Brian Smith

We were huge in the surf market.

Then there was the ski side.

Well, snowboarding was just starting and I picked up on that vibe very, very early.

So we started advertising to the youth snowboarding thing and that worked in the snowboarding industry.

It took a long time for me to get back east because I didn't know what the kids did for sport in the winter.

And I was talking to a sporting good owner from, I think it was Chicago, and he rolled his eyes and go, they play hockey, you know, and being Australian, I had no idea of the hockey market.

And when I looked it up, I went, oh, my God, this is twice as big as surfing.

And so we started making our ads for the youth hockey players, which were all over from Chicago all the way back to Boston.

And that turned out to be a huge market.

And the big department stores now are seeing this happen.

And so they started calling me to come and negotiate getting their product into the stores.

I found a mailing list of stylists in Hollywood and sent a letter to them.

And about 400 people responded.

And so I sent them all a pair of Ugg boots, no questions asked.

And it was a couple of months before I started seeing them on Celebrities.

But the biggest thing that came out of that was that I started looking at People magazine and Us magazine bit by bit.

The Ugg boots started showing up over and over again in all of the celebrity magazines.

So I came up with the description, casual comfort.

And I said, I want to market Uggs as the ultimate casual comfort footwear.

So we had the money to hire a PR agency that I was hoping would take this to the market and make it a much more mainstream product.