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

“I would have said Remember how big the surf brands were in the 90s? Like Pac Sun was in every mall, right? These were billion dollar companies. That was like a $3 billion company at one point Yeah, you name it. Rusty, like they're these huge brands. Yeah. And they sold to a subset at a quality and a price point, but there was fervor around that world. And like, what if I took all of my experience in like luxury American fashion? And implemented that into the surf coastal style that I grew up with people love vacation. People love the beach. People love that outdoor lifestyle. And what if it went toe to toe with premium fashion?”
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 what did that mean? Like, if somebody said, okay, Mike, tell me, all right, big shot. You missed your big shot. It was a designer Ralph Lauren. What do you think you're going to do that's going to be so interesting? You know, you're like 27, 28, 30 maybe. And so some of them, come on, kid, what are you gonna do? That's gonna be better than all these things out 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
“Okay, that was not going to be the name, but the concept was basically the same. It was going to be a surf and meat streetwear bra”
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, all right, so in 2012, you officially quit Ralph Lauren. And we'll get to that in a sec. But before you do that, In high school already, you had this brand Coast to Kirby. Co”
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 started feeling that way when I felt so comfortable, when I could like take an original design concept. And I know I could see the finished garment. So like if it started with like a fabric swatch that was this big, like if I found an antique piece of fabric from a quilt, right, from the 1920s, I could take that and visualize a cool shirt with these type of buttons and this type of wash and these type of seams. And I just knew I could make it. And I'm like, if I can do it here, it's go time.”
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 was the point, Mike, where you felt like okay. I'm ready to leave Ralph Lauren. Like, I mean, that's a huge platform, right? And a huge launching pad. I'm sure you could have worked for any number of other fashion brands and had an incredible career, right? Maybe become the fashion director or the creative director of a coutour house or something like that. But clearly that wasn't in your part of your plan. So at what point did you start to say, okay, I'm ready to kind of do this thing”
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 I wanted a little bit of what he had. I started feeling that, you know, probably four or five years in, and we started, it was like once a month, we would sort of get together on like a Sunday for a couple hours and we would start talking about it. Do we want to do? Where do we want to go? What products do we want to make? What's the brand going to be? What's the brand slogan going to be? What's the name of the brand? We spent years, two years probably trying to think about what the name of the brand's going to be. We didn't get anywhere with that, so settled on our last name.”
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 think the first thing for me was like seeing Mike in the Ralph Lauren world, like he would have me come by the showroom sometimes and kind of like we would go to the mansion. You know, I was going from this stodgy Wall Street office, you know, barren to just like this amazing world that Mike was living in. And when Mike would get up in the morning, he would dress a costume, you know, some, they looked like a 1980s prepy guide to a 1940s lumberjack. Like they just, the costumes that he wore. It was cool. Like it was just fun to experience. He was living in this creative world, you know, and I'm living in this spreadsheet world.”
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
“Wall Street part, you know, all right. How often were you guys talking about the contours of what your company would be like? As early as, I don't know, a year or two years after graduating or even before, like take me into those conversations you guys were having.”
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, you guys are roommates in the city And Alex, you would be going to your finance job, and Mike, you'd go to Ralph Lauren every day to the office.”
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
“Hong Kong, I was 23 years old and I was in Hong Kong four times a year going from Hong Kong to Chennai, India to Taipei to Japan to Tokyo. And, you know, working on that line, RRL was a gift because the dream for Ralph was like to replicate a garment from the 1930s. So like, yeah. And how do you do that in 2015 or 2016? Like, you got to dissect every element of that fabric from the yarn size to how the yarn's finished to the finishing of the fabric to how densely it's woven to then when it's sewn, like what kind of stitching do you do to have it be super durable or crinkle in certain ways? And then how do you wash it to break it in? And so like I just started becoming an engineer, really you become a garment engineer at that point. And that was like took my passion to another level.”
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, kind of like super premium but rugged and very vintage inspired. It's sort of like focused on denim and American workwear and sort of the heritage of American clothing and trying to replicate that style And then What really clicked for me was when I started going overseas to the factories and fabric mills. And that just was like, that was just like...”
