Title Nine: Missy Park (October 2021)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/f2513b1e5f92fba1

Hey everyone, it's Guy here. So this week we're bringing you a really great episode from the archive. It's with Missy Park, who came on the show to tell a story of Title Nine, the women's sports apparel brand. The company had a pretty rocky launch in the late nineteen eighties, but
As you'll hear.
A last minute addition to its mail order catalog?
changed everything. This episode first ran back in October of 2021, and I hope you enjoy it.
So you get these catalogs.
fifteen or twenty thousand catalogs. And and h how did you do how many orders did you get from those
So we put those catalogs and then I'm just
Waiting.
For the phone to ring. Yeah.
And
Waiting.
And
Waiting.

Okay. And I think we got a whopping
Maybe fifteen orders.
Maybe seven of'em.
Or from someone that I did not know.
Wow, that's for mailing out.
Over 20,000 catalogs. That's the hit rate. Super sad.

Super sad.
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements.
They built.
I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Missy Park's frustration with bad fitting sports gear.
led her to launch Title IX.
One of the very first American sportswear brands, exclusively.
For women.
About a year ago, I was riding my bike near the railroad tracks in Berkeley, California.
when I passed a clothing store with an unusual name.
The store was called Title Nine, and
I thought it might have something to do with a law, but
A law I couldn't remember right at that moment.
So a few days later.
I looked it up.
Title Nine, I was reminded, was a US civil rights law passed in nineteen seventy two.
It prohibited discrimination based on sex in any federally funded school or educational program.
And among the things the law did was to open up high school and college sports.

Colleges and universities that received federal dollars.
now had to provide the same opportunities for women to participate in sports as they did for men.
In that year, Nineteen Seventy Two.
Less than twenty percent of all the athletes on the US Olympic team?
Or women.
But by 2016?
Nearly fifty five percent of the team was female.
And much of this is because of Title Nine.
The same year Title IX was required to take effect in schools, nineteen seventy six,
Missy Park joined her high school basketball team in Greenville, South Carolina.
She'd go on to play Division I basketball at Yale.
but after years of wearing bad fitting sports apparel as a student athlete,
Missy decided to solve her own problem.
And in nineteen eighty nine.
long before anyone would hear the names Lululemon or Athleta,
Missy Park founded Title Nine.
one of the first brands to make sports apparel.
For women.
Now, today, many of those other brands are multi-billion dollar companies, either backed by venture capital or publicly traded.
But Title IX is comparatively small.
This year, it will do roughly a hundred million dollars in revenue.
And unlike its competitors.
Title IX is owned only by one person.
Missy Park.
She bootstrapped the brand from day one.
and built it very, very slowly.
If the company grew by five or even ten percent a year,
That was considered a victory.
And that slow growth has allowed the company to build a sustainable and supportive culture.
Missy Park grew up in the sixties and seventies in Greenville, South Carolina.
in the foothills of the smoky mountains.
Her dad was a World War II veteran and became kind of an overnight entrepreneur when he bought the small manufacturing company that he once worked for.
And as for her mom?
My mom, on the other hand.
Was a stay at home mom, and we always accuse her of being part of a
Secret feminist cell in Greenville, South Carolina, in the sixties.
Because she was
What she thought women ought to be paid for birthing babies. Yeah.
Ta I would say that was pretty ahead of her time. My mom and dad had
separate checking accounts. I remember my mom
fighting to get her credit card in her own name rather than in Mrs. Russell Hunter Park. So my mom loved being a full time homemaker, but she thought it was a position worth paying for.
And this was really I mean this was
People don't
remember, I mean the seventies was I mean, this is the era of ERA, equal rights amendment and of
Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug, you know, with her hats, right? There w there there was
Huge.
leaps a and strides that happened in the seventies. And from your description of your mom, she was
Either secretly harboring those feelings or maybe
Not so secretly harbouring them.
Yeah, well, you know, my parents were so unusual.
Like my mom was in charge of the girls and and our allowances. And we had budgets and we had to reconcile at the end of the every month and we had to give
Money to savings and to offerings, and each year we would take on other responsibilities.
It was her expectation that we would go up to be
financially independent women capable of running our own
finances in our own life.
Yeah.
And um
As a little girl, or maybe even a a young teen
Did you know for sure you were not gonna end up living in Greenville, South Carolina?
N no, I I would say I'm the kind of person that maybe everybody else
is for sure about it and no one's more surprised than me.
You know, I
I really loved growing up in Grainville.
It was at the time a great place for me. It's a small place. I could ride my bike everywhere.
I was in that first generation of girls and women that were able to grow up with Title Nine um being in effect.
All the way through high school and all the way through college.
And of course Tellowan just got kinda opened up.
uh sports for for women and girls at at the time.
Um and and you got to
Play lots of bang.
Yes, I got to play every sport. You know I I mean I
Coming up when I did.
Especially as a girl, you just played all the sports. Um and if you were willing to play and you were willing to try

You were pretty good because there weren't as many women pouring into the sports and fields as there are now. So yes, I we will say, guy, I think that I was a big fish in a very small pond. That's what I'll say. Well I'm I'm curious because here you are.
You were in a small southern
town in the seventies.
Being a debutante is a
was, and to some extent still is, but less less so, was a
kind of a cultural phenomenon in the south. Was there like were you a debutant, for example?
Oh my gosh, I hate your guts right now. So let's just go on the record right now, I hate your guts.
Um
Yes, I was a debutant. Now you and me and all of your listeners know that.
And in my home office here you could see my little rebellion against that. There's a picture of me at what, about nineteen in a w a white gown with long gloves that actually
won't go up above my upper arm and biceps, sadly. Um and I'm spinning a basketball and I have my basketball sneakers on. So you were forced or kind of pressured to to to be a Debbie T.
You know, here's the danger things like that.
Yeah, I'm just a kid. This is where I grow up. Sure. And
Now I look back on it.
And and I see it differently.
But it was one of those things, you know, I love my mom and dad and
Had
very quickly like
There's some battles
That if you can give in
And it's not much skin off my back. Yeah.
Then I should just do it because it's gonna make my mom so happy. But it is the source of a lot of amusement amongst my family and close friends, more because it's
So different.
From who I am. Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah.
And
How would you describe yourself as
A teenager were you
Did you get along with everybody? Were you um
A pleaser.
No, no definitely not a pleaser. I would say
I'm pretty loud. I
speak before I think. Yeah. I have strong opinions that can change quickly.
I think it was an okay student.
I think I got along well with most folks.
Yeah.
I mean you must have been
Better than an okay student,'cause you went to Yale.
You attended Yale.
Um Yeah, yeah. Well I will also tell you this that
I we joke about it in my family, but my parents single greatest failing is that they have a daughter that went to Yale.
Because

