing real estate advisor who was working with me before COVID. And we started going out to landlords and saying, you know, here's all the places we want to be. And I made the decision with my real estate. I was like, the one thing we need to make sure we do is get as much term, you know, make the leases as long as possible because this is going to be the cheapest we can ever get rent ever. And that's what we did. And we signed over the course of 2020 and 21 40 leases over the next for the for stores that would open over the next three years”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our retail business. Listen to Ron Shake Story, and just to update, he had Panera bread. And in 2009, during the financial crisis, he was like, well, let's just expand because we can get good terms for leases. We can get good locations. People are shutting down. Let's go in. Let's go big.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great episode, and I'll never forget he has this part where he talks about during the Great Recession where he said, you know, could be an amazing opportunity because in recessions, you know, real estate's cheaper, construction's cheaper, landlords want you. And I was like, what do we do? We got this 11-store retail fleet. It's small, it's not at scale. Maybe this is an amazing time for us to really scale our retail business.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no business in New York, but in the resort town, same thing. Business was up like 60%, 100% year over year. And so when we got to Q3, business is making money. And I had a bunch of people who are smart, who are like, I think, you know, you only got 11 stores. Like, why don't you close all your non-beach stores, close all your New York City stores, sell your Boston stores, and just like walk away. And I had listened to your podcast. I heard the episode on the guy who started Panera Bread.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We became meaningfully profitable starting in the summer of 2020. And the other thing that happened was what's going to happen with our stores? At that time, we had 12 stores. Six of the 12 were in kind of resort beach destinations. Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Sag Harbor, which is exactly. And they're closed. So we're like, what's going to happen? And then when the things got lifted, you know, somewhere in some places in June, some places July 4th weekend.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we started seeing our e-commerce business in May just started multiplying. And then year over year, we started seeing like 100% growth year over year. And what was the best thing that happened to us, which we thought was the worst thing, was we had all this inventory that we bought for our wholesale and our retail channels that all of a sudden we could actually hit the demand for our e-commerce business. And, you know, if we were to sold that product at wholesale, you know, we would have made a significantly less gross margin, but we had the e-commerce business now at a much higher gross margin. So all of a sudden, the business starts making money.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we had a couple really great things that were going into that year of 2020. Our Nord Stream business was finally starting to work. So stores were between wholesale and stores, it was about 70% of our business and only about 30% of our business is e-commerce. So when first shut down, 70% of our business is basically dead. And it was really tough. And, you know, we had to do furloughs for a bunch of the team and we had to figure out how to survive. And then at some point in May, you know, we're like, all right, e-commerce is better than we thought. We had comfortable product. It was great for stay-at-home. Like it's performing better. Like let's start spending more on marketing.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so I want to fast forward a little bit to COVID because I mean, it was a scary time, but for a lot of retail brands, and especially e commerce focused brands, it turned out to be an incredible opportunity because people are stuck in front of their computers. Now, some Apparel brands, it was a disaster, right? Especially if you're selling stuff for the office. But for more casual brands and things like that, it was actually a great year. Tell me what happened to you guys during that COVID year.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we're going to have this flagship story we've always talked about, it's got to be at this amazing shopping center called the Malibu Country Mart. And that was, I think we signed a five-year lease to start. That was the first time where we now had a real lease. We were going to put some real money into the store. And there's so much anticipation when you open up that first real store. Is it going to work? Oh my God, like this is one of our, one of our big moves we've ever made. And I'll never forget when we went out there for opening weekend. We had a little party that Saturday and the location was just amazing. It's like right where all the traffic is and the music was great in the store. It just was amazing energy and people walked in and it was busy and we sold clothes and it was like, this is going to work. And it did.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meantime, you guys are expanding, right? I think by 2018 you had seven stores stores in Boston, Nantucket, you had a store in New York, and then you had Malibu. My question about those stories were you at all nervous about signing a 10 year lease in Malibu or in Boston, you know, and even in New York City, like that's a lot of pressure. You've got to perform to make sure that those don't drain your resources.