Matthew Tesvich is waging war on smelly feet.

Selling odor-preventing socks he designed at his startup SKUNK SKIN, the 23-year-old graduate of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Terry College of Business recently won Buy It Now!,” a top show on Amazon Prime Video. He pitched the product to judges on Episode 4 before a live audience after a college friend who’d been on “Shark Tank” mentioned him to the producers and he auditioned via a video pitch. Buy It Now is a storefront on Amazon that offers stores on the platform extra visibility.

Tesvich has built his e-commerce business, founded in November 2022 in Athens, Ga., to an expected $350,000 to $400,000 in sales this year and projects that is on pace for $1 million in annual revenue by 2025.

He’s part of a growing trend. If Tesvich and his business partner break $1 million, they’ll earn a spot among the growing number of people starting million-dollar, one-person businesses and partnerships. In the U.S. 53,460 firms with no employees on payroll reached $1-2.5 million in revenue in 2021, according to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2021, the most recent year available. That figure is an all-time high—up nearly 48% since 2012—with businesses in retail, professional services, construction, wholesaling, health care, finance and insurance, and real estate rental and leasing hitting $1 million in the greatest numbers.

Driving the trend are factors such as easy access to low-cost technology, the increasing convenience of finding freelance help and outsourcing through online platforms, the growth of free social media advertising and more recently, free AI tools that help one person businesses achieve more than ever. At the same time, many people are questioning traditional careers, seeking greater financial rewards and flexibility in where they do their work than many jobs offer.

Accidental inspo

Tesvich, who played baseball while attending high school in Cumming, Ga., looked forward to playing at the college level until his arm felt weak one day when pitching. When a doctor ordered an MRI, he learned he had torn his throwing shoulder and injured the other shoulder and an elbow, as well.

Despite that disappointment, Tesvich saw an opportunity to pursue another passion—entrepreneurship—inspired by Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Before reading it, he thought that to become successful, he had to work his way up the corporate ladder like his dad. “Reading it changed my perspective,” he says. “I knew I wanted to get into entrepreneurship. I just didn’t think it would be so early.”

He found his big idea after his roommate brought home an anti-bacterial towel one day—and saw the potential to use the fabric to prevent the pesky problem of foot odor with special socks.

“I had stinky feet growing up,” he says. “My parents always joked about that. I was a joke in the locker room. And so I created an odorless sock out of this towel after doing a year and a half of R&D, and then figured that it wasn’t something only I could use, but also millions of people around the country.”

From idea to product

But Tesvich had a lot of work ahead to realize his dream. To manufacture the socks, he needed a prototype. Tapping the inner discipline he’d built as an athlete, he approached about 100 manufacturers in the area. “I started calling all of the mills in North Carolina,” he says.

Most either ignored him—“they would hang up on me, wouldn’t return my voice mail or wouldn’t return my email,” he recalls–or priced their services out of his reach. So he turned to the makers’ marketplace Alibaba to look for a manufacturer, using Google Translate to talk with plants in China.

“I felt like my back was against the wall,” he recalls. “I told them we’re going to put in a big order with you if your product is as high quality as you say it is, but I need you to send me a free sample.”

Even when he found a manufacturer, getting the prototype right wasn’t as easy as it might sound. Some of the prototype makers offered to use a chemical spray, rather than the anti-bacterial fibers, to add odor-preventing properties to the socks—but he wanted a more natural and durable option. “I would put it in the washing machine, and it wouldn’t be effective,” he recalls.

Tesvich spent about 18 months getting the prototype right during Covid. As the weeks stretched into months, he had to tap his inner reserves to keep going. “Anytime I felt defeated or demotivated, I kept thinking back to Thomas Edison and light bulb,” he says. “He kept saying every time he failed and with every iteration, he was one step closer to success. And I knew that whatever I was working on was going to be easier than inventing the lightbulb.”

Working with his manufacturing partner, Tesvich developed a chemical-free fabric technology to prevent foot odor. “When it’s applied, your skin neutralizes what would have caused bacteria,” he says, referring to the fabric. The company has filed a provisional patent and is seeking a utility patent, he says.

As Tesvich perfected the product, he turned to collegiate athletes at UGA and Clemson University to test it. He knew he was ready to go to market when these testers started saying their teammates wanted a pair, too. At that point, he used about $20,000 he’d saved over the years while working in sales for a golf course for his first production run.

“I was confident that this was going to work, and I knew myself,” he says. “One of my mentors said, ‘You went from being a physical athlete to a mental athlete,’ and I knew I had made that switch to being a mental athlete and had to figure out how to sell and make it work.”

Bootstrapping a business

One challenge Tesvich faced was a lack of capital. He had no outside investors or lenders.

So he got resourceful. While attending UGA, he participated in several business accelerators—programs to nurture budding startups—where he raised about $10,000 in pitch competitions and learned valuable lessons that came in handy in future fundraising. “I learned how to pitch and tell the story,” he says. “Storytelling is so, so, so crucial, whether you’re telling your story to a friend, or you’re trying to sell.”

