The Tale of the Chair

When creating a product, it is important to consider things like functionality, weight and color. When creating a brand, however, it is important for the founder to be more in tune with the audience and the mission. The latter was the mindset of Steven Wilcox from the very beginning of the PARKIT brand creation. Growing up in California, Steven was taken by surfing and the culture that the surf scene had to offer. Born into a family of entrepreneurs, Steven knew he wanted to start his own business one day but wasn’t sure where to start. Through schooling, mentorship, and years of valuable experience, Steven eventually broke out on his own, creating a brand focused on elevating people’s outdoor experiences. From sitting out on the beaches of California to sitting around a campfire comparing stories of outdoor experiences, PARKIT chairs are the best way to enjoy the exploration.

An Entrepreneur is Born

Steven Wilcox grew up in Southern California near Oceanside, a practically perfect town in his eyes. The weather is constantly around 75 degrees and the waves are ideal for surfing. In addition to the natural benefits of the area, the surfing culture in Oceanside promotes travel, exploration, and activity, perfect for a young man full of ideas. Once he learned the tricks of the trade, Steven was quick to put surfing at the forefront of his life, switching his favorite after school activity from baseball to water polo in order to strengthen his paddling skills, for example. The fast paced, dynamic environment was a good match for his creative brain.

 

In addition to the surf culture, Steven had members of his family to spur along his entrepreneurial spirit. His grandfather and uncle were entrepreneurs for their entire adult lives and his uncle especially made sure to teach Steven some tips and tricks as he was growing up. When Steven grew up and went to college he chose to study business with a concentration in entrepreneurship, where he gained knowledge of the foundations of the market that he took and ran with. As his first job out of college, Steven worked for a popular outdoor company who made ski goggles. Charged with marketing and promoting the sale of a unique type of goggle called prism goggles, which were great for skiers and snowboarders moving through heavy falling snow, Steven came up with a unique marketing tactic. This tactic involved a television display shaped like ski goggles which displayed on one side the prism technology and on the other side the bland view of a skier with normal goggles. The display was not only a blast for Steven and his team to create, it was successful and taught Steven valuable lessons about marketing and promoting a product. 

After his experience with the first company, Steven moved on to another, structured significantly differently. So differently, in fact, that the company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. This meant that the company needed to restructure itself. Steven got to see “under the hood” of two different companies which left him with ideas of what to do and what not to do when it came time for him to create his own brand. 

Take a Leap and PARKIT

Steven’s uncle taught him many things about running a business when Steven was young, and he made sure to continue as he got older, especially when Steven was at a turning point in his career. 

“I think my uncle put through all those entrepreneurship conversations where I realized it's just a matter of me deciding that I believed in myself enough that I could do it instead of looking under the hood of all these cars.

You can look under the hood of a thousand race cars, but unless you've gotten in the driver's seat of it, you really don't know how fast it's going to go, but you can look at the best practices and go, cool. This is set up this way. This is set up that way. And this is the way that I think it should be set up.”

Steven knew it was time to take the leap and use the knowledge and skills that he acquired to form his own brand. He wasn’t sure of the product he was interested in but he knew the mission of his brand. Centered around his favorite activities, surfing, camping, snowboarding, and general outdoor exploration, Steven aimed to create an inclusive brand that focused on the consumer as well as sending out quality products. One night, sitting around the campfire, one of Steven’s friends sat down in his camp chair with a little extra umph and fell straight through to the ground. The light bulb went off in Steven’s head and he knew that a camp chair was the perfect idea for a product. Inclusive and not requiring any special skills, a camp chair is the perfect thing to bring people together and also enhance any solo outdoor experience. 

Brand over Product

Steven has created a sturdy, functional outdoor chair, based on lawn chairs that he used growing up with a little added graphic design and special attention paid to the materials used. However, the overall brand of PARKIT is what he is most proud of, and rightfully so. From his years of experience working with different businesses in addition to his schooling and his familial mentorship, Steven knew that when he started his own business he wanted the focus to be on the brand and mission, not just the product. 

“…[T]he thing that I could see in my mind so clearly was the brand and…the product was going to be secondary. It was more about the mission that we were on and… that our mission is ultimately to enjoy the exploration, spend quality time outdoors with the people we love the most, friends, family, and do the activities and share the stories that make us who we are.”

PARKIT is a brand that encourages community and exploration, only a few of the values that Steven likes to live out, along with a few others that are more present than one might think.

“PARKIT in itself is an acronym. It stands for presence, adventure, responsibility, kindness, independence, and tenacity. And…that plays into everything that we do. It plays into everything that we post on social media, it plays into our blog posts, and at the end of the day, that’s what we want people to remember: the experience that they have with our brand and our products and who we are and want to be a part of that versus just feeling like they're just buying a product from us online. It's entirely about the people. And I think that's what has played a big role in our first year of business and the success that we saw.”

Steven Wilcox is a very passionate entrepreneur. He values his customers and coworkers and the hard work that it takes to produce not only a product, but a community. Steven is proud of the product he puts out and encourages everyone who purchases a PARKIT chair to share their experiences with each other and with the PARKIT team. PARKIT chairs can be found online and PARKIT chair experiences can be shared on social media under the handle @parkitmovement. 

Full Transcription 

Zach Rollins: My name is captain Zach, and this is along the keel is a lifelong Waterman. I have gone coast to coast, having opportunities to rub elbows with some incredibly hardworking men and women who have built their lives by the shoreline. I take you behind the scenes of some of the most iconic coastal brands, chat with entrepreneurs and chop it up with the people who are making a difference on our coastal communities, worn from the need, built by the water, get ready to earn your summer

Zach Rollins: what's going on everyone. And welcome back to another episode of along the keel. And in this episode of the podcast, we're talking with Steven Wilcox, the founder of Parkin, and after looking under the hood of hundreds of incredible brands, some of which are some of the most well-known surf brands and outdoor brands in his.

Stephen knew that he had the recipe for success. It was only a matter of time that he was waiting for the right moment, the right idea to strike for him to go on and follow his dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. And it wasn't until a trip with friends, some added stress and a broken camping chair that his hunger to follow his entrepreneurial spirit would be kicked into full drive and would allow him to create the world's best.

Not going to say beach chair, not going to say camping. Adventure chair. Cause that's exactly what it is. It's a chair that does it all is pretty unbeatable. You guys got to check this thing out. So it was awesome. Being able to talk with Steven all about how everything came to be his career as a marketer in the outdoor industry, but better yet just the simple conversations around why everyone should be able to go surfing or do something that they love in the outdoors and how important it is to our society of just being in the outdoors.

So that more on this episode of the podcast, make sure to check us out on social media, follow us on Instagram, Facebook as well as on our YouTube channel and go sign up for a newsletter. We got some really cool announcements coming this October, which is now, which is meaning you should go and sign up right now because in the next three weeks, we're going to be doing a huge revamp of the website.

We already did it. It's just going to be launched. So check it out and stay tuned and hope you guys enjoy this episode of along the keel.

Steven Wilcox: When a bartender throws a beer down like the bar and it slides to the customer's hand, we were at one end of the container sliding chairs down to the other end guys, catching them, putting them on putting them on a pallet block, picking up how it block and bringing that into the warehouse and then stacking them in an organized way in the warehouse.

So I very happy to be distant sweats today and not lifting anything.

Zach Rollins: Yeah, no kidding. So now how many chairs did you wind up moving?

Steven Wilcox: We moved yesterday, we moved 1200 and then that's the last of our first purchase order. There was a total in our first PO of about 5,000 units and those those 3,800 that aren't accounted for in the story.

So far, those are at distribution centers in Indiana and Carlsbad, which are helping serve all of our pre-order campaigns that we ran over the last. So they're helping those go out the door as quickly as possible since they're, a three PL with basically, think of a junior ups. So they're doing that and we've now stocked up our warehouse.

So as soon as they burn through all of their units on their end, we'll start shipping out of our warehouse. So

Zach Rollins: exciting. Very exciting. Yeah. Wicked exciting for sure. It's interesting. I was actually, I've been looking through PLS quite a bit lately for an e-commerce site that we're looking to start pretty soon.

And it's just in the works. Now, when you say three PL and you have your own warehouse, what is that like? Why did you choose to have your own warehouse in addition to the three pills? Like why not just go full force into third-party.

Steven Wilcox: Yeah. It was a decision that we made a long time ago. Before we get into some of this stuff, I just wanted to just double check with you.

And you mentioned it'd be super conversational today, but is there like an intro or anything that you normally do? I like, I was going to say, I was like, I feel like we're just jumping straight in here, so super cool. Yeah, so three PLS in general, like when we first, so I'll back this up a bit because it plays into the whole story of how park it became a business.

And like we had designed the product, which we can get into we went through prototype revisions and we were like, basically at the position with our factories overseas, where they were like, this is your minimum order quantity. And I remember seeing this number from them being like, oh crap, how on earth are we going to sell that many units?

And it was just like this, like in my mind it felt really daunting at the time. And so we were trying to minimize like every expense we could, we were like, okay, like, how can we. Minimize our warehousing cost. Oh, cool. Your uncle has a warehouse in Carlsbad that he's only using half of it for like this.

Perfect. Hey uncle, can I borrow some space in your warehouse for my product? I don't know how long I'll be using that space guy anticipate that will grow out of it. But would love to do that. And he was like, yeah, absolutely use that space. No one's using it. It's just empty. We basically have just been storing people's RV's and jet-skis in it.

So we moved those things out and we planned to basically put our product in there and he was going to let us store it for free. And when you have a product like ours, it's really big that that footprint that you take up in the store is going to be rather expensive or not in the store, but in the warehouse is going to be rather expensive.

And so that was a cost that I was like, okay, we have to order X amount of units. I don't know how fast we're going to sell those. I don't know what that warehousing cost is going to be. I want to make sure that we, can eliminate that in the beginning. And then as the business grows and we know, all right, cool.

We're selling 500 units a month. We're selling 5,000 units a month. As we grow, and then we're in that window we'll know how much space we need, how fast the turnover is. Like you start to get into the cycle of the business. And so that was really just a decision to minimize those costs and make that a really easy process.

And now we're at a stage where I'm like, maybe we didn't need that, but we've got, that's the way that we set it up in the beginning. And so we've got probably six months to a year shipping out of my uncle's warehouse and where I'm going to become an expert in basically three PL management and what's required to actually pick pack label how to organize it.

And so that way, I figured there's a longterm benefit to it where we'll be able to just hop into a pop into a bunch of three PLS and go what's your process. And when they explain their process, I can go that matches what we do. Perfect. You're going to be a great fit because it's different for every different three PL may have, will have their own stuff.

I think it will be a good thing for us, but that's how that's the long-winded story of how how we ended up storing stuff on our own without using a three PL in the various.

Zach Rollins: Yeah, it's a weird thing to think about, right? Cause you have the product, but now you have to distribute it, and setting up the website and getting all the products there is the easy part, but it's all the backend stuff that you have to do that from my experience and my buddy, who has a coffee company John, who I've talked about on this, on the podcast several times, we've talked about even doing our own third party logistics company and just the process that goes into it.

Cause he has a big warehouse and he has a ton of extra space around. So he looked into subleasing and then, he does a lot of fulfillment through him through his own coffee company. And that was a conversation we had, a long time ago now, but super interesting stuff, and with your product being so big that's a lot of pallet space and they do it per pallet, from what I've seen.

So yeah,

Steven Wilcox: exactly. And if we can do it, like what we've learned in. Like even with our containers and like that logistics, you've invited, brought that up. Like my cousin helped me and my cousin just graduated from college at LMU. And he's on the job hunt right now, but I just shot him a text message.

I'm like, Hey, I've got two containers showing up. We're going to unload them. You want to make a quick, easy, 150 bucks cruise on over. We're going to, we're going to unload these things. So he comes over yesterday and he sees the truck pull up and he sees all the boxes in there. And we finished the first truck and we go get some food before the second truck gets there.

And he's I had never thought about like the things that go that, that products go through to get to me. I just go on a website and I like order it. And then three days later, oh my God, it's at my doorstep. Awesome. I've got my new hat, my new shoes. And he started asking a ton of questions about what even goes into it.

And I was like like before I launched Archit, I was a marketing person. I just thought of marketing teams like action sports companies and was a brand consultant for a number of like smaller businesses as well. And I never thought about the work that goes into actually getting a product to the warehouse.

And then to the customer, I was always like, oh cool. We've got these cool sunglasses. What can we do from a marketing standpoint to help sell these sunglasses? I didn't think about the engineers that had gone through and done like a thousands of fit tests or the little like minor variations or selection process on like, why is this piece of the chair this way?

Versus like every other company that does it this way. Like those little things that engineers have just sifted through every bit and diesel spend hours doing it. Yeah. Like one, we don't think about that. And then two, you get into the world of okay, now how are we going to produce this product that our engineers have designed?

And you've got to find suppliers with raw materials. You've got to get the raw materials to a factory that has the equipment. Manufacturer the raw material into the product, right? Then you've got to get that product into a packaging plant where it gets, stuffed and wrapped and protected. And the big cardboard box goes over and sealed.

That gets loaded into a container that gets put onto a boat that comes across an ocean that goes into a port that gets loaded onto a truck, or sometimes even a train before the truck, before it finally ends up in your warehouse. And then your warehouse is organized and set up in a way where it's like, cool, the order came in and we're going to get it to you in three to five days with no problems.

There's so many things that as a consumer and as a marketer, I didn't ever think of that launching park. It has forced me to really think about, and it's given me a lot of respect. And a lot of, just consciousness. What other companies deal with? I definitely don't ever send the customer service email being like, what's going on with this.

Yeah. Cause now I totally understand the whole process. And I'm like, wow, 20, 20 year old me was such a pain in the ass. And 30 year old me now is I totally understand the process. You guys do your thing. As long as I get my product, as long as we get my product, we're good. And if I paid for express shipping, then hurry up.

But if I didn't do that, then we're getting,

Zach Rollins: yeah. Yeah. In a world where everything is so instantaneous, right? Amazon, for instance, it's you get things in two days and that's the expectation now. So if you're not. Upholding that standard, even from a small e-commerce brand, a lot of people don't realize that this is just someone pick packing and shipping hats out of their living room.

It's

Steven Wilcox: not Amazon. That actually leads me to one of my favorite stories is the the story of vineyard vines. And there's probably elements of this story that I'll get wrong. But I saw it on the news or on TV, on one of those like shark tank type of episode things that they have up there now.

And basically the guys who founded vineyard vines had no production capabilities or whatever, but they had a couple of samples and they like walked into Macy's or Nordstrom or something along those lines, like a big department store and were like, this is what we want to do for ties. We want to put whales and boats and like other graphics all over them and these crazy.

And they're like, perfect. We'll take a thousand of them. And they're like what? Okay. And like they literally went home called their bosses, basically quit their jobs, called their best friends and said, we need help. We have to produce a thousand of these in the next, like two weeks.

How do we do it? And they did it. It's it's just things like that, that you don't really think about when you're on the consumer. End of it. There's a lot of things that go into it. And when you're thinking about Amazon too, like the Amazon mindset that's been created is I think it's awesome.

What Amazon's done in terms of the way that the customer is treated and the way that the customers get their products so quickly. And they're so valued. But it definitely puts like small companies in a little bit of a trickier. And what I mean by that is let's say you have Amazon prime and w we don't sell on Amazon like park, it's not available on Amazon right now.

We may be in the future. Yeah. It depends on how we expand and grow. There's a couple of things that are really, in my opinion, beneficial to being a direct consumer business where you own all of that on your own website, and you manage those relationships before you start to spread those things out.

You eventually, you have to grow, we'll get into that later. But like to your point about how Amazon's kind of changed the consumer, like sometimes you go on Amazon and if you have an Amazon prime account you're expecting two day shipping. And the thing about the two day shipping is that two day shipping is only available for products that Amazon fulfills.

For example, like this pen, I ordered a package of pens, 50 of them from Amazon. It got to me in two days, Amazon, and these are sitting in an Amazon warehouse somewhere. Our chairs, they sit, they would sit in our warehouse, the order would come through Amazon and we would have fill it exactly fulfilled by merchant.

And there's a split where the consumer doesn't necessarily always understand the difference. And like on the brand side, and I've experienced this with some of my, some of the clients I used to work with they're getting hit with customer service emails, like why hasn't my thing shipped. I'm a prime member.

And it's yes, we understand that we're not a prime product. We're fulfilled by merchant. It went out the door today. It's going to get to you in the next three to five days. And then it just is a little bit of a confusion point for kids for sometimes. But it's ultimately at the end of the day, like it's definitely a standard that they've set that a lot of us, three PLS included brands included who owned their own distribution.

Like we're trying to achieve that same type of speed and accuracy and customer service. And so it's a good goal. It's a good bar that they've set because it's driving everybody to be.

Zach Rollins: Oh, for sure. With competition, everyone's going to get better in the long run. I actually had a Amazon store for a long time throughout college, as a way to get some beer money on the weekends.

And so I learned the ins and outs of fulfilled by merchant fulfilled by, for the blind FBA fulfilled by Amazon. And it's interesting to hear a lot of people didn't understand exactly what I was doing because they just assumed Amazon was the one putting products up there and fulfilling them.

And that was it. Like it was own e-commerce store. There was a total disconnect by the fact that there was actually people putting products on Amazon and then selling them for themselves. Like my buddy, who has the coffee company, that's his number one sales channel is Amazon, but he developed his company in a way that.

That fits, he's not someone that goes direct to consumer, he's going right to Amazon and he's even said it, there's pluses and minuses. One of the, one of the minuses is Amazon has the ability to turn you off at any time, they want right. Whereas direct to consumer, you have a little bit more control over your own destiny, but then at the same time, you also have a captive audience right.

Being on Amazon. It's right. It's right there. It's one click away the ships in two days. It's a toss up.

Steven Wilcox: It's definitely crazy what they've been able to do, but yeah it's what makes the world turn. Yeah. And

Zach Rollins: you mentioned, earlier on and through our future era earlier conversation, you started out when you're living in California now, is that where you've always been and then also, park it, like what is parking?

Cause you've had a very interesting career in many ways, super entrepreneurial, and always filling those shoes. I guess taking a step back has entrepreneurship and doing your thing and being a professional. You, as, Joe Rogan would say, what is that? What did that look like in the earlier years before?

Steven Wilcox: Yeah, no great question. So the story of really Steven and the professional Steven what you would find on LinkedIn, I guess if you could say is no, I was born in California in a town called Marietta, which is about an hour north of San Diego, a little bit inland of the coast.

Our next door neighbor is Temecula, which has become famous over the last 10 to 15 years for its wineries. Just trying to help triangulate anybody. Who's trying to figure out where the heck in the world is Marietta. A lot of times I get confused with Marietta, Georgia, not the same complete opposite side of the country.

But grew up in Marietta and just spent my whole life playing sports. And running around the classic 1990s, like childhood, where we were like, we had the skateboards and the bicycles and there were Hills and whatnot near our house that we would go and ride our bikes to and build dirt jumps and do all those things.

All that, all this stuff that kind of comes with being a nineties kid. And as soon as basically I turned 16 or I guess back a little further than that, one of our friends had turned 16 and he was a surfer. He started driving from Marietta to Oceanside which is where a park it's based and that's where we live now.

But he would drive to Oceanside and that really spurred off this whole, like surfing kind of love and passion and lifestyle for me. Just, it just seemed like the best thing to do, like Marietta was like 105 in the summer and like hot and, but close enough to the coast that it was a little bit muggy, not like east coast muggy, but it was hot.

And then you'd go to Oceanside. It'd be like 75 degrees, sunny. You're surfing, like it's the beach culture thing. And I just fell in love with it. And at the same time, like I was super inspired by all the surf brands of the aid of the day. Like the quick silvers and the billabongs Rusty's all those surf brands that were just promoting this really awesome lifestyle, tied to these very like cultural values of go experience the world, discover these different cultures and on top of that, like when you go to all these places and you like learn the food and you learn the language, you learn about the people you get to ride these absolutely insane, like perfect waves.

And I just felt, so it felt like so gravitated towards that, that basically all the other sports I was playing like baseball done water polo and swimming was like, Hey, water, polo, swimming, super fun. An added benefit. It's really great for my paddling. And I just started moving my life towards this like surf culture and went off to college and my dad was a, in the air force.

My mom was a teacher, so it didn't really have the business acumen in my background to be like, I'm going to go into business. But my uncle was an entrepreneur and my grandfather was also an entrepreneur. And the two of them my grandfather helped his father on wall street. Basically my great-grandfather in some capacity, I don't know the complete story, but in some capacity, started some form of financial from whether it was financial advisory.

But it starts something in that well, and my grandfather helped him start that when he was young. And then my uncle is actually a label printer. So he prints the labels for like beer bottles, salsa bottles. You name it. If it's a label it's printed on the west coast of the United States, like I guarantee you at one point or another, his business has been the label company that helped.

Produce the labels for their products. And so the two of them, I saw like what they were doing with their lives. And I was looking at it at my parents and it was like, all right, like there's a, probably a lot of good things here. Like my mom's a teacher that's made me a lifelong learner. My dad is in the air force.

That's brought me like discipline structure process. And then the two of them brought me a lot of like creative ingenuity. Like how can you solve problems for the world and align that with your business? And so it just became like the perfect storm for me to start thinking about like entrepreneurship.

And so when I went to school, I actually studied business and I had an emphasis in entrepreneurship and that exposed me to like venture capital firms and all these different, crazy things that like, at the time I was like, I don't know what this is at all. I've never been exposed to this. And I'm sitting next to kids in class whose parents are like, oh, run their own businesses.

We know all about this stuff. And I'm just like, how do you guys know what the heck an angel investor. But that was like the first eye-opening thing to wow. There's like a huge path for entrepreneurs to really go out there and build their own business and find investors. There's a system that existed.

This. It's not like Phil Knight just one day was like, I'm going to build shoes. He did, if you've read shoe dog, he did be like, I'm going to go build shoes. But there's a bunch of tools out there that if you know where to knock and you know where to look, you're going to figure out like the people who can help guide you along and building your business.

And I think that had a huge opportunity in what would it become park it very early on. That's, we're talking eight, nine years ago is when I was experiencing all of this. And then after I graduated from school that surfing passion really came into play and I was able to join the marketing team at Oakley where I was responsible for the action sports side of their business with with a handful of other people assets.

So it was super fun. And this was before Facebook marketing was really a thing and you could track everything. It was. Hey guys, here's X amount of dollars for marketing at Oakley make this sell a ton of sunglasses. And so we just thought of some of the most ridiculous ways to try and sell sunglasses and snow goggles.

What was, what were some

Zach Rollins: of those strategies that you had

Steven Wilcox: to put in place? So one of them, we actually rolled out a Goggle called called prism Goggle technology called prism, which was basically an enhanced contrast and low light. If you're skiing in a snow storm, you're supposed to be able to see better.

And one of the things that we ended up doing was we built these giant TVs that were shaped like goggles. So think a TV, literally the size of the wall behind me. I don't know if the viewers listening to this podcast are going to get a video recording. Okay, perfect. So basically from like the guitar on the wall to the doorframe that's a pretty large gap there that picture behind me is four feet wide.

So we would fill that entire. With a rounded out TV screen in the shape of a Goggle and then toggle was split in half with what the other guys see, and then what with prism. And we put those in windows of ski shops and snow shops and like retail shops all around the country. And that was like one of the wildest ideas that we got to execute, which like, yeah, let's just make a giant Goggle, how are we going to do it?

I don't know, but we'll figure it out. And we just filled giant goggles and it was super fun. But that was like, that was, that, that was some of the stuff that led into like brand building. And like when you're with what I had learned in school, it was like, cool. These are the operational functions and the legal functions and the financial functions that go into to running a business.

They don't really teach you a lot about brand and Oakley. Specifically was really keen on. When you get hired, these are our values. These are, this is our history you were hired because we believe that you align with our values and our history, like you are the brand, you're an extension of the brand.

And they focus so heavily on brand. And I remember like emailing somebody at red bull about a thing. And I, like I said, the business to them and they were like first off always refer to red bull as the brand. And I was like, oh, okay. Like this theme of brand just kept getting thrown at me and throwing at me and thrown at me.

And I started to realize that's, what's kept me. That's what made me become like that surfer when I was like 16 years old was all the brand like messaging and the core values of these companies. And learned all of that through the Oakley experience went off to Quicksilver and the story of Quicksilver is pretty funny.

I got hired after about half of the marketing team. Just threw their hands in the air. And I got a phone call from a friend of mine who worked there and said, Hey we need someone to jump in over here. And it's a great opportunity. And I think you'd be a great fit for it. And this was my like, oh wow, I don't have to do the action sports side.

I get to kick out the skateboarding and kick out the wakeboarding, which has never been me and B only surfing. And so I was like, yeah, let's do this jumped over to Quicksilver three days into being onboarded at Quicksilver, the company filed chapter 11 bankruptcy. And I flew up to Seattle to visit my mom.

That's where she lives now. And it was her birthday. And I said, yeah, I got the job at Quicksilver. It's so far things seem good. We filed bankruptcy, but I got it. I got paid on Friday. So I think that's a good sign. And I learned that there's two types of bankruptcy. There's chapter 11, which is a restructure and there's chapter seven, which is basically, we are closing our doors for good.

We'll see you later. That's what sports chalet had to do. And. I learned basically between at that moment, I recognize whoa. At Oakley, you were in a machine that had all of the everything firing at all cylinders. This is the processes that they had in place. This is the importance of all these processes and Quicksilver.

On the other side, they had at one point had those processes because they were just flying. They were a publicly traded company. They were worth north of a billion dollars for a clothing brand and action sports space, which is pretty much unheard of. And something had gone wrong and, there's decisions along the way.

And there's articles and research people can do to identify which one it is. But ultimately I learned this is what happens when things aren't managed appropriately. It went in and there was a little bit of a misalignment and it was almost catastrophic for the entire business and.

The best part about my timing with that was one. I got to see oh, this is why, what Oakley has done is so valuable. But I also got to see, this is how we're going to restructure it. And this is how we're going to fix it. And was a part of, I spent about a year with Quicksilver part of the restructure and fixing their brand image and fixing their business and their processes.

And that was the light bulb moment.

Zach Rollins: And what was it that you thought? Having seen both where Oakley is very brand centric and Quicksilver's kind of lost their way in a lot of ways, it sounds and even today, that a lot of companies, they start with a really solid brand and they start with a lot of authenticity as to who they are.

And then all of a sudden they start to focus more on the sale and less of the story. So in what way do you think Quicksilver lost their way

Steven Wilcox: quick? Silver didn't lose their way in terms of the. And the story where they lost their way was in some of the operational functions of the business.

So more logistical stuff. Yeah, there was some there were some like cashflow things. There were some operational things, there were some distribution things, because the brand has always been strong, but that's one of the things that, being a brand guy Quicksilver's brand has always been like one of the most dominating action sports space it's globally recognized.

Do you see that mountain in that wave? And you immediately think of Kelly Slater and you got to give a lot of credit to their surf team manager who brought in guys like Kelly Slater to really lead the charge. He was winning God what? He went 11 world titles. I think maybe 12. I forget off the top of my head.

It's so many, it's hard to ever track, but

Zach Rollins: he's pretty well known. So he's doing a good

Steven Wilcox: job exactly. But like what, what happened was like between the two of them my, in my comparing and contrasting like those two experiences, just hanging out with some friends. I had the light bulb moment where I realized, wow, wait a minute.

The finance side because of schooling, the paths and things you can do also because of schooling, you've learned the value of process and procedure and how to fire on all cylinders through Oakley. And you've learned a lot of the mistakes that a brand like silver went through, it made, and now you're learning how to reassert and restructure and basically like replatform that business into, the strong company that has always been.

But that was a moment for me where I was like, you're becoming like a bit of a 360, you've got a little bit of not expertise, but you have experience in a lot of different fields now and seeing a lot of different things. What's that next step going to be. As I'm having this conversation in my head, my uncle's like showing up every month for something for his own work and we're grabbing dinner and he's just poking me with like entrepreneurship, when are you going to do it?

And I'm like, oh, it's really risky. Schools are always like nine out of 10 entrepreneurs fail. And like it's true. There's a huge failure rate. But there was just something that just made me feel like, yeah, the way that I wanna grow personally. And the way that I want to succeed professionally, isn't going to happen.

If I'm waiting for an organization to tell me, congratulations, you've earned your promotion. That was something that just never sat well with me. If you played sports and you were the best quarterback, you worked your ass off to be the starting quarterback and the coach recognized it and you got to be the starter and.

