Brian Smith

cool product he lasted less than a year and then they brought in a young lady called connie richwayne who had spent time in a lot of the the new york high fashion footwear industry and she's the one that started advertising in you know the the really really high-end women's fashion mags

That teamed up with the fact that we'd sent boots to Oprah and she ordered pairs for her staff and everything.

And if we had announced that Oprah was wearing our shoes or boots, it would have killed the company when I owned the company because I didn't have the capital to build the product to take on that demand.

That in conjunction with Connie Richwayne, who knew New York fashion, those two things coincided to make UGG like break through the $100 million barrier and the $200 million, $500 million.

Wow.

And that combination is what really built Deckers into the billion-dollar UGG brand.

Yes, especially after it's coming up on another two years.

It'll be 50 years, I think, two or three years.

And I am just blown away at the longevity of it.

The fact that it's in the $2 billion range now for a couple of years, and a lot of people ask me if I resent the fact that I don't own it anymore, and it couldn't be more opposite.

In fact, after all of this, I wrote a book called The Birth of a Brand.

Mm-hmm.

The theme of that book was you can't give birth to adults, right?

Every entrepreneur has this aha moment, which is the conception, and then they take some action, which is the birth, right?

So for me, buying six pairs of samples was the birth of UGG.

But then every business just goes into this horrible infancy and it just lies there.

But if you can keep feeding it and keep it alive, it'll hit the toddling stage, which is really cool because magazines are running articles about your product and all your true believer friends are telling their friends.

And that's a pretty cool phase.

And that goes from toddling into youth, which to me is the best phase of every business because production's working, accounting and admin's working, you know, everything's working.

And you can run a $10, $15, $20 million company in that youth phase.