You know when people talk about work -life balance, what's your honest opinion of that?
Kobe Bryant wasn't doing three throws at 3am for no reason.
There's a cost to that, right?
George Heaton, the founder of global fashion brand, represented by the weekend post Malone, Justin Bieber, one of the most popular luxury street brands in the world.
When I was 18, starting this brand, it was just me and my brother in my dad's shed, figuring out products and where we could take the brand.
But then we went from doing 10, 15 sales to like a thousand every day of the week, 2 ,000, 3 ,000, 4 ,000.
We were making money at that time, more than what we should have in our early twenties.
So we're fucking around a lot, alcohol, girls, cars, and we're doing like 35 million revenue and we're like, we're going to do 50 million next year, but we don't know what we're doing.
Now the business is doing about $100 million.
That's when the realization came that you don't need to be good at business to own a business, because there's people that are so much better at things than you.
They can lay the foundations for it to become a billion dollar brand.
And you can focus on what you're actually good at.
That was a catalyst that just changed everything.
We're building this.
There's no ceiling to what it can be.
That was until we got a letter from me.
That was the worst day in the business.
It was rock bottom, but the best view of heaven is from hell, right?
You've got to get to the bottom of that mountain to start re -climbing it.
It became this driving force that I thought we cannot stop now.
And then what happens?
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Onto the show. George, what is the mission that you're on?
It's just to be the best version of myself, really, just to show up and do everything at the highest level I can.
What influence did your parents have?
Because I've heard you talk about your mother and your father a lot, but let's start with your father.
What kind of influence did he have on you?
I guess, when I was growing up, he had a bit more than what everyone else had in my town.
So like, he had a Range Rover, and he dropped me off to school in that Range Rover, and all the kids thought that was sick.
So all of the time, I felt proud of that.
So I was like, I want to be like this.
Like, what is it that my dad's got that other people don't have?
And the way he showed up with my family and how he would, he wouldn't, like I've never seen him drunk.
Even to this day, I've never seen him drunk.
Like he was, a role model is like this stoic guy that would just work hard, show up, drop his kids off at school, come to football training every single night.
Like he would be there for me.
And I think that was just like, even though it was never spoke about in the household, it just like created my own discipline, I guess.
Was he an emotional man?
No, no. No emotion.
I've never seen him cry.
Has he ever said, I love you?
To me, I don't know, maybe as a young kid, but not a reason to know.
What about your mom?
Very supportive. She used to sit on the end of my bed every night and be like, George, you got to make it.
You got to carry your brother and sister.
Like you've got to carry this family on, which was quite a hard thing to take in when I was young.
But she just like affirmed that every single day.
And like, she loved the work I did and the art that I did.
And she would try and express that to all her friends and talk about me a lot.
And it was always like something that was kind of, it kind of pushed me a bit, you know?
Gave me like words of affirmation, I guess, confidence.
Was that, was her saying that a frequent thing?
I'm just trying to figure out why she would say that to you versus your siblings, presumably because you're the oldest?
No, that was the middle child.
But Mike kind of, he was very within himself as a younger kid and didn't come out much.
And he just did his own thing.
Whereas I would express myself a little bit more than him within the family.
And I think my mum saw that as a way that I could be the carrier of whatever that boat was later down in life.
And your parents, what did they do?
So your dad was? My dad sold minibuses.
So him and his dad were in business.
So that was kind of like me and my brother.
And like me and my brother, they looked the same.
They did the same thing.
Like had the same demeanor, same attitude to everything.
And I think that's why me and my brother went into business because we saw that the family had been able to do that prior.
Did you have any idea when you were a young man, like 12, 13, 14, that you would be in this industry?
Yeah, I did, to be fair.
Looking back at it, I had sensitive skin as a kid and anything that fit me wrong or like itched me or like a back neck label all the way a pant fit would irritate me so much that I'd take it to my grands.
And she was a tailor.
So she would tape her things and take next set of things.
And she would make sure I knew what the composition was before buying garments.
And when I look back at it now, I realized that being that particular so young kind of stemmed into how I've built the brand and what it stands for and the quality and everything like that.
And Michael, I met Michael before when the first time we had you on the podcast, I think you had eight employees and Michael was there as well.
And he comes across as a bit of a genius but a bit of a introverted genius.
What was the difference in your skillset?
Cause you both went and studied like art, well, graphic design.
What was the difference in your skillset?
There wasn't really one.
He was just better than me.
Better than me at art, definitely.
And cause he was my big brother.
I looked up to him.
So like through primary school, like he was into like heavy metal and rock and like California and surf and skate.
And that wasn't really a particular thing in Bolton.
Like everyone was in track suits and had shaped heads and TNs and smoked on the corner.
We were skating down these cobbly roads with long hair and like big DC shoes on and skinny jeans.
And I just wanted to be him.
Like until like early twenties, like he was my idol really.
And when did you make the decision to apply your artistic skills to clothing?
College. So we had a project where we had to make, we had to make something of our art that could sell.
And Mike was two years ahead of me.
So he'd already done the same course I was on.
And he'd done like a little gallery where people would buy his drawings.
And I looked at that and I looked at my dad and my dad wanted us to come into the business at the time.
And the last thing I wanted to do was that, but also I didn't want to sit and wait around all my life to sell a painting for 40 grand.
And I remember going into the class and I remember the teacher telling me that average salary of a graphic designer was 30K.
And I'd go home and I'd speak to my dad and I'd be like, hold on, if university is gonna cost me 9K a year and the average salary is 40K a year.
And I'm like, I can't fucking buy myself a Range Rover with that.
And I wanted to be like my dad.
So I was like, what is it that I can make that I can make money from?
Like everyone wants to be successful, right?
There's no denying that like money was such a big thing back then that I wanted.
And I was so particular about the clothing, like I said, about my grand and taking things in and how we'd adjust all my garments that there was this upbringing of social media.
Instagram was just starting.
And YouTube was just starting.
And I managed to watch a few videos of like artists like Shepherd Ferry who owned Obey and Nicky Diamonds who own Diamond Supply and Huff.
And these guys over here on the West Coast that were just selling like T -shirts with graphics on.
And I thought, why can't we be the British version of that?
What have we gotta do to do that?
And this college project came up and I just thought I'll give it a go.
You know, a second ago you said being a graphic designer wasn't gonna allow you to buy the same car as your dad.
Was it, how much was your dad a lot of driving force behind your sort of your decision making?
And like when I say that, like was there really a motivation to try and beat him or at least get to where he was?
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
A very conscious motivation.
Yeah. Because you thought about making proud or make yourself proud.
Yeah, I thought I'd make the family proud, but as well it was just like, no one thought in my family that, or even through my friends or through my mum and dad's friends, whoever was around us, no one thought that we'd ever be anything.
No one thought that like our heart could sell and we could make money that way and we could build careers that way.
Everyone always expected us, especially my granddad just expected us to go into the family business.
Having listened to some of your interviews and stuff and gotten to know you, it does feel like there's a bit of a chip on your shoulder and I'm not necessarily sure who the chip on your shoulder has come from.
I think a lot of it's self -inflicted.
I think I just like to have something there to prove something wrong or something right.
Maybe prove myself right.
Comes at a cost though.
It does come at a cost, yeah.
But I'm willing to take that cost on.
Are you sure? Yeah.
I've been doing it now for 13 years.
I'm not gonna stop anytime soon and like I only feel now that we're just getting started with it, so.
I'm really curious about this early phase, which I kind of call the shedding phase where an entrepreneur makes the decision that they're gonna do something unusual in the context of their like current social group.
And the shedding phase, I define as like when your family start thinking you're a bit weird and you feel the resistance from your family and then you're like boys from school, start thinking you think you're Richard Branson or whatever and they start making little comments.
Can you recount what your shedding phase was like?
I think that was it.
I think like a lot of people who I was around just laughed at it.
A lot of people just thought it was a joke.
And it got to that stage where then it was like, oh, it's your dad's business.
Your dad buys the stock and like, like this is a family business.
You guys aren't making this money and whatever until it gets to a point where it like just completely exceeds what people think that is.
And then they seem to come back around and then they're buying your product and then they're congratulating you on the drops and then they're your biggest fans.
Do you remember any comments that you heard?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
I remember there was one where I bought this R8 and it was like, I must've been 19 or 20.
She's a car, right?
Right, yeah. And Audi.
I had it packed up in my town where I was and I remember getting a message on Facebook saying, that car your dad's bought you is packed up here.
He's going to get a ticket on them yellow lines.
And I was thinking like, come on.
How did it make you feel?
It made me wanna go to the next level with everything over and over till it had drawn out that noise.
So it was like, okay, maybe his dad was successful running a small business, had a nice house and whatever.
I wanted to take that to like a hundred times that to prove that it wasn't that, I guess.
And so after you leave college, well, it's during college, right?
When you sort of start the business, is that 2012?
Yeah. When you first start the business and then Michael joins you a year later.
Yeah. After you started selling T -shirts?
Yeah, he was doing a bit of the graphics here and there and I would run them to the, run orders to the post office and then at night we'd sit and draw together and then I'd speak to suppliers in China and stuff like that.
And it just rolled on for the three years that I was at university.
What was that first year like?
That first year in business?
From what I can remember, it wasn't really business.
It was just going to the back garden where my dad's shed was, speak to some suppliers in China, go to university, complete my, whatever it was I was doing there, come back, pack orders, speak to customers, do it all again every single day for like the first three years.
How big was the business in the first year?
I've probably turned over about 10 ,000.
Pounds? Yeah. What about the second year?
Maybe like 50K. I think the third year is when we decided to actually make it a limited company and get an accountant.
And how much did you do in the third year roughly?
In terms of revenue, I can't remember.
I think it was around half a mil.
Okay. Cause I remember going to the accountants and we did all this.