In work, you can be the guy that does exactly all of those things. And a lot of it depends on company culture. So I want to point that out, some companies are really good at it. So companies are really bad at it, but there's a lot of people who go into these companies are super motivated, master their craft really fast and they get burnt out because they're bored and I would get bored.

And a lot of these roles that were like very task oriented in the very beginning, and then they'd give me something that was the next thing that bite off. But there was no incentive though. It was like, oh, you have more bandwidth. So we're going to give you more. But there was no like compensation on the other end.

And I was like, this doesn't make sense. It doesn't add up. And then I remember having a conversation with my uncle about this. If you did that as a contractor, you would bill hourly and then every time that something new came in, you would be able to adjust the contract. And I was like, oh wow. So I started side hustling and I started basically taking what I knew and in terms of brand building and marketing management.

And I started reaching out to small brands that I knew needed help. And I think this actually was like the icing on the cake in terms of what led to the creation of park. It was those conversations and those clients let me see the inner workings of a business that was run by three to five people who had nobody in marketing, but the guy was a finance genius and his partner was a product engineer.

There were so many businesses that I got to see basically like under the. I got to basically walk. I got to basically walk the Daytona 500 and look under the hood of every car and go, wow, like this process works, this one doesn't we got fix these things. And I got to see, it's so rapidly because now I was contracting and I was meeting with a new brand every week at a coffee shop, learning about what they needed, what they wanted help with.

Sometimes the deal would sign sometimes the deal wouldn't sign, but I got to see all of that and everything that I learned through all those processes, I took every best practice that I could and was like, how do we roadmap this into your own business? And the bigger challenge was like, how do we roadmap this into a business that fits with what you want it to be?

And I didn't want to start another clothing brand. Now I'm getting into like how the idea for park at camp. No, let me ask you this

Zach Rollins: though, because it was interesting to see that you went around and you're asking all these questions and you're getting involved in these smaller companies and being that puzzle piece, if you will, that kind of fits in where they needed to be.

But what I really find interesting is that, to take a step back and learn a little bit about your uncle and how he was just poking you and prodding you. W what do you think it was growing up and seeing that and the lifestyle that goes with it and seeing him and your grandfather that kind of led you to this?

Because in a lot of ways I can relate, I didn't have, my dad had a small business growing up, and it was at that moment that I realized, okay, this is the direction I want to go. And friends and family that had all been an entrepreneurship were huge influence, and starting this podcast, getting to, like you see under the hood a little bit, get to ask these questions to people and give them a platform.

In what ways do you think. This culmination of your career, you going and doing side hustles and then the underlying mindset that you had gotten from your family started this.

Steven Wilcox: Yeah, I think he played a huge role. My uncle did in terms of the entrepreneurship bug that got created. And a lot of it had to do with, I think like him sharing, like what he was doing at my age.

And so he was like, yeah, when I was your age, I was driving to, X amount of label shops, getting these things, getting these contracts and did you know that if I remember one of the things he said to me, it was like, did you know that if I sold a thousand labels for my old company, when I worked for them, I'd make 10% on that sale.

And I was like, oh, okay. And he's yeah. Do you know what a label cost? I'm like, no, he's three sets like, oh, so you make 10% of 3 cents. He was like, yeah. I'm like, that's. And he's yeah, but do you know what happens? Do you know what happens when you own the business? And I was like no. What happens when you own the business?

And he goes you own the entire margin. You don't have to pay that margin to a sales rep because you sold it and you manage it and you do it. And I was like, so what's your mark? What's your markup. Then on that 3 cent label, he's like something like 50% or 60%. And I thought to myself, the numbers and I was like, all right.

So we started running some numbers and it's like, all so you said sell 10,000 labels. What was your commission? And he's oh, it was like 300 bucks. It would say you sell 10,000 labels and you run the business. What's your commission. And he's three grand. And I'm like, whoa, holy crap. That was like the light bulb moment for me, where not so much like the financial part of it.

That's a big part of it. But at the same time, like that was the moment for me, where I was like that's the key. That's the key to entrepreneurship. That's the key to pursuing your. That's how you enable other people to join your mission and you that mission to grow and they get to be a part of the success of what everyone's creating is like that.

Being able to like you get that margin and you decide where it's going to go, how it's going to be spent, how it's going to be utilized to either impact the customer impact your employees impact your network of contractors, depending on how you set it up. That was like the moment for me, where I recognized wow, that's crazy how to use money that you generate as revenue as a tool to grow versus a thing that sits in your bank account that you spend at the bars on Friday and Saturday and buy a new surf board with when you go on a trip, like that was like the big mind shift for me financially that I think my uncle put through all those entrepreneurship conversations where I realized it's just a matter of me deciding that I believed in myself enough that I could do it instead of looking under the hood of all these cars.

You can look under the hood of a thousand race cars, but unless you've gotten in the driver's seat of it, you really don't know how fast it's going to go, but you can look at the best practices and go, cool. This is set up this way. This is set up that way. And this is the way that I think it should be set up.

I would agree with that, but that race car driver is going to ultimately know the feeling of what it's like to cross that finish line first or go it like whipping around that turn. And for context, I've been watching that formula one documentary on Netflix. Yeah, I haven't been so all my analogies are all car based.

I apologize. But that type of thing is I think what ultimately led me to the being like, all right, it's time to take that jump. Let's build your own business. And when it came around to actually building park it specifically, it was about, alright, what kind of product can we build that aligns with your passions, which was surfing, snowboarding, camping, outdoor exploration.

Getting friends around a campfire doing all those things that we love to do. And one of the things in my head was like, do not build a clothing brand, do not build a clothing brand. Don't build a clothing brand. Like we don't need it. Yeah, exactly. And it's it's fun. If you can build a giant clothing brand and that's what you want to do, and you're a fashion person, go do it.

You're going to have a creative edge over somebody else. But for me, it was like, I'm just going to slap. I'm just going to slap logos on t-shirts. No, that's not what I wanted to do. And we were sitting around a campfire actually in Santa Ana for a few years back. And one of my buddies sits down on his chair.

And as he goes to sit down the entire bottom, ripped out and he had to spend the rest of the weekend sitting on the floor with his back rest, basically up against a tree that was nearby. So he didn't have the bark going into his back. And that was my moment where I went, oh my God, this is it. This is the product.

This is what we're going to build. I called one of my buddies. And I was like, Hey, what do you think of this idea? And I was like, I want to take the old retro style beach chair, camping chair, you know that from the fifties and sixties, but I want to put really cool patterns on it and build it to be industrial and build it with functional features that are just missing from what we need today.

And he was like, I kinda like it, send me like a rendering of what you're thinking. And so I took an old lawn chair and at this point my graphic design skills were pretty poor. They've gotten a lot better. Entrepreneurship forces you to learn skills because you can't pay it out, you gotta do it all.

And I took a couple of things from like Adobe Adobe stock and layer them on top of a chair and sent it to him. And he was like, yeah, actually I would definitely buy one of these. And I was like, all right, cool. That's all I needed to hear. I'm going to send this to a few other people. And so I started talking to friends and family about it and they're always like really.

And I was like but the thing that I could see in my mind so clearly was the brand. And like the product was going to be secondary. It was more about the mission that we were on and the brand and that our mission is ultimately to enjoy the exploration, spend quality, time outdoors with the people we love the most friends, family, and do the activities and share the stories that make us who we are.

How many times have you sat around a campfire with your uncle? And he's got some, he's got some fishing tale about this 300 pound tuna he hooked. And meanwhile, his wife's over there shaking her head, just oh, not this story. Again, it was 110 pound tuna. Exactly. You're like, it's it's those moments where we get to learn about who each other are.

And it builds that community. And that's what I always wanted the park brand to be about. And our first slogan was actually like, where do you park it? Which was the idea of the locations and places you would go. And then enjoy the exploration, came to me like flying on an airplane one day and they were like, enjoy the flight.

And I was like, enjoy the flight. Oh, I'm going I'm exploring what if I was in and then also light bulb with that's our mission to enjoy the exploration. Yeah. And that became more about like ex exploration, meaning like your life, enjoy the exploration of your life and park.

It is a tool in our chair. The Voyager is a tool that you can use to basically facilitate that mission where you get to share your story. You get to learn from other people's story. And through that our networks grow. And at the end of the day, like if there's anything that I think the world could use more of right now, especially in 2021 after the year 2020, and what we all experienced is a little bit more handshaking and a little bit more.

Tell me your story. Let's sit around the fire. Let's crack open a couple of beers, learn about one another and find out how we can all serve each other. And that's like the main mission of our business is to get people outside, doing those things that they love to do and engaging in those relationships.

And we hope that they'll do that with our product because, that's where, like I mentioned the empowerment of the business comes from the financial capital that you're able to create, the sales of our shares empower us to continue leading that mission and continue, exposing our brand to more people.

It's going to allow us to have events in the future and all that type of stuff. But I really, when I think back to the story that I've been sharing here is it really came down to what are the values that the business is going to stand by? Which park it in itself is an acronym. It stands for presence, adventure, responsibility, kindness, independence, and tenacity.

And, like that plays into everything that we do. It plays into everything that we post on social media. It plays into our blog posts and. At the end of the day, like that's what we want people to remember is the experience that they have with our brand and our products and who we are and want to be a part of that versus just feeling like they're just buying a product from us online and throw it out, whatever you know exactly.

It's entirely about the people. And I think that's, what's played a big role in, in our first year of business and the success that we saw.

Zach Rollins: Yeah. And now what do you mean? We brought this up earlier as well, but it seems as though prior to let's use 20, 20 as a landmark, if you're. W we saw so many other, so many brands get to this pinnacle where it seems as though they stepped away from their authenticity and their true self.

