Matt Kelly (Spacegoods) - From Two T-Shirt Sales to a $5M Collapse to a VC-Backed Coffee Brand
On this episode, Spacegoods Founder Matt Kelly joins us to unpack:
- Why he started designing fake brand logos on his computer as a teenager, and how that habit turned into roughly 15 different businesses before Spacegoods
- The neon light business that hit $5-6 million in revenue when he was 23, and why moving its supply chain from China to the UK is what actually sank it
- Why that collapse “ruined his life financially and mentally” for about a year, and how the fallout became the raw, unfiltered catalyst for the first episode of his own podcast, the Midnight Pod
- Why Spacegoods used to be introduced as “the Pink Mushroom brand,” and the repositioning underway right now to strip the word “mushroom” out of the business entirely
- The blunt conversation that handed the CEO title to his MD, David Randall, after Matt realized he’d “created this prison” for himself doing the HR and finance work he hated
- Why he had no idea what a “valuation” even meant when investors first came calling, and how he ended up backed by people behind three successful consumer exits
- How subscription orders went from 15% of the business to 95%, and why one single product still drives 90% of revenue
- The founder rule he broke by launching new SKUs, entering retail, and expanding into Germany all at the same time
- Why Matt says taste matters more for retention than the actual ingredients in his products
- Why Holland & Barrett has become Spacegoods’ single biggest retailer, and the one reason that channel still isn’t enough to scale the business the way Matt wants
- The honest reason Spacegoods still hasn’t launched in the US, despite Matt saying he “loses sleep” over it, and the investor disagreement standing in the way
Learn more about Spacegoods at spacegoods.com