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It changes how you think of the world around you. And I think I had known I came from private equity. And so I knew that sort of like going the venture capital private equity route was something we wouldn't do because of what we wanted to do with the brand, how we wanted to do this forever. We didn't really want to sell it. This is like, this was Mike and I's thing. And I knew some of the founders who went on a ski trip in 2016 with a bunch of these founders of some of the brands you mentioned and they liked our clothes. And I think they had given me feedback that they were like, it's so cool that you don't have to do what we have to do and how fast we have to grow and how big the companies need to be like that you get to kind of just do this with your brother. And there was perspective that if I didn't meet these guys and have this ski trip with them, that I may have looked from afar, but they were very excited about how we were building it.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, but at the same time, there was always this thing where Alex and I love the fact that our brand was always one of those things where if you know you know. Like, I don't know, we just were like, yeah, I wish it would have gone faster. It would have been easier. But when you kind of know there's no out, if you know what I mean, like the end is maybe never.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of hype, and some of these brands were on how I built this, and I'm happy, they're great brands, the Warby Parkers of the World and the Tom's Shoes and the Casper mattresses. Were you guys ever looking at some of these brands, including competitors and just thinking, what's going on? Why aren't we there?”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've had brands on that are just like rocket ships. Year one, two million, year two, 10 million, year three, 50 million, year 400 million. You're just like, what? How does, you know? And sometimes it's luck. Sometimes there's a lot of cash that's come in. There's a bunch of different reasons. Sometimes it's really just hit the zeitgeist, like crumble cookies, right? Just crumble cookies just went crazy. This, it took you guys a bunch of years before you were going to hit 20, 25 million, which is still super impressive. I think five, six years in, you're at $25 million. I'm curious. You're in New York.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I definitely told them, you know, we're not a high flyer, Warby Parker raising money and venture capital, you know, we're selling the wholesale. Who wants to invest in the business that is doing wholesale? We spent some time with him, and I think he really saw us and the vision of what we were doing, and he became our first meaningful outside investor. And he gave us the capital that we sort of needed to kind of like take this next step.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Made a significant investment. He sent me an email to hello at Faradibrand.com, like to our customer service email. And it said, hey, Alex, I bought some shirts in Nantucket. They're great shirts. If you're ever looking for money, let's talk. And, you know, we're a couple million dollar fashion brand two years in, three years, you know, we're not getting many emails like this.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guys, had a basic, like the story I've read is that around 2016, you kind of get cold contacted from a guy in Nantucket or who saw the shirt of Nantucket and he wanted to invest. And he became, I guess to this day, your sole outside non-family member friend investor. And this person is private. They don't want to be known. They're not a public. Names.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of in that year, we sort of started playing with what would become probably our first hero product, which is the legend sweater shirt, which is sort of like our take on a flannel shirt meets kind of a sweater. And that was in like about 2015 I started working on it and then we launched it in 2016. And it was the first product where we put it in the store and it like evaporated. Everyone who touched it bought it. And that product really helped us be like, all right, this is how we have to be a direct-to-consumer brand.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything was stressed, and one of the guys I used to work with was like, you know, I got coffee with him just to catch up. And I was like, I needed money. I had no money left. The whole time, right guy, we're telling all of our factories, give us another month to pay. We're basically, like, 60 days becomes 90 days, becomes 120 days. So half of our email traffic was just deflecting payment. We had a couple employees at that point, but you got to be just so positive, right? And just like everything's awesome, like the brand's so cool and amazing. And like, so, you know, in many ways, like I'm sort of like end up being the energy a lot around the positivity of the brand as Alex sort of burdens a lot of the stress of the brand.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we come back after the break, just as the money starts to run out, an angel who also happens to be an investor appears from Nantucket with an offer. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this. Welcome back to How I Built This I'm Guy Ross. So around 2015, Alex and Mike are two years into building their fashion brand. They're selling across multiple channels, the Faerty website, wholesale, and one retail store in New York. But managing cash flow is a constant challenge, and they're still not making a profit”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were constantly running out of money, and that's because of the inventory cycle of the business. And it's just a constant playing your payables, trying to get as much extent on the payables, trying to make the cash flow of this business work. But there was really, really stressful for me because, you know, I felt like the whole business, the financial, like it was just kind of on my shoulders to make this business, to make this business work and be successful. So it was like, as I said, I just got obsessed with how do we sell the product as much as possible. Nothing, you know, the wholesale business sort of hit the first year and a half. And then it kind of stopped. And the e-commerce business just until we did that catalog, I didn't really see any customers coming in in droves because we had spent the money on the marketing. And then the retail store was doing $250,000 a year or $300,000 a year. It's not a million, millions of dollar store.