A lot of people tended to focus more on, as I said earlier, the sale and less about the story, we've seen companies rise and fall, some started out with, being truly authentic to themselves. But then all of a sudden, took a left turn, got involved in a venture capitalist or whatnot, and then they totally lose their authenticity.

You seem like a very authentic guy and park. It seems like a very authentic brand just because you've grown up doing it. You are the brand, and in many ways, so that combination of brand and business, but then also this passion side of things, how is your life actually played a role into.

Creating it, like you could have created anything, you create it, you could have created this, a fishing rod or a surf board, or what have you, but you chose a chair. You chose that moment where you sit around the campfire and I got, I'm willing to believe there's more to that story in terms of why.

Because it seems to me like telling stories is your thing. You started out with branding, you're a marketer, you're a storyteller. So to create a brand that is all around the person and the story, that's something special and not a lot of people are willing to do that and take that extra step because I'll tell you haven't tried it.

It's a in trying it there's a lot more legwork and it's a lot more long-term than creating a t-shirt and throwing logos on it and being able to sell a bunch right off the bat.

Steven Wilcox: Yeah. That's a great question. And I appreciate all that. I think the. The ultimate, why actually stems from a thought that I had in college.

And the thought that I had in college was I was just like, so obsessed with surfing. I had studied abroad in Australia and crossed all these waves off my my surfing bucket list. And I had a conversation with a guy at Lennox head and I was just sitting there watching the waves go by, like filling out my study abroad journal.

And he comes up to me and he starts asking me about like surfing and whatnot. And he notices real quick that I don't have an Australian accent. And he's oh, where are you from? I'm like, oh, I'm from California. And we start like really getting into start talking about like the global things around the world.

And I'm like, this is a very interesting conversation to be having with this like 50 year old man, randomly and Lennox head Australia. And he asked me, he was like if there was like one thing you think you could do to make the world a better place, what would you do? And I was like, honestly, I think that just more people should surf, like the happiness that brings me the meditation.

It would bring. The feeling like the way that it would just set my day, if I served before school or surf before work, the pace that it sets for my day is so positive versus a day where maybe I don't. And I remember thinking to myself, it'd be really cool if just more people understood that feeling.

And if we could get more people to surf, I think the world would be a little bit more of a better place. And the irony of that is in 2020, everyone started working from home and a lot more people started surfing and our beach has got a lot more crowded and ironically, more people surfing meant more angry surfers because it was so crowded.

So I don't know if my theory back in college was correct, but you asked that question what was the deeper why? And I think the deeper, why was always knowing that like we as humans have the ability to basically build things that are greater than ourselves, like when you think about I'm just gonna use the country as an example, like the founding fathers of this country knew they were building something greater than themselves.

You can see that in the values and whatnot were instilled in some of the founding documents. I don't want to get too political, but I'm using it as like the analogy, right? And as a bit as a person, you can choose to either make that you or you can choose to make that a business, or you can make it a charity, or you can make it an organization that supports, you can choose to make that whatever it is.

But the goal, in my opinion, should always be to make something that's bigger than yourself that serves a greater purpose. And, I think there's a certain celebrities that we can think to who go, okay, they've done that for themselves. And they've done that from a hole by some sort of foundation or some company.

There's a lot of people who've done that where they've made it more about their mission and not who they are as a person. And I knew with park it, we could do that. And I knew with park it, and I knew what that thought process around. If everyone starts the world be a better. What would be something that would be more relatable to more people at the same time.

And everyone remembers the first time they go camping. Everyone either loves it or they hate it. But then, but the first time that you actually are sitting around a fire and you look up and you're in the middle of nowhere and you see the Milky way with your own eyes, like you look up into the sky and you see that cloudiness with all the stars compacted together and you see the Milky way actually there that doesn't take any crazy skill like it does to surf a 10 foot wave or snowboard down a mountain in Alaska, out of a helicopter that just takes the ability to say, I'm going to drive out into the desert tonight with some friends, bring some beer and some food light, a fire and hang out.

And that was the moment where I was like, this is a mission that can actually touch more people and it's going to impact more people because it doesn't have that physical barrier that a lot of the other things that I had used to think of. And that's what led really to the understanding of that, that campfire motive was sitting around that fire that night with friends of ours, there were guys who are basically like semi-professional snowboarders.

There were guys like me who like going down Charlotte, like the runs off of chairlifts and there were guys would never snowboarded in their life, but we all got to be a part of it. And that was the part of it that I really liked was it was just very inclusive of everybody, regardless of your skill set in a certain activity, it was more about just meeting and hanging out and sharing stories and having a good time and doing that.

And that was where like the chair, really fit in perfectly with that. How do we make the world a little bit of a happier, better place? And if people are hanging out having a good time, then you know, we're doing our job. Yeah. I can

Zach Rollins: totally relate to that because in a lot of ways, what I've always set out to do is, I was working in Hawaii, out on the big island and it was this realization of, you know what, man?

Yeah. I'm captain of boats. Sure. I'm taking people out. I'm actually what I'm doing is teaching people how to love the ocean. People that are from Arkansas, from South Dakota, where they don't have the opportunity, and I got the opportunity as a kid growing up, this, that was my life.

I got to summer here in Rhode Island, grew up here and had a little dinghy and I could go explore and pick up crabs and turn over rocks. And that was kinda my that's how I lived. And not everyone got to do that. Whereas the outdoors in general, Hey, it's free for the most part, you might need some gear to get there, but you could get out and be outdoors with the shorts and t-shirt pair of sneakers, but that moment that you describe of being around a fire with friends and family and taking a moment for yourself to look up to the Milky way is it's eye opening, cause it, it puts in perspective that there's a lot more out there.

There's a lot more you can do. There's a lot more you can create. And I think humans in general, Everyone's creative in their own. Whether it's playing a video game, being a carpenter, being a boat builder, you don't have to build a physical thing. You could build a blog, you could do whatever.

So I find it really interesting. I love the fact that you've tied that into the brand and, a chair it seems basic in the sense that yeah, you put it around and you set it up, you sit in it. But it's much, much more than that, on a very deeper level. And I love how you've brought that out, especially with a fire cause who love, who doesn't love a campfire.

I mean there's no bad time at a campfire. So as you develop this brand and taking bits and pieces from all these other brands that you've worked with in your career at, these outdoor companies, you saw under the hood, you got to pick all these pieces up and.

Decide to make a chair. Now, what does that process look like? Because as we started this podcast, we got into the nuts and bolts of three PLS, which we probably could have saved until now, it doesn't matter anyway. Like how did you get to the point where you're like, all right, I got this idea.

We're sitting around a campfire, I got the brand laid out. How am I, how the hell am I going to build a chair?

Steven Wilcox: Yeah, that's, that was a process. So like I mentioned in the beginning too, like I had no idea about product design development, the engineering work that needed to go into stuff. And the way that started with, I was just ordering chairs off of like Amazon and other chair sites, just being like, all right, let's see how they do this.

And I called up a buddy of mine who was an engineer. And I was like, where would you do? He was like pick your favorite one. And we could just re-engineer it. And I was like you can do that. And he's but at least in the beginning, let's just do it that way. And so he tried to help me do a few things and it just wasn't ever really coming to.

And I was driving around at the same time. Like I was driving around like metal shops and woodworking shops and like basically just spinning my wheels, being like walking in and be like, Hey, can you guys build this? Or showing them a chair? And they're like, dude, why do you want to build a chair? And I was like this doesn't, this is, you're not the right guy.

Okay. Next next. And every single guy would be like I can't do that. Maybe you should go talk to this guy or maybe you should talk to this guy. And before you know it, like I've even come in, I've talked to you and you're like, I don't do this. I do podcast. Like you should talk to this guy.

Everything was just like leading to another door. And I just one day went on LinkedIn and I would have wrote on a post on LinkedIn. And I was like, Hey, I have an idea for a product, but I'm not exactly sure at all how to build it. And I don't want to disclose what it is because this is a public forum.

And it's not necessarily a super. Challenging. It's not like I'm coming up with the algorithm Facebook, like it is a, it is at the end of the day, it is a chair. We built a pretty bad-ass one and there's a lot of complexities to the one that we built, but I didn't all know what to do.

And an old coworker of mine from Oakley reached out and commented on it and said, you need to meet Jason Kluk. He's the founder of a product design firm in Utah. They helped us build these things for our business and I think they could help you. And so I took his advice and I reached out to Jason and shot him a message through the contact form being like, would love to talk to you guys, have this idea.

I don't really know what to do. And I like jumped through their website and their company is called a Kluger Onyx, K L U G O Y and X. Like a tricky name there. Awesome group of people there, their motto on their website was bring us your napkin sketch and we'll bring it to life. And I was like, perfect.

This is exactly what I need. And got on my first phone call with them. And I was like, oh these are like the big leagues. Like these guys are real product designers. This is a real firm. Like they, they know what they're doing. And it's like that first phone call with Jason was like him also feeling like me feeling out whether or not I thought they could do it and him feeling out whether or not I was serious enough to pursue it.

And like at this stage, like I've gone through the full-time jobs with these companies. I've gone through some of the contracting I'm like really getting into like the beginning stage of contracting the contracting, accelerates through the whole product development process. And we'll get into that, but I'm like trying to figure out okay, what are the capital needs going to be from this?

And I've got my savings account and it's looking pretty good. Not great. Like I'm not buying a house anytime soon, but like it's doable. I've got months of float and the meeting goes great. And he sends me the quote, like three days later and the quote comes out and I'm like, oh shit, this was my whole state.