There's an awful lot of good schools um in the south. Sure.
And there are.
Did I think my parents really wanted me?
Um to go to one of those great southern schools.
All right, you're nineteen eighty, I think. About nineteen eighty. You get to New Haven. Yep.
You played
Several sports there, lacrosse, tennis.
um and basketball. You are an athlete. That is your w was that your identity, your self identity as an athlete? Totally. Yeah. You get to Yale, you're Missy Park
The basketball player.
Yes, the southern basketball player when I get to Yale. Yeah. And and just to be clear, there were
Um, there were women's sports, right? At at Yale. They had had been for a long time.
Yeah. But the difference when you got there was title nine.
which had been was passed in in nineteen seventy two is in full effect, right?
And and so what did that mean when you were when you got to Yale in nineteen eighty as a student athlete?
Well, I think a lot with my generation in particular, guy, you know, yes, title nine was passed.
Yes, the seventies had happened, but
We were still in that place of everything that we gain.
is a loss.
For
the guys on the other side of it. That was a perspective that you as a woman athlete are taking
away resources from me
as a male athlete.
Exactly.
And in some ways, yes, that was true. It's like all of a sudden the men's basketball team doesn't have
The pick of all of the basketball.
Practice times.
They have to share them with the women's team.
Do those four years feel like
There were battles?
Yeah.
Well, I think it also it goes to sort of the genesis of
Title Man the Company is, you know, me and my teammates are
getting uniforms that are hand me down men's uniforms. I remember my my buddy Regina Sullivan, she wore I think like a size six and a half women's shoe, but they don't make women's shoes. So she had to go to like
The little kids department at Macy's and buy some little boys sneakers.
So the sense of having to create
the traditions around a team.
What it means to get success.
All at the same time fighting for
the good practice times, marketing support in the community. Those were battles being fought on two fronts for sure. And as I said, the genesis of Title IX, I mean I remember my buddies and I were all like, ah, when we graduate from college, we're gonna go get some experience.
And then we're gonna start the women's version of Nike. Of course, they all went and got
really good jobs you know investment banking, Proctor Gamble, Microsoft. And I was the only one that actually ended up not getting one of those good jobs, so I had to figure out something else to do.
Alright, you graduate.
um in in around eighty four. Mm-hmm. And from what I gather you wanted you decided that you would go into into coaching. That y maybe you would like explore

Professional coach of some sort.
Right.
I was lucky enough to be offered a job at our art travel.
At Harvard.
And then I found it very difficult to coach against my
Former teammates.
and a job opened up at Yale the following year.
But I think I realize at that point.
That
Coaching a team was never gonna be the same thing as playing on a team.
Yeah, I I there's a book by David Epstein called The Sports Gene and and he makes an analogy between
a player and a coach, and the analogy is
Just because you're a bird.
It doesn't mean you can be an ornithologist.
And I think that's right.
Well yes, correct.
And I think that's right.
All right, so you realize that that that
college or basketball co coaching is not the right fit for you.
And it's the mid eighties.
You're from Greenville, South Carolina. You're living in New England.
What got you out to the West Coast? What was it?
I knew I didn't want to live in the south. Okay.
I knew I didn't want to be cold.
Fair enough.
I knew I didn't have any money.
My brother lived in California.
So
I
Packed up my I had a Toyota pickup truck. I packed up all of my worldly belongings.
And my parents had given me a tent.
for graduation from college because
They knew exactly what I would want. A tent. That's a tent, right? Like who? What southern parent I mean, like who would do that? Right? But they knew I wanted a tent, so I
In those days you had to seam seal the tent to seal up all the little needle holes so it wouldn't leak and
I'm uh unrolling the tent and I'm taking off the hang tag and I look at it and it says
The North Face
Nan na Harrison Street.
Berkeley, California. Wow.
So
I moved in with my brother.
Um, I'd also led some bike trips for kids, so I just really loved cycling and
It's like, okay, I either want to work for a bike company or I want to work for the North Face. Yeah. So
I started just walking into bike shops, asking them, you know, about bike companies that were in California and how I might get a job and
One of those
bike shops I ran into a guy by the name of Michael Phillips.
who happened to be a sales rep for some old bike brand.
And he's like
You looking for a job?
It's like, Well, why don't you come?
Ride with me in my van for a day while I call on customers I can teach you about the business. Well
Well, my brother had different ideas. Right. He was like, This guy's creepy. Don't do it. Exactly. Um
While that was going on, Michael, and then at the same time I was kinda trying to
Find my way into the North Face and
I had heard at the time that there was another young woman about my age that was leading up the equipment division in the North Face, a woman by the name of Sally McCoy, who was from Charlotte, North Carolina and had gone to Dartmouth.
and was a little bit older than I was, so I was like, okay, she's the person I need to talk to.
Yeah.
But I can't get anybody right, y you know, you're not emailing people. Like maybe you write'em a letter. I don't know what you do. Well what I do is I find out nine nine nine Harrison Street and I
Walk into the reception area and
I'm like ah I I'd like to see Sally McCoy.
Like, well do you have an appointment?
No, I don't but
Well she's busy.
I'm like, Okay, well I'll just wait.