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
“Alright, Mike, you graduate from Washu in 2005. And again, like you and your brother are just, you've got this vision, but the vision is I'm going to start a clothing company, but I'm 22, 23. There's no way I can do this now. I better go find a job in a bigger company. And you got a job with Ralph Lauren. Wow.”
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 Carrie, who was your girlfriend in college who factors in because you would marry each other and she would join the company that you guys would start as a co-founder, she went to law school at this time, right? She went to California.”
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 was make as much money as I can and learn as much as I can. And I found myself always wanting to work on the consumer projects that investments that we were looking at where I could learn more about specific things within consumer or apparel. So I always gravitated towards, okay, if I'm going to do this, what can I work on? How do I work on this team to get me a little bit more exposure?”
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
“Alright, so you graduate from Yale. You go to New York, Alex, to work finance not with the intention of making partner and buying a house in Hamptons and taking a helicopter there one day on the weekends. But just to make enough money so you could leave and start this fashion business, from the time you got to your first job after college.”
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
“Bingo. Yeah, that's true. And I even in starting my sophomore year in college, eBay was just coming up. And I used to in free time, I used to go to the local marshals and TJ Maxx's and like the New Haven area, and I would buy things and resell them on eBay. Like I got into whatever merchandising or whatever you want to call it. And so I think for me, a lot of it was I got to learn. I got to figure out what am I going to bring to the 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
“I mean, it's very rare, and you're extremely lucky that already at a young age you had this vision of what you wanted to do. Mike, you knew you wanted to start a business in fashion, a fashion brand. Alex, you knew you wanted to work with your brother. And so, I mean, it sounds like, and just correct me if I'm wrong, that you both went into college studying these things so that you could get jobs to help you learn more in order to help you get to the place where you could then leave and start a business. Is that more or less true?”
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 think some of it is we were the last two. So we were the youngest. We just could easily be with each other. And so whether that's a twin thing or that's a brother thing, it's just like it's even hard to describe. It just was like a natural thing that we experienced from the day we were born. Yeah, me and my mom talks about when we're zero years old and couldn't walk or crawl, we still ended up in each other's cribs. She'd be like, I don't even know how. You guys can't even move. And like you end up in each other's cribs every night.”
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 just, I'm curious, and you may not have the answer to this because maybe I'd have to ask your mom, or I don't know, other people, but what did your parents do to cultivate the relationship that you guys have? Because like my sisters are best friends, absolutely best friends, and my children are really close. My boys are, and I hope they will be forever. But like, you guys are grown men with families, and you're so tight. What do they do to cultivate that and help you guys become not only brothers but like best friends?”
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 I think that our friends, our world, it was just, we kept, we said it. So we put it out in the world. I think we were always like, we got to do something together. Like whatever our job is in the future, it needs to be together because what could be better than us working together one day.”
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, he wrote, when he wrote his college essay, can't remember if it was exactly right after he wrote the essay, but the dots that we connect is I met my wife. She tells the story of when we kind of first met and started hanging out that I told her I was going to start a clothing company with my brother.”
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
“Alex, when you were in high school, right, you're playing football. And you saw your brother's interest in art. I'm sure you remember him talking already in high school about one day wanting to start a clothing business. When he started to talk about that, did you already at that point see you having a role in doing that with him?”
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
“Wow, we would fly to games, come home Sunday night, I'd have to go right to the studio to finish a sewing project. I'd be sewing all night. I'd be so tired I'd sew seams backwards and then like stay up another two hours to seam rip it and start again. And I was the only male student in the program. I had no previous experience sewing, but there was just something about it that I like even when it was hard and I was like there was I had that just stick with it learn the craft, keep going step one on your journey”
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
“Totally. I mean, my coach was beyond, you know, because he's like this old Midwestern guy. Incongruous. Absolutely. And, you know, let alone to have an art school kid on the basketball team, like to have a fashion designer. You know, I had fashion shows, guys. So the guys would come to the shows, you know, and I was like using them as models.”
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, but on the team, like, I'm just trying to imagine these guys like, dude, you're doing what? You're majoring in fashion design. You're taking sewing? Like, did you get grief?”
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 Mike, you played basketball at Wash U in St. Louis, and I also read that you majored in fashion design there. You took a sewing class in college.”
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 should also mention that both of you guys, both of you were really good at sports. I think, Alex, you played football in high school and then in college.”
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
“True, yeah, like being an artist is cool, where you live in a small suburban town, like being a surfer is cool. And I had some great mentor like teachers that I was like, this guy's really cool. And he's like, you know, a professional ceramicist. And so probably the combo of my parents, like my mom is creative and always pushed me to be more like take a lot of art classes. I started getting comfortable with like, I'm actually going to be an artist. I can actually have a real job being a fashion designer. And then my dad is like the ultimate optimist. Whatever. Who cares what people say? Just go do 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
“I'm wondering, Mike, in high school, did you ever, I don't feel like you kind of had to hide your interest in fashion and design? Because high school people can be weird about that stuff. Was that something that you didn't really talk about much?”
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 was like, there's something I'm into this. I'm into walking into Bloomingdale's by myself after school and going to the Ralph Lawrence store. And then you get to high school and you're like trying to create my own style. And the surf stuff didn't feel like where I wanted to go anymore. So I started like started buying some other pieces to play with the surf stuff. Junior year, right? You got to start thinking about going to college. You got to sit down and write an essay. And one of the questions that whatever the prompter was like, you know, what do you want to do when you get older? And I sat there and I started writing about starting a clothing company. I started writing about this line called Coast to Curb. And it was my life. The things that worked on the coast.”
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
“My dad had a pretty good style, so I always looked up to him. Like he was his first gig after college was on Wall Street in the 70s. So you can imagine dressing the part was a big part of it. So he had like naturally good style. Like I always remember as a kid going through his Thai closet and like looking at the color combinations of the Paisleys and being like, wow, that's interesting. And then like feeling his t-shirts because they were like better than my quicksilver t-shirts. And then all of a sudden I'm in New York City. My dad took me to Bergdorf Goodman. And I remember feeling a cashmere sweater for the first time and being like, what is 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
“Today, the company has around 80 stores across the US. The roots of this story, though, go back more than a decade before launch, because Mike Faardi first dreamed of starting a clothing brand as a teenager. And instead of rushing into it, he and his brother Alex spent twelve years getting ready. Mike studied fashion in college and then worked at Ralph Lorin. Alex built a career in finance to learn business and to save money. It was a long first step, but that patience and that all of the above business model, it paid off. And for Mike and Alex, it was the culmination of a childhood dream of working together. The twins are the youngest of seven children. They grew up in a small town on the Jersey shore where they both learned surf, and all the clothing they wore was bought at the local surf shop. In middle school, the family moved to New York City.”
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
“Most entrepreneurs are taught to pick a lane, go all in on wholesale, or all in on direct to consumer or all in on retail. But today's guests, they didn't pick one. They picked all of the above. When Mike and Alex Ferdi launched their clothing brand in twenty thirteen, investors were throwing money at direct to consumer companies, low overhead, high margins, no middlemen. That was the quote unquote smart play. But the Fairy Twins had something else in mind, a blend of wholesale, brick and mortar, and online sales, a strategy most people thought was outdated, maybe even doomed, and yet that contrarian move helped turn Fairty into a two hundred fifty million dollar brand. Now, if you're not familiar with it, Fairty is a brand of clothing that takes its inspiration from surface.”
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
“Welcome to How I Built This show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. Guy Raz, and on the show today how a college admissions essay grew into Faudi, a clothing brand that traveled the country in a mobile beach house before growing to a quarter of a billion dollars in sales.”
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
“But I felt so comfortable when I could take an original design concept and I know I could see the finished garment. So like if I found an antique piece of fabric from a quilt right from the 1920s, I could take that and visualize a cool shirt with these type of buttons and this type of wash and these type of seams. And I just knew I could make it. And I'm like, if I can do it here, it's go time.”
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 when you're ready to launch, you offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe. All loans subject to credit approval. Did you have any fear about leaving Ralph Lauren to start something?”
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
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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 know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
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