And I'm like it's almost like someone was like, we know exactly what he's got to produce this product. Let's do it now. But in my mind, I'm like son of a bitch. Okay. This was this took me a year and a half to accumulate. If you want to do this, we're going to have to make these investments.

Everybody says, you got to invest in yourself. Let's look at this, not as like a purchasing of a surfboard, that's the money gone. And you're going to have the surfboard. This is an investment into your future. And that shift in mindset helped me make the decision a little bit more, but ultimately brought on clue Ghana.

And our first meeting was an ideation meeting where I basically spelled out like, this is what I wanted to do. This is what I want it to look like. This is the functionality features that we think are going to be important. And the aesthetic to me was super important. I wanted it to be in line with those 1950s and 1960s lawn chairs that are like world famous with the crisscross pattern.

And their designer like hit, like just crushed it. He came back to me on our next meeting with a deck that was like, this is what you've described to us. This is what that looks like. And now here's the ways that we think it can evolve and become even more than just like the initial idea and the whole thing, just basically from that moment, I was like, oh my God, this is it.

This is real. This is going to be real. And that was conversations happen. In October of 2018 for context. So we're talking, two and a half years ago from the day that we're recording this podcast. And from there it was like, okay what do we do next? We've got to build a CAD model.

And so the engineer gets in and he builds a CAD model of a design. And it's all right. Now, what do we do? We've got to build a prototype and we built the first prototype. When you build the CAD model, gravity doesn't exist. Just the floating, rendering, and space, just floating around. You can grab the mouse, twisted the chair spins.

And the very first prototype we set it up and you set it down on the ground and we try to do one of the FA like the features and it just fell out. We were like, oh shit, we didn't think about gravity. Like just funny things like that happen. And we were like, all right, cool. So we got to tweak this and then we've refined and tested and refined.

And we did another prototype and like this one was closer, but it wasn't. But we were definitely getting like towards where we want it to be. And this whole time while this was happening, like I don't, I'm not working for the business. Full-time, I've invested my entire savings account into this product design, like project.

And we're trying, I'm contracting like I'm ramping up contracting. I normally I'm working with four to five clients on a monthly basis. I'm working with nine to 12 right now. I'm trying to get as much like money and cashflow in through these contracting services as I can. And at the same time, I'm exponentially learning.

This is how this business is succeeding here. This is how this business is failing here. This is what can be done. The fix that this business is failing to make them succeed. Like the other one, I'm learning all this all at the same time. And I didn't notice that it was happening. Then it's like one of those things where if you think about the Steve jobs quote we discussed today, it's you can connect the dots going backwards.

I look at that and I'm like, that was the best thing to be doing with my time. It was super stressful because as a contractor, it's not guaranteed. But I was learning and getting exposed to so much that I wouldn't be exposed to in a normal job, that it was all playing a factor into like how we structured the business, how we thought about supply chain how we thought about distribution.

Like those questions really started to become pronounced versus like, all right, we've got a product and we don't know what to do. So I learned a ton of that at the same time. The product, ultimately the one that became like the winning ticket, we got that prototype in January of 2020. So it took a full year and a half to get to that prototype.

And from there it was like, okay, cool. We're going to launch our Kickstarter campaign this spring. It's going to be great timing. People are going to be thinking about summer. We're going to put this chair in front of people. They're not going to get it for probably six to nine months. Cause that's just the nature of the beast with Kickstarter.

We're trying to raise money to fund that first purchase order. But we started going content crazy and our content like to speak about, brand. It was all about. Camping. It was all around adventure. It was all around, driving out in the middle of the desert and hanging out with friends with the firecracker and beers.

And so we just started building everything around that. And then hyper-focusing on the features of our chair. What made us better? What were our differentiators? And we put that into a Kickstarter campaign that was set to launch on March 18th. And if we think back to March 18th, 2020, that's the same day that everybody panicked and bought toilet paper.

Yeah. And so my brother calls me on March 16th and he goes, what are you doing for St. Patrick's day tomorrow? I'm like, just getting ready for the Kickstarter campaign. And I'm like, tunnel visioning. Like every book I've read, it's you got to push through the hurdles, you got to break through the walls.

And he's are you sure you still want to launch? And I'm like, yeah. You're like, every book says I got to. And he goes, yeah, I think you might want to rewrite the book on this one. This is a pandemic. This is a thing. This isn't normal. You might want. Like I hit the brakes and I call, I called my uncle and I go, Hey entrepreneur, can I mentor, what am I supposed to do?

And he goes, I think I decided with your brother on this one, I called Jason at Kluger phonics. Who's become a, basically a really great business mentor of mine through the whole relationship in the last couple of years as well. And he goes yeah, you should probably definitely brakes on this.

And so I'm like, all right, we're three for three. Everyone's been saying it hit the brakes on my gut is like leaning towards, maybe I should, recognize the context of what's happening in the world, not just the tunnel vision of these books. And we decided to hit the brakes, which actually turned out, I think, to be the best decision we could have ever made.

And in the moment it was like, oh God, like we pumped the brakes in the Kickstarter campaign. I started to panic thinking that I've invested all this money into a company that's never gonna work. This is just my internal thought process. And. That weekend we're out. The bars haven't been closed yet.

We're at a bar here locally in ocean side, and there's this epic cover band playing. And I get the notification in my pocket that says that mammoth mountain is closed. And I'm like, oh man, we were planning on just like driving that. Cause all the work from home stuff had initiated. And we were like, wait, we don't have to be in offices meetings.

Can't be held. We can work from wherever the mountains are open, let's go snowboarding. And suddenly that was gone. And then the whole message from icon pass came out and they were like, we're shutting down all operations at all mountains across north America. And I was like, the outdoor industry is done.

That was like the way I felt. And I was like, I had just planned to roll out this outdoor business on Kickstarter. And we had invested all this money in the product design and development. And it was like gone overnight. And for about three weeks it felt that way. And then about the third or fourth week, somewhere on there, I started recognizing that our beaches and ocean side were packed.

And like they had said like beaches are closed. Like no one can go to the beach. And we had people just driving in like Monday to Monday, like weekdays, because people didn't have to be in an office just walking around the beach, doing their thing outside. And I was like, people want to be outside. People don't have anything else to do.

We got a launch. And so we immediately cranked up the cranked up. The volume, started pummeling money in the ad spend for our pre-campaign launch. And we ended up launching on Kickstarter on May 6th. And we had an absolutely like incredible Kickstarter campaign, far surpassed any of our expectations.

We were like, maybe we'll raise a hundred to 150 K that'd be awesome. That'll help us with our first purchase order. And we ended up raising just under $500,000 in 30 days. And I'll never forget like going and I'm like, I didn't even think it was going to be that big. So I had everything still for the business, set up under my own like personal checking account.

This is like how naive I was to like, what we were doing from a financial perspective is that. Like the Kickstarter campaign completed. We were like blown away. This is incredible. We got to get started now and building the supply chain, working with the factories, getting the product, actually built, shipped, all of those pieces that come with it now.

And I go into the Wells Fargo down the street from my house and I get a cashier's check to go deposit with our new bank that I'm opening up for the business. And I walk up to the woman and I like, felt so uncomfortable saying the number because every first off you're wearing a mask because it's COVID and you walk up and there's a line of people behind me.

And I'm about to tell her, I need her to write a cashier's check for just south of $500,000. Cause I haven't deposit this into the bank for the business. And I just can you please pull a check for it? I just held up the calculator number, like on the thing. And she looked at me like all cockeyed and I was like, and I'm like, here's my card.

She swipes the card. The bounce pulls up. She's what do you do? I ran a Kickstarter campaign for an outdoor chair. We call the Voyager, I run a business called park it, and it went really well. And I didn't think that we were going to have to do this, but we need to pause it, this cash. We need to transfer this cash to our business banking account because I didn't set it up that way.

And can you please pull the check? And she was just like, so blown away. And I was too, and I remember like holding the check and taking a photo of it being like, this is insane. It's now my responsibility to use this and produce all the chairs that have just been ordered and produce access. And I've never done that in my entire life.

I have no idea where to start. And thankfully Kluger Onyx has a partner company called angst. Which acts as a sourcing agent for manufacturing partners in China. And so Jason connects me with Nate who leads that arm of the business. And Nate and I start going back and forth. I'm like, okay, this is what we got to do.

This is how this all needs to work. And Nate and his team were incredible. They got us lined up with basically our entire supply chain to the point now where we can basically place an order. And within 60 to 90 days, we've got new units showing up. But it was just so mind blowing to be like, oh my God, this is going to be a real business.

This is that was the moment. I think for me, the Kickstarter campaign where it really became real people ask like, when did it become real? And I'm like, the prototype was a step, but the moment that we saw people gravitating towards our mission and like our Kickstarter campaign. Yeah.

It touched on the features of our chair, but we were still very brand focused. It was like, this is what we're here to do and what we believe. And I think that had a huge impact on why our campaign did way better than we thought it would. And even since, yeah, you're buying a story and you're buying an experience and like those people who purchased on day one of our Kickstarter campaign on May 6th of last year, they just got their products literally this week.

Like we just had the containers unload at the port of long beach. And that's another story too. I don't know if we've got the time to get into, but the ports were completely congested. There was like 35 to 40 ships sitting outside of long beach. And right now, if you try to order a lot of things there backward for months, and that played into our, our coming in the market plan and all these things that the year of 2020 threw at us were curve balls.

That one, many people had never dealed dealt with two. I certainly didn't know how to deal with them, but you have to just take this nimble and mindset and focus. All right. This is the problem. This is how I think we should solve it. Let's try it. And if it doesn't solve the problem, all right, that did not lead to the solution.