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meantime, you did raise a little bit more money from your existing investors, right? Because you had cash coming in, but this is an expensive proposition. You've got to order stuff. You've got to pay probably pretty quickly, and then you're not getting the money in for $30, $45, sometimes 60 days, maybe longer.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The American classics were almost started by catalogs, right? Like old Penny's catalogs from the 40s and Sears catalogs. I think just the idea of we were just selling product that needed to be shown in a way that was interesting. So I think there was like when a customer picks this up, no different than the person who walked into the specialty store and was like, this clothing looks kind of interesting. Farret, Faraday, I don't even know how to say it, but the stuff's interesting. I'm going to just keep a look.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just interesting how you chose to spend your money because, again, it's counterintuitive. It's like some brands, you got radio ads, you know, like it's counterintuitive, but those things still do work.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just went online. It was like a big thing. You know, J. Crew, everyone got out. Catalog for J Crew for so many years. And then one day they just decided to stop doing their catalog. And I was like, that's interesting. Remember, as kids, we'd always got catalogs. I'm like, they're just not catalogs coming. And I don't know. I think we were like, we got to do some type of marketing. And I was like, why don't we just try a catalog? And so that was our first paid media that we ever did in holiday 2015”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I think is really interesting that you did in the first maybe year and a half was you sent out a print catalog, which you would think is counterintuitive, like, wait, a print catalog, because I get print catalogs, I don't look at them, but I'm not necessarily the target. I do think that probably a lot more people look at them than I would assume, because it worked. Like people were literally dialing a 1-800 number to order.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, you don't ask permission. You just do it. We still do it. But we still do it. Like, I went to Bloomingdale's yesterday and I moved our stuff and moved something out. But, you know, the biggest thing I found successful was like, it was me walking into the store, telling a salesperson, hey, this is my brand. Here's my story. Here's why the product's good. I just found that those interactions to the salespeople were like paid dividends and dividends and dividends because they're the ones who sell it every day. And that human connection, you can't, I can't do that at scale in a department. So I just, I can't talk to everyone that walks in and looking for a pair of pants because I got to go home. I got to, you know, about to have a family. But what I can do is I can get the salespeople to be on our side.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What that first year when we shipped to Nordstrom, I visited every single one. It was 10 different Nordstroms across the country. And I did a version of what Sarah did, moving someone else to another rack, moving our stuff. But the most out of that.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were you able to do anything to increase visibility at the Nordstroms and Bloomingdale's is a famous story, and we had this on our show, Sarah Blakely was actually our first guest 10 years ago when we launched the show. And true story, that she would go into the Nieman Marcus's and she would like make sure to put the spanks by the register when no one was looking and she would like front face them and make sure that she positioned them better. Because it was just a few Neeman Marcus stores. But now you're shipping your stuff to these department stores and are you just kind of crossing your fingers and hoping that people notice it?”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think Mike designed shirts at Ralph Lauren. And if you go back to this world we were living in in 2014, 15, 16, it was like very contemporary. Clothing was like solid, black and white, or very preppy, like vineyard vines was kind of a big brand at the time. Yeah. There just wasn't a classic great sunfaded plaid shirt that you could buy. And so Nordstrom, you know, a lot of West Coast stores, a lot of stores in the Pacific Northwest, they didn't have this sort of like premium high-end plaid flannel shirt. And that was the first shirt at Nordstrom that we really saw velocity with.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just being frustrated. Like, I wish the business was bigger. I wish the business was bigger. And then, like, X amount of years in when Faraday's got more notoriety, it works And you also, I think there is a product, you sort of got to figure out the product to your point. You come in, you know your rag and bone pant size, like what's the product if you walked into Nordstrom that would sell itself?”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so my job was to try and accumulate as many of these specialty clothing store customers as possible. And they would give us a shot, you know, a couple thousand dollar order, you know, 40 pieces, 30 pieces. But in those type of environments, those buyers are also the sellers. They got to sell it. So we found that those were the stores that could really move the product versus the big department stores. So we had very little luck, even though we got some of these small orders from Nordstroms in the first bunch of years. It wasn't much. It was really small.”
2025-10-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Faherty Brand: Alex and Mike Faherty. How Jersey Shore + Manhattan Chic grew to 80 stores. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT