How Bombas' founders built a billion-dollar business and Shark Tank's most successful product ever

Randy Goldberg and David Heath’s certified B-Corp apparel company Bombas is one of the biggest-ever brands to appear on Shark Tank.

Transcript

00:00I think on our first two days, we ended up doing like $300,000 in sales.

00:05Mind you, our business up until this point in the first year had done about $900,000.

00:09So we did a third of our business in two days than what we had done in the first year.

00:14Our website crashed.

00:15Horrible.

00:16We had all these really challenging experiences for what was at the time

00:20was the biggest moment in our company's history.

00:23Hi, I'm Dave Heath.

00:24I'm the co-founder and CEO of Bombas.

00:26I'm Randy Goldberg.

00:28I'm the co-founder and chief brand officer of Bombas.

00:30And this is the secret to our success.

00:33Going back to 2011, scrolling on Facebook,

00:36I came across a quote that said that socks were the number one

00:39most requested clothing item at homeless shelters.

00:41I remember I shared this fact with Randy,

00:43and he had kind of a similar reaction that I had.

00:46And then I think we asked the question to ourselves,

00:48like, could we create a sock company that donates a pair

00:51for every pair that it's sold to have some small impact?

00:55We spent two years developing this product

00:58and ended up putting it out into the world, and people really loved it.

01:00So we decided to launch the business on Indiegogo,

01:04the crowdfunding platform, in August of 2013.

01:07And in 30 days, we had sold $150,000 worth of product.

01:12And at the end of that, we were like, wow, okay,

01:13I feel like we have something here.

01:16Built a website, placed our first production run,

01:18and then started shipping orders.

01:20And then in June of 2014, we got a call from Shark Tank

01:24to see if we wanted to audition to be on the show.

01:27Obviously, we said yes.

01:29And I think, you know, from the moment we aired on Shark Tank

01:32till that moment where we completely sold out,

01:35I think we did about $2 million in revenue.

01:37And that's really kind of where we feel like the business took off.