An underwear brand doing A$64M in revenue at a 76% gross margin, adjusted profitable, with A$26M of cash and zero debt, has a market cap of A$26M.

Read that again. The public market is valuing the brand at nothing. You get it free with the bank balance.

Step One is a bamboo-underwear DTC brand based in Sydney, and its five years on the ASX are the consumer cycle compressed into one chart.

2021 listing: IPO at a A$284M valuation on A$62M revenue, 29x EBITDA, up 80% on day one, peaking at a ~A$530M cap.
2022 crash: guidance missed, UK and US unprofitable, stock down 83%.
2023–24 rebound: revenue growing again, stock up 6x, back above IPO at A$310M on 3.3x sales, A$87M revenue, A$17.4M EBITDA, A$12.7M profit, dividends, the founder sells A$30M.
2026 reset: sales down 27%, a A$10.9M inventory write-down, a reported loss, dividend suspended, stock down 74%.

Here's where I'll disagree with the tape. From where I sit, this is a very disciplined reset. Management took the inventory write-off in one go rather than bleeding it through promotions. They let the revenue go instead of buying it back with discounts that would have wrecked the 76% margin. They've accepted a smaller underlying business that's more profitable, and they're leaning into the one channel that's actually growing, the UK, from behind a fortress balance sheet. That's exactly the sequence I'd push for in a restructuring, and most public-company boards can't stomach it because the headline is "sales down 27%."

The flip side is that the market has decided a declining DTC apparel business has no equity value beyond its cash and in a sector that's just watched Everlane and Allbirds, you can see why. Tough trading for a declining business.

Comfrt's marketing playbook is so heavily dissected it has a name, the "Hudson Method," after the founder who took a hoodie brand from zero to a $150M+ run rate in three years with no outside capital. Seed thousands of micro-creators with free product, convert the top performers into an affiliate sales force, and let commission substitute for rising Meta CPMs.

But have you seen Mellow Sleep?

$130M in revenue in year one. Bootstrapped. The #1 brand in TikTok Shop's Home category. Just launched in Target.

Launched last July, it's performance sleep gear for the "sleepmaxxing" era: hotel-level bedding styled in a pastel aesthetic built for short-form video. Hero products are the CloudAlign pillow at $39.99 and the Marshmallow Comforter at $129.99, always, of course, on promo. Since launch, over a million creators have requested samples and 100,000+ videos have been posted. The biggest channel is its own site, then TikTok, then Amazon. It's the cozy-girl, Stanley-cup, Comfrt-hoodie aesthetic applied to the bed.

Just as modern tech startups launch AI-native, modern CPG brands are launching creator-affiliate native. The old DTC model bought customer attention from an algorithm at ever-increasing prices and hoped the LTV covered it. Mellow pays creators only when a product sells, which means CAC is a function of revenue, not a bet against it. That's a different cost structure, and it's why a year-one brand can be bootstrapped to $130M when the Meta-dependent version would have needed a $30M Series A to get there.

To state the obvious: digitally native creators are fundamentally better brand monetizers than traditional Hollywood A-listers. The Outset just proved it the expensive way.

Scarlett Johansson's skincare brand shut down last week after four years in market. Launched in 2022, co-founded with a beauty executive, backed by The Najafi Companies, the same family office behind Beach House Group's Pattern (Tracee Ellis Ross), Moon (Kendall Jenner), and Florence by Mills (Millie Bobby Brown), and the house that just exited Béis to Samsonite at $210M. ~$10M of funding. Clean, vegan, allergen-free skincare for sensitive skin, priced $32–54, in Sephora, Nordstrom, and Goop.

On paper, it had every ingredient of the incubator machine I broke down with The Center: a thesis, a face, patient capital, premium retail. It was missing the one that does the work.

Scarlett Johansson has no digital audience to monetize. She's one of the very few A-list holdouts with no Instagram, no X, no TikTok. She's spoken about it for years, finds the exposure anxiety-inducing. That's a completely legitimate personal choice. It's also disqualifying for a celebrity brand in 2026. Hailey Bieber's face is on every Rhode asset, and that's the main reason a two-SKU brand sold for $1B. The celebrity's distribution is the brand.

Strip the distribution away and what's left is the product. No ingredient story, no derm co-founder, no format innovation. A nice moisturizer in a crowded aisle.

Two kids in Boston built apparel brands at the same time. I sold mine after years for an outcome I'd generously call mediocre. Dave's still going, eight figures, profitable, still enjoying it.

Dave started Janji thirteen years ago on a bus to a Division III track meet. We grew up together in the Boston DTC scene, both building under the Bonobos shadow, both making the wholesale-first mistake, both convinced we were building the next great consumer company.

The moment worth studying came at year six. Dave and his co-founder sat down over beers at Bukowski's and asked the question most founders avoid: keep going, or change course?

One - can you credibly reach a market salary within one to two years? Not a fortune. Market. If you can't see the path after six years, that's information.

Two - is there real momentum? Dave put a number on it. Growing 11% a year, not making money, three years straight, there are no green shoots there. You want 20%+ with a reason to believe it continues.

Three - does it feel unnecessarily hard? If you're dreading Sundays, that's a signal too.

Janji passed. They kept going. Then they made the hardest call of all, dropping the Toms-inspired giving model that defined the brand's first decade, because it turned out that's not why people buy. Sales went up. The 2022 repositioning around the explorer runner; trail, ultra, the journey over the finish time, put them exactly where the running boom landed.

Last week it was Michael Robinov's cohorts telling him to stay. This week it's Dave's three questions. Same lesson from two founders a decade apart: the decision to keep going should never be an act of faith. It should be an act of measurement.

Because of twelve years of friendship, this conversation goes places most episodes don't. The K-shaped consumer. Why freshness beats durability in apparel. And the sliding-doors question: what happens to Janji if COVID never comes?

🎧 Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify.

Drive to Survive roughly doubled Formula 1's US TV audience, took ESPN's rights fee from ~$5M a year to ~$85M, created two new American Grands Prix, and helped turn Liberty Media's $4.4B purchase into a ~$25B+ asset. The template is well understood: a documentary series as the top of a funnel that monetizes everywhere downstream.

So it's no surprise that Arthur Blank's family office, Wyc Grousbeck, and the PGA Tour itself have now put ~$44M behind the company building golf's version. Pro Shop just closed a $24M Series B following a $20M Series A in 2024. Co-founder Chad Mumm, ex-Vox Media Studios, created Netflix's Full Swing (golf's Drive to Survive).

What makes Pro Shop more interesting than a studio is that it's assembling the entire stack beneath the content.

Studios: Full Swing, co-producer of Happy Gilmore 2 and The Hawk.
Platform: Skratch, the PGA Tour's digital and social brand, contributed by the Tour for equity.
Community: GolfWRX, the internet's largest equipment forum, acquired.
Talent: Paige Co., a media-and-commerce JV with Paige Spiranac, plus The Vanity Index and Dan On Golf.
Commerce: Sugarloaf Social Club, a lifestyle apparel brand.
Live: the PGA Tour's Creator Classic and the revived Skins Game on Prime Video.

The model: content is the gateway to owned commerce and live experiences.

The question for Pro Shop is the one every media-to-commerce model faces: how much of the value it creates does it get to keep? Liberty Media kept F1's upside because it owned the league. Pro Shop owns the content, a community, and some talent, but the Tour owns the sport. Watch where the equity sits as the commerce layer scales.

Quick ask: Dave's three questions: market salary within two years, 20%+ growth, not dreading Sundays. How many does your business pass right now?

Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/fanbi/