But First!

Today’s newsletter is (unsurprisingly) presented by Holderness and Bourne.

A company can be good with two excellent founders, but it can’t be great unless it has terrific products. Holderness and Bourne combines all of that and produces my favorite golf shirt and layers of any apparel company.

A personal favorite right now is the Lawson pullover (which we also have in our pro shop and which I am literally wearing as I type this).

OK, onto the Q&A.

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[Jason here] While working on this collage I wondered “Are there two sharper heads of hair in the golf industry?” Alex and John have the kind of hair that you see and say “I’ll buy whatever you’re selling” because it’s sure to be just fine tuned. I might have too much time to think while I’m making these illustrations.

Q&A: Alex Holderness, John Bourne

Kyle Porter: The Holderness and Bourne origin story is well-circulated by now. But I'm curious if you guys remember the first time one of you pitched the idea to the other, where you were at and what the reaction was whenever that went down.

Alex Holderness: It was definitely after a round of golf when we were both living and working in New York City and playing golf courses such as Mariners Point on the weekend. We would end up back in the city. I honestly couldn't recall which of us told the other one to shut up and stop complaining about golf shirts and, “Let's go see if we can do something about it.” But knowing John, it was probably him, more of a solutions-oriented guy than a complainer. I'll go ahead and give John credit for it because somebody said, “Well, why wouldn't we just try to go figure this out then, man? If you hate the collar so much, let's go make a better one.”

John Bourne: “I think it's right that it was very much a shared desire to make a better mousetrap, so to speak. After a round of golf, go to Old Town bar off Union Square in Manhattan, have a few drinks, complain about our jobs, complain about the state of golf shop apparel. Finally, like Alex said, who knows who said what, but we looked at each other and said, “F this, let's go do something about it.” A version of that did happen.

We had this idea about how a better-fitting, classically-styled golf shirt with a structured collar — like the ones we were wearing Monday through Friday — would be really neat. But also this notion that we didn't love our jobs, we weren't fulfilled. We knew that we weren't giving 110% of ourselves to the thing we were spending so much time doing.

The last thing is … there was that entrepreneurial instinct. We also didn't like the cultures that we were working in. We felt like, “Wouldn't it be cool to build a company that created not just the product of the golf apparel, but the product of the place that we, and eventually maybe a bunch of other people, get to go work together and pursue common goals with common culture? Wouldn't that be neat?”

The urgency came from the fact that felt like neither of us had kids. We were dating the woman we would marry. We had this closing window of time to go and full send, let's give it a whirl. Five years later, might not have been able to do it. Five years before, it might have been a different idea with a little bit less urgency.

Timing's everything.

Out in the Wild

KP: From there, do you remember the first time you experienced someone out in the wild wearing your product or talking about it or overhearing somebody and thinking like, “Wow, we made that thing that other people are enjoying?”

Bourne: I have one that may not have been the very first, but it's the one that's coming to mind. Winged Foot was one of the first few golf shops that we got into.

It's a long, crazy story about how all this happened. But we went back maybe a year after the first order had been in the shop. We were invited to have a drink in the bar after a round of golf with the guy who was hosting us. Somebody walked into the bar wearing one of the shirts that prior season with the Winged Foot logo on it. I just remember being like, “That's really cool.”

Then our host called him over and told him about it. Then that guy who was wearing the shirt proceeded to just go on about how much he loved the fit and the collar and just repeating back without us having had any marketing or anything else, all of the reasons why this thing was good.

I mean, it still is a thrill. It's in the airport now, and you might see it from across the terminal and just like, “All right, that is really something, man. Yeah. Wow.”

“I’m Still Not Sure”

KP: In conjunction with that, do you remember the moment where you're like, “Hey, this is going to work as a business?”

Holderness: “I think it was around that same time where we got the brand into Winged Foot and Somerset Hills and Yale and a few other really good golf shops and just hoped for the best. We had no idea what success looked like at that point. Within about a month, all of them, like literally every shop that we stock — which was a half dozen or so, mostly in the Northeast — was calling us back saying, “Hey, we're out. We need you guys to send some other styles. What else do you make?”

The answer at the time was, “We don't have anything else.” This was it. This was this small little assortment that we were hoping would do well enough to then make some additional investment. That was the moment where we looked at each other and said, “All right, well, this is pretty good.“ We've heard from some mentors we have now in the industry that this is actually really good and not normal.

Bourne: My other answer to that question is that I'm still not sure. I think there has to be a humility and discipline to proving yourself every day. We say all the time around here, you have to earn your right to exist in any industry … every single day because it can go [away] like that. I hope it's working, but I'm still not convinced. I don't think either of us wake up in the morning with some sense that we're done, we did it. No way.

When It’s Crazy at Work

KP: When things do get crazy at work or something goes badly or something falls through or whatever, as partners and founders in running the business, what do you go back to just to remind yourselves like, “Hey, it's going to be okay. This is what we're doing.”

