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**Jeff Sheldon:** E-commerce was just getting started, there was no social media... I think maybe YouTube was around, but I don't think Twitter was launched... Facebook was in its infancy... It was just completely different. You could name the five independent T-shirt brands on one hand. That existed at that time. And ... |
I think timing plays a lot of the key part of why I'm still doing it... Because starting a brand today, starting a T-shirt brand, a lifestyle brand, a design brand - it's hard, man. There's thousands and thousands of people just showing up on Instagram, launching companies and then closing down a couple months later be... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the hardest part? And how long is that list? |
**Jeff Sheldon:** So many, yeah... We could be here for another two hours. For me, the hardest part -- well, two things. Before I had kids, I would say the hardest part was just focus and deciding what I should be working on, and what I should be delegating, what I should say no to, because I have a tendency to just di... |
Some people say it's hard to come up with ideas... I'm more of the opposite. I've got so many ideas, I've gotta figure out "How am I gonna figure out which ones to work on?" But then after having kids, the hardest part is certainly juggling being a business owner and being a dad, and being a business owner and being a ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And I imagine you work from home, right? |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Your studio's at home... |
**Jeff Sheldon:** For now, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For now, right. |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, the kids are in the background, and there's pros and cons to it. I mean, everyone's working from home right now, but I've been doing this for my entire career pretty much... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I'm with you on that front. |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Same. In a lot of ways, we could probably commiserate on stories, because -- let me try this one out then... I call them micro-moments. Some people might think "Gosh, you work from home. That must suck, to go get coffee and get bombarded by your kids." Nope. Love it. Those are my micro-moments. I ge... |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, definitely. I mean, I love the moments that I get to have, and the fact that we eat three meals a day together practically every day, because we're home, and we're cooking... That's why quarantine didn't feel that much different for me. We're just always home, never going out and meeting people ... |
\[12:11\] If I was traveling and never home, I would have missed so many of these little moments with my kids, with them crashing into my office and taking all the stuff out of my cabinets, and dumping it on the floor, and pretending to work... They both say they have to come in and do emails, and they get up on my com... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jeff Sheldon:** So yeah, I love that aspect of it, and then I think there's other times where I can switch out of the business owner hat, the designer hat, and I get to the point where I'm so side-tracked with them that there's this tension of like "Oh, I'd love to just keep playing with them, but I've got limited ho... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you structure your day then? Do you do 9 to 5, or has it got to be more sporadic because you're just naturally more sporadic in needs? |
**Jeff Sheldon:** It's fairly standard, probably anywhere between -- well, they get up super-early, so it could be 7 to 5, it could be 9 to 5, it could be 6 to 4... It kind of just varies, because they're always up at like 5 or 6 AM... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Which is the unfortunate thing... |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Which is not necessarily my favorite thing, because I'm not a morning person. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, nobody likes to get up at 5 or 6 unless they are getting up to work out, or take a run... And even then, it's still a slog. It's tough. |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I think that you've got this aspect - what you're keying on though is while you and I may be on the fortunate side and we get to 1) work from home, and I think with quarantine you have a lot of people doing that, some enjoying it and some not... But we've had this luxury and blessing to be abl... |
What I'm getting at is this -- you hear this, even the word "authenticity", you hear "balance". "You need to balance." I've heard this idea of work/life harmony, versus work/life blending, or work/life balance. How do you try to frame your balance? |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, I think it's an impossible balance. There is no right balance that we're all seeking or striving for, because you're never gonna get to a place where things are perfectly harmonious and you're like "I'm working the exact right number of hours a day, and I feel like I'm with my family the exact n... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right... |
**Jeff Sheldon:** No one's at the zoo in the middle of the week, because we would just go take the kids there. So I think it's more of a give and take and ebb and flow for what it looks like work and life... I'm very grateful and very thankful that my work is something I'm passionate about and I enjoy, so it doesn't ne... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jeff Sheldon:** But yeah, I think that question comes up a lot. We're all seeking this utopian state where we just figure out how to work-life balance everything. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's always changing, right? It's never static, it's always changing to some degree. There's some similarity in the change, but even the change is different and unique... So you can't say (like you said) "It's this way every single day, and my life is like this, and it's boring, and it's the same...... |
\[16:12\] Something that you and I align on when it comes to, I would say, life and something that we've adopted in our business is "Slow and steady wins." Now, we add on "Wins the race", but life is a race of some sort, I don't know... Maybe the race is not necessary, but slow and steady wins nonetheless. For me, that... |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How has slow and steady been something for you? |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, totally... That's been a key differentiator, I think, of how I've built my business and how you build your business. I have never tried to build it to get this rocket ship growth where I can just turn it, get huge, get noticed, flip it, sell it to somebody else and cash out... Because for one, I... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I have to admit I haven't bought Analog yet, or got on the Kickstarter, but I plan to. |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Alright. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm not an early adopter, but I'm an adopter for sure. And you've got like 30 days in a Kickstarter, so no matter what, you're early. So I'm late early... |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...but I do plan. Now, before we go into Analog, I do wanna mention Gather. So you've launched shirts, you've launched new things, you've got other people's products in the Ugmonk store, you've got coffee - different interests; we're both fans of Fellow, I love Fellow brand stuff. You've got a coupl... |
Now, you've launched other things before. Gather, in particular, was one of your most recent larger, singular products, that was sort of tangentially, mostly in the design space, not so much laser-fit into Ugmonk... But you sell things that are useful, to people who care about aesthetics, simplicity, minimalism, essent... |
**Jeff Sheldon:** Yeah, up until 2017 - that's when I launched Gather, and that's the modular desk organizer that's all customizable... That Kickstarter blew up way beyond our biggest expectations. We tried to plan for worst-case scenario, best-case scenario, and it just blew the best-case scenario out of the water. En... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Like, "Jeff, you're rich. You're loaded, Jeff." |
**Jeff Sheldon:** "What are you gonna do with all that money?" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "You're going on vacation now." \[laughs\] |
**Jeff Sheldon:** \[19:51\] But it was a really big learning experience. The product has been really successful, people love it, we're still selling them to this day... And it really just brought a lot of things back full-circle in that learning experience. Doing things at scale, and launching a product, and going big ... |
So after that whole process of going through that, realizing my eyes got big, wanting to go huge with that, and then coming back full-circle to like "I just wanna make more things. I wanna make more products, I have more ideas I wanna put out there... How do I get things done? How do I bring the manufacturing local? Ho... |
We're not gonna try and push this into other retail outlets, we're really trying to make a product, make it here in the U.S, and make it really well, even if our margins aren't as big, and ship it directly to the people by our own team. We're gonna ship out thousands of these. We're not gonna outsource that; we truly w... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a lesson there, the long, hard way. It's interesting that kind of choice though, because Shark Tank has this inertia... Right? Millions of dollars, big success. Even whenever you watch it, they have internal commercials of other entrepreneurs and founders who've come on Shark Tank, and "They... |
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