Brian Smith

So I've got that against me.

And I, by a pure fluke, was having a beer with one of my good retailers in Ocean Beach in San Diego at his store.

And I was talking about how hard it was for me to get traction in the advertising.

And he...

called out to the back and he called a half a dozen of these little kids you know the 12 to 13 year old grommies who store their surfboards in the shop and he says hey you guys what do you think of Uggs?

And they pretty much all just said, oh, those Uggs, man, they're so fake.

Have you seen those ads?

Those models, they can't surf.

And instantly I realized that not only was my ads not working, I was actually turning people away from Ugg boots because of the images that I portrayed them in.

So it was a huge learning thing.

Yeah, I had a buddy.

He was a former world surf champion, Pete Townend, who worked for Surfing Magazine.

And he was running a scholastic surf team at the time.

And I called him up and said, hey, do you have any young kids who are about to turn pro?

And he gave me Mike Parsons and Ted Robinson as two people to check out.

And so I hired them for, I paid them in boots, you know.

And I just took my own little Canon SureShot and we went surfing at Black's Beach.

in La Jolla and trestles up in San Onofre.

Yeah.

So when I ran those ads, the sales, which had been around, you know, 30 to 50,000 per year, the immediate jump was like $200,000.