We literally like tore the business apart and rebuilt it and he said to us at the end of this thing like, if you've got a hundred grand in the bank, you should carry on with it.
If not, you've spent three years just like doing nothing and it's going nowhere.
And luckily we had way more than that in the bank.
And I was like, okay, let's do this for real.
You spent two years, you know, by the end of the second year, you're generating 50K, which is like not enough really to pay yourself a salary whilst covering costs of the business.
No, I didn't take a salary for seven or eight years.
So surely at that point, people around you are telling you that you're an idiot and they've got quite good evidence to suggest that you're actually wasting your time.
But I never had a big doubt that it wouldn't work.
I've had a lot of doubts, but never had a doubt that it wouldn't work.
And I knew that I would do everything I could to make sure it worked.
What did work, how would you define worked at that moment?
What was success at that moment?
Success was putting product online in its selling and seeing that launch night and seeing 500 people log in and buy something or a thousand people and seeing that incremental gain over time, that was what was like the driving force, more people following the brand, more people sending DMs.
That was it really.
Why don't people start?
And I say that because, in hindsight now, you're gonna understand looking back at your own work, the quality of it, what you went through and you probably have a pretty good idea on why people just don't start.
You must get so many DMs from people that have an idea, a fashion idea or anything.
Why don't they start?
I think it's that pressure of failure, the feeling of doubt, and, as well, wasting time.
If they've got a family or they've got a job where it's full time, then to start something else on the side, when they've got to see to the family or the girlfriend or the wife or whatever it is, you don't have much time to go and do something else that you then hope will eventually, in the future,
take off or become successful.
And it takes so long.
It does take, I know a lot of people say it takes 10 years to become an overnight success and I think that's true.
You spent almost four years, from 2012 till, I guess, no, two years, 2012 till about 2015 -ish, kind of just effectively messing around?
Yeah, messing around, really, mess around.
A lot of messing around.
Learning. Learning, yeah.
It's probably a better use of words.
And enjoying it, as well, me and my friends had sat in my dad's shed all night just figuring out products and things that we wanted to do and where we could take the brand, and I'd love to go back to them times because they were great and we had nothing.
No one was really watching us, but we thought everyone was watching us and we thought it was the next big fucking powerhouse of a brand.
So, yeah, it was fun.
I don't regret any of it.
Putting these two questions together about why people don't start and also those three years where you weren't really making any money and you're in the shed in your dad's house, why didn't you quit?
Because, as I said a second ago, there must have been so much force telling you to go and get a real job.
But why didn't you quit?
I think it just leads back to, again, proving people wrong and proving myself right.
And the only other option I had was to go and work for my dad, and I didn't wanna do that because I'd done that all my teens and I hated it.
I hated cleaning mini buses and ripping stickers off the sides of windows and going to auctions and bidding on cars and stuff.
Like, that wasn't me.
And that was the only other option I had.
So it was like, this is it.
It's all or nothing really.
When you look back at the products that you made in that shed, how do you feel about them?
There was a few great ones and a few absolutely terrible ones.
I remember the first collection, I moved to China because originally I would buy stock in from America, print it in the UK and like make zero profit on it, but it was great and it felt great.
And then eventually we decided like, let's try and make some profit on a collection.
And I remember this collection coming back after a few months and like, all the fits were wrong and the fabrics were wrong.
And I just cried on my mum's floor for like hours that night.
So there was a lot of really rough times as well as a lot of fun, but it was all just like figuring out different things and like learning how to do every single job within that business.
Cause you know, if I'm a young fashion designer or a young creative and I look at your work now, I look at the product that represents putting out now, it's easy to see how one might be put off from starting because I look at yourself and go, Jesus Christ, I cry.
You can't compete with it.
You can't compete with that.
Like that's more than 10 years of like mastery.
So I'm just not gonna bother starting.
What do you say to those people?
Say, look, you got to put the work in, it's going to be 10 years.
Like regardless of what industry it is or what product you're making, like I wouldn't even think about the next two to three years.
I think about 10 years.
That's the mindset you've got to have and it's not going to be easy and it's not going to be fun, but you just got to do everything you can to make it work.
So the brand kind of scales up to what sort of revenue number from 2012 up to 2018?
We built it up to like six to seven mil.
So like 2015, 16, 17, it was just flat like six, seven mil.
Year over year. Yeah.
And we thought that was a ceiling in thought at the time.
As our young selves with not much knowledge and no real thought in the industry, like we thought that we were at the ceiling of what represent was.
And then that's when the realisation came that like, if we carry on doing what we're doing, it's not going to work and this brand will fail.
What was the advice you needed at that point leading?
Definitely didn't get the advice, but it was to just completely restart, refocus, go again, build a new team and go into what we already knew that was waiting for us.
We knew what we were capable of, we just weren't doing it.
What weren't you doing?
Focusing on our consumer, asking them what they wanted, speaking to them, being within the community of what represent was and giving them what they wanted.
When you say the point about team, you said rebuild a new team.
When you started the brand, who were you hiring?
All my friends, I hired all my friends, all my close friends, because I wanted to enjoy it.
And I didn't know a thing about hiring people.
I didn't want to interview people and bring them into my dad's garden shed.
So up until we had a unit, like it was just me and my friends and we were all just doing 50 jobs each.
No one had a title, no one knew what was going on and it didn't work.
But now we're at such a level where there's 100 people in the business.
Two of those friends that came in right at the start are still in the business and are very high up in the business and have amazing successful lives.
So half worked and half didn't.
When you say it didn't work, what does that mean in reality?
It means that like, I guess it's all not my fault as such, but it's all, I brought people into the brand that shouldn't have been in fashion or shouldn't have been doing what I'd asked them to do or like their career didn't go the way that it should have gone because we were just plateauing at this base
of like quite a boring fashion brand at the time.
And like, we had to split up and we had to regroup and start again.
And the ones that stayed have now stayed forever which is insane.
And the ones that left, they've carried on with their lives.
What have you learned about hiring?
Again, when I say the advice that you wish you'd gotten at the time before you'd hired a single person that you might give if you could speak to George at 18 years old and you could give him hiring advice on how to pick people, what would you say?
Hire fast, fire faster.
Interesting. I spent a lot of years where I didn't hire people because I didn't think they would fit into the brand.
And even though they don't seem a certain way or they're into the same brands that I'm into or they follow this kind of industry that we're in whether it's street war or luxury or high fashion like there is still unbelievable people that can do amazing things way better than what I can do in all levels
of business that don't look like they should be or don't seem like they would.
So just like realizing that back then would have really helped the business grow.
I think sometimes like young founders, I remember just thinking back on my own experience we're sometimes scared to hire people that are like more experienced than we are because how are we going to manage them?
And all those kinds of concerns.
And also why would they want to come here?
Right. Why would they want to come here was a massive thing for me.
Why would someone want to come to a smaller brand than what they were at?
And especially in that time when it wasn't growing because you don't want to go into a company that's not growing.
But now it's completely different.
The whole ecosystem that we've built and who wants to come into the brand and the way the brand is growing, it's now like we have the abundance of everyone wanting to join the brand.
So it's now like it's hard to pick and choose who we bring into the brand rather than going out there and looking for them and trying to get them into the brand.
You know what I mean?
It's so like catch 22.
I have a lot of Dragon's Den investments and these are typically early stage companies that are often quite young.
And I sit with them all the time and I talk to them about this paradox of, it's some kind of multifaceted thing.
They are a very young team, very inexperienced.
They have small budgets, relatively small budgets.
So they're thinking we can't pay an exceptional really experienced person because a hundred thousand pound salary is so much for us.
And because they don't, and also the stuff you said about like why would anyone want to come work in this shed?
Because of that, they never grow to be able to pay for those people, to be able to create an environment where exceptional people would come.
So the only way like I see of kick starting the process is to bring in exceptional people now.
Yeah. If that makes sense.
Pay for it now and you'll see the increased outcome later, definitely.
Yeah. Like bringing in exceptional people will never be a bad thing in the business.
But it feels like it because they, because it costs so much.
Cost so much, yeah.
Yeah, but you're also gonna learn so much from them.
Just especially if you're a small team and you're bringing in people that have been in there for 10 years and done what you're trying to do.
Like the information and the value that they provide just to open your mind up to what's actually possible.
Yeah. Can get you to the next level.
Like I've brought a CEO in to represent that was handling a $500 million business.
For him to come into my business, at the time it was only doing 20 mil and to tell me what's possible and run me through different geographies and how products can have a lifetime and how you can maintain a constant like steady sale of one product for so many years.
When I, we were just thinking that you put something online, let it sell out and then you move on to the next thing.
And there's so many different like factors that can come in and different areas of growth and sales and categories and all these different things that just make you realize, oh, you can turn the business from 20 to 50 mil by just doing this.
But you would never know that if you were just in your little group of people that you've grown up with and done it with forever.
And you don't even know that you don't know it.
Like it's an unknown unknown.
No, because there's no one teaching you.
And that's why I'm trying to do this YouTube channel and trying to be so expressive, but also like authentic on the YouTube and on Instagram by telling people less and showing them how, what we actually do and how we do it.
Because when I was 18 starting this brand, I had nowhere to look, I had no mentors.
There was no one in fashion that would wanted to come and help us.
And there was nothing like that.
I could just go online and find and buying a course to build a brand isn't gonna work.
That's the biggest load of bullshit ever.
So like you're stuck in your own ways and you've got limited beliefs.
And you don't know what you don't know.
So how would you, how, again, if you could like go back cause there's so many young kids that are gonna be looking up to you thinking, okay, George, I get it.
There's lots of things that I don't know.
Where do I go to find the answers?
What's the best way to go to find these answers that are gonna help me go to the next level?
I think you got to research now.
I think everyone's very explicitly authentic online.