So
I wait.
And I wait.
And I'm there.
Pretty much
All day. Yeah.
And finally this guy comes down the stairs that
jump into the front lobby and
He's like, you know, you've been here a long time.
Um, is there anybody helping you? And like, Well no, I really want to talk to this woman, Sally McCoy, but
She seems to be very busy.
Um, he goes, Well, well, maybe I can help you.
This guy's name was Mark Erickson, and he was I think the vice president of product.
Um, I was super disappointed to be talking to him, but
He ended up getting my foot in the door at the north face and
I ended up meeting Sally McCoy and
A really
interesting group of
Businesswomen.
And that was really my
First exposure.
to a real job
I mean it it's interesting because you wanted to work for that company. You were a student athlete and you were really passionate.
And one of your principles as a as a leader is
hire for passion. You can train people to do the business stuff. Don't worry about skills. Or training. Like hire for passion, which I think is a thousand percent right. Like people have to believe
In the mission.
of what you're doing. That's more important than anything else. And then you can
Train them.
Well, I think that was it. I uh they had this thing that needed doing and
It was very entrepreneurial.
you just had such a broad range of things that you could do. I mean they strongly believed in the
It's easier to be forgiven than to obtain permission rule. Yeah.
So it it's a great I and right, I I honestly know I think about it.
It was such a good so the first job I got, strangely enough, was putting together a retail point of sale
catalog for them. So it's gonna be a uh
Like a magazine that's gonna sit in their retail stores.
I mien I don't have any skills
I mean like literally zero skills and
There I am. I'm
Working with a grafic designer, I'm working with photographers.
I'm going on photo shoots. I wrote copy.
for uh about product that I didn't
really know anything about.
Fortunately there was a lot of supervision. I really wasn't doing all that, but I was
sort of the person kind of making sure everything
held together in the end. Yeah. And and by the way, I think while you were at
North Face, you m you met someone who worked there who would eventually become
your your life partner, your wife, right?
That's right. Actually how I met her
Is
Sally had recommended that all of the managers Sally McCoy, the w original woman I want to talk to, had recommended that all the managers take a look and see if they had any job openings. And Dana, uh my wife, happened to have one
So I actually interviewed with Dana for the job that she had.
Yeah.
I really, really wanted, even though I was
Colossally unsuited for it.
Um
So I did not get the job, but more importantly, I I got the girl.
Yeah. And the truth of the matter is that my buddy Michael Phillips, who was not an axe murderer, but ended up being a very good man who mentored me. He actually
Hooked me up with Fisher Mountain Bikes and I applied for a job there.
I didn't get the job at Fisher Mountain Bikes, but I
My parents raised me right and they told me to make sure to write thank you notes.
And the person they did hire ended up not working out. And they called me and said, Hey, the job's yours if you want it.
So I went
To work at Fisher.
Which was
One of the first, if not the first mountain bike company. Yeah, I think it was. Gary Fisher, right? Yeah. I mean tha these are all pioneers of like outdoor gear, of mountain biking. And I had to work with them and I'm like, seventy six. Yeah.
And I think good job.
Experience on the young. That's what I g my short version is that
So
I went
To work at Fisher and
Inside sales, and that was me calling on bike shops.
But suffice it to say, most bike shop guys were not used to having a woman calling them on the phone. So you must have really stood out. I mean, here we are talking in twenty twenty one.
You've been in California since
nineteen eighty five and
I mean your accent
sticks out, right? I mean but you really rarely run into people in Berkeley.
with a South Carolina accent.
No, I know. Yeah, I think I I stuck out. For good or ill. Um and
And and you were
Uh from what I
Rhett, I think your brother lived across the bay.
South of the airport in Foster City. W eventually, presumably you moved to to Berkeley because you were working for
Yes, I had a job with a paycheck. So I could afford to have uh a room in a house.
W when you were a student athlete, right?
You
Imagine
We're already thinking about the fact that
The clothing made for women athletes was not
Well thought out.
While you were working in North Base
you were fr from what I I've read, like you were thinking about this like
problem that there were there was no good athletic gear for women.
Yeah, you know, guy, it's it's funny'cause here's the thing I think about a lot. I mean uh
I'm assuming you know about
The narrative fallacy, right?
Like this idea that
We end up at a certain place and then we make up this really nice story that proceeds logically from point A to point Z. Yeah.
It's just
It's just a lie, so I I I I want to tell all this to you.
But it's gonna be completely misleading that like
Oh, and then I went to Yo where I found ill fitting uniforms and and then I went to the North Face and was frustrated but No, I was just
Well I guess I think
I used to think
To use an old school analogy, I used to think
I was the person operating the flippers on the pinball machine.
I'm the ball. Right.
You know, I mean I think that's
So I'm having all of these experiences. You were bouncing around. Right. I'm just bouncing around. Five hundred points. Free ball. Yay. Okay. I'm gonna play. I'm gonna keep playing.
Um
But so so I I I wanna make sure like that part of it is clear. This was I I mean, I am
I am not foresighted enough.
to have planned what happened.
And just to be clear, almost nobody who's been on the show is. There's no I I can't think of a single story where somebody said
You know, I was eighteen, I had this vision, now I'm fifty five and and you know
It it it kind of unfolds over time and it's it's like being the ball in the pinball machine. Yes.
Exactly.
Um, and I think that's it, you know, so I can look back and I can see the thread. Like I can look back on my
Time as a kid, you know, I'm like
eight or nine or ten years old, and at the time there was
Basically one sports magazine. Yeah. Sports illustrated.
And I would go through every single one of them and try and find pictures of women athletes.
And I would
painstakingly cut them out and put them on a poster board and have it up in my room.
So
You could say like it was already in me then. I wasn't thinking like, and therefore I am going to start um a women's athletic apparel company. Right. But the seeds were there early trying to create
A vision of what I could be.
What was women's sportswear?
in in the eighties. I mean Nike
had been making s stuff, but what did that mean?
Oh, it was kind of aerobics, right? I mean Jane Fonda. It's kind of that kind of stuff. I mean I think about
You know, for me, you when you play college sports, you get all your gear given to you, ill fitting or not. It's given to you. Um, it's given to you, they wash it for you. If it wears out, you get a new one. It's not your concern.
Then I graduate from college and all of a sudden I'm having to buy
My own gear.
And there's nowhere
To find
Anything that's
built or designed
specifically women. Th you know, there's no Lululemons. There's no there's there's nothing. It literally there is nothing.
And really, I mean, if you think about it, it's it's just math, right? Um, Title Nine was passed in seventy two. So I I was in that first generation. There was no
Market.
What what was it that
I mean, you're twenty seven.
And
You decide
At that age.

Were you frustrated working in
For a bigger company, did you
Were you just one of these people who had to be your own
Boss.
What do you remember about that time in your life that led you to to that decision?
I would say probably that, you know, I think about the North Face
Now I had great jobs.
But I'm twenty six.
And I'm like
Boy.
These guys are kinda idiots. If they can run these businesses, then anybody can do it.
You know,'cause I'm twenty six twenty six and I know everything. Of course you do. You know. So
It was
Frustration. They wouldn't
do everything that I wanted them to do. They probably aren't even paying any attention to me. I'm like some entry level person. They don't
You know, they're busy. They've actually got important decisions to make. Where I'm down here seeing
How?
Idiotic everything is.
So I'm so confident, right? I remember that feeling. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it my favorite part of it is just like
And now, guy
I'm the idiot.
But you know what? Here's the thing, because we're both we're both talking um we're both you know older and we're talking about remembering that feeling. And if you are listening and you are 26.
It's okay to think that I'm an idiot or Missy's an idiot because that's the fuel you need.
to do something stupid enough to start a business that will ultimately be a good decision.
Right. I mean, those are very like
People say, Oh, how did you do that when you were twenty six?
And I have to say, it's the only time to do it.
Yeah.
And and this is nineteen eighty nine, I think, when you decide to start the business. And
What what what did you tell yourself? Did you say, you know, I'm gonna start a
A women's apparel company
'Cause it's always been on my mind like what
What what how did you describe it to people? And it says, So what are you gonna do now, Missy?
Well, first I did zero market research. My market research was me and my friends, which let's just be very clear is a very small group of people. You just said hey, would you use
This
Yeah.
Hey, you need shorts that fit women, don't you? Yeah, me too. Um, but I had enough
To say, okay, there's not enough people in Berkeley, California.
To support a retail store just
Sha
women athletes. Yeah.
So I need to do something that's more national, so I can find all the women who need workout and fitness gear.
So I did sort of what is the precursor to the internet is that was a mail order catalog.
Did you have I mean?
Let's just
Back up for a sec. I mean
W what kind of money did you have?
to start an apparel company. Presumably you had some savings from your job. Exactly. I had like thirty thousand bucks and I can tell you sort of cash, yeah.
Yeah, okay. But what people were telling me is, you know, this time, right? This is
Uh nineteen eighty nine.
And I'm talking to as many people as I
could possibly talk to, I'm calling anybody that'll talk to me on the phone. Asking them what?
Uh hey, I've decided I want to start a mail order catalog. You have started one. And all of them
Told me.
If you're gonna do this, you need at least a half a million dollars. To start a mail order catalog business. Cause this was eighty nine, this is how you marketed. You sent out
Or or not millions. Guy. Or not millions. Or not, okay. So people said you need you need at least a half a million bucks to make this work.
Yep. That's intimidating. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, Well I I I don't have a half a million dollars. I have I have thirty thousand dollars.
So I call up my dad.
That's it.
So Dad, I'm super excited.
Ca I've got an idea for a business.
Yeah.
The best part about it is
That no one else
is doing it.
Yeah. And he's quiet for a second.
And he said.
There might be a good reason for that, Missy.

When we come back in just a moment.
How Missy struggles for months and then years to get Title IX going.
and how she discovers the one item of clothing that will give the business a much needed boost.
Stay with us, I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to How I Built This.
Hey, welcome back to how I built this.
I'm Guy Roz.
So
It's nineteen eighty nine and Missy has decided to quit her job.
And put
$30,000 of her own money into launching a mail order catalog for women's sportswear.
And that
Thirty thousand dollars?
Is pretty much all she has to spend on everything.
Including the clothes.
But the good news is if there are all these
Big manufacturers and small manufacturers.
who are starting to think about the coming women's market.
Now the retail stores are not necessarily buying the stuff because obviously they're worried about the customer coming in.
Today.
But these manufacturers have to think about tomorrow. Um so
Lots of manufacturers were starting to what they used to call shrink it and pink it, and I think they still call it that. They take their men's stuff and
They do it over in pink and call it a day and make it smaller.
So but the good news about that is there were a a lot of also small brands of women my age or a little bit older.
Who were also starting to design and manufacture.
Women's athletic apparel.
manufacture your your own. Right. You can afford it. You're gonna find
manufacturers buy their their stuff and then
put it in the ca have a catalog and that that would be it. And
Eventually.
I'm assuming you you got connected to probably smaller manufacturers.
Exactly. Okay. So yes, I could we could have gone into manufacturing and that probably would have cost me a half a million dollars, uh more. I uh an unlimited amount of money.
But what I realized pretty quickly is there were enough of these small brands, you know.

Pearl Zumi
moving comfort was like the first women's running brand. So I started calling on folks like that and
You know, mostly what I did is
Well one, again, I don't ha I'm operating out of a garage in the house that I have a room in. You're living in like a group house with other sort of other people. I'm living in a group house
And I wanted the cheapest rent, so I got the room that was actually the garage.
Nice.
So yeah, nice. So I have to go outside to go to the bathroom to go come back in the house to go to the bathro yeah, whatever. And
I'm trying to
get these manufacturers to talk to me
But they're not gonna talk to me if I'm
meeting them in my garage. So I would go down to my brother's
office in Foster City, I can't remember where he was
And I would meet people there in his office, so it'd be like
Official, right? Pre We Work, you could prevent it. Starbucks, really. Exactly. It was pre everything. So how am I gonna fake this? Yeah. Um and and then finally one of them actually's like
So what what's going on here?
And it ended up being the
The sales rep for moving comfort.
And so then I just said, Well, I'm I'm starting and I really I don't have an office. This is my brother's office. And she was very kind to me.
She said, Well look, I'm gonna I've met you, I can see you're real
Why don't we just come? I'll just come and show you the line. I'll show it to you.
in your living room. And moving comfort was one of the first businesses that
I mean they became our bank. And I mean, they they were a manufacturer, moving comfort.
Yep, a brand like Nike.
they were like, Okay, we're willing to work with you. Yeah. And at this point I know it's mainly you by yourself, right, actually running the company, but I mean did you have any help or or support?
Yes.
I just was surrounded by a whole bunch of people.
who were willing and
fired up about this idea. Who were they?
My teammates, right? I was playing Ultimate Frisbee. My teammates were my early models.
And then one of my teammates happened to be
A woman who was uh an editor at a women's sports and fitness magazine. So she became my first copy editor. She had a friend who was a graphic designer, so she designed the catalog for free. I had another friend who I met playing basketball.
And she designed because you had to have a corporate package. I don't know why, but that's what you needed. A corporate package was like
A logo, uh letterhead, an envelope. All these things you have to do. Now, I think. Yeah. You had to have that. So my friend Lisa did it all and threw in a T shirt for ninety dollars. Okay, that sounds like a good price. And the name? The name which is a great name, was it
Had you thought of that then? Yeah.
That was the thing that was kind of hanging me up.
is I couldn't come up with a name. I come I've gone through like four or five and
Somebody had all of'em a you know, I was like, Oh, it'll be cheetah sports because the female cheetah is whatever. Yeah, faster. And then I remember I was up on telegraph
Maybe walking around Mo's books or that other bookstore that was right next to it.
And uh
I was just looking through books and
I picked up this book and it was writing about the history of women's sports in America and
I
Started reading it.
Oh.
Title Nine

That's what I'll name my and that was it. You know, no one wanted that name.
Um
unsurprisingly. So I named it Title Nine after
That piece of legislation that
Ensure that I got to play sports.
All the way through high school and college.
And you were the idea was you were gonna sell like
Like running shorts and and tights and things like that.
Yeah, well
Ремер вас ми.

So very narrow group of people, but it was me I had uh
We had tights, we had running shorts, we had cycling shorts. We really didn't have.
much in the way of tops because you got all your tops for free.
at the races and the tournaments if you went to. Oh okay. I was not a merchant. I mean it it's it's interesting because today, you know Tad Line is is
very well known for sports prize.
Uh women.
Like you weren't thinking, oh we're gonna sell sports bras.
Well
So I put together this assortment of stuff, and it's a tiny little flyer of stuff and
I
really do not know anything about the apparel industry. I I knew what I was able to glean at the North Face. But I'm just putting to assembling a group of merchandise that I can get people to sell to me on credit. And then at the last minute
I got in touch with a sales rep who was representing two women
who had invented
I didn't know this at the time, but it invented the first sports bra and
And
I'm super flat chested. We're gonna say
Double A on a good day. So
That's an afterthought for me, but this guy was a guy because most of the sales reps at that time were guys. Right.
Um he he says, You know, I really think you oughta
And by the way, were sports bras widely used in in nineteen eighty nine? No. No. So what did women do who were a women athletes do?
For support. They'd wear two and three bras, guy. Oh wow.
So anyway, as almost an afterthought, we bought some sports bras and we'd done all the shooting, it was all in color.
And so I just had time to take some real quick
Black and white.
Photos.
And we put'em on what was then called the order form. This is in the catalogue.
Yeah, in in the catalog and then there's an order form in there. Yeah. And so I put'em in there
And
I think we sent out.
Like.
Fifteen thousand
catalogs. And and by the way, I'm looking at a photo some photos from that first catalog and
Um it is not a slick
uh production at all. It is um I mean it's cool'cause all the all the models are um are athl women athletes and they're not like glamour shots or ac uh some action shots, but they're very authentic and
These were like these were your friends.
Yeah.
Yep. Mostly that I played Ultimate Frisbee with or
went road riding or mountain biking with, or that I worked with at the North Face.
So you've got the catalog up and running and
I'm assuming you had to order a bunch of stuff with your
the s the small amount of capital you had and just
Hold it.
In your
In your whereage. In where you lived. In your room.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And our suppliers were our bankers, so I would
Order stuff, let's say
in November, and then I would say I'd like for you to ship it to me.
in May and then I would like to
Pay you in September.
Wow.
I mean it's a little bit of a a Ponzies game that you hope. You're just hoping some All right, so you get these catalogs.
fifteen or twenty thousand catalogs. And and h how did you do? How many orders did you get from those cat um
Those catalogs and then I'm just
Waiting.
For the phone to ring. Yeah.
And
Waiting.
And
Waiting.
Okay. And I think we got a whopping maybe fifteen orders.
Maybe seven of'em were from someone that I did not know. Wow. That's for mailing out.
Over twenty thousand catalogs.
Super sexy. That's crazy. Super sex. But but that makes statistical sense. You gotta right? You're gonna your hit rate is gonna be it did not make statistical it didn't make any sense to me. You're correct. But one thing that I did notice in this
That all of the people that I didn't know.
And many of the ones I did know.
Put a sports bra on their order.
And so
While I may not have been
The quickest study
You don't have to tell me twice. And I realized like
Wow.
Sports bras, that is probably now I know the most essential piece of sports equipment for the average American woman.
Yeah.
Th this is nineteen eighty nine, the year you start, um
I I know that the first four years it was like
Really rough. And but uh but that first year.
Wha not only did you have you're dealing with like cash flow issues
But that was the year the the earthquake, the big Bay Area earthquake.
I remember, you know, I remember exactly
Because

I was so relieved there was an earthquake because we were going through the financials.
Not to make light of the earthquake at all, but I just s I mean, it just is how much the finances weighed on me. Because you were watching
Not only your
bank account dwindle, but you owe people money. And just kinda you know, the ways you think about so
We did the first catalogue, it went poorly.
saw a little opportunity
for sports bras, so I was gonna make the most of that that I could. But I was also even then trying to figure out like, okay, how do I kinda get out of this and just go back and get a job again? I can't just quit after one, but
I'll do a second one and it'll be super, super cheap. It'll just be like a folded up piece of paper. Yeah. It's like super cheap. So I did a super cheap folded up piece of paper. And
It did a little better, even though it was a little worse.
You were from from what I read.
You would
Order a bunch of stuff.
And then you would sell it and then some money would come in.
And then you would use all that money to send out to order more stuff and then send out
the stuff to people who ordered it. So you were constantly out of cash. Like every
Right. Yep.
It was like s cash in and then out. No cash. Constantly.
constantly out of cash and I remember a like
Two times a year I would be
And even now I sort of have
sort of stress reactions around these two times of year. It's a time when we're building up a lot of inventory. Yeah. Um, and you know, there are these two times when
You have invested a lot of money in marketing, you've invested a lot of money in inventory and sales.
Uh
Going to come, you hope they're going to come.
But you don't know if they are and it
Kinda two times a year. I just
I'd just be done. I'll just like You want to quit.
Yeah.
At one point in those in the first
I think maybe four years, you were like two hundred thousand dollars in debt.
Yes.
That was a lot of duh.
But you were thinking, all right.
What
What could I do for a living?
Right.
What can I do for a living where clearly I am self unemployable? And how did you deal with that stress? Did you
Did you get depressed? Did you
Did you get anxious? Did you lash out?
Well, Dana actually had a real job and a good job, so
her paycheck was supporting both of us. Oh wow um so uh by this time, you know, I I wasn't taking any money of the business. She was she was
Only your girlfriend at the time and and supporting you.
Yeah, well, you know, that that's a matter of laws or a matter of practice, right?
Because we we actually couldn't be officially married until believe it or not, something like
Two thousand twelve or fifteen, I mean, which is crazy. Um
So what would I do in terms of the stress relief
And Dana reminds me of this all the time because it's
You you never get out of that. I mean, we're always in it for the rest of building a business. You have those times and
My solution then was to call my dad because he was
Whenever I talked with him, he always just had like
the one good piece of advice that I needed to hold on to. Um, I remember very early on when I was ready to hang it up.
And I called him and I was just like I Dad, I just
It's just it's not happening. I I can't
learn fast enough.
I just don't think I can do it. And then he he would just go to the business and he's like, Well, tell me about your customers.
Tell me about how much it costs you to get a new customer now.
How much did it cost you to get a customer?
This time last year.
Hm.
And he would just find the successes. Well
So I think
that's the thing is those little lifelines that
That someone can offer you. Yeah. Um, it's not like, Oh, and then we got a vest investor and I got a million dollars and everything was fine. Yeah. It's like no, there were a lot of little lifelines all along the road and continue to be.
I read and I don't know how
much of a big deal this was, but I I did see a reference to
A flood that destroyed all the inventory.

Was that in your what when you were in the garage? In the garage, yeah. Mm-hmm.
W how did a flood get in there?

I
What happened was
We had installed some racks in the garage.
And by we I mean Dana.