Holderness: That's a great question. Thankfully, it doesn't happen very often. But anytime there is stress or a big fire we have to fight, we go back to our five cultural tenets, which we wrote down. We have a sheet of paper that people here in the company know about.

And anything, no matter what it is can get resolved favorably if we deploy that culture in the moment and keep it in mind. And that's not just me and John, that's everybody in the room. That's everybody in the company that has to uphold those ideals.

Bourne: I think a lot of times, bad stuff and challenges have made us stronger in the past. We can look to some past examples of where things that felt pretty catastrophic … with the right attitude, with the right culture, with the right people, they should all be opportunities to improve, get stronger, get better.

Toughest Part of Apparel

KP: Did you find it harder to build the apparel part of the company or the business and culture part of the company?

Holderness: We've never been short of inspiration and idea flow on the apparel side, but it is hard in many cases to bring those products to life. Shirts are hard, but a hybrid jacket is exponentially harder. The awesome products that you see in pro shops or stores anywhere, whether it's H&B or some other brand, I no longer take for granted that they just happened … because the path to awesome in a physical product like a golf pants or a shirt or anything is no accident.

Actually designing, sourcing, producing that product is incredibly complicated and challenging. I don't know that I'd say it's more challenging than running the rest of the business, but it's certainly not as straightforward as I thought it might be when I was just on the customer side 15 years ago buying things in stores.

Bourne: I would say they're related because the way that you hire excellent people who can make excellent things, which is not an act of magic, it's an act of discipline and hard work. [To] make them over over time, the consistency, color, all excellent over time, is by having good culture and doing all of the team things. It's a bit of a cop-out answer, but they're not different.

Balanced Imbalance

KP: As the guys that founded this and have been there since the beginning, how difficult has it been to not conflate your personal lives with your professional lives?

Bourne: I think anything you're doing that you're putting 110% into is going to create an imbalance on anything else. This is a trite thing that I've said before, but I don't think it's balanced. It's just the seesaw average position is in balance, but it's never in balance.

It's always up or down on one side or the other and moving in one direction or the other, constantly reacting, overreacting to the imbalance.

I feel like I've been able to devote more time to family, which is important to me. I think what we've realized is we're running a marathon and not a sprint. To run that marathon well, you have to sustain yourself with the love and stability of a strong family life, a strong partnership. What Alex and I have with each other is very special to me.

Holderness: The tough part is putting our names on it and now having kids. When we started the business and decided to put our names on all these millions of things out in the world, we didn't have children who had those names also.

Whether it's with the kids or our wives or anything, no one else asked for this.

In fact, I'm not even sure we asked for this. I'm not sure we realized what we're doing other than that when it came to naming the brand, it was all of our favorite brands are the proprietors of the business.

That's a seal of integrity and a promise, a commitment to there's real human beings If anything goes wrong. We still believe in that firmly, which is where some of the tension comes from, is we're very proud of our ethos, and that ethos is around a proprietor's mindset.

Mr. Hickey and Mr. Freeman

KP: What were the brands outside of apparel that you drew from that used the proprietors’ names that you were compelled by?

Holderness: Most of them were actually in apparel, but not in golf. We were thinking about the old tailoring brands that you look in your granddad's sport coat from the 1950s, and it said Hickey Freeman.

Well, there was a Mr. Hickey and a Mr. Freeman. A lot of the shirt makers that we liked over in London were Hilditch and Key, Turnbull and Asser. You look up the stories or buy the books that tell the story of those brands, and those were guys that just thought, “We can make a better shirt.” So they put their name on the door.

Signing Ben Griffin

KP: How did the relationship with Ryder Cupper Ben Griffin, come about and what has that been like?

Holderness: That's been a fun one for us, as you might imagine. The backstory there is I went to the University of North Carolina, proud Tar Heel, and I have a text chain with some guys that I graduated from Carolina with. A few years ago, one of the guys hit the text chain with, “Hey Alex, have you heard of this kid, Ben Griffin? You got to keep an eye on him.” I had not, at the time, heard of Ben, didn't know the story. I looked him up, and at the time I think he's playing on the Korn Ferry Tour.

So I looked this kid up and he went to Carolina and he's on the Tour, and that's a pretty good start. Then I'm zooming in on the photos that he's posted to his Instagram, and in every single competitive photo from his tournament play, he's wearing H&B.

I thought, “You got to be kidding me.” That's insane. I sent him a DM on Instagram, which I had to have my wife show me how to do because I'm 45 and really not good at that stuff. But I sent him a note saying, “Hey, man, I'm a Tar Heel, one of the cofounders of Holderness and Bourne, and I see you're wearing it in these in these tournaments. I really hope you're not paying for this stuff. We'd love to talk. We'd