Like if they wanna be the next George Heaton, you can scroll down my Instagram for the last 10 years and see exactly what I've done and where I've been and how I've done it, who we've done it with.
Or you can go on the YouTube channel and back load a documentary that we did three years ago that shows the last 10 years.
And I know you do it with the Diary of a CEO behind the scenes as well.
So people are willing as well to like give you advice.
I give people advice on social media all the time.
But that decision then to bring in that CEO, where did that information come from?
I spent a good couple of years just really like rebuilding myself when that plateau happened.
There was like 18 months to two years where it was just before COVID started and I wanted to just like really build myself up into someone that I wasn't at that time, but I wanted to be.
What was going on in your world?
I felt like I was stuck and like I said, we had limited beliefs.
We didn't know where to go and what to do.
It was like, how do I then figure that out.
If I'm not got a mentor or someone telling me which way to go with it, I've got to do it myself.
So it was like, read every single self health book, look into every single fashion show, figure out like what it is we want to do and where we want to go with this brand and how we're going to build it up, but also with ourselves.
Was this the period in 2018 where you said you lost the motivation for the business?
Yeah, just before that.
Take me into that period of your life.
If I'm a fly on the wall, what do I see in your world at that time where you're like not excited about it?
Not excited about it because we were getting a lot of pushback from press and we were trying to do runway shows and no stores wanted to buy us and our price points weren't right.
And the way we were taking the design wasn't right.
And that was painful because it was a passion for us.
It was our love. So that negative feedback was kind of painful at the time but we used it as like a reset button.
And I looked at myself as well at the same time and I wasn't putting everything into the brand.
I wasn't going full on with it.
I was messing around and like enjoying my life as well cause we were making money at that time like more than what we should have been doing in our early twenties.
So we were fucking around a lot and I'm not going to say a lie like we would, we didn't know what we were doing, we were messing about.
And it just got to a point where like that year became unprofitable.
And for me to sit there and think fuck like I've done this for the past seven or eight years and now it's not making money.
That was like, that was the thing that then just, that was a catalyst that just changed everything.
I just took a real good hard look at what we are and who we were and just changed it all.
What about you on a personal level at that time?
You said you weren't happy with yourself.
Didn't, I hated the way I looked.
I hated the way I came across on social media.
I was very shy, very unconfident and like terrible at hiring people and just didn't like had not anger issues but was always angry, was always negative.
Always had like this pessimistic view of everything.
Even the weather had pissed me off for a long time.
And I just remember reading a few books and thinking like, why am I this way?
And how do I change myself?
Even like being the artist, I even redrew how I wanted to look.
And it was like every single day now I've got to work on being that guy who is George Heaton that I want him to be, not who I am now.
You actually drew a picture.
Yeah, I used to look back at it all the time and just think this is, I wanted to recreate myself and recreate the brand.
What was the base you were starting from at that point?
And how old were you at this point?
26, I think I was 25, 26.
I just like had an unhealthy relationship with the way I worked and even the food I had and like I wasn't healthy, I wasn't doing well.
Didn't look great, like didn't feel myself.
I didn't want to look at myself in the mirror.
You didn't want to look at yourself in the mirror?
Yeah. Cause I didn't like who I'd become and I didn't like what the brand had become either.
And the brand was my life.
So it was like, this all needs to change.
When you say you didn't want to look at yourself in the mirror, do you actually mean that?
Are you saying that as like a figure of speech?
I guess a figure of speech, but as well like realizing that I wanted to change a lot.
So then when you do want to change then you don't like the way you are.
How did you know you wanted to change?
I mean, that sounds like a slightly peculiar question, but I always think about what it takes for someone to have one of those moments in their life where they go, do you know what, enough is enough.
And sometimes I've always like pondered.
I think I've said it a few times on the show, like do people have to reach a certain rock bottom in their lives before they go, do you know what?
100%, and I see this with people now that we inspire with 247 or who will send me a DM and say, look, you've changed my life through this or that.
I think that like the best view of heaven is from hell.
I think you've got to get to the bottom of that mountain to start re -climbing it.
I think if you just sit around in the middle somewhere and life's just is what it is.
That was what I was going through.
And like I had a girlfriend and we'd split up and that was terrible.
Yeah, the brand wasn't doing well.
I got told it was unprofitable and like, I was just in this fucking, what for me was rock bottom.
And I know it doesn't sound bad compared to a lot of other people's lives, I understand that, but for me, the where I'd been and the trajectory that I thought I was on, it was rock bottom.
So that was like the reset.
So you drew a picture of yourself and how you wanted to look.
Did you write anything about who you wanted to be in terms of values or?
Yeah. I've got a best friend who's done a very similar transformation and they literally wrote down like a set of principles and it's in the notes of their phone.
It's my friend Anthony.
And he went from being in a place in his life where he also figuratively couldn't look himself in the mirror, dropped alcohol, hit the gym and has turned it around.
And he has almost has this like 10 commandments in the notes of his phone.
You did something similar.
Exactly the same and I still have them that pop up every morning, like reminders on my phone.
I found this guy called Andy Fritzella and he had a book called 75 Hard and it was like a mental toughness challenge but it also included a lot of working out in there and it was like no alcohol, drink this much water, read this much of a book and just do it every single day for 75 days.
Write down five things you're gonna do that day.
And I did that and I started doing it and I started seeing like these crazy results in my life just with everything.
Just the way I could structure my day and knowing that like I had to put two workouts into a day.
One had to be outside, one had to be inside.
So structure the rest of the day around that and then started learning how to plan my day out better and where the time was where I could go and do these other things.
And like every night I would read 10 pages of a book, whichever book that was from all around holiday books and Robert Greene and everything like that.
So I was learning all these things whilst I was also doing this mental toughness challenge and it was like a 75 day thing.
And I remember getting to the end of it and just thinking fuck, like I looked at myself then and I was like, okay, I can see the change.
And you know when you can see change, that's when you like really go into it.
You start getting obsessed when you see whether it's success or like your fitness levels go up or just the way your energy levels are every day and just figuring out that like these little indicators are changing the way I am.
And then at the same time, we were really working on the business so the business was starting to see a bit more success and that whole thing, the cadence of that just kept rolling and rolling and rolling.
And I guess whether it's obsession or addiction, I got addicted to it.
And like there couldn't be a day go by where I wouldn't work out or I wouldn't eat the exact calories that I needed to eat or I wouldn't sleep the exact, I needed to get the exact amount of sleep that I wanted.
And it just completely changed like the way I looked and like my levels of fitness and cardiovascular and strength and everything like that, just went through the roof.
Because people will look at you now and think that they'll see you getting up at five a .m.
in the morning and going for like a 20 mile run and hitting the gym later that evening, running a business, doing all these things being super productive and they'll probably think, he was just born with something that I don't have.
Like he's just got this level of motivation and probably came in his DNA that I don't have.
Yeah and a lot of people do say that, a lot of people think it's genetics or they think it's steroids and stuff like that.
Or they'll just think, how you're like wired in a way from birth.
I used to think that as well back when I was overweight and unhealthy and I'd look at people on Instagram and be like, yeah, genetics, whatever.
Yep, he's on steroids.
I can't look like that.
I've got a business to run.
Like you would dismiss everything but it's not.
And once you start doing it yourself and you see those little gains and you get into it, you can really change.
What is the starting point?
One step at a time, whether it's 10 ,000 steps or doing even a 20 minute workout, that's all people need to do to change.
Because you'll start seeing results regardless of what position you're in right now.
If you can just keep increasing incrementally what you're doing in terms of fitness or your business or however you like you sleep, whatever it is that you feel is not right, you'll see the change over time it comes and it takes a long time.
It takes a really long time but it happens.
It's difficult to believe, I guess for some people because they see the mountain in front of them and you're telling them, listen, it's just one step at a time up that mountain but they're just looking at the top of the mountain and going, Jesus Christ, that's a long way away.
And the thought that the first steps to take are small ones, almost doesn't seem believable.
Yeah, and same with me, like I would go head on into something thinking that you could just go out there and run a marathon within a week and people do that and it crushes you and then you have to start again.
But it's just about finding that rhythm of what you enjoy and just doing it and not really taking your foot off the gas once you start doing it.
So jumping back to 2018 then, so the business is stagnant during that period of time and you go on this process of reinventing yourself, you also go on the process of reinventing the business.
What does that mean?
How did you reinvent the business?
We stripped back all the wholesale that we were doing and we focused on the DTC.
So we went into this weekly drop thing and it was just before COVID happened and James, who is the Chief Product Officer, was super keen on moving our production out to Portugal.
It was currently in the UK and Italy and he was making no money.
And I had so many arguments with him about it and hated this way of thinking that he was doing and what he wanted to do with the business.
And we had a massive heated argument about it and it was so right for the business at the time and I just didn't know it because I weren't accepting of changing the way we were working and I didn't understand that you could go and do this other thing and produce in a different way than what we were doing.
And full credit to him, he completely changed the whole margin of what we were doing.
So James was doing that for like nine months straight and Mike was doing all these new graphics that was gonna change the way the brand looked.
And then I came out to LA a few times and found these T -shirts that I really loved and these cargo pants that I loved and then we started putting all these three things together through all of us.
And then I have a guy called Stephan who was doing all the website maintenance and everything like that and we changed the way the website looked and the whole vision of the brand and we deleted everything off social media and just like restarted and it just started working and we put like 300 T -shirts
online and we sold 300 in a minute.
And then the next week Mike did another design and we sold 600 in a minute and then 900 in a minute and then it was like, fuck, we actually do have a following here.
We've gone from doing 10, 15 sales through the day to like a thousand every single Wednesday, 2 ,000, 3 ,000, 4 ,000.
And that gave us like the liquid and also the confidence to then go and create more collections and go back to becoming a real brand again.