And
She's handy, but not super handy.
And
They probably weren't installed in the most professional manner.
So
They came crashing down.
In the middle of the night, but we're not in the garage.
We're asleep and we don't hear and then there's a
Brainstorm.
And you know, like
Berkeley garages, there's
Just the order swooped up in there and
I think it was about that point where I decided it was time for us to
get real office space. I'm like, this is ridiculous. We need to stop doing this. Yeah. It's probably shortly after that that we moved into
Again another converted warehouse, just uh it was next to an ice cream manufacturer, also a small
Entrepreneurial led, and every morning it would smell like chocolate when I came in. So everything that we shipped out started smelling like chocolate.
Alright, so those those first four years
There were moments where you really were like
very seriously thinking that this was not gonna work out.
But I guess around nineteen ninety three.
You guys turned a profit for the first time. This is four years in.
Probably not a huge profit, but a profit nonetheless. Yes.
And
What was that the result of? Was it w was it you were just getting
sort of better at managing things and more experienced. Did you hire people? What what happened?
Well
You know, what I would say is
It's just like
staying in the game, right? I mean, that's just the best way I can describe it. It's just for me, I'm just like I'm gonna just stay in the game here. I'm gonna kinda keep hitting little singles. And I think it's it kinda goes to basically a business philosophy is just sort of fail faster to succeed sooner. And
You know, if you're gonna make big mistakes, those take a long time. Little mistakes don't take a very long time. You can make a lot of little mistakes really fast.
So I think it was just because we didn't have anybody
Really until we were over forty million dollars. We didn't have anybody who had
Retail experience apparel experience, marketing experience, men we had
Everybody
was just
True believers
Product users that are really interested in women's outdoor gear and athletic apparel. That's it. I think that the story of Title Nine is a story of hitting singles.
Which is actually
a great strategy, right? And and a strategy
That you can really only do
Without
having outside investors.
Right. You can't do that if you've got people who expect
a 10x return in five to ten years.
You you you can't just hit singles
because no one's gonna be that patient.
I mean we've had apparel brands on the show that have raised
venture money and and you know.
Did that even
On your radar? Was that ever even anything you
You considered or or thought about, or was it just not even
Something that you thought.
Was it
An option.
I think you always ha it always has to stay on your radar because you never know what's gonna happen, right? But it's never a real option. I I I think the time I was most aware of
how impossible it would be to go out and get investors is uh we had a president that the first president we had
who came in and Estelle de Musie, she did a great job running the business. She
She'd done everything. She bought businesses, sold businesses, and she came in and ran the business for a while.
And I said, you know, somebody contacted me from one of the big investment banks, I can't remember who now and
I told us would you like
to talk with this guy. Would you like us to talk to this guy? She's like, sure, let's do it. Let's do it.
So the guy comes and I'm meeting with him first. I really literally cannot remember his name anymore, but he comes into the office.
And I'm talking to him.
And guy literally
The longer I talk.
The more nervous he is getting.
As if he has walked into some sort of alternate universe that does not speak his language. What were you saying?
Just about how we you know, people wanna riding by the door on scooters, so there's
Chaos, we play a lot of games at work, so there's a lot of stuff going on around. So he's walked into a foreign country. You know, maybe I'm talking about every year we do something called the Title I Olympics and we divide up into teams and we play sports together for a day, and people, you know, get hurt.
hopefully not badly, but you know, we we play hard. And that just didn't work in his investment banker mind, right?
And then Estelle came in.
And she sits down.
And she starts talking to him.
And that guy was so
Visibly relieved.
And just talking to her, I just was
I don't even know the language to talk. Yeah.
So to answer your question, do we consider it yes.
Um
Would it have to be someone who is very different from me to really get that deal done? Yes.
But
By the same token, what I would say is if you hit singles
Which we do and we're good at.
You're not gonna hit a grand slam.
Yeah.
Just you need to make your peace with that.
And I think I would take the staying in the game of singles to
Striking out a whole bunch and every once in a while getting a grand slam.
W once you became profitable.
Right.
And again it wasn't like
Buckets of money, but probably profitable enough where you could
Yeah.
When were you able to actually hire
People
And pay them a salary.
Every time someone asks me that I'm taken back to my own
decisions around that and how hard it was. You know, first we just had people who would help us out and volunteer.
And then I remember, and this is probably one of the conflicts, and maybe something about being a female entrepreneur. I really wanted to go home to South Carolina for Christmas.
And
The phones were gonna ring and people were gonna wanna place orders and return product and
I wanted to be in South Carolina and I couldn't be because of the phones. And this was before call forwarding and all the stuff that you could do now.
So I had a teammate and I said hey
And she lived in California. I was like, would you be up for
mind in the store while I go home for Christmas and
She said sure.
And I said, You know what, if it works out, then maybe you can keep doing some work.
And so that was really how I hired my first actual paid employee as Renee Thomas Jacobs. We are still good friends. She ended up being
our first president um but it felt like a
big step. Like there's
Who can I afford to do this?
Should I just be working harder myself?

When we come back in just a moment.
Title IX keeps hitting singles until Missy makes some miscalculations.

in a slump.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to how I built this.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz.
It's the mid-1990s, and Title IX has only just become profitable.
And Missy is still running the company on a shoestring.
And still looking for ways?
to get new customers.
The way we did it is the old fashioned way. You know, we went to a lot of races and, you know, tournaments and we would sell stuff like our excess inventory. We would sell there and we would build up our mailing list by doing that.
And then
The hard work of building
A customer file, you know, selling people
A sports bra, selling a woman a sports bra she can't do without, and you earn her trust on that, and she comes back to you.
For all of her
athletic apparel needs. And and and to this day I would say
That we are much better.
at keeping our customers than we are at acquiring new ones. That's just always b and I think that's again that sort of bootstrappy hitting singles, you know, our customers know
That we get them, that we're product users and product testers.
So that once they find us.
They stay with us for a long time, but it's not like we're going out there.
And we're gonna do a hundred million dollar marketing campaign that's gonna net us a whole bunch more new customers all at once. That's just never been the model.
W was that ever I me was it always designed to be a direct'cause it w this was a direct to consumer business from the beginning. Was it was that the model from the beginning? Did you ever think, you know, maybe we'll do a collaboration with
you know, Macy's or something.
You know, I think we just weren't
sophisticated I wasn't sophisticated enough to think like that. I was just
I want to control
everything that I can. I know it's a delusion, but I still want to control it, right?
I mean certainly people proposed them, but I just couldn't
Again, remember, we're mostly selling other people's brands at this point. Yeah but with Title Nine on it or was was No, it's just with uh Whatever brand it was. Whatever brand it was. Okay. And and I guess eventually like like eight years in or something, you you finally opened up a store, like a a brick and mortar store
uh in Berkeley
Yep.
What's interesting to me is today we're looking at the
Women's apparel.
market. And it's enormous, right? Like you really
are the pioneer. You really created this category with Title Nine. I mean this is long before Lululemon or Athleta or
outdoor voices, any of those existed.
at that point, eight years in,
Did people get it or was it still a curiosity?
You know what the most incredible statistic about that first store was? The amazing thing about that store.
was that
Over fifty percent of the customers that came to that store had
Came from more than two hours away.
Wow. Who who were they were they
Were they um uh uh high school athletes, college athletes, um non um Just women that wanna work out. What age rangers were you like, I would say probably
We think of our customers sort of like that.
thirty to fifty age range. And it was pretty much that then as well. You know, they're not
They have some disposable income because
You know, at that point
direct or e com wasn't as big a thing. There very few people were willing to buy something sight unseen. Yeah.
But what we found mostly was
People
We're coming from all over the country. Yeah.
They were flying to SFO
And they would come to our store. So we were really looking for that.
woman who is in the workforce now and is coming into her own either in aerobic studios or, you know, in the outdoors and needs to find the gear that works for her. Yeah.
The second piece though I will say
is our sports bra business.
ended up there was a small piece of that that ended up being
A big part.
of our business to high school and college athletes even now we have a lot of
mother daughter first trips to buy sports bras um happened at our retail stores.
I I wonder, you know, um
One of the it's it's interesting'cause w I I've heard you describe a low point.
in your career.
As a leader.

maternity leave. Because obviously you were
uh incredibly overjoyed at the birth of your first child. Um you were thirty seven. You
You had a very
difficult, long labor.
And you
Uh you just decided that you were the CEO and the
Founder and the you didn't want to
take a long leave. That you you were back in the office pretty soon after the birth of your daughter.
Yeah.
And I think you know, that's it's a little bit of a hero complex there, right?
you know, the business was doing well. I I was still running the business at that point, but the business was doing well enough. But you know, I mean that's the thing about running a business, you get so much positive reinforcement, especially if you're
the founder, owner, entrepreneur, you've done every job, you know all the answers.
And then I suppose there's something about like wow, I know mom, I don't know any answers. I think I'd rather go back to the place where I know answers. I mean, if you know, you want me to get into
sort of the psychological underpinnings of that.
choice.
You know, I have this picture
Uh it's like a Polaroid of
Gilly, so she comes to the office with me when she was a newborn.
Yeah, yeah, really young and she's all like swaddled and she's on one of those spinny chairs, like spinny roly chairs. And she's just lying there all swaveled up, like right on the chair, and there's no one around.