Let's try another one. And you just go through this kind of constant level of persistence where you're just like, I liken it to traveling, and it's really easy to do when you have to do it. It's harder to do when you don't have to do it. And so if you're traveling and you're traveling on a trip when there's like a guided tour and the tour buses driving you around and you get to see the lube and the Eiffel tower, and then they drop you off at a PSG soccer game, like you're just make it to the bus at eight o'clock in the morning.

You're on the ride. If you're traveling solo and not even solo, but if you're traveling without a guide, you're in a group of people like you guys are making decisions on the fly. Like you're like, okay who's got a map. Who's good. Who's good with. What can we use to get there? Are we going to Uber?

I'll do it. I don't know if they even have Uber's in this town. Do they have bird scooter? Like you you start to figure out the solutions to get to your goals and you're doing it only because that's like what you have to do. And there's an element to entrepreneurship where you just end up doing things.

Not because you want to, because you have to. And I always like to say, if I give it's something that you have to do, it should be something that you should look at and say, this is something that I get to do. The world has conspired in some sort of way where the challenge that I'm faced with today is to figure out how to load as many chairs in a 40 foot container, as I possibly can, as fast as possible.

We're getting. Yes, exactly. And I like you just start to figure those things out. And as you start to figure those things out, you start to get into this like momentum that a lot of people call it, flow state and you start solving other problems. And the next problem, the next. And that's what I think is like the greatest buzz about entrepreneurship is for me is like really just the buzz that I get when it's like in flow, state solving this problem.

It's like, when you're watching a movie and you watch a hacker, set up his computer, he does like the finger keyboard stretch. And he starts blasting his music and he's like, all right, let's hack this company today. Like you get into that zone and you just start solving problems. And as you're solving those problems, you're like, yes, the, to do list is checking off or checking these boxes.

These things are getting done. And like it took us a year of getting over these hurdles and figuring out our supply chain and whatnot. But we're now getting product into the hands of people who are our customers and they're giving us feedback. And the first week has been just incredible. We've gotten so much positive feedback from people saying, waited a year for this.

It's been worth the way, love it. Great quality, like things that were like, yes, like this is what we wanted people to see and feel when they've received our. Now we're super excited to see, where they take it and what they do with it. And we're running a social media campaign every month where there'll be a chance for people who are customers of our brand to win cool prizes by showing us like where they park it.

And whether it's photos, videos, stories, whatever it is, share those with our brand. We want to then promote those stories within our own brand to keep in line with our mission and make it about the experience. And it's exciting now that we're getting to that stage where we get to really, see and feel and meet with people who have used our product in the way that we intended it to be used.

Zach Rollins: Yeah. It seems to me like you feel as though you have a responsibility to these people to provide the best experience possible, and that, that really sticks out because with the Kickstarter campaign I've never done one of those before, but all of a sudden you get dumped. Almost 500 grand, which is incredible.

But at the same time, you're like, oh shit. Now what do I do? So what was that? What's that feeling like? And all of a sudden you're like, all right what's your first step because wheels are turning there. You got to produce these chairs. So what does that first phone

Steven Wilcox: call look like?

The first call in regarding to that first step? It happened actually on day three of our Kickstarter campaign, because our first day we did, we'd had a huge, first three days, we broke a hundred K in the first three days. And we were like, oh my God, we didn't 30 days what we were going about to do in 30.

And I got on the phone with Jason and I said, Hey this is happening. It's real. We got to start the process the better now than waiting 35 days. And he's like, all right, perfect. So Jason gets us on a meeting with Nate and we start diving through, okay, like what are we going to do here? And he's like, all right we need the most recent like mock-ups and renderings.

We need to start talking. We need to start sourcing factories. So I'm going to put one of my teammates. In charge of, talking to like 10 to 15 different manufacturers and seeing, who can take these renderings and build a samples. So we got a bunch of samples built. Then we got those samples shipped to the us.

We evaluated all of them, figured out what was good, what was bad. And that ultimately led us to figuring out who our partner was going to be for manufacturing. And then from there it became like, it became so fine tooth combed which is where I really started to appreciate what engineers do and product designers, because like we were trying to figure out so many little pieces like what's the thickness of the webbing gonna be?

What's the exact aluminum we're going to use, are we going to powder coat these? Or are they going to be anodized or is the wood going to be a Birch or maple, a bamboo like, like you're going through all these like tiny decisions had to make all the way down to what the screws are making.

And I'm sitting there and I'm like, I'm not a product guy. What should we use? And they're like, we would recommend these. And I'm like, okay, what's the benefit of those? And they're like, these are the benefits. I'm like, okay, what are the detriments of those? And these are the dashboards I'm like, okay we can't use those because those will rust, like that was not allowed.

And so you have to go through all these, like really my new, like process pieces to basically build the SOP or standard operating procedure of how your product is going to be built and what's going to be used to do it. And that takes a lot of time and trying to coordinate that in a pandemic, across a continent and an ocean with a bit of a language barrier it was definitely super challenging, but at the end of the day, like we met every week on Wednesday at 7:00 PM, like clockwork for an hour.

We went through everything that was updated and knew what were the new challenges, what were the new decisions? And it's resulted in a really great product. And we're really proud of. But that was like, those are, I guess those are steps one through five, you said what's the first step.

That's what, that's the path that you go on and you're right. You do have this responsibility to your customers to be like, you've entrusted me to do this. And it's my job now to do what you expect of me. And that's one of the things that I think a lot of businesses forget. And you touched on this about a few minutes ago where you talk about how businesses get caught up on the dollar sign.

And they forget that the customer is what's important. And Jeff Bezos talks about it all the time. And even athletes talk about all the time and athletes don't deal with customers in the same sense that a business does. But athletes, I remember, I specifically remember, the way that Derek Jeter would speak about Yankee fans, right?

And when you speak about your fans and your customers, in my opinion, they're the same. Sure. I agree. And the way that, that Derek Jeter would speak about them, it made me as a California kid who like, did not have any reason to want to like the Yankees. It made me love him. And I was obsessed with him as a kid growing up, playing baseball before I wasn't surfing, I was just like Derek Jeter's model.

I got 17 books and I got a signed baseball in here that I bought on eBay. Derek Jeter was my guy, but it's because of the focus that he put is that because of the focus that he put on the fans and the impact that they played in who he is and who he was, and it made you feel this connection to him.

I don't know him. I don't might like to go to meeting him is like probably zero. But as a brand, like you want that engagement. You want people to feel that way and businesses. Sometimes they get too caught up in the dollar sign. And you see this with, I think you see this with athletes when they do hold outs and all that stuff.

It's Hey man, you're getting play it. You're getting paid to play. This isn't a I guess at the end of the day, like you are getting paid to play a sport, so you can hold out for the money, but like you're there to fulfill your mission. Is your mission to win a championship or is your mission to be the number one paid position player in your league?

As a business, are you there to be the number one grossing revenue driver in your industry, or are you there to impact people's lives positively? And there was a client that I worked for. There was a client that I worked for whose motto was ensure that every customer is glad that they met us and they did a really good job of that.

On the front end, they did a very poor job of that on the backend. And I won't get into who the company is, they don't exist anymore. And I think part of the reason they don't exist anymore is because of. And they became very focused on, they would say that in the company meetings, but then as soon as you'd go into the offices, there's like charts everywhere.

This is where we're at for weekly revenue and daily revenue and monthly revenue. And these are our top sales performance. And I guess sales guys get really motivated by that. They liked the numbers. They're competitive. It's a good thing for the sales team, but it needs to stick within the sales team.

It doesn't need to proliferate to customer service or to project management or to product or to marketing because the reason why all those people are there are to facilitate the mission it's sales job to drive the revenue, to continue facilitating the mission like we spoke on earlier. And I think a lot of businesses forget that.

And that's one of the things that, that is always going to be something that we're focusing on is that, we may not be the largest revenue driver in the world. If we're a publicly traded company and we have to pick between shareholders and stakeholders, I'm going to pick the stakeholders. I'm going to pick the internal people within the company.

I'm not going to. The guy on wall street who wants to make a quick buck? Like you're we probably, if the, if park at IPO's, I don't even know if I would necessarily be the guy leading that ship, like that's where my mindset is. Who knows things could change in 10, 15, 20 years. I don't know.

But that's the mindset that I want to always make sure that we're adhering to is that we're here to facilitate that mission of enjoying the exploration. Yeah. I

Zach Rollins: love how you brought out the analogy of Derek Jeter. Cause I'm a red Sox fan, so

Steven Wilcox: I, yeah,

Zach Rollins: exactly at birth I'm, destined to hate the Yankees just by default growing up, going up to red Sox games every summer here in Fenway.

But you love Derek Jeter, right? Because he's Derek, Jeter's the man, he's a legend, but what I think is really interesting is, and I guess the same could be said about Michael Jordan. Is these guys right? They didn't have just short careers. They truly built a brand that lasts because they gave a shit about their customers and about their fans, and companies like Yeti, yet he's been around for a really long time and they make a great product, but they also give back a lot, and I had this guy, Michael Sims on the podcast who founded hooking gap watch, and his motto was, build a brand that lasts right. And stand the test of time. So a little funny, but it worked, and the thing that I pull from you is, that's your goal is to really build a brand that lasts.

And to say that it hasn't already would be false because this started three years ago, and I think that's a really big Testament to the fact that this stuff takes time, with time comes patients. So how has your mindset been throughout this whole process? Because. You can say it's yeah, you gotta be patient.

It takes time. You gotta enjoy the process. But there's moments where you're like, man, the process sucks right now. Like I don't want to be patient. I want this thing to work. So what is the, what, what has been your process to really stick true to who you are, both the brand, but you as a person and then say to yourself, man, this is going to be a process, right?