Whereas you were saying that, it made me think about how so many people aren't successful in their lives or aren't as successful as they could possibly be because they haven't gotten out of their own way.
And that was me a million times over.
And just like having that open mindedness and listening to other people and knowing that you're not right with everything is such a fucking huge thing.
It's difficult when you're, I think, especially if you're a young CEO because you're probably already a bit insecure.
Right, yeah, a hundred percent, yeah.
Like you feel like you should know everything so you're like overcompensating by - But then as well, like the business was growing so much that I would have only just restricted it if I would have stayed in that CEO position even though I was learning a lot and listening to a lot of things and we had
to bring people in because we were busting at the seams, didn't have enough staff and the revenue was going crazy and we didn't know what to do with ourselves.
We're all running around like a headless chicken.
There's only 20 people in the business and we're doing like 30, 35 million revenue and it was like, fuck, what are we gonna do?
We're gonna do 50 million next year but we don't know what we're doing.
Just like, so silly.
But yeah, you just - I was gonna say from the outside, it looks like you had it all together.
Of course it does, yeah.
For the whole 13 years it kinda looks like that.
And it still looks like that now and we definitely don't have it all together but I do have an amazing leadership team and everyone in the business is so bought into it now and there's a mission statement and some fundamentals behind the business and everyone's really on the mission with me and they
fucking live for it and love it and will die for it.
You've created a pretty amazing company culture.
You were talking about it there.
How have you done that?
It's not really, I'm not gonna sit here and take credit for that.
I'll take credit for the gym that we have in there and the way we like, everyone works hard but also the CEO that came in, Spenny, he's all about people.
People over profit every day of the week.
Whatever it is, it's people first.
So we have such a good group of, the leadership team he's brought in and everyone who's involved with the business now it's just constant transparency and here's where we go in, here's what we're doing, here's what's wrong, here's what's right, we need to focus more on this, we need to do more of this and just
giving them everything that they want and even though it's, yeah, you gotta work hard, you gotta work fucking hard.
We're still like, we're probably the best place to work for that I know of.
Self -awareness, I've spoken to a lot of founders that have been very, very successful, especially out of Europe and one of the things that they all seem to have in common is at some point in their journey, they developed such a high self -awareness that as we said, they got out of the way of the business
and just focused on the thing that they're good at and that's pretty much what it looks like you're doing now.
Yeah and I hope that's right and I've seen people do that and get it wrong but for me, I think it is right.
I'm not a businessman and for me to be the CEO of this business that's growing rapidly and has all these people involved with it, all I would do is stump the growth of it.
So like you said earlier today, there's people that are so much better at things than you and if you can bring them into your business, they can get on with that stuff and do 10 times better job than you can and lay the foundations for it to become 500 million or a billion dollar brand or 10 billion dollar
brand and you can focus on what you're actually good at.
How do you get them to come?
I think like you said then, company culture, if you see represent on LinkedIn or something, you're gonna look at it and think, fuck, I wanna be in there.
These guys and girls are getting after it, doing gym sessions together at 6 a .m.
and they're all out and they're just enjoying the workplace but that comes from being a successful brand.
You can't just do that from the get -go.
You can't just build a gym with no money, right?
So you've gotta build that level of success and then you're able to reinvest into the brand rather than into your stock and building the actual size of the company.
Because this is always the issue that I hear, specifically like young founders or early stage entrepreneurs talking about is, okay, Steve, I get it, I know we need great people but how do I persuade great people like Spencer?
It's about spending, right?
Yeah, Paul Spencer, yeah.
Paul Spencer. How do I get him to come work here?
When he's working at like Puma.
He was at Puma, wasn't he?
Yeah, he was at India.
How did you get him to come from Puma to represent?
Built a relationship with him over many years.
James was in contact with him for five years since we first met.
And then as the business scaled, he saw what we had.
Like he saw what me and Mike had together as brothers and he saw what me, Mike, James and Steph had as like a leadership team and he wanted to be involved with it because he knows that there's no other options for us.
It was like, we're building this.
There's no ceiling, like what is representing 10 years?
Like what can it be?
And he says it every day, it's like gives me fucking goosebumps walking in here because there's no limit to it.
Like, we can do everything.
If we can sell sportswear, we can sell vintage T -shirts and we can sell, we can sell salt.
Like it's insane. We can do anything.
It's not really a brand anymore.
It's like a lifestyle.
Of all the business decisions that you've made, where does hiring a CEO to run the business and you stepping out of the way rank?
Number one. Really?
My life's just so much better now that he's involved with the business and there's a lot of weight taken off my shoulders.
It's not the first time I've heard this.
Think Ben Francis would have said the same.
Yeah, about. You know, and Julian at Hugh said the same and that putting someone in that CEO role where it's both like not enjoyable for you as a creative, but also it's not good for the business because it's not your skillset.
And yeah, it wasn't enjoyable for a long time and you'd do it because you had to do it.
And if I spent six hours in that role of a CEO to then come out of my room and be like, Mike, let's go and design this thing.
You didn't wanna do it.
There's no energy. That shit drains your energy.
If you're a creative, the business side of the thing drains your energy.
It absolutely kills you.
Even to this day, I'll go into a board meeting and after 15 minutes, I'm just like, oh my God, I'm done.
I'm asleep. But I could sit in Mike's room and design for 12 hours straight with him.
How much as a creative and a creative founder do you have to stay in touch with the business side of things, though?
You spoke about the board room.
Do you still kind of need to know what's going on?
I like to, yeah. I love to know as much as I can.
But as well, I think you should keep things away from yourself because it will inflict you with, even if it's like negative things, think especially if you're so focused on building this next collection or whatever it is.
If you're hearing negative feedback about some kind of product that's not working or something in the business is not working, that affects what you're doing there.
So I think trying to divide them two things is crucial.
And I did that with Mike from the get go because I knew that like negativity and like feedback loops on things that weren't great wasn't good for him when he's designing.
So kind of kept him just like strictly to design, but obviously we'd give him facts and figures and numbers and stuff like that, but try and keep him out of it as much as he can.
What was your hardest day?
Oh, I remember we got a letter from a company also called Represent in Europe telling us that we were basically done.
I know. Yeah, that was the worst day in the business.
What did the letter say?
Just said like that they owned the trademark in Europe and we were, they were just gonna take us for everything we had.
We couldn't carry on trading.
They wanted all of your money.
More than what we had.
And that like, that was in that same period that 2018 to 20 where we were just like every day we were waiting for responses and every day it was like waking up and thinking, fuck, like is it all over today?
Is it all over tomorrow?
Can we do what we wanna do?
Is this even our business anymore?
Do we even own what we're doing?
And like there was only really me, Mike, and James that knew about this that was going on because I didn't wanna put it out to anyone.
I didn't want anyone in the business to know like this was happening or even my family.
And it really fucking like restricted us with everything we did, every decision we made, every garment we sold.
So that was included in that really dark period.
They presumably owned the trademark that you were using.
So you had called yourself Represent but someone else owned the trademark for Europe.
Yeah. And you didn't realize that at the time.
We thought we owned it because we had the UK IP and all over the rest of the world.
There was this dormant, we thought it was dormant but apparently we're selling clothing section 25 or whatever.
Section 25 is like the clothing category for trademark.
And first we thought all right, we'll be able to figure this out, let's get some lawyers and we'll go into it in a certain way and approach it like this.
And it was just constantly like, no, no, no.
They weren't willing to.
Nothing. And that was like, that was the devil that were you up every night.
But I used that as like, I guess again, it's that chip on the shoulder thing.
I kinda used it as that.
And I realized that like we had to get, we had to do so much and make so much of the brand that we didn't wanna keep it open that when the time came to it and he gave in and he wanted to take money, we had the money to be able to do it.
This sort of dark period between 2018 and sort of 2020 was, did that cause it?
Or was that just on top of it?
That was like, that was the icing on the cake.
Right, so the business is stagnant and then you get this letter through so one wants to take everything you have.
And we spent so many months like just sat in the back office just figuring out what we're gonna recall the brand, how we're gonna rebrand it and like what it meant if it was not represented anymore.
And we couldn't post anything on social media.
So it was like, we can't show this guy that the brand does well or we're making any money because then he'll want more and he'll start seeing all these other things.
And we were sewing our own heads about it and like all the advice from lawyers was just always bad news.
But eventually we got him to come up with a figure that he wanted for it.
And I remember it was, I think it was March 2020 we ended up like signing and getting our name back.
He wanted millions.
Yeah. You said the lawyers were giving you bad news.
What were they saying?
It just like, they wouldn't respond for three months.
The lawyers? No, no, no, not the lawyers, his lawyers.
Okay, his lawyers. Okay, so he was gonna correct.
And then they respond on the last day of like this three month period, but you'd be in the car going to like Portugal to find out if this production's ready and you'd get this long email and your heart just drop and you'd be like, what's gonna get sad?
And then we'd go back to the office and sit there again and try and rethink of another name and then respond to him within a few days and then it'd be another three months.
So there was just this like, this dark cloud above our heads all the time.
When you say dark cloud, what does the dark cloud feel like?
Flying on the wall again.
Yeah, just you not being able to be yourself with everything you do.
Every decision you make, whether it's buying a fucking sandwich from the shop, it's like, that's not your money to buy that sandwich cause someone else owns the name while you're making that money.
It'd like get you like that.
Did it interfere with your sleep, your mental health?
Everything, but also, but like I said earlier, it also became this driving force.
Well, like I'd use it as a thing where it was like, I know this probably sounds so stupid, but like I've just got started running in 2020 and I was like, I'm gonna go out and run 15k.
And if I stop, that's like him coming for us.
He was like, I have to win at everything we do.
Whether it was just a run or it's a design selling or whatever it is, like, you cannot stop now.
Can't be easy going through that with your brother as well because you're gonna both be somewhat protective of each other, I imagine.
