Greg Taylor (Step One) - Starting with $800 and Couch Surfing to 30M Units Sold and IPO
On this episode, Step One Clothing CEO and Founder Greg Taylor joins us to unpack:
- Starting with $800 to his name and living on a friend's couch, and the moment a billionaire's friend told him his underwear idea had a "0.1% chance" of ever making a dollar
- Why Greg flew to China's Canton Fair with no brand, no samples, and no name, and got laughed out of factory after factory before one agreed to work with him
- The "cup sizes for men" idea that seemed absurd to manufacturers but became the breakthrough behind Step One's anti-chafe design
- How Greg ran quality control on shipping containers from Australia during Covid, without ever setting foot in the factory, by weighing boxes over video call
- Why the "pair for a pair" referral campaign spiraled out of control, with customers destroying their old underwear on camera in increasingly unhinged ways
- What it actually felt like to ring the bell at the Australian Stock Exchange as the sole shareholder, with no outside funding, no co-founders, and no debt, and why the real moment happened a week earlier
- Why Greg compares being a public company to everyone being able to see exactly how much money is in your bank account
- The out-of-the-blue LinkedIn message from John Lewis that turned Step One into a UK retail brand almost overnight
- Why Greg says the single hire that most changed the business wasn't in marketing or ecommerce, but a chief legal officer
- How fatherhood forced Greg to put rigid boundaries around his time, and the "be the dumbest person at the table" philosophy behind how he hires
- Why Greg believes AI is about to drive the biggest shift business has seen in a hundred years
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