How upskilling helped The Oodie founder David Fogarty build a business making $180 million in revenue
In this interview with SmartCompany Plus, Fogarty shares how years of self-teaching and upskilling helped him build his empire.
Wearable blanket brand The Oodie came onto the market about three-and-a-half years ago, when South Australian-based entrepreneur David Fogarty was struck with the innovative idea — another to add onto his pre-existing brands, Calming Blankets and Pupnaps.
The Oodie quickly became a household name, in which the piece of clothing (a combination of a blanket and a hoodie) grew to a 300,000 strong follower base on Instagram and even became renown for being the best possible working-from-home attire.
As images of customers wearing The Oodie spread across the internet, it was apparent that what can only be described as an empire was being built. Fast forward to 2021, and Fogarty’s brands — plus more in the works, which he says can’t be disclosed just yet — sit under the umbrella of the Davie Group, a business that recorded $182 million in revenue for the 2020-21 financial year.
Davie Group’s success and popularity doesn’t come from external investors, high-profile owners or leading stockists. Instead, the group runs off a direct-to-consumer model with 79 employees, two offices (one in Adelaide and one in Melbourne), and Fogarty is the sole owner.
In this interview with SmartCompany Plus, Fogarty shares how years of self-teaching and upskilling helped him build his empire.
Key takeaways
Failure is a natural part of business.
Everything is about the product. Get your product market fit before anything else.
Even the most successful people you know are still learning.
YouTube is a great free resource. Make the most of it.
Started from the bottom
Davie Group’s brands mostly exist to solve common health and lifestyle problems, from calming beds for pets with anxiety, to weighted toys designed to assist adults and children with sensory conditions. But before Forgarty tapped into this lifestyle niche, he was trying his luck elsewhere.
“I’ve actually founded a lot of businesses,” Fogarty tells SmartCompany Plus, admitting this was really just “launching things and failing”.
“I launched a Vietnamese roll shop; I launched a singlet business; I tried a seasoning business after growing seasonings in my shed,” he says.
Unfortunately, none of them were really working out.
Fogarty then went through what he describes as “a period of learning”, where he watched a lot of YouTube videos, listened to a lot of podcasts and read a lot of books.
“It was all just standard free methods of learning,” Fogarty says, cementing the notion that there’s no magic trick to success.
However he does say that one of the best things he did was purchase a camera and learn videography, as it allowed him to start consulting small businesses around Adelaide and offering them free work — such as content creation and social media.
It soon progressed to paid work, where Fogarty was “really able to learn on the job”.
“But then I ended up launching Calming Blankets and dropping all of that.”
Still, Fogarty attributes this period of learning and upskilling to his business success, and the skills he developed to launch his first successful brand are now pillars of the entire Davie Group.
The four horsemen
In the last financial year, The Oodie brand itself achieved $155 million in revenue, with a 408% increase in revenue across the board compared to the 2020 financial year.
When asked about The Oodie’s sale success, Fogarty says his four-pronged approach of content, social media, customer service and product development leads the charge. The combo is so strong and universal, in fact, that the same model is applied to all of Davie Group’s brands to produce similar strong sales.
So is there an order to this four-pronged approach — or do all four focuses work together simultaneously? Fogarty says at the start, it’s all about product.
“Don’t invest too much into it, because it might not work,” he laughs, explaining what he would tell someone at the start of their business journey.
“Then you test it for digital marketing without over-capitalising on it.”
Fogarty says once you’ve got the product down-pat, you can figure out the rest out — but if you have a poor product, it’s going to be very hard to get sales and then invest in other areas of the business.
For him, ‘figuring the rest out’ involved becoming heavily involved in content, and specifically making sure his content was designed for Facebook’s paid marketing.
“A lot of platforms have their own kind of ‘ideal ad’ but we really focus on Facebook and Google,” Fogarty says. However, he does note that TikTok and influencer marketing are also growing rapidly, and the brands aren’t shying away from jumping on those trends.
@the_oodieLike this if you relate to @Shak.TV ? ##TheOodie ##Oodie ##OodieSquad ##fyp ##workfromhome♬ original sound – The Oodie
When it comes to the fourth prong, so-to-speak, Fogarty says the brands never skimp on customer service.
“There’s a lot of opportunities that you can take as an e-commerce business or a growing business to cut corners,” he says, like sacrificing communication to increase conversion rates, or reducing the amount of staff to limit the need for multiple channels.
But Davie Group “really never looks at it like that”, Fogarty says.
“We’re always willing to invest in better customer service.”
To measure its customer service success, Fogarty explains that Davie Group surveys its customers frequently, monitors its retention around repeat purchase rates, and acknowledges its online reviews on various sites.
“Put that all together and we’ve acquired lots of customers, we’re going above and beyond [with customer service] and we’re continuing to develop the product for them, which allows that snowball of growth to happen.”
Learn from your competition
While Fogarty does attribute the popularity of The Oodie to such a strong funnel, he still doesn’t shy away from reiterating that it “all comes down to the product”.
When asked what his advice would be for other businesses wanting to become a brand that ‘everyone knows the name of’ he says you can’t just compare yourself to others, and you can’t play copycat.
“Your product or even business economics might not actually work for that digital platform. Low margin products and low margin businesses don’t have the flexibility of high margin products, Fogarty explains.
What you can do is learn what works for others, and test what will work for you by “really understanding your business model and what the ideal growth strategy behind that is”.
Fogarty suggests finding someone else with a similar business model, grabbing a coffee and really learning about their process — rather than simply trying to mimic a large, established brand’s success.
“There’s growth models for all different types of brands out there,” he says. You just have to find one that works for you.
Upskilling never stops
Fogarty says he believes the time he spent learning, teaching himself, and upskilling “is everything”.
“There’s not one successful person that doesn’t still self-teach themselves,” he says.
“I’m still learning more than ever, every single day to be honest.
“[Learning] was the defining moment where it stopped me from failing businesses, and it’s the one thing that keeps you progressing.”
As he looks towards the future — with capital raising and a potential IPO in sight — Fogarty says his current upskill in focus is on “how to be a better CEO” for his team and make sure they have everything they need.
After all, “they’re the reason we’re still growing,” he says.