And if there's that dark cloud hanging over both of you at the same time, it's.
Yeah, it ruined both of those.
It ruined his, the way he designed it, yeah, everything.
And then so eventually you get a breakthrough and this guy agrees to a figure.
And at the time, you know, millions and millions of pounds if you're making six or seven million in the business and you're saying it's not really profitable, I'm guessing the money wasn't in the bank to send this guy millions of pounds.
No, but the deal went through in 2020 when we were really like pushing forward and doing everything we could so that when that thing happened, we had enough money for it.
How do you feel about him?
This guy that sent you that letter?
Up until then, just hate, just absolute hate because we were a bunch of young guys that were trying to build this business and we had 20 employees at the time that we'd probably have to lay off and we'd lose all the money and we'd be in debt for the rest of our lives or whatever.
Just because he decided that he wanted to use that name to sell nothing basically wasn't selling anything.
So yeah, up until that day, I was really upset about it.
But after it, I kind of just realized that it is what it is and that's how things go.
And when I look back at it now, it really fucking catapulted the business because that's when we came out of our shell and that's when we started really like building this brand into a lifestyle and not just T -shirts on the floor on an Instagram page.
Did your parents know?
Yeah. That you were going through that?
Yeah, a little bit.
I wouldn't tell them the full extent, but.
Right. Just because I don't like putting pressure on other people, especially when it's not gonna affect their lives as such at the time.
But yeah, we would go to my mom and dad's every weekend and it would always be a subject that came up as he replied, yeah.
As he responded, like, have you heard anything?
It's just like, yeah, it fucked us.
How would you deal with that?
Cause you're a young guy.
I remember the first time in business where I experienced anxiety.
I thought anxiety was something that happens to other people.
And then I remember the day very clearly where I had to let the managing director on New York office go.
I had to fire him. Right.
And I was sat in my apartment in Manchester thinking about that flight tomorrow where I'd asked this person to come and meet me for a coffee and I was just like riddled with anxiety for the first time ever.
I was like, this is what people talk about when they're talking about mental health.
This is it. It's happening to me.
I'm invincible, but it's suddenly happening to me.
Obviously, as it always goes, it wasn't as bad as I imagined, but it's the imagination that wants to fuck us up.
Yeah, and the imagination is 95 % of it, isn't it?
Have you experienced that before?
Mental health, I always struggle when people ask me about this because no, not really.
I've always been pretty solid on where I want to go, who I want to be, what I want to do, and just stuck to a plan.
Anxiety, that thing, that period, yeah, that caused me anxiety, but not to an extent where it was crippling.
But I kind of, now I kind of enjoy the bits of anxiety I get because you learn from it, right?
You're going into that meeting and telling him you're going to get fired.
Once that's done, you have that relief and then you know next time we do it, this is how it goes.
So, you'll lose that 95 % of anxiety that happens before it or you'll lose a little bit of it.
Yeah, you will. I guess I get really anxious going onto podcasts.
The past few days I've been really anxious coming on here and I've done 100 of them before.
So, you never lose it, but...
How'd you cope with it?
Just being prepared as much as you can for whatever that thing is.
So, if that is you going to fire someone, you've got to know the reasons why you're firing them.
Like where they can go, what's going to be best for them, what's going to be best for you and just going into it like that.
And then there's nothing really that can happen within that meeting then that can go wrong, I think.
And I think that kind of clears the anxiety.
On the brands, you know, you've gone through a bit of a transition, as you said, the brand was stagnant at one point and then it took off again when you made a lot of sort of operational changes and sort of changes to the business model.
But at the heart of the brand, there was always something special, you know?
To even be at six million revenue.
And I remember back when I first discovered Represent and for anyone that doesn't know, it's basically the only thing I wear.
So, like if you ever see me out or on stage or whatever, I'm wearing Represent, head to toe.
I mean, it's, I wear this...
I usually don't wear this on the podcast, but when I'm not on the podcast, it's the only thing I'm wearing.
And the 24 -7 pants that you've made are the only pants that I wear.
Everyone knows that.
Like, you know, I don't actually have another pair of pants.
I love that. That's all I wear.
Because there's something, when I discovered the brand, there was always something special about it.
And it's hard to explain, right?
And when you observe the brand, it's clearly turned into a bit of a cult.
Right. A good cult, no one's getting murdered.
It's a good cult. But what is that thing that the brand always had?
Ooh, that's hard. That's a hard question.
It's really hard. I think it's the fact that it's like two brothers that are from Manchester that don't really belong in fashion have come up and done this really cool thing where they're proving that we don't need to just follow the rule book and we can do whatever we want to do and sell whatever we
want to sell. And like, it's still...
Even though it's a huge brand now, it's still like a small thing where like the owner's club for existence, like...
Which is like one range within it.
One range within it, where you see someone else in an owner's club hoodie.
Like you see them two guys, not at each other.
And it's like, yeah, you're part of something.
Like, we've kind of built this community that...
It stems from the people that are in the business, but it's so much bigger and it's on a global scale, but it's still like pretty small.
And it's like a... It's a family business, right?
It's run by two brothers and everyone within the business feels like family.
And when you buy a piece of that product, we're giving them way more than what they expect.
Like, one of my main things is like quality.
And I want the customer to think, hmm, I follow these guys, kind of cool.
I might try a hoodie and they get way more than they expect.
And that's when like they become part of that cult.
You're exceeding their expectations.
Exceeding their expectations way more than what they thought it would.
But for you to exceed my expectations, there must be something going on in the office that isn't going on in the other fashion brands offices.
And what is that thing that's happening at Representas that's probably not happening at your competitors place?
I think it's my innate desire to just be the best.
However we show up, whether it's a pop up, whether it's a run club, whether it's the feel of a garment or the delivery saying it's gonna take three days and it takes one day.
I think it's just my innate desire to just really be the best at how we show up as a brand.
Exhausting. Cause the reason why people don't do that is because it's easier to cut the corner.
It's easier to send it three days.
It's easier to not really care about the quality.
Course, but like it's so personal to us and it's all we wear and it's all we obsess over every day.
So it's gotta be good.
What do people not see in terms of the effort that goes into the work between you and your brother Michael?
What is it that people don't see?
They don't seem like enough.
Yeah. Like I'm trying to get him to come out more with how he does things in these processes and stuff.
But just like with him, you're seeing a guy that is in a room designing all day, every day with his graphics team.
And it's not just him, it's the full scale of the business, the logistics, the production, the garment text, the guys that are designing all the actual garments and like the content team, like all of them are so bought into it.
And everyone we bring up to the office, whether it's a store or another brand or whatever, like they're fucking blown away.
No one can believe what's going on in there.
And it's this ecosystem that's been built by Spenny and us as leaders and really like bled this mission into everyone that's in there that we're creating something that's gonna be phenomenal and something that'll last way longer than what we lost ourselves.
When you've put so much of your heart into the designs and then you go on Instagram and someone's copied it.
Yeah. And it's your brother's design that they've copied.
And I see people copying your stuff all the time.
How's that? It's good.
It means the design's good, right?
That's not how you felt the first time.
No, at first you fucking hate it and you think people are taking food off your table.
And in some cases, that's right.
And if it's a brand that's like very similar to us and they're trying to do the same, they're at the same price points as us and they're in our market and they're taking market share, then yeah, it's like, they shouldn't be doing that.
And it'll bite them in the ass when it comes to it.
And at the end of the day, it's who's in it for the long run, right?
Copying other people.
We used to do it when we started.
I'm not gonna sit here and say everything was original.
We've all been there and done that.
I don't think, I don't think when you're at a larger scale, you do do it, but then you see brands, a huge, high luxury fashion brands go and do it to a small designer.
So I think it's just what comes with life.
I'm sure you'll get it with podcasts.
It's the same thing, right?
You just gotta laugh at it.
Yeah, I've thought about how my journey with people like copying what you do, whatever, it's been on a bit of a journey.
And it's difficult because especially when you care so much about something, if someone copies it, it really hits you in the heart to some degree.
It's like, especially if you can like remember why you came up with the idea and then, but you're right, it's an inevitability.
And it's also, I always think about how the most important stuff is actually the part of the iceberg under the water.
Yeah, and even with design, I try and get this across to my team that like, it's not even the design really that counts, it's the whole brand.
They're not buying into this word.
They're not buying into that.
They're buying into this essence of like them becoming part of this club and like they're getting this prestige and they're getting the workouts and they're all part of this whole like lifestyle that we're portraying and doing and living and becoming.
The most important stuff they can't copy.
No one can copy that.
They can copy a logo and they can't copy like what you stand for, right?
So you've gone from being a business that was making sort of eight million in 2018 to as we sit here now, I think last year you did about a hundred million dollars.
Which is exceptional.
Money is now large in your life.
I'm sure you run the numbers and you go, shit, I'm worth this much money if I sold it for this fucking hour.
Try not to. But do you think, do you think about, how do you think about money now?
I'm not gonna lie and sit here and say like, oh, money's not an issue.
Money's not a thing that drives me cause it is and I think it is with everyone and I'll speak to billionaires and they'll say on camera that they're doing it for this and doing it for that.
And then they'll say off camera like, I want to get fucking rich, of course I want to be rich.
Everyone wants to be rich.
There's no negativity that comes with having a lot of money and I think that society and the way it's perceived now is like not a good thing that you're making a lot of money.
Like I want represent to be doing billions.
I want everyone in the business to be extremely wealthy.
I want the leadership team to be able to have generational wealth.
Like that's first and foremost, like I love that.
Why not? But if you had a billion pounds now, would you be any happier?
I don't measure anything on happiness.
Like I'm happy to sit in design for six hours or I'm happy to go for a run and like absolutely ruin my legs.
Like that makes me happy.
I also like doing hard things and rewarding myself and that's not really money, but like I said earlier, money never has a negative impact I don't think.