Fortunately, he liked the rigors of pitching.

“I went from one type of pitching to another, and I think both take extreme mental discipline,” he says. “In baseball, I was the underdog. I hit puberty after everybody else, so I was competing with grown men with full-grown beards. I didn’t throw hard enough, so I had to truly learn how to pitch, keep hitters off balance and change locations, and I got really good at that. It’s the same thing with pitching a business. You have to learn how to engage an audience. How do you have them feel it—and feel like they’re part of the process with you?”

SKUNK SKIN went on to raise a total of about $100,000 in a variety of pitch competitions around the country. Tesvich opted for “non-dilutive” pitch competitions, which do not require the founders to give up equity in exchange for the prize money. Giving away too much equity can put founders at a disadvantage in fundraising later and, if the startup takes off, leave them with little to show for their hard work.

After Tesvich reached out to local reporters with his story and some of the coverage went national, his startup began picking up traction. Selling on Amazon, the company generated about $60,000 in its first year and became cash-flow positive after two weeks, according to Tesvich. “We ended up getting the majority of our sales that Christmas season from that,” he says. It brought in about $170,000 in its second year, he says.

Building a brand from the ground up

Initially, Tesvich branded the socks OX SOX. However, the US Patent and Trademark Office found that the name was too similar to another one so he had to rebrand.

This time around, the startup looked for a name “that’s loud, in-your-face, a name you won’t forget,” he recalls. When he asked the question What is the stinkiest animal you can think of? a skunk came to mind.

Given that the brand’s technology works when applied to the skin—and planned to expand to T-shirts, sports bras, underwear and other products that touch the skin, the company combined the two into Skunk Skin.

Staying close to the customer

To learn how to grow the brand, Tesvich planned what was, in effect, a listening tour—turning to his biggest customers for insights on how to keep improving his product and what aspects to promote.

He discovered that his top customers, who purchased up to nine pairs of socks each, were either mothers of youth athletes or blue-collar workers, such as plumbers and electricians, who have to wear boots all day and may have to take off their footwear when entering customers’ homes. The company has also built a following among amateur athletes involved in pickleball and other sports.

“I flew to see our top 10 customers all around the country and took them out to go get lunch, dinner, or breakfast, and we would sit down for two, three, four hours,” he says. “I asked them questions—What do you like about the socks? What do you hate about the socks? What would you like to see?—and just let them talk. I took extensive notes.”

Spreading the word

Another that helped the brand take off was making the most of partnerships. He teamed up with co-founder Payton Cranford, a market development specialist, in 2023.

He also partnered with TikTok and Instagram influencer Leon Ondieki, who has promoted the socks on social media. The company’s TikTok Shop, connected to an e-commerce store that sits on the Shopify platform, has done so well—in conjunction with SKUNK SKIN’S Amazon store, that to keep up, Tesvich hired a bunch of students from the University of South Florida, all eager to learn about e-commerce and digital marketing. They now fulfill the orders at a storage unit he rented. This was work he initially did himself until an advisor suggested his time was better spent working on strategy. “That way I’m completely hands-off and can focus on growing the business.”

Another big win has been a subscription program. While the industry average for repeat customers is about 7 to 7.5%, he says, SKUNK SKIN is seeing about 12% of customers returning thanks to its subscription plan.

Tapping the power of partnerships

As he has grown the brand, Tesvich has made sure to seek out advisers, such as Bob Pinckney, director of the UGA Entrepreneurship Program. One thing he learned through baseball was the importance of being coachable, he says. “I’m 23 years old, and I feel like every time I’m making a decision, I’m making a blind right turn because I’ve never done this before,” he says. “A lot of this stuff is very new to me. Being able to lean on people who have been there and done that is almost like being able to see in the dark.”

Another key adviser is Brian Fasulo, an executive producer, scriptwriter and founder at the omnichannel marketing agency Blue Water TV in Tampa. Fasulo has been a mentor to Tesvich, who was introduced to him by a mutual friend. Blue Water acquired Amazon Marketplace Top Seller, a digital direct-to-consumer channel, in 2017 and was instrumental in the growth of brands such as SodaStream.

“What makes Matthew so special is that he’s so kind, appreciative, and genuine,” says Fasulo. “That will get you everywhere. For young people willing to admit they don’t know what they don’t know, find someone and ask. It’s everything.”

With the help of his advisers, Tesvich now intends to keep building his brand. He takes inspiration from the customers who have shared stories of how the socks have helped them. “One of our big customers consistently throws out her pickleball shoes every two or three months, because she’s naturally got stinky feet and her entire garage would be filled with the smell of foot odor,” he says. “She started wearing our socks with her shoes, and she’s had them for over a year now, with no issues.”

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