This is going on three years almost. And we're just now coming to market what does that experience been?

Steven Wilcox: So I'm glad you posed this question and I have the perfect analogy for it. And the story that comes to mind about it too, was where I actually came to realize it was, I had a client that I was working for and they wanted everything rushed.

It was like rush. We need this rush. We need this rush. We need this rush. We need this rushed. And we were driving out to Xi'an for a family camping trip. I was just getting blown up by this client being like, we need this done, we need this done. We need this done. And I'm like, it's not going to get done.

I need you guys to recognize that good work takes time. And like I'm having that thought process while I'm like stressed out and frustrated in the car, driving through the desert and we get to Zion. And I don't know if any, if you've been designed on and Utah, but awesome. Perfect. So you've seen it and you get into Utah and as soon as you cross into Utah, like the landscape changes, there's just something about it's almost like the way they drew state lines or yeah.

Arizona, a bunch of dirt, a big canyon Utah, whoa, weird red mountains flat. Yeah. And it's they're like, we're drawing the line here. There's just something here. We're drawing the line. And so you cross the uterine, you started to see this like beautiful landscape starts to present itself to you and you drive in the Xi'an and you make this like you follow this river, which is the river that made Zion canyon.

You start to hook this left-hand turn as you get into like the town and you get your first real look at the wall that reads all the way down and weaves in and out. And it does what the canyon wall does. If you've seen it all the way down, that leads all the way down to the narrows too, which is one of the most incredible things I think I've ever seen in regards to what it builds and how it's so different from one end, all the way to the other.

And we're pulling in and the sun setting and I'm looking out the window and I'm like, this took millions of years to build. And it's one of the most beautiful places in the country. And it reminds you that great work takes time. Like the grand canyon wasn't built overnight. Zion wasn't built overnight.

What this client wants from me can not be built in two hours. It needs like proper thought and understanding it cause, cause everything that we do from an artistic perspective and from a brand perspective, it has layers. It's going to affect different people differently because of different personality types of.

But you have to think about how all that comes together into one. All those ingredients come together into one thing. And I remember just looking at the walls and Zion and being like, okay, this client doesn't get it. I don't think I'm supposed to keep working with this client. I gotta focus on the things that give me value and make me feel the pride of the work that I'm proud of.

And it's gonna take time to be really good and you just have to be okay with it. And, if we were to run water down our driveway, we wouldn't notice a single thing in the span of one day, but you look at Zion and you think of how long that water has been running through there and what it's created.

And it's incredible. And one of the things I think, as an entrepreneur, that was really good for me was having that experience with that client at that time. Because at that time we were still between the first prototype and the second prototype in terms of product design and it just reinforced. The next, one's probably not going to be perfect either, but take it one day at a time, figure out ways to continually improve either, the brand, the process, the product, whatever it is always find something that can be improved.

And just keep working at that little by little. And my dad had a saying that a little bit over time adds up to a lot, and I don't know if it's necessarily his saying, but that's who I learned it from. And it's true a little bit over time adds up to a lot. I look at our website right now and I think to myself, wow, our websites looking pretty good.

I couldn't have turn that website in a day. It's taken us two years to get to this point in our website and, there's everything like that. Great work takes time and patience and discipline. And those three things if, use together in our harmony can create some pretty cool stuff. We're glad that it worked out for us with our product that's for sure.

Zach Rollins: Yeah. It seems to be working out really well and, It's so true. Like I, I'm a competitive weightlifter on top of all the other things I've been doing. And that sport in particular is such a analogy for life in such an analogy for patients, right? Because you take these two things, both the art of the sport, which is challenging of itself and learning a brand new skill.

And then you have the load and fighting gravity every day. And it's this juxtaposition of the two that breeds the sport of weightlifting. And, guys that are going to the Olympics, they just chose the Olympic team a few days ago. And they didn't start yesterday. Let's just put it that way.

This was years and years and trial and error. And, it's a Testament to what it takes to really build a great business and a brand that lasts. Going through this whole process, do you think there's been one thing that really sticks out in your mind as you imagine? If I had to take one thing away from this, if this all left yesterday, what would I learn from it?

Steven Wilcox: That's a great question. If this all left, let's say tomorrow, there's a nuclear war and there's no more parking. No one's going outside. Whatever outside it's gone. Oh, it sounds like March 18th and 2020. What would I say I've learned from this? I would say that I've learned that authentic work and basically aligning yourself with a mission and a purpose in association with that work.

You're really empowered to do whatever you want. There's a lot of variables that come into play. When you say that on the surface, it's a very simple statement. But let's say you have an idea for, the next grade. Camera feature that someone's going to create. If you believe that you can do it and it's in alignment with your passions and it can become your purpose and people spend a lot of time talking about find your purpose in life.

And there's a lot of quotes that people talk about where it's like you don't really choose your purpose chooses you. And I think there's an element where both of those are actually really more of a 50 50 I always knew I wanted to do something outdoors and exciting, and I love sports and I love surfing and I love traveling.

I love everything that comes with that. And I don't know exactly how that became the B. It came to be like very young. But the business side of these things and the decisions that I get to make has been definitely like almost some sort of a calling for me where it's this is what you get to do because you've made these decisions.

And that's led me to the roundabout way that this is how park it and the, what we stand for as a business and who I, what I like to do with my time, get to be married together. And that drives my lifestyle and who I am and what I get to do. And I think that if a lot more people were empowered with that type of understanding that a lot more people would be willing to take that risk.

I think our school system has done a very unique spin on entrepreneurship, where they talk very heavily about how launching a business is very likely to fail. And I don't think that's the way that we should be teaching people who, might not fit into the system perfectly in terms of.

Maybe they don't like getting good grades because they hate math. Maybe they're super artistic. Like Albert Einstein said maybe it was Einstein I'm blanking on. It's also a meme that I saw. So who knows what the mean people, but he said he's like a fish is an idiot. If you put them on a, if you put them at a park, like something like that, like a fish doesn't belong in a park, you gotta put a fish in the ocean.

That's where the fish is a genius, and nine out of 10 entrepreneurs may fail. But the nine that failed are just one step closer now to finding where they're going to be a genius. And I think that's one of the things that like from a education standpoint, no one ever told you that no one taught you that you didn't get taught in business school that the business you run will fail and you'll be done.

You were taught that or no, I'm sorry. You were taught that the business that you ran would fail. And then after that you'd have to go find a job. That's true. Like I started a couple of businesses before. And to be honest, we had no idea what we were doing. I don't even know if I would classify them as businesses.

We filed them as LLCs with the state of California, because we thought we needed to, but like they, they didn't generate any revenue. We never figured out how to monetize any of them. They never gained any traction, but each one of those entrepreneurial ideas led to the next one, which led to the next one, which led to the understanding of cool.

We've learned a few things. And now how do we apply what we've learned to the next one? And like it, it touches on what I was saying with persistence. And I think that if all of this were to go away tomorrow, the one thing that I've learned is that it's really your own decision every day to wake up and choose I'm going to solve these problems.

Because one, you have the mindset that you have chosen that you like to solve. These problems. Two they're in alignment with your mission and three they're the they're aligned alignment with your values. And if you're doing that, I think you're going to feel fulfilled and. That you necessarily won't.

Some people do from a job. I never was one of those guys. I think that's a definite thing for me, but that's an aspect of kind of a, what I've learned the most, I think is that if let's say park, it went away tomorrow, I could probably start a new business and a new brand and bring a new product to market and do something along those lines.

And it could be completely different ethos behind it, but I know what foundation I want. I would want it to be. And I know, I wouldn't know how to do it.

Zach Rollins: Love that. Stephen, it's been a, it's been a pleasure being able to chat with you with the outdoor industry kinda on just full throttle right now, it's, it seems to me like there's no better time to be launching what you're doing.

So in a lot of ways, COVID, I think. Was an unfortunate circumstance, but what it really did was it got people out outdoors and made people realize life is short. Let's go out and enjoy the outdoors. Let's go to Zion national park because it's gorgeous. Let's take that backpack and trip that we haven't taken and let's go, let's go utilize, park it and explore somewhere different.

So with that said, where can people get in touch with you? Where can they learn more about it? How can they get a chair? Like how can get people learn more?

Steven Wilcox: Yeah. So our chairs are for sale on our website at WW dot park, it movement.com to get in touch with me, simply just fill out a little form on our connect.

We have a chat slash a support page on our website, fill out the form, shoot out the email. Most of those emails get forwarded to me. And so if there's anything anyone wants to chat about regarding the brand or reach out for partnership opportunities We're in a stage, like you mentioned where the outdoor industry is on fire and we're new and we're here and we're excited to stake our claim in it and have a lot of fun doing it.

Find us on our website. So the easiest way, you can also find us on Instagram at park, at movement. Just hit us up in the DMS and we, we get back to you pretty quick,

Zach Rollins: flat on an awesome Steven, thanks again for coming on and we'll catch you soon and that's a wrap everyone. Thank you guys for tuning into this episode of the podcast.

It was a real pleasure to be able to talk with Steven. If you want to learn more about park it and how you can get involved head on over to the link below, you can check out the entire blog post and write up on our website and you can also get a sneak peek of the new website that is going to be dropping very soon.

So make sure to tune into that. And we will see you on the next episode of the podcast. We have some great guests in the lineup, including a new segment that is all about the people. Or getting involved on the water. So not only are we touching base on the brands, but we're also starting to touch base on the people.

Some people that I've gotten to rub elbows with and learn all about and their lives and how they've built them along the coastline. So that more coming up on along the keel. And I hope you guys as always work hard, do good, be incredible and have an awesome day.