On that point about giving you a billion dollars, if I give you a billion dollars and it's not gonna make you any happier, then what's the point in the money?
I think it will make me happier.
Really? Yeah, of course, dude, I couldn't, my family would be set forever.
All my team would be set forever.
Like that in itself makes me happy.
Imagine me being able to turn up to my family and being like, okay, dad I know you've worked all your life.
Here's this, enjoy it.
What's the exit strategy per se?
I don't know anything else.
So why would I wanna leave?
How are you gonna get the billion if you don't leave?
We'll do it in profits.
No, I don't want a billion dollars in my bank account.
That's not needed but when you say what's the exit strategy, like when I watched you leave your business, I was always thinking like you already had the podcast lined up and you're already ready to move into this other thing anyway.
So it made sense for you.
I don't have that and I also don't want that.
I love represent. I wake up and it's represent everything.
Everything I talk to about everyone is the brand.
Everything I do is the brand.
Even bringing my fitness into this thing is my brand and I've been able to then build 247 into this brand which is actually just more of a passion project for me than building a business.
And even all the athletes that are involved, like I'm able to suck so much knowledge and worth out of these people personally for myself through the brand.
So me then moving into something else or just selling the business doesn't make sense.
When your identity and your profession become so intrinsically linked, there's a cost to that, right?
Because you talked about big backs being against the wall.
If the brand were to go down, if the revenue started to plummet and it went out of Vogue or whatever they call it, it just was not popular anymore, that's linked to your self -esteem and your self -worth and your identity.
100%. And look, there is days where it doesn't do well.
There are still days now where we'll launch products and we'll have a nightmare with it.
How does that feel honestly?
It fucks with you. Fucks with your confidence.
But it also gives you a realization that you're not superhuman and you can't do everything and not everything you touch turns to gold.
And then you've got to go back to drawing board and do it again.
What does that look like?
So that you think about the last time it happened, how did it feel and how long did that feeling last?
The last few days. And I'll speak to Spenny about it a lot over the few days and he'll reassure that something else is gonna take that feeling away from it.
And it usually does.
And as well, it's not all about small failures along the way.
And there's so many exciting things that when something small trips you up a little bit, you've got to realize like, no, this is for the long term.
Like the future is this.
In 10 years, let's look back at this as like a learning curve.
Amongst all of this, you've still got to figure out how to have a life, like a personal life, because regardless of how intricately connected you are to the brand represent, you're still gonna need to have a life.
You're still gonna need to be a George in there somewhere.
Yeah, and I never really did for a long time.
Past 10 years, I've not really had a life.
Not nothing outside of represent, but I've built represent into my life.
In the moment, I think about times in my career where I was absolutely all in on something to the point that I was like seven days a week in this fucking office.
Even the weekends when there's nothing to do, I'm just in there cause I've got no mates.
That's when I realized, so then Sundays where you'd be sat at home on your own, no one would be messaging you.
You can't do anything with people in the business cause it's their time off with their families.
That's when I realized like, fuck, I'm probably too bought into this.
Were you lonely? Alone, but never lonely.
I never got to the point where I felt lonely.
Maybe a little bit, but I would distract myself with going working out for five hours, you know?
Or I'll just put my headphones in and listening to a book and just going and coming back and then the Sunday's done anyway.
Sundays were my worst days because I didn't have anyone to do anything with.
Like I'd go train at a local gym where there was a big community there from 6 a .m.
till 9 a .m. and I'd come home and I'd just sit there and think, Wednesday, Monday.
Isn't that funny? He takes my mum, like, what are you up to?
And she'd be like, oh, we're actually up in Scotland doing this trip.
And I'd be like, fuck, I can't even go see my mum.
So, yeah, I guess there is a little bit of loneliness in there.
I was lonely, but I didn't know it at the time.
I didn't know it in hindsight because I look back at the way I was living and right, yeah, I was filling the gap, the Sunday, Saturday, summer evenings, holidays, even Christmases, like, because I was in Manchester, my family were in the southwest.
I was filling it with work, like often just like pointless work.
Yeah, absolutely unneeded stuff.
A lot of the time it's great and you can go out and you can spend a few hours on your own and write a load of things down that you need to do that next week.
But you need a team to do anything.
I can't get anything done without the team.
And that's one thing I would realise every weekend that I'm wasting my time pretending to work.
That's exactly what I was doing.
Relationships, romantic relationships.
Let's start with non -romantic relationships, in fact.
You talk about having to shed people in terms of like, negative influences in order to change your life.
People ask me about this all the time, which is, you know, how important is the environment on personal and professional success?
I think it's everything.
I think that your ecosystem that you build around you is everything, whether that's the distance it takes you to get to the gym or the people you follow on social media If you're following Joe from school that's out every night drinking and you're watching them stories, even if it's 20 seconds of your
day, you're wasting your time watching them stories and you're also looking at things that are just absolutely pointless to your life.
So why don't you go and follow someone who's done what you wanna do or is doing what you wanna do or who actually inspires you and just clear out all the bullshit and you're gonna be so much more in the right headspace if you do something like that.
Did you do that? Did you clear out...
I did it a lot of times.
Got a lot of bad messages from doing it.
Really, you didn't follow Joe?
Yeah, why'd you unfollow me?
You explain it to him.
Yeah, just tell him how it is.
Just say, look mate, I don't wanna watch you see it anymore.
So romantic relationships then.
How has that been? Because it must be pretty tricky with the level of obsession that you have to maintain a healthy, happy romantic relationship.
A non -existent, didn't entertain it for so many years.
Tried it once, maybe like when I was 25, 26 and it just didn't work.
Why didn't it work?
I was obsessed with work and I was also like, I didn't know who I was and what I wanted to be and it was before that era, before that time of mine where I changed.
So it's just, I didn't like who I was and obviously that doesn't work when you're in a relationship.
You gotta love yourself first, right?
And then after that, I just kinda just said, no, I'm not doing it and didn't up until recently really.
Didn't entertain it at all for so many years.
You've got a girlfriend.
Have I now? No, not really, not really, kind of.
Would she answer this question the same way?
No, she's got a boyfriend.
She's got a boyfriend.
Nah. Are you a little bit, you're an avoidant, aren't you?
Do you know the attachment styles?
Have you heard about the attachment styles?
No, what's that? Three attachment styles, you've got the secures.
They're the ones that just have a perfect relationship.
Right. You know, they're like, no problems, they're like, you know, and then you've got the anxious ones who are clingy, like needy, like they need like, Need attention.
Yeah, exactly. And then you've got the avoidant who kind of run.
You strike me as an avoidant.
I don't know what I am.
I really don't know.
I'm definitely not an attachment one, no.
And I just always thought it would be a pressure on myself to then, and I didn't want to let someone else down because of what I was doing with work.
And I don't want to have to explain to someone like, this is my business, this is my life, I'm doing this all the time when they want to see you and they want your attention and stuff.
But now like hiring is spending and having more time and actually coming moving out here, I've got time now.
Like my day is done way before what it was at home.
I would work from a train and then I would work from, I'd be in the office at five in the morning, I'd leave at 7 p .m.
and I'd go to bed. So there was no time, but now I can wake up early, get all the stuff done with the guys at home, work with the guys over here building out representing LA and then I can be done by like 2, 3 p .m.
a lot of days. So I have then time to like, I guess date goals and things like that.
And how's that going?
I hate it. Really? No, I'm not hated I guess.
I have this fucking feeling where, I'm not fulfilling what I should be doing and I'm kind of giving myself a disservice if I'm out doing something else.
And I think a lot of entrepreneurs and people who run businesses get that.
Where like if you're not fully into the business, like with every minute of your time, you feel like you're not doing the right thing.
And I'm starting to try and get up.
Like a guilt. Yes, very guilty, yeah.
And that actually caused me a little bit of what we think is anxiety.
I don't know if it is anxiety, but it really...
Yeah, I would wake up the next day and be like, fuck, I've like spent four hours with this person that I'm not interested in seeing.
That's what I've wasted four hours, what I could have been working, could have been building the brand, could have been doing other things.
Sounds like a lot. When I say a lot, I mean like a lot of weight to carry.
Like to not be able to go on a date with someone for four hours without waking up the next day, feeling anxious about how you spent your time.
It feels like your passion has become a bit of a prison.
Yeah, self -inflicted prison.
But I love it and it's a privilege to have it.
But I'm starting learning.
Like I said, I kind of got a girlfriend right now.
Kind of got a girlfriend.
You're in so much trouble.
You have no idea. Ah, it's fine.
She's like, oh, Georgia's on a podcast, I'll have a listen to this.
She's gonna click it.
We'll do a chapter on YouTube, which is called Georgia's Girlfriend.
We'll put it in the trailer.
You're gonna be in a bit of serious trouble.
No, it's absolutely fine.
Valentine's Day yesterday and you're throwing under the bus.
Interesting. Yeah, but it does, it sounds like a little bit of a prison.
You know, not being able to take your foot off the pedal at all without feeling anxious.
Are you happy? Yeah.
And what does that mean?
That means I wake up, I'm fucking thankful for what I've got and what I've built and who I'm around.
And like my brother and my family and like, I enjoy being able to just do what I want to do.
And that is the work, I guess, most of the time.
We know when people talk about work -life balance, what's your honest opinion of that?
Bullshit. If you actually want to build something that's gonna stand the test of time and make you very successful and rich and happy and bring other people with you, it's gonna take everything.
I fully believe that.
I don't think you can half -ass it.
I don't think it can be a side project and I don't think it can be something that's just three hours a day.
I think that you've gotta go fully into it to become like high -level achiever.
Like actually a winner.
What are you willing to sacrifice for that?
Everything, whatever it takes.
Why not? I'm already into it now, so gotta go full -on.
