Eric Girouard

Ad copy

This is what failure looks like. Most people know BRUNT for our boots because that’s what we launched the company with. What a lot of people don’t know is, a year before we launched BRUNT I started working on our work apparel line. I knew a lot less about apparel than I did boots, which was not a high bar, and made every mistake possible. I tried to do it myself, partnered with the wrong people which forced us to have to charge too much, made some solid designs but didn’t nail the fits so those didn’t matter, and ultimately we failed. As the CEO of the company, you could say I was a failure. It would have been easy for me to say “we tried, let’s just be a killer work boot brand” because at that point our boot business had caught fire. But that didn’t align with the original vision I wrote for BRUNT, literally with a pen to paper. I explicitly wrote that I wanted BRUNT to be the first workwear brand that could one day be worn head to toe by millions of blue collar workers across the country - not just a boot brand, not just an apparel brand, both. I believed we could do it because of the power and authenticity of our brand. So I was left with one choice, I had to start from scratch and rebuild, brick by fck’n brick. This time I hired people that knew way more about making performance workwear than I ever would, we found better partners which enabled us to get our prices right, found better fabrics, made our branding cohesive, and most importantly we worked with dozens of blue collar guys on the job to really understand how our apparel should fit them perfectly. . It’s been 5 years since I originally started working on BRUNT’s apparel in the garage of my house. Today, BRUNT is now consistently selling more pairs of pants every day than we do boots. I couldn’t be more proud to be standing here in front our own apparel fixture that holds our pants, t-shirts, hoodies(backside) and hats, at a retail partner of ours Shoeteria. Most people celebrate the outcome, but they don’t see the grit that goes into straight up willing something to happen, especially after you fail. So again, this is a picture of what failure looks like…when you don’t give up. https://bruntworkwear.com/collections/apparel?sort=MANUAL&reverse=false

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