On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Kevin Lavelle. Kevin is a dad, husband, and repeat founder who transformed menswear with Mizzen+Main, a business that’s done hundreds of millions in revenue, and is now creating happier parents and healthier families, one restful night at a time, with Harbor.. We talk about secure and reliable baby monitor systems, prioritizing innovation and customer experience, maintaining organic audience engagement, and so much more!
Kevin Lavelle is the CEO and Co-Founder of Harbor. He brings a wealth of experience from his role as the Founder and Chairman of Mizzen+Main, having invented the world’s first performance fabric dress shirt.
With a successful growth round raised from L Catterton, partnerships with world-renowned athletes like Phil Mickelson and JJ Watt, and a background in omnichannel retail, Kevin is not only a dedicated entrepreneur but also a loving husband and father of two.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Kevin Lavelle
I can confidently say, whatever decision you make, it's going to be wrong. It's just a question of how wrong it will be and can you survive the incorrect assumptions.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
Today, I'm welcoming to the show a repeat founder, Kevin Lavelle. Today, we're talking about Harbor. Welcome to the show.
Kevin Lavelle
Thanks, Chase. Always glad to be able to tell a story. Appreciate it.
Chase Clymer
I'm very excited. Alright.
So people that live under a rock, they don't know what you're building over there. Can you just give them a quick rundown of the types of products that you're selling at Harbor?
Kevin Lavelle
Yeah, absolutely. So at Harbor, we're building the most secure, reliable quality baby monitor on the market today.
My son is 7 years old and I woke up one morning to discover our Nanit app had crashed and we were no longer monitoring our son overnight. After running upstairs and discovering he was okay, I wanted to fix that problem and know that if I was trying to monitor my son overnight, I could.
So we went out and bought an old school camera and monitor and ran two systems in parallel. Seven years later, still no one's built a better system. And so that's why I launched Harbor. We have a dedicated 10 inch monitor that connects directly to a very high quality baby camera. And both the camera and the monitor also connect to the Internet, so you get the best of both worlds.
Dedicated local failsafe device and all the benefits of remote access, record and rewind, access on your phone, and all sorts of other features. We've got a lot of really cool stuff that comes along with it.
That then becomes the foundation for a remote night nanny platform. We're bringing the cost from four to $700 a night for overnight care down to $20 a night with experts that can coach you all night long with secure encrypted coaching. That allows parents to get some much needed sleep in those first few months and years of raising young kids.
Chase Clymer
Well, that's an amazing platform and a lot of awesome product features.
Now, where did the idea for this business come from? It seems like a pretty significant problem to solve. But you're not a first-time founder, are you?
Kevin Lavelle
No. No. And so I'll touch a little bit more in the background, but maybe jump backwards.
In college, I had an experience where I watched a guy run into a building soaked in sweat. He was wearing a dress shirt and when he dried off an hour later, he looked even worse. I grew up playing golf and watched performance polos take over on the golf course and wondered why no one had ever made a dress shirt out of performance fabrics.
The idea stayed with me for many years. Ultimately, after working in the real world for a few years, I decided I had to give this a shot. So I developed the world's first performance fabric dress shirt. I'm wearing one of our shirts right now.
It stretches. You don't have to iron it or dry clean it. It looks like a normal shirt, cuffs, and collars. You can wear it with a suit and tie. It's a little more casual option. So I launched that in July of 2012.
And, you know, I'm not shy to say that when I launched, I assumed we would sell out of our first 1000 units in a few days. ‘Hey, I've just created a performance fabric dress shirt’, of course, everyone's going to want to come and buy it.
But as any of your listeners will know, ‘if you build it, they will come’ is not true, especially in the world of Ecommerce. You've got to actually build a brand. You've got to build an engine. And so it's been a couple of years really getting off the ground and slow going first year, and then things really started to pick up.
Since I started the company, we've sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of products. We sponsored the Tim Ferriss Show, which changed the trajectory of our business. We signed endorsement deals with guys like JJ Watt and Phil Mickelson, which are great representatives of the brand. And we're in hundreds of retail stores around the country.
It was on that journey that I learned how to build a business, learned how to create physical products, build a brand, all of that.
My son was born in 2016 and it was actually in the labor and delivery room that I signed the term sheet for our investment from L Catterton, the world's largest consumer retail private equity shop.
It was a very intense time. I was looking for great technology that could improve our lives because technology is supposed to improve our lives, but oftentimes it doesn't. I did a whole bunch of research, went out and bought a Nanit camera.
For those of your listeners who aren't familiar, it's basically just a Wi-Fi camera with an app on your phone that has some features that are kind of geared towards parents. But many parents that I know were so frustrated with those devices, they just bought a Nest camera or a Ring camera because it's pretty much the same thing for a fraction of the cost, which is you're running an app on your phone.
As I said earlier, I woke up one morning and discovered the app had crashed. So they make your phone be your baby monitor and you just run an app.
I learned after the app had crashed that you can't rely on apps on your phone for anything. It's great to have, but you can't rely on it to know any information without fail. That experience changed our perception of these products. I've wanted to build something better.
I've paid attention for many, many years. I have a daughter who we needed a product for. Ultimately, there's been really no innovation in this space other than these companies selling baby biometric devices. They use strap wearables for your kid or camera recognition.
It's a fear-based marketing trying to help parents believe that their device could help them catch SIDS from happening, stop SIDS from happening.
Unfortunately, SIDS is the most gruesome reality a parent can face. Doctors have no idea what causes SIDS and so it is literally impossible for an off the shelf at home biometric device to catch it. And indeed all of these companies that market these products have to add all sorts of disclaimers to say they can't do it, that they can't actually catch these things.
So that's a little bit of background. I could obviously talk about this forever, very passionate about it. Ultimately, my co-founder and I both have two young kids of our own, a bunch of our team members do. We built the product that we'd wish we'd had for our own kids.
Ultimately, I hope to be able to change the very difficult first few years of lack of sleep for parents everywhere.
Chase Clymer
Oh, amazing stuff. There's so much I want to dive into.
First, I'm gonna have to pick your brain about Mizzen+Main for a little bit and then I promise we'll get right back to Harbor.
Kevin Lavelle
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Chase Clymer
My favorite thing about building a successful product, and I've done hundreds of these interviews, is just taking a novel idea and making it that much better. That boils down to what you did at Mizzen+Main.
So I really like to highlight that when I have people on these shows that have such a successful business. Because there are entrepreneurs out there that believe, ‘If I don't build the next Facebook, I'm not going to be successful.’
Now, would you say that with your first initial launch of the product, the ‘if you build it, they will come’, that hard reality there, I know there's some people out there sitting on some merchandise or some first run of the product, and it didn't have the reaction that they initially expected.
Can you dive in a little bit more there? What exactly did you do to start to move those units?
Kevin Lavelle
Yeah. So ultimately, the thing that I tell most folks is whatever you can do as an aspiring entrepreneur wanting to launch your first business is do every single thing you possibly can to demonstrate some measure of traction and interest.
With Mizzen+Main, you know, I've done some customer interviews, sort of, but ultimately I just had to go make the first batch of product. I didn't need to… I spent a lot of my own money. I had a little bit of savings built up. And so I poured that into that.
I needed to go get people to tell me, will they actually buy the product? It's very different when you say, ‘Will you buy the product to give me money for the thing that I'm giving you?’.
And so I had to make a thousand units. That was a minimum run to get the first product made. R&D was what I did myself and working pattern maker to make the pattern. Some friends and family bought a shirt. Then I had to go get moving because day four, I think it was we reset Shopify to zero dollars and I had to actually go sell it.
I did everything that I could. I went to, I live in Dallas, I went to Katy Trail, which is a long trail through the middle of the city, and handed out water bottles with our brand name on it. We hosted a launch party for the business a week later to try and generate some awareness. I went to a Gold's Gym and set up a rolling rack in the front, because we used to work out there and I knew all the people and they let me set up a rack to try and sell some shirts.
I bought a booth at the Dallas Marathon Expo to try and sell my product. I went to Wichita Falls. There's a bike race called Hotter’N Hell. It's a 100 mile bike race in August, which is miserable.
I basically said, ‘Where are my customers, even if they don't know their customers yet, and how can I get in front of them?’ And it was one shirt at a time. We didn't have any money to spend on Facebook or anything else. And Facebook marketing in 2012 was just in its very infancy.
But I did do anything that I could to create a bond with our customers as well. So I included a handwritten note in every single order for probably the first two and a half, maybe even three years.
And then there were times where I would go and look up at someone who had placed an order and find something out about them. And I learned this from Gary V. They went to the University of Arkansas. And so I bought a Smathers and Branson coozie and sent it to them.
In the earliest days, that recommendation of doing things that don't scale is really important because you have to figure out what might work so that you can double and triple down on it. And then you do double and triple down and find out that, you know, quadrupling down actually doesn't work. And that's what you got to do to figure out how to scale and how to get going.
But the hardest challenge with an Ecommerce physical product business is managing inventory and demand, especially with a variable skew-based business. You have sizes and you have styles. And balancing those together, out of the gate, you want to make as low an investment as possible to validate what your next set of decisions are.
And I can confidently say, whatever decision you make, it's going to be wrong. It's just a question of how wrong it will be. And can you survive the incorrect assumptions?
Chase Clymer
Oh, that was such an amazing answer.
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Chase Clymer
Doing things that don't scale, again, it comes up all the time with successful brands, and I think the one thing is just getting in motion. A lot of people get distracted by doing business, which is a terrible way to describe being busy and just finding things to do. The common denominator that they're not doing is finding those sales. They're not getting out there and doing exactly what you said that you were doing.
You were going to these races, you were going to the gym, you were finding your customers where they were. That is exactly how you take a business from zero to one and actually get those customers.
Kevin Lavelle
And ultimately, that first set of products that we made, as I look back in hindsight, they were terrible. And I've got some people that I know that say, ‘I still have one of your first shirts’, I'm like, ‘Burn it, please. Don't show anyone that we made that.’
But at the time, it was really exciting. It was something totally different. And people were like, ‘Man, I get this.’ And it was fun to see, I think back to when we released our second generation of products, some of my friends were like, ‘Okay, now I get it. This is worth it.’ They may have purchased one.
But I will say, and this is a good lesson for my second business and how I also hope to be a friend of other founders. If you have a friend who starts a business, it means more than anything that you could possibly do otherwise to just buy one of whatever they're selling. And even if it's not for you, buy it as a gift for someone else. And don't ask your friend for a discount when they've just started their brand new business.
The friends that I have that were with me in the first run, and then many of my friends who have kids that are already too old for it are like, ‘Yep, I'll get one. I'm going to give it to a friend or I'm going to give it to an employee.’
Cody Barbo, the founder of Trust and Will and a friend of mine here in Dallas in New York, who's already both messaged me within a week of each other and said, ‘I want to be your first customer’, and neither one of them need the product themselves at this point. And that just means so much to me.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's amazing advice. So let's pivot a little bit. Obviously, Mizzen+Main went on to be a great success. There's a lot of lessons learned there and I'm sure I'll have you back and we can dive deeper into there.
But today I want to talk about Harbor. There’s something I identified that was different between the two businesses. I don't know if this was a decision you made from just your experience or just a coincidence is that you've got basically one skew in a subscription business now versus multiple skews in more of a drop-based, traditional fashion, if I'm going to really break it down business.
Was that on purpose?
Kevin Lavelle
So yes and no. The reality is, as a parent, you need a baby monitor and you don't really care to get it in multiple colors. You don't really care to accessorize in a big way. The reality of the product that we're selling is we don't need lots of different options.
Down the line, we may have some iteration on the product. But I look at that as a feature that becomes available that wasn't previously available. We future-proof so much of the technology inside of the product so that we can edit on a firmware and software basis rather than on a physical feature basis. So that is a very nice aspect of this business relative to the alternative.
Then our relationship with our customers is going to be on a membership basis. The reality there, I'm not wearing it, I'm always in, it's charging right now. You can see my tan. I've had a Whoop for five years and I still appreciate the nature of the business that they've built because they keep releasing new features.
My product that I got years ago continues to get better, and that's part of what I'm paying for, membership and access to the information that they provide.
And the reality of building a camera and a tablet, these are expensive products. If you want to build them outside of China, which we are doing, with non-Chinese chips, which we are doing, and you want it to be quality, which we are doing, none of which our competitors can say, it's an expensive product.
And so rather than, you know, basically buy this piece of electronics and then you have to subscribe and get all these other things. If you pay us, then you'll get more. This is a relationship over a period of time that allows us to continue to innovate and put this incredible product in front of our customers.
And ultimately, we look at kind of the number one leader in the space and our product is pretty much the same price. It depends on what subscription you get to their product because their premium subscription makes it even more. But with ours, you get a 10 inch tablet along with the camera, along with all the features that we have.
I think the last thing on the membership side of it is, so much of what any of the other Wi-Fi based app systems are selling you is a subscription to store your footage in their cloud. We will not store any of our customers' footage in any cloud. We have a memory chip on the device itself, so anything that you store is stored on the device.
Now, after a period of time, it will erase itself. But if you want to save a precious moment, I think about when I put my daughter into her crib for the last time, I went into my Nest camera, Google camera, and saved that clip down. And it was a lot of work to save it down.
So we've made it really easy. You can just hit a button, save it down onto your phone. You don't have to worry about what's stored and what cloud and frankly, from a security perspective, how much do I trust their security? Because this is my family. These are my most intimate moments often.
So we're not selling subscriptions. We are selling incredible features, things like the ability to have an individual parent woken up by a watch alert. So if you wanna decide which parent gets to wake up that night, rather than noise immediately blaring through on your monitor, you can have it go through to an individual parent's Apple watch and just vibrate on their watch, that parent can get up, disable the alert on the monitor because you've got about 10 seconds before we would start issuing an audible alert. Then the other parent may not wake up at all.
Those are features that are unlike anything that exists today and require robust maintenance and upkeep to continue to offer great things like that. And that's a big part of why we decided to go with the membership model.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, from a marketing and advertising perspective and building out a funnel, as you will, is it just easier to work on one product versus what you're doing over at Mizzen+Main with multiple lines and multiple styles?
Kevin Lavelle
I'm going to say an answer that’s a little bit of a CYA answer. And also, it's just the reality. There are pros and cons to both.
Selling one product membership is much easier from a messaging perspective because you just hit the same thing again and again.
However, when you've got different types of shirts, different types of pants, different styles, and then you've got more spring stuff and more winter stuff. That variation on the marketing front, you always have something new to say. Man, there's a lot there.
Then ultimately, I've thought a lot about this going down the road of launching a second consumer business: 3.6 million children are born in the United States every year. Unfortunately, that number is declining, which America needs to change. We need to have more children.
But 3.6 million children are born in the United States every year. I don't have the specifics on how many of those are second, third, fourth, fifth children, but ultimately you have this constant flow of new customers that need to be monitored, right? Well, the parents are buying it, but you have a constant influx of new customers.
And then the reality is every year, you have all these new people coming into your space that are first-time parents that have no idea what they're doing. Everything is brand new to them. With Mizzen+Main as an example, our target demographic is basically late 20s to early 50s, men above a certain income threshold, and that pie is enormous. However, the competition is enormous.
When we started, everyone laughed us out of the room when we said we're going to make a performance-fabric dress shirt. Today, everyone has copied us in some former fashion. And now there are entire startups that have basically copied our entire business model suit to nuts, including hiring some of the same models and using some of the same verbiage to describe our product.
So there are pros and cons. But what I will say really excites me about Harbor on the marketing front is when my wife and I found out she was expecting, every person that we knew that had kids were like, ‘This is the stroller you need to get. This is the formula you need to buy. These are the best pajamas.’
They had all these recommendations. No one said, ‘You've got to get this baby monitor. This baby monitor is amazing. It helped us sleep. It was so reliable. It's amazing.’ No one says that. And with Harbor, we think of the word of mouth opportunity for the love of products that we've already created with our trial users that we've been working with for the last year.
We think once the product begins shipping later this year and gets in consumers' hands, the word of mouth will be unlike anything I could have ever dreamed of in any prior company because parents have this obsession with, ‘If I can help you in a way that I wish that I had had, I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to hear because man, this is a tough journey.’
And so I'm excited for that part of the building startup number 2.
Chase Clymer
Oh yeah. That's going to be an amazing... What do they call that? Almost like a growth hack or just a growth model there.
Now, you've shared so much with us today.
But is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience?
Kevin Lavelle
We didn't necessarily talk about... I mentioned very briefly on the celebrity front, the endorsement. When I started Mizzen+Main, influencers weren't really a thing. Instagram was in its earliest days and so we didn't do the traditional influencer marketing at Mizzen+Main for years.
Now it's a meaningful part of our business. Men don't buy from influencers the same way that women do, so we actually work with a lot of female influencers from a gifting perspective. But for us, the earliest kind of influencer growth hack was we became the shirt of choice of professional athletes.
And that happened because a friend of mine that I went to high school with, we hadn't chatted in a long time, but we'd reconnected. He brought us up to do a trunk show at Nat Stadium in DC. And we sold like $10,000 worth of product in, I don't know, 45 minutes or an hour. We weren't doing that in a day.
The way that baseball works from a trade perspective is guys are moving clubhouses all the time. And so you get one guy in one clubhouse who loves your product. He goes to another clubhouse and then goes, ‘Hey, you want to come do a trunk show?’ So I started doing all these trunk shows in 2014, 15 and it just changed so much for us.
Chase Clymer
And it was mostly just baseball.
Kevin Lavelle
It started out as baseball and then it carried forward. With baseball, they're traveling all the time. They usually have to dress up. Because our shirts stretch, they fit athletic guys in a way that normal shirts don't. It's easier to care for.
And because it stretches and it fits better than most custom shirts because of the nature of how it falls. And guys who are athletes, especially, they're going up and down and waiting on a pretty consistent basis. That then allowed us to kind of create some real brand awareness in the world of pro athletes, which led us to signing an endorsement deal with JJ Watt.
That really put us on the map in a pretty significant way because we were such a small business at the time, anyone who was paying attention was like, ‘Clearly this is an incredible product because a guy like JJ, they can't pay him $10 million, which is what he probably could have gotten from another apparel manufacturer.’
But what was nice was we weren't competitive with Nike, Reebok, Under Armour, et cetera, because we weren't making athletic apparel. And so we were sort of able to sneak under a lot of other contracts because we weren't competitive with any of these brands or businesses.
With Harbor, I'm taking a lot of the lessons learned there. We're talking with some celebrity moms right now, some of whom are very interested in the opportunity to really take a meaningful position in the business and really help elevate what we're doing.
It's still very early days. We haven't even started shipping products to customers, we've just been working in trials. But working with some mom influencers and then working with some celebrities, that is the focus this time around as compared to some of the more straightforward things.
I can't go to Gold's Gym and set up a rolling rack and start selling baby monitors. It's a very different experience. And because of the nature of our product and the membership, we're going to wait a little while before we go down the wholesale route.
I'll say this. It makes me chuckle. I saw another brand and I won't call them out for it. So many brands that started between 2010 and 2020 basically said, ‘We are direct-to-consumer forever. We will never go wholesale. We will never, never, never, never, never, never.’ Every single one of them has ended up going wholesale in some capacity, whether it's small or substantial.
I just think it's foolish to issue those types of decrees because you never know where your business is going to take you. And I've always looked at wholesale partners as a very valuable extension of the broader Mizzen+Main team.
And so with Harbor, we're going to start direct-to-consumer. We don't have a ton of units for the first year or two because we're standing up that production. In time, we'll get there. But ultimately, it's just a different set of tactics this time while trying to learn from what I had... What worked and what didn't last time.
Chase Clymer
No, that's amazing.
And I want to specifically point out that you said nothing about paid acquisition, Facebook, Meta, Google, those channels, which I think is tantamount to you can start a business in 2024 and you don't have to pay to play through those more and more expensive acquisition channels if you can just think of a smart way to get in front of your target audience.
Kevin Lavelle
Yeah. Look, we are doing a very small presence there because we want to test and learn, and there are some valuable learnings especially if you start to get some traction having been on the platform for a while.
But our spending there is not significant. And until there is some real reason to meaningfully grow that, it will be a small percentage of our total business.
And it's interesting for me to think, when I started Mizzen+Main, it was 2012, Facebook made up, I don't know, a microscopic percentage of most ad budgets. And today, I don't know for a lot, but it's a huge percentage for a ton of businesses, Meta overall.
But the reality is in some cases, I think they overplayed their hands. And in others, because of tracking and privacy laws and all these other things. Five years from now, I think we're going to see a dramatic total reduction in these channels, despite the positives that come along with it because it's just not about bombarding people with Facebook and Instagram ads. It's about building a brand that people want to be a part of.
And so we're investing in relationships with influencers and people who can tell our story. We are doing a huge investment in really great content that can be a resource for parents. In a sea of bad information and a lot of frankly blogs that don't want to offend anyone at all, so they give really lukewarm, wishy-washy guidance, we're gonna be a place, and we already are, that cuts through the noise and gives parents that information that they need.
And we think those investments in brand awareness and engagement with our customers and providing value for them will be worth many times over anything that we could get with Meta or Google.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. And I think that's a great place to end it. Talking about cutting through the noise of all the BS. That's exactly what we do here on this podcast.
Kevin, if I am picking up what you're putting down, I want to go check out Harbor. Where should I go?
Kevin Lavelle
Our website is harbor.co. On the socials, you can find us at harborsleep. And I am at kevinslavelle on X. And I'm on LinkedIn as well.
So try and share some of the experiences along the way and if I can be helpful to folks answering questions, I'm always happy to do so if I can.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. We'll try to make sure to link to all those things in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Kevin Lavelle
Thanks, Chase.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Until next time!