Look, Kobe Bryant wasn't doing three throws at fucking 3 a .m.
for no reason. You got to be the best, you gotta do everything right.
I always talk about the cost that comes with that and the sacrifice.
Are you willing to sacrifice you not having a family yourself?
For the time being, yeah.
Maybe later on in life when it becomes something that I can step aside from even more, then yeah.
You're gonna wanna step aside from it.
Because you're getting anxiety doing four -hour dates.
How are you doing, Steph?
I am, but I'm learning, I'm learning.
I'm starting to do it.
Like I said, yeah. You've seen progress in that regard?
Definitely, yeah. I think it's just about building that muscle of understanding you can do other things and realizing it's not gonna come crashing down if you take your foot off the brake for a second.
But still knowing that you're giving it your all when you are in it.
Is there a point where, always think about Burberry as an example.
The Burberry story of how they kind of went out of fashion because they became too popular.
What I'm trying to say is like, Burberry was aspirational.
So lots of people start wearing it.
Some less aspirational people start wearing it.
People start knocking it off and selling it for super cheap in markets.
Then eventually it's no longer aspirational because it got so popular that it becomes uncool.
Do you worry about that as a risk factor for represent?
So that's like a life cycle, right?
And that comes every couple years or every seven years, whatever they may be in the industry.
But there's always different markets to push and pull on.
Also like represent is so small in terms of size compared to Burberry.
At the moment, we have a very core customer base where we kind of can identify them and we know where they are and what they're doing.
And until that goes mainstream, which I think usually happens probably at like 250, 300 million revenue.
It's not a worry as such at the moment.
I used to worry about a lot.
But like when Spenny came in, he was handling a $500 million business, he's like, we're barely touching the sides.
20 % of our revenue is in the US.
That's only $20 million.
It could sell $20 million out of LA and not see the product for the next six months.
You wouldn't even see someone wearing it.
So at this point, no, but it is something that we'll always think about and you've always got to limit your distribution and make sure you're selling it in the right places.
And look, we are still like a luxury brand.
We're in the best stores in the world.
Like it's not like you can walk into a PacSun and pick us up.
So it's still not a mainstream brand and it's expensive.
I was wondering if that's less of a threat on the 24 seven side of things, where it's more about like utility and less about like fashion.
Because, you know, everyone wears Nike.
And no one's like, oh my God, I'm not wearing Nike because they're wearing, you know.
Yeah, biggest sportswear brand in the world.
And how are they able to tier a Travis Scott or a Virgil Oblow Jordan one that's going for $5 ,000, but they're still selling tracksuits at $20.
And you can still see everyone in Gold's Gym to everyone in fucking Equinox wearing it.
So there's just tiers to everything, right?
There's a trickle down system with everything.
I wonder if that's, but is that because it's like more of a utility product than a fashion product?
I think so with Nike, yeah, definitely.
Because there's not really like a fashion brand that's able to sell like a $20 item.
And then like a... Ralph Lauren.
Oh really do they sell cheap and expensive stuff?
If you look at Ralph Lauren most like, it looks amazing from the outside and they have all these beautiful stores in like the best spots in London and New York and LA and most of their revenue is done through Outlook $20 polos or $15 polos.
60 % of their sales is a polo top, which I'm not exactly sure on, but that's what I hear.
So there's ways you can, I guess smoke and mirror it, disguise things and do other things.
But for us, like we're pretty solid on where we wanna be in terms of the marketplace and the price points and we'll grow that way rather than having to tier things to an extent.
What are the most important...
Because I think most people will be listening to this conversation.
In essence, cause they wanna know how you've done what you've done.
They wanna know like the transferable principles behind how it's possible to scale a very successful business that also is unique because it's quite a cult business.
You've got like an incredibly cultish brand.
You know, you do like run clubs and almost a thousand people will show up on the street corner or you drop something and you sell thousands in minutes.
What are those principles that you would maybe say to a 18 year old George or to that kid in your DMs that's asking for the principles?
Principles that only you could have learned in hindsight.
I think it's about creating the DNA of what the brand is and sticking to that.
Not veering off in different directions and changing everything up every so often based on trends.
So I think it's about holding a DNA whether that's true thick and thin.
So whether it's not right for that time or it is right for that time.
There'll always be life cycles in fashion and things will go out and in fashion, but if you can kind of cultivate the look that you want, that's first and foremost what it is.
If you look at 247 and represent, 247 looks like represent, but it's active wear.
It's not like it's a whole different thing that looks like Lululemon.
Like it still looks like represent.
So I think making sure the DNA in the brand is very like visible.
Where does the DNA come from?
Just personal preference, what we like to wear, what I feel like I look good in, what Mike feels like he looks good in, what the team love and just building that over time, step by step, just creating products that we feel like is either missing or we just want for ourselves to wear.
And what would you say about hard work as a principal?
I think it's everything.
I really do think it's everything.
I meet a lot of people, especially out here that have their little hands in different businesses, lots of different pies, but don't work hard at any of them and none of them really ever succeed or they only own 1 % when you find out they've sold the business.
So I think it's all about just like going all in on something that you own.
I think it's hard if you were just a small minority shareholder and something like that then is not really your passion.
It's someone else's or it's a big group of people's.
But when people think about hard work, and people advise someone and say, you have to work hard if you want to be successful people say, oh, that's toxic.
Yeah, don't care. What's toxic?
What word, that word is just makes no sense.
You're gonna encourage people to be burnt out.
Yeah, I think you can come out the other side of burnt out.
Like the more you do right, the more you can do.
So if you're working hard at something and you're starting to feel like it's getting a bit too much, the pressure's a bit too much, you carry on doing it, you're gonna come out of it.
It's not like you're just gonna end, nothing ends.
You just figure out different ways to actually make it successful or something will work and you'll be like, oh fuck, then your energy goes back up and you start going down there and it works.
I don't think, I don't know, I think there's a lot of negativity around working hard and I don't like that.
There's gonna be a kid listening right now that's like 18, 16 and they just can't find the motivation whatever that means.
They can't find the motivation to get up and go to the gym.
They've got some idea, but it's still on the sofa that they had it on.
Like what would you say to that young man or woman is the first thing to get the wheels in motion?
Fuck motivation. I don't have motivation a lot of time.
It's actually more about discipline.
It's about just getting it done, get up and get it done.
Like with anything, with work, with working out, with creating a product, with building a brand, with relationships, whatever, it's discipline over motivation.
Motivation is a small thing that can last two minutes or an hour.
Motivation can come from listening to a song on your iPod.
If you've got discipline, you're willing to do it every single day of your life and knowing that it's gonna take so long to do it, you just get up and do it.
You don't even think about motivation.
And what is discipline then?
Discipline is an instruction manual.
What is discipline to you?
Yeah, I guess it is an instruction manual.
I guess it's a list of things that you must do for yourself to become what you wanna be.
And I guess it's a deciding factor on whether you're gonna do something or not.
And it goes back to what you said about, you drew a picture of yourself, of what you wanted to look like, but you also wrote out a set of principles or values that you wanted to embody.
And then you're living your life by that as opposed to how you feel every day.
Yeah, yeah. When you put it that way, that's what it is.
And eventually it becomes part of them, it becomes a muscle, right?
And you grow that muscle and you're constantly breaking it down and regrowing it and then principles just become your life.
They say like habits, what is it?
Thoughts become habits and then habits become principles and that becomes you as a person.
A lot of people just don't think they're moldable, though it goes back to what we were saying earlier, but like we just don't think that we can change ourselves.
Yeah. But your evidence of that, really remarkable evidence of that.
Yeah, and there's a lot of people out there that are.
There's so many inspiring stories out there on social media and in books and podcasts and stuff that all these people that have completely changed their lives.
It just takes a lot of time and a lot of effort.
Are you confident? I'm not gonna lie, I still have like doubts about things a lot of the time, especially in business, but with myself, yeah, I'm confident.
What do you have doubts about in business?
Just like you said before, maybe one day the revenue stops, maybe one day it gets too popular, maybe one day something doesn't work out.
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What if Michael turned around and said, do you know what, I'm done?
He just said, I just can't do this anymore.
I'm gonna just, you know, I'm done.
But I'd probably cry.
Yeah, definitely. And I'd just try and figure out why, what it is, and then trying to get him back in.
He said no, I'm done.
And just, that was it forever.
It had sucked. It had sucked a lot.
Because I've been, since school, we've been together doing this forever.
So, for him then not to be there, he'd be pretty shitty.
Because like, who are you doing it for then?
Like I'd fucking die for Mike.
Do you know what I mean?
Like if someone had, if someone said, I'm gonna, I've gotta kick you out of the business.
But Mike stays, I'd go.
Like this, this isn't really for me.
I guess it's for him.
And it's like, it's kind of at that point where that can't happen.
He enjoys it too much.
We love doing this.
It's interesting, that thought experiment though, kind of illuminates much of the reason why you're doing it in the first place.
Because the first thing you said was who you were doing it for then.
But if I'd asked you earlier, who you're doing this for, I don't know if you would have said, I'm doing it for Mike.
No, I'm doing it for Mike.
I'm doing it for the team.
I'm doing it for my family, definitely.
But if the team leaves you're still gonna crack on.
Yeah, it's just a new team.
But if Mike leaves.
If Mike leaves, I don't know if I carry on.
That's so difficult to answer.
I had a business partner and the reason I asked that question is I thought the same.
I thought, one day I played out in my scenario that they quit.
And I remember thinking to myself, the exact same thing, who am I doing this for then?
Like we started this together.
So the mission is actually me and you getting to the finish line.
And you get excited when they get excited.
Or like if Mike sends me a design that he's in love with and I'm like, fucking hell, yeah, this is insane.
And you just have that energy between you.
If that wasn't there anymore, yeah, it would suck.
How important do you think having a co -founder is?
