Chris Wilson & Kerry Sebree

Chris Wilson and Kerry Sebree run Wild Willies, a beard and grooming brand they started after selling the last company they built together.

Wilson and Brad had gotten to know each other through other ventures before the two founders came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast, and Brad opened by volunteering himself as a before and after model. A good part of the episode went to a t shirt going on sale at the Darlington race, which falls on Mother's Day, and which reads Shavings For Pussies. Brad asked for the first one off the line with both their signatures on it.

They met in 2013 on a conference panel about selling online, worked out that they lived close to each other, and then spent two weeks on a sourcing trip in China that Sebree describes as a five star cruise they nearly died on twice. They came out of it as foxhole buddies. The product line now runs well past beard oil. There is a heated beard brush that became the top selling item in the category, derma rollers for men with patchy spots, gummies loaded with biotin for people who will not swallow a pill, and an SPF 30 daily moisturizer that sells because it settles one specific argument at home. The design rule is that a routine has to be two steps, because the third step is a man walking away from it.

Two calls cost them something. The first was killing the marketing that was working. Early on they did what every beard brand did, a good looking guy with his shirt off, and the creative decision was whether he had two women draped on his leg or three. It pulled eyeballs, and twenty minutes later nobody could tell a Wild Willies post from anyone else's. They sat down and had a come to Jesus meeting about who they actually were, and took Americana instead. The second came when Walmart called. They asked the big box veterans whose online they were managing, and got told to expect a 50 store test for a year with margins that would put them out of business. They left dejected and took the meeting anyway. Walmart took three products into 1,900 stores, a holiday promotion sold through 100,000 pieces at 98 percent, and the following January it was five products in 3,600. Later, a private equity firm put walk away money in front of them, and they said no.

Wild Willies has made the Inc. 5000 three years running and landed at number 22. Most of what followed was financial press wanting to talk about the numbers. The part they kept was the people who wrote in asking what to do at a particular stage, because both of them remember wanting somebody to call at that exact moment and having nobody. They own five or six other brands and have turned that into an incubator, which drifted into a mentor program neither of them planned. Around the shop they say two things: good things happen when smart guys get together, and if you do the right thing it always pays off somehow. The other line they keep, from Tom Morton, is fly under the radar.