I'm like
Huh.
But I think I needed to have that and realized like wow that's really
That's really screwed up. I I I gotta do better.
But then I think now um when people talk about work life balance, I think
You know, there's really no such thing as balance.
If you want to do something really great, whether that's be a great mom.
Um or be a great entrepreneur or a great business person.
You're really gonna have to
Dig in
and have a lot of imbalance for a while.
But it always has to flip back.
We're gonna ride there's gonna be a teeter totter. Yeah. Sometimes it's gonna be, I am really digging in on work, and sometimes it's gonna be I am really digging in on home.
And then for those ordinary days, hopefully I get home in time for dinner every day.
I think around two thousand you started to
design and manufacture your own stuff. Um how how how involved were were you in
In the designs.
I mean what I would say about us is
Mostly what we are
And I think you have to be if you're gonna be owner operated.
We are very opportunistic. So the very first thing we ended up manufacturing ourselves was a sports bra.
And it was because I found a sports bra
that someone else was selling
And
It was kind of a passion project for her. She was maybe a yoga teacher, and
And she couldn't find a sports bra she liked, so
She made this one and ended up being a top selling sports bra for us for many, many years. But
At a certain point she decided she was more interested in fitness instruction, understandably, than in making
sports bras. So she said hey.
I wanna get out of this business. Would you like
to buy.
the rights and designs for this we called it the frog bra.
And
I said sure.
Um, and then she coached us up on
on how to get into the manufacturing business.
Basically in in in the two thousands there was an absolute explosion

Apparel brands. Lulu Lemon.
Athleta
Now there's outdoor voices. Nike and and Adidas are making this stuff. Um
We had Chip Wilson on the show. We we had Tyler Haney of Outdoor Voice on the sho on the show before a few years ago.
You started this category. You were the
Lonely voice in the wilderness.
Saying hey
There is a market for women's athletic wear
But
These
Other brands.
Which started after you.

Bigger very fast.
Yes, I'm not sure.
How did you
What did you think about that? I mean, w did you feel like you were under pressure to like
compete and to grow faster and to
I don't know, was it frustrating to not
get the recognition that that maybe
Ye you felt
You guys deserved.
So kinda in the nicest way possible what you're saying is why'd you let all those uh late players come in and squash you like a bug? I'm not saying that. No. No, but it's it's spot on. It's spot on. Um you know
So I played basketball in college, and I have to tell you, I never played better basketball than when I was having to compete for a spot.
Yeah.
So I mean I think that having more folks in the field makes helps us all raise our game. Um at the same time I'd say we're
In some ways we're competing on the same game, but in other ways
We're not. Um to be really honest, if if Title I were a publicly traded company
Someone should fire me right now.
I mean
That that's just the facts of it. They should fire me because
The fact is the sole purpose of a publicly traded company or a private equity backed company is to maximize shareholder value in purely financial terms.
And
Plain and simple, I haven't done that.
But I would say that at Title Nine
I have, I think we all have.
Always measured that.
This idea value creation.
much more broadly. And I think m my philosophy, and and I think it's all of our philosophy now, can probably be summed up with one of my favorite sayings, uh not all things that count can be counted.
Yeah. I mean you built a business that
Didn't it was bootstrapped is bootstrapped. You never
brought in outside investors, so you didn't have to
Make decisions that
That
You know, they wanted you to make.
But there's a trade off, right? You don't you don't explode, you don't go on the New York Stock Exchange, you don't
You're not
A billionaire.
Yeah, I mean I think it
You know, when I think about that guy, I think about how this choice that we made and that we remake every day,
i is informed by our business practices. And it's everything from the suppliers we choose to
Who we choose to hire, I mean, probably at in the most important way is
that we have chosen up and coming female executives rather than some
Plug and play C level.
Actually, I have to say one of the things I'm still very proud of is that we
grew the business from probably zero to about fifty million.
with not one person that knew anything about retail or apparel
Or business at all. I mean, it's just like pure passion about women, um, and the transformative power of sports.
And you know, we have this pitch vest that we do twice a year for up and coming women run brands.
I mean I am filled up by seeing these women come in and
grow their businesses. We share resources and and sometimes even finances with these kinds of businesses and and and we're all stronger and better for it. So
It's just a different game.
You um
We've been quoted as saying
That's not true.
Around twenty fourteen, the company had climbed out of a pretty bad
pretty s significant downturn. And I'm assuming that that was probably connected to the recession.
But you said that
s it was solely self inflicted and I wonder
I mean
You know.
Maybe some
maybe some personnel decisions or or strategic decisions.
Led to
um some rough years.
Yes, very rough.
You know I was a kid, my I
Something bad happened to somebody and
a self inflicted wound and I'd t talk to my mom about it, I'd say
Well, it was their own fault. And my mom would say, Well, those are the worst kind.
I mean, and I would say that I have a a lifetime of the worst kind of self inflicted wounds. Um
Some of the biggest mistakes are people mistakes. Um, and mostly they are my own failures and leadership that
negatively impacted. Um
Team members or the whole team.
And twenty fourteen fifteen, while it had its share of people mistakes, I think it was really a failure on
On my part to recognize how quickly we needed to shift.
From a print and bricks and mortar model to a digital model. To like social media marketing and things like influencers and things like that. Exactly. All of that. And it's you know, I mean it's one of those things where, you know, if a company's been around a long time, it it has a legacy.
Yeah.
You know, and that's a great thing, but it's also
a challenging thing.
I couldn't figure out how to rebuild the organization around digital.
And I think I set the team up for maybe the only time in the history of the company where.
We were not all playing off the same sheet of music. There were folks who were very committed to the print model.
You were still a catalogue, primarily a catalogue.
And you can't you can't be today.
No, it's just too late. No, we i it's just it's not happening. Uh don't get me wrong, print is an awesome secret weapon to have. Yeah. They're they're a part of your marketing mix, but in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen.
Yikes. I mean, maybe they were
Eighty percent.
Yeah, marking mix. Now when you consider our digital, you consider our retail.
Only
Thirty percent of the marketing mix. Yeah. So a dramatic change in six years.
But I remember talking to Dana at one point and I was like, You know, I think
I think we're gonna have to take out a a mortgage on the house and I just need you to tell me that
That you're
Willing to go back to work.
Like the fortunes of the business had had kind of reversed in in a sense. Yeah.
Brutal.
So so revenue, sales figures, everything was was declining.
Yep.
and inventory. Way too much inventory. And of course that's gonna create stress for everybody.
Yeah.
But in those moments
I mean
We have
Mm.
Good.
people.
And I I wish I could have been the coach.
that they needed me to be.
And I I I think I'm I'm getting better at it. I would say that the progress is slow, but I think
You know, the lessons that I have to learn now are
the lessons of
leadership more than they are entrepreneurship.
Yeah.
I guess the those sort of that that
I know it's a dark days, it sounds too dramatic, but the
Kind of the downturn.
led you to eventually to to bring on a new
President of the company.
Johnny Lynn a a man.
And you m had for the most part.
women executives. Um was hiring Johnny um
Did you have pause, did anybody have paused and say, Wait, we're a women's apparel company?
Is this the right fit?
Oh, hell yeah. There was a hell of a lot of pause. Yeah. Yeah, man. Thank you for being gentle, but hell yeah.

