We recently connected with Zach Goldstein and have shared our conversation below.

Zach, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you tell us a story about a time you failed?

I don’t know if I’d categorize it as a failure, more so a learning opportunity. In the earlier days of starting Public Rec, finding the right fulfillment partner was incredibly challenging. While I knew some of the better known fulfillment centers for our industry, they wouldn’t take my call since we didn’t have funding and were below their minimums. The alternative was working with partners who didn’t have the right system or labor in place to support direct to consumer apparel fulfillment. Orders would go out late. Inventory would get lost. Returns would be improperly processed. There is a lot of nuance involved in direct to consumer apparel fulfillment that can easily go missed without the right partner.

At one point, I signed up with a fulfillment center that was “big” and reputable, but had never done apparel fulfillment. I quickly learned they weren’t a fit and 3 weeks into the partnership that I spent months vetting, I pulled the plug and relocated our inventory. It was stressful and scary not knowing how the partner was going to react, but necessary for the health of the business.

I learned a lot of the fulfillment nuance the hard way, but moved quickly and stayed close to it until we felt like we had the right partner.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a finance guy turned entrepreneur. I started Public Rec about 8 years ago. We’re a leisure apparel brand based in Chicago. We sell mainly through our website, but have 4 stores in Chicago, New York, Scottsdale, and San Jose. We also sell through Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Saks, StitchFix, and Scheels.

We started with one product, the All Day Every Day Pant, a nicer fitting pair of leisure pants that come in waist and inseam sizing for a better fit. Since then, we’ve come out with more styles that balance comfort and style. Clothes you can wear to work, travel, home, and working out.

We’ve had a lot of success building the brand, and we’re just getting started!

The idea for Public Rec came about because I would often find myself wearing baggy sweatpants and sweatshirts that never really fit or looked good. They were made out of old, grey cotton fabric. And it made me start to think, why hasn’t anyone updated this type of clothing for men in particular. So we set out by starting to upgrade baggy sweatpants, and since then, we’ve built a full assortment of comfortable, stylish, and easy to wear apparel for men and now women too.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We sell on our own website through shopify. The pros are that we can control the entire customer experience. We can share the right information at the right time, and build a branded experience that differentiates us and gives us a reason to exist. Also, we’re then able to maintain the customer relationship as we release new products and bring the customer along on our journey. We feel like we can build a premium brand experience by directing them to our site.

On the flip side, we’ve had to build our credibility over time and market our site and brand to drive traffic and awareness. We don’t have a built-in audience like an Amazon marketplace with pre-existing customers. There are definitely reasons to sell on Amazon, but given the brand we are building, we have opted not to for the time being.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Public Rec received funding in a few different ways when I was starting out. I was trying to avoid going down the route of raising outside investment from institutional partners and bootstrapped as much as possible. First, I had saved up a decent amount of money from my previous jobs to fund the business and pay for things like a website, logo, name trademark and legal setup, and prototypes. I also didn’t take a salary for the first few years, so I was making sure that any money that was coming into the business stayed in and I lived on my savings during that time period.

We launched on Kickstarter to fund our first purchase order . We were fortunate to presell 2,000 pants and raise $180,000 to fund that initial PO. That was a meaningful start for us to generate some demand and a customer base.

After selling on our website for a year, I started reaching out to old coworkers to raise a “friends and family” round of $500,000. That took about a year and many individual investors, but eventually we did it.

After taking on that funding, the rest of our growth has been funded through cash flow and bank loans. We’ve been fortunate to show profitability early on and receive bank financing.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.publicrec.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/publicrec/
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/publicrecapparel