I think massively, I know earlier when you said you get lonely, like I think that is a major block in loneliness because he is always there.
And I have, like I always have him to lean into and I would never put pressure and stress on him in a personal way, but I know he's there if that happened.
So I think it's a massive thing, but who you go into business with is another massive thing.
And like, you've got to be completely different to each other.
And even though we look the same and we seem the same, like we are very different people.
What have you learned from the bad people that you've hired, the ones that didn't work?
In terms of when I say that, I mean, what have you learned is a bad quality in someone to work with, to build a business with, to employ?
Stuck in old ways and not being open -minded to change.
I think a lot of people are very restrictive when, especially if you're bringing someone higher up from them, then some people will always like backfire against that.
And that's a bad quality and it's a human nature and I understand it.
And you can always try and like change the way they think about things.
But if they're not willing to accept that change, especially when you're in a growing company, like there's some people and Spenny always tells me this is some people that'll take you to 50 mil and there's some people that'll take you to 250 mil and there's some people take you to a billion and it won't
be the same people.
And you've just got to accept that and you gotta do everything you can for all them people at that time, however far they go with the brand.
I actually had a conversation with a founder the other day whose business I've just invested in.
And it's the exact same conversation that nobody seems to talk about because in both your case and mine, we both did the same thing.
We hired a bunch of young people that were probably the ones that were willing to come and work for us, that were also the ones we could maybe manage.
And then the business grows.
And the problem you have is the next set of talent you need to get you up to the next rung on the ladder, they need to come in above the people that were there from the beginning.
And the originals don't love that because that kind of blocks their progression.
That's what they think.
That's what they think, but no, it's not true, is it?
Because they can learn from them things and then they can step up, just takes more time or they'll get more knowledge out of it if that person does come in.
But you guys get in the way.
Yeah, he goes getting the way.
And like I said, some people are not open -minded to that.
And they're also very, people get comfortable.
They get comfortable in that position that they're in and they don't want anyone to report into and they don't wanna do this and do that.
But that's life, right?
What's next for you?
This year? Yeah. Start of the year, isn't it?
I guess we're building out women's wear in the brand.
We are opening three stores this year, which will be our first stores.
We've not done a store yet.
And it's something that we've wanted to do for so many years, but just finding the right places and being in the right space for it.
Why stores? Because we have.
People think that's going against the way that the world's going.
Everything's getting more difficult.
Of course, yeah. And that's what, that's, I think that's a major advantage.
Like same thing happened in COVID.
Everyone pulled away from their productions and stopped selling garments for a while.
Whereas we were like, okay, we will take everyone's production space and we'll start selling online.
And then we made huge relationships with factories that we usually couldn't get in.
And now we're like the best in them factories and doing everything the right way with them because we supported them during them times.
But for the store aspect, it's like we have these communities all over the globe where people wanna be a part of the brand and they're showing up to run clubs and we'll go and do one in Dubai or we'll do one in LA.
Like I want somewhere for them guys to be able to come into the brand and guys and girls to come into the brand and be able to smell it and feel it and touch it and have it way more professional than them just walking into a store and seeing it on a rail or see it on a shoe shelf.
So it's about creating an area where the community can come in and feel more of the brand and who we are and what we do.
And then hopefully roll out globally.
And then 247 has a lot of focus this year.
Usually it's just like a couple of people in the building that are doing it.
And now we've got a full team working on that.
We're trying to expand that.
Hopefully I'd like to open some gyms with it.
The concept for that is maybe next year, but not this year.
And then I'm building another brand called Cadence, which is an electrolyte drink, high sodium, first ready to drink sodium in a can in the market.
And that's something that I've been working on for the past year and a half with a guy called Ross out here.
And that's because going back to 2019, 2020, when I started getting into fitness and lifestyle and health, like electrolytes just became something that I was consistently taking.
And I've not been sick one day since then.
And I've never had my energy levels drop and I've never had bad sleep.
And I don't get headaches anymore.
And it just seems like the salt that's in there is what is causing like this constant stream of energy and it's supporting my workouts.
And I love flavored drinks.
So I thought, why can't I make my own version of that?
And I tested it out with a collaboration we did earlier last year.
And it seemed our customer really wanted it.
So I was like, we'll build another brand and put it under that umbrella and see how it goes.
What is the goal here?
I think the goal is - Like I mean, just generally, like with all of this stuff, like what's the goal?
I won't represent to be a lifestyle and not a brand.
I want it to be unconventional and I want it to be more than just clothes.
And I say that a lot recently, but I just want it to not just be about the clothes.
I want the clothes to be a by -product.
Why? Why not? No one's really done that yet.
Everyone talks about brand.
But I mean, what's the point?
You've got drinks, you've got the 247 range, you've got the sort of original represent range.
What is the finish line here?
That's the good thing.
I don't think there is one.
I don't think there is a, I don't think there's a limit to what it can be and what this thing that started off as 25 screen printed t -shirts can become over the next hundred years or so.
But do you not sit around with Michael and go, listen, we'll get to two billion.
We'll sell it there and we'll just get a couple of yachts.
No, like look at Ben Francis.
They got valued at a billion.
He's still in the business.
It's not a big, doesn't become about the money, right?
It's not about the money.
It's about what you're actually able to do and do some things different and like not be conventional and try and just, I just wanna do something that no one's done.
You know, why not? And I asked these questions, you know, I'm playing devil's advocate here because I think some people think that this is all kind of like a means to an end with entrepreneurship generally.
It's like a means to an end.
But when I speak to entrepreneurs like you, it's so clear that it's much more about the journey and the journey you're like, it just seems like you probably wanna die on the journey at some point.
Yeah, well, you're speaking to like a lot of successful people and people that have been in it for a long time, right?
You're not speaking to those guys that are walking around on the street saying, I'm gonna build this and I'm gonna sell it in three years for six billion or, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is an exit strategy and they've just started.
They never work. No one ever, that never works for anybody.
Like that's a bullshit way of thinking.
You're talking to the people that have really bought into their own fucking brand and they're living it and they're loving it and it's forever I guess.
And it's a mission, isn't it?
Yeah, that's their mission.
That's kind of the tagline that I associate to you because you post that a lot is it's a mission and there's something difference between a business and a mission.
That's clearly what you've encapsulated.
What are you good at?
Are you good at business?
I'm good at understanding business.
But when you say good at business, what do you mean?
I mean, you could define it yourself, but I guess what people typically think of as business is like operations, finance, processes.
No, I'm not, not at all.
I think that's actually will be really wonderful news to a lot of people because there's a lot of people out there that think you have to be.
Good at business to own a business.
No, I think it's about starting off and just figuring things out along the way and putting people in place of them things that you're not good at that are way better than you would it.
As soon as we started doing that, that's when the business took off.
George, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for.
The question that's been left for you is what is something in your life that you assume to be true but you haven't yet deeply questioned.
It's quite funny because it's something that I'm really interested in, but like don't talk about it a lot.
I guess whether like the aliens are amongst us.
That's not what I was expecting you to say.
No, not at all. And it's completely different to what we've just talked about for the past however long, but that really like interests me.
The fact that like there's all these different stories and conspiracies and things that are going on constantly, especially now more than ever.
And I wonder if it would change the world if one of the governing bodies or whoever it was actually came out and said, yes, this is this.
And these are with us.
I think it's just amazing.
We're going into like the world of like simulations and AI and all that stuff now.
So I saw that thing come out with chat GPT the other day Sora where they can create, they can do text to video.
That's what I, I saw the first reply to Sam Altman's tweet said, this is the technology that was used to create us.
And it just wobbled my brain a little bit because I thought now we're getting to a point where we've got these Apple Vision Pro headsets and we're able to make video with text.
And I'm looking at this woman in HD that's like 85 years old that was made by typing a couple of words.
And you just assume any rate of improvement.
And eventually you get to something that is indistinguishable from the world.
Reality. It might even be a video game.
I think there's, I've heard Elon talk about this and he's like, he talks about it.
He said so much that he's had to ban the conversation.
Right. Because you fall into a little bit of a hole.
Yeah. You literally have no idea who we are, what we're doing, why we're here.
And yeah, is there an alternate universe or are we just living in someone else's head?
I don't know, so interesting.
Thank you, Georgia.
Thank you for a number of reasons.
Thank you for dressing me for the last three years because I think your clothes are the best.
No, thank you. It's a very subjective thing, but in terms of quality and consideration, sometimes you can tell when someone has gone the extra mile on a piece of work.
Right. Pretty much always when they've thought about things from first principles, they've really thought about all the decisions and that's what Represent has always been to me.
A brand that always thinks about the decisions.
And it's different in every way.
As I said, from an end -to -end experience, it's different.
And you can tell that the brand comes from somebody somewhere's heart.
Right. And you can tell the difference again with brands where someone didn't really care about the process and they are maybe copying something else.
And then there's this other brand called Represent where it's clearly coming from someone somewhere's heart and their own unique vision.
That's why I've always loved the brand.
And that's why I think you've been able to cultivate this cult because there's something in humans where they can tell the real from the not so real.
Yeah. They can just feel it.
We can feel it. And that's what Represent has always been.
And that's why I'm always been so fascinated by you and your brother and a huge supporter of both of you.
And on like a human level, you're both just fucking great guys.
I appreciate it. And I say it up behind your back all the time.
I go, that guy's a great guy.
He's just like a really nice, humble human being.
And on paper, people might let him go, he has a lot of reasons not to be.
This guy looks like fucking something that was literally drawn on a piece of paper by an alien.
Like, but he's got this incredible business, but he's a really good human being, and so is Michael.
So thank you for the inspiration.
Keep doing what you're doing.
Cause the mission that you're on is inspiring many other people to start missions of their own.
I think that's something the world needs a lot more of.
I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
I loved it. I'll see you next time.
Bye, bye. Bye.