Um
You know, sometimes the right woman for the job is a man.
Right. Um, and I think that with Johnny Lynn, he was
just what I I feel like every time we have had a president leaning the business, they have been exactly what we needed at the time they came in. Yeah. We need a diversity of ideas about how to run this business. And
Johnny is going to bring that to us, and he is
such a good leader and I felt confident knowing that
I wasn't gonna be leading the company on a daily basis that the next person we needed
To lead was someone who could build a great executive team.
Yeah. Um so they could lead long past when I'm here.

Um
You are a retail business.
I think you have
Fourteen or fifteen stores. Yeah.
And um
You
Can I come out of this?
Rough period and you're back to
You know?
Uh I think you hit a hit a hundred million dollars and then Covid hits.
Which
Was
Absolutely devastating.
Certainly initially.
For retail.
Um you had to close all your stores. I think
I think
Store sales account for like twenty percent of your total business and that was it. Zero percent.
And uh
That's a lot of money.
I I I read that you guys had six
weeks of cash in the bank in twenty twenty.
So
Sales drop like a rock. We're in the middle of what should have been our busiest season.
we should have done about
ten million dollars in sales and we lost
Five million dollars of sales in the last two weeks of March alone.
Well.
We had
Six weeks of cash on hand.
And then
Sales start to come back.
Maybe in
August or September.
А в кор
We didn't recover the year. We ended up in negative.
Territory.
But I would say we made up a lot of ground on it.
Now we've
probably worked our way up to that eighty five percent ecom and fifteen percent retail.
But a bigger number overall.
I mean, Missy, you've been at this for
thirty plus years it's been
I know incredibly

I mean at some point and and I'm sure you've been approached in the past, but at some point
There will be
A moment where somebody
You know, says hey we wanna
More by this.
And you'll be in a position to decide whether to do that.
Mm.
Um when I mean
What do you think? I mean, at some point do you think you would
You would entertain that?
Well
Guy, you are asking me the question
That the accountants and the lawyers have been asking me since what day one. Right. What is the exit strategy? Right. Which you don't have to answer, because it's your company. No, I think it's I I think I'm coming more to what the exit strategy is, as I I'm you know, I couldn't have answered it
It's important. It's absolutely incumbent upon me to be able to answer that question. If I want Title IX to outlast this generation of leaders, I need to be able to answer that question. Um, and the thing that I know is that my goal is to get it in the hand of the next generation.
of female owner operators.
I do not need a liquidity event because of the way we have grown it.
At this point, we have zero debt.
We have zero outside investors.
So it is a good spot.
for someone to come in and be able to earn seat at the ownership table. And that is my hope is that
Ед сам понектен до фифтін єс.
I'll be able to pass title nine on to the next group of owner operators.
Who I hope will do it.
A whole heck of a lot.
Better than I have.
So I am not
thinking actively about
An exit strategy, I am thinking actively about leadership succession.
Yeah, fair enough.

Um
Missy, could you ever have imagined when you started this in the garage in in in eighty nine as a
twenty six, twenty seven year old.
That
Thirty plus years on.
It would look something like this, was that
Could you envision that?
Well
I I wanna say no and
I wanna say maybe a little bit yes in only the sort of frivolous way that a
twenty year old might like
We need to start the women's version of Nike.
You know, and then once I got around to it.
No.
I I don't think I ever could have envisioned
What
The work has become
And the people, right, that I've gotten to work with.
I'm not sure I really had expectations, to be honest. I was like, this is gonna be a fun adventure.
And I think that's
Really, when I think about business, it's the great game of business. Yeah. You know, we're not curing cancer, guy. I mean
So it can it can be fun. There can be times when it is hard and you take your losses, but
It's a great game and it's been a great adventure. So I I hope I have a
Few more adventures left in me.
How much do you tribute?
your success to
to to the work you put in, the really hard work you put in and and how much
It has to do with luck. I mean you had some lucky breaks early on and I mean
course meeting Dana and and and like I
Who helped you kinda like
learn about the bike business and then and then North Face and
meeting the right people at the right time, but also
Obviously.
There was a a grind there too. So how much of
Of those things to you.
Would you attribute to the
success of the business.
Yeah, right. It's percentages. It's not binary. It's not all luck or
all hard work. It's it's percentages. And I think
You know, if you want to talk about the luckiest things that probably had
sort of the
absolutely necessary parts of it. I had to be a young woman.
growing up in the seventies and eighties, not in the forties and fifties. That's luck.
I probably had to grow up in a family.
That was
Encouraging me to be an entrepreneur, even though that might not be something young women in the South did at the time.
That's luck.
I had to grow up
And not be battling
Abject poverty.
Yeah. That's luck.
So when you look at all those very lucky things and then you add on to it all of the things, the happenstance meetings and the people that offered me a hand up, I mean, I'd say
It's ninety percent luck.
But then what I would say is the part that I can control.
Is the ten percent.
Yeah. That's work.
And so it may only be 10%, but I'm gonna work as hard as I can to control that ten percent.
That's Missy Park, founder and CEO of Title IX.
When we first recorded this episode in 2021, the company had just written the biggest check in its history.
$1 million to the US women's national soccer team, so they could pay their players more money and get them a little closer to what the male soccer players make.
And this wasn't for a fancy sponsorship deal or anything like that. It was just a
Straight up gift.
a straight pass through to the players we're not asking I don't want a I said like I don't want to have a beer with the US women's national soccer team. I
Honestly, this is. I'm sure they would buy you a beer, though. They might buy me a beer. I d I do have a Budweiser beer glass with Megan Rapino on it. I think that'll do. So it's kinda like I'm having a beer with her.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter at guyroz.com or on Substack.
This episode was produced by JC Howard with music composed by Ramteen Ara Blue.
It was edited by Niva Grant with research help from Claire Murashima. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Massini, Elaine Coates, Imon Maani, John Isabella, Katherine Cypher, Carrie Thompson, and Sam Paulson.
I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to how I built this.