This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. All right, you're gonna round out the week catching up with an old friend, Nate check It's co founder and CEO of Rome, based up in Stanford, Connecticut, here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio. Great to see you.
It's great seeing you. It's been too long. Uh. What's funny speaking of Stanford is one of the reasons that you and I got in touch was I was up at Chelsea Pierre's Stamford edition with one of my sons. He was playing lacrosse. I was wandering around Chelsea Piers and you don't have to wander far before you see a roan. Looks like a pop up, but I mean it's there. It's a almost three year pop up at
this point. We we took office space at Chelsea Pierre Stanford three years ago and we said, you know, what would be great would be to put a store here, and they were great, and it's just it's done so incredib doubly well. It's really the first store we ever opened, and we just keep it going as long as we possibly can. Well, internally, I think you're familiar with the Chelsea Pierce here in New York City. I mean, this is a massive complex. You've got so many people going through,
and let's be honest, it's your demo. Yeah. Well parents, parents are going through all the time, and everybody's there to work out there athletically minded, so it's perfect for us. Sorry, how big is the company now? You've taken funding the last couple of years, your private equity backed. Uh, if we were just talking about the athletic apparel, it's definitely a hot market now. Um, we've had incredible growth really
over the last eighteen months. In particular, the company's ground leaps and bounds and we've grown triple digits every single year since inception. Um, we added four retail stores. Uh, you know, we've We've been told that our Hudson Yards store is the second highest sales per square foot retailer there. Yeah,
and I'm sure they do well. But in the apparel world, you know, we've done really really well there and so um, the growth has been phenomenal, but it's been driven primarily by our direct business, you know, through our website, round dot com and then through our retail stores. So let's talk about the direct to consumer business because I think if we think back to the key themes, certainly of twenty nine and I'm guessing going into it's that sort of like D two se blended with a bit of
retail omni channel look at things. What have you learned about the consumer, especially through uh that direct to consumer channel? Well, there's I mean, there's so much to unpack there, but I think the main thing is that businesses that are having a ton of success right now, it's not necessarily the direct to consumer model, although it's a huge part of it. It's the digitally native part that I think is driving a lot of it. The primary transaction is
moving online. You know, you're seeing it every single Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Retail matters for sure, and it's not completely irrelevant. But brands that have a great direct relationship with their customer, which is handled over digital channels, work really really well in this environment, and it can be complimented with a wholesale relationship and appearing in the right places. You know,
we're the number one men's brand for Equinox. Now we're the number one men's brand with Peloton and um and those things. Have mattered for us, but you can't rely on that to be your soul business ever. Considering and opening a women's line. We we get that question a lot um. We you know, we're hyper focused on what we're doing right now, and we think that we can be kind of a unique voice in the market. There
are a tremendous amount of women's brands out there. We if we go into it, we'd only go into it if we thought we could be the appsolute best in the category. You've been at this for about five years now. What's been the biggest surprise so far? I think, gosh, I mean, I think the biggest surprise is just that I still love more than anything, I really love the
product piece. And we are a product driven business, and you know, you hear about these bigger consumer companies that start to I know, we're a technology company, and yeah we do, we have a we have a head of data and analytics now, but we are a product company and we love making the best in class products. And so what have you learned about the product in terms of like what people want? What's really resonated? Because I know, like I wear some of like your commuter pant, you know,
That's exactly what I was gonna talk about. So we started, you know, hyper focused on active what you can wear to the gym, what you can wear to run in, and the line is evolved. We launched a dress shirt this year on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. We cannot keep the shirt and stock we so we we put it up first day of our Black Friday sale.
We started breaking on sizes in the first day. The biggest complaint we had is you can't buy this dress shirt anywhere, and um, we didn't have enough stock to give to any of our wholesalers, so they were upset. So um, I think I think the biggest shock is that our consumer is trusting us to make a button down dress shirt, which five years ago I never would have thought we would be in that business out to
replace the trader rest. We do make some really incredible vest yes, And so what have you learned about the consumer of late? Because I mean, what you're talking what's underneath a lot of what you're talking about, And I think what Shannale is alluding to as well, is this is this notion that fashion has changed. It's changed on Wall Street, it's changed in the professional landscape as well. Where where are we and where are we moving to?
And that's it's a great question. So I mean, if you go back ten fifteen years in the guy's closet, the way that men think is it would all be segmented, bucketed by activity. This is what I can wear to the gym, This is what I can wear to work, This is what I can wear to travel, this is what I can wear at home to what I can wear to hang out with friends. So many of those categories exclude formal for a second. So many of those categories have collapsed into a single category. Now we call
that category performance lifestyle. We were really one of the first in the industry to ever use that term. A lot of people use ath leisure, but I think that's a misnomer for what this is. This is an athletic clothing that's meant to you know that you can wear anywhere else. This is traditional lifestyle silhouettes made with unbelievable performance fabrics. So if you wanted to run a marathon in our commuter pants and people have you could if
you wanted to. Are are the way we developed our dress shirt is our chief product officer took it in the mountains of Croatia and ran thirteen miles in it. So it's performance based fabrics and clothing that can live with you. But we're making them in some of the silhouettes that are kind of the most popular and that guys feel comfortable. So you're an entrepreneur, right, and but you started this company with a full time job. Still didn't Yeah, I did, that's true. At what point did
you decide to break out on your own? I feel like everybody who's listening is sitting there in a full time chaveliche. Well, I also had two kids, which was the which was the bigger challenge, and I had had a startup that I had done before that did not go so well. So the biggest challenge was convincing my wife to you know, support me and get behind it again.
But you know, I think part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur the pros or you know, you're you have all these opportunity the concert you can't turn that voice off inside your head. There's a better way, there's some there's a way of solving this problem. And for me, it didn't feel like a choice. I knew I had to get back to doing something entrepreneurial. Biggest goal for what are you looking ahead too? We are planning on doubling the business again, so we've got big aggressive goals.
It gets harder as the business gets bigger to do that. But um, the team's really excited and lined around it. And is that new lines, new products or it's drivention? What is it? It's driven primarily by a couple of things. Actually, in some ways it will be a more focused and assortment around the things that we know are working really
really well. Um, But it's also about leaning into retail a little bit more aggressively and then harnessing the power of data to better understand our consumer and find more consumers like them. All right, Nate Check, It's always good to catch up with you. Co founder CEO of Rome based up in Stanford, Connecticut. Check them out online at road dot com, or check them out if you're up at Chelsea Pierce like I was, or at Hudson Yards