![]() "We do a lot of those types of things to go above and beyond for our guys," Hency said.Ĭhubbies' American-made shorts come in a number of patterns: there are the company's patriotic Americans shorts, as well as shorts in any number of patterns and colors. The Chubbies team, in return, sent him karate lessons. Kyle Hency, who heads up the business development and finance teams at Chubbies, says that one of Chubbies' high-school customers wrote to the company to let them know that he had his pair of Chubbies stolen from his locker at school by bullies. "These items are outrageous, but our customer knows they're going to find them nowhere else," he says.Ĭhubbies also tries to innovate on the customer experience side of the company too. For example, Castillo says the company is working on an entire outerwear collection, including items like a rain-jacket short, a puffer short, and a sherpa short. Some of the company's products also border on the absurd. We take items of clothing that people are familiar with and turn them into shorts."Ĭhubbies has expanded beyond just shorts to shirts with its Nutter shirt line. ![]() "So we made a tear-away short that guys could rip away and there was a Speedo underneath. "When we were growing up, a big thing was tear-away basketball pants," he says. Rainer Castillo, who leads the merchandising, product design, and development teams for Chubbies, says the company always wants to innovate on shorts, and one way the it does that is through riffs on nostalgic items. "When a guy throws them on, the stress and rigors of the work week can be put on hold for a bit." "We're constantly building this brand around the weekend and the feeling you get around Friday at 5 p.m.," Montgomery says. They're also experimenting with producing long-sleeve shirts and heavier-weight warmer items to let Chubbies customers wear shorts year-round. ![]() They've launched swim trunks and even a Hawaiian-style T-shirt, called the Nutter. As the years have gone on, the company has expanded beyond their signature shorts, which have a 5.5-inch inseam. Since then, Chubbies has had a steady growth curve, Montgomery says. Two years later, in April 2014, the company raised a $4.4 million round from Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer, Rothenberg Ventures, Trunk Club's Brian Spaly, IDG Ventures USA, and other investors. In October 2012, Chubbies raised an undisclosed amount of cash from Rothenberg Ventures. So far, Chubbies has taken very little venture capital funding. If you walk around any big college campus when it's nice out, you're bound to see at least a few guys rocking Chubbies shorts. Today, Chubbies has an ambassadors program, and has plucked more than a hundred college guys to help it continue to spread the word on college campuses. "Invariably, the guys who responded to us were the fraternity presidents and heads of these groups saying 'Hey, I know a guy who's interested, and it happens to be me,' and immediately they were on board," Montgomery says. To make sure they started spring and summer sales strong, the founders sent emails to fraternity presidents and the heads of other social groups on college campuses, letting them know about the shorts. ![]() They started gearing up for March, which would be the company's first big inflection point. Montgomery and his cofounders launched their company in September, just before winter. "We saw complete strangers who we hadn't told about the brand purchasing from us." Recruiting college fraternity brothers "From day one we saw there was a very talkable, very shareable notion around our brand," Montgomery says. From the beginning, the founders were inundated, selling out of their early merchandise immediately. And in September 2011, Chubbies launched its website. When they got home from the beach, the founders built out a website and made a couple hundred more pairs of shorts. "It was such an extension of our personalities to start this company." "We all had the mindset of wanting to run something ourselves and wanting to do something that was a little more meaningful and a little more fun," Montgomery says. So in 2011, a few years after graduating, they decided they'd had enough of their own jobs - they wanted to start their own company together, and they wanted to sell the short-shorts they loved wearing themselves. "If you had a really cool pair of shorts, people would talk about it," Chubbies cofounder Tom Montgomery tells Business Insider. But for Chubbies cofounders Kyle Hency, Rainer Castillo, Preston Rutherford, and Tom Montgomery, it was the most natural thing in the world to start a company based around retro-inspired shorts.Īfter graduating from Stanford, where they all met, the four guys pursued jobs in different fields ranging from traditional finance to the startup world to corporate retail.īack in college, the four guys would wear retro short-shorts they found in thrift stores and had handed down from their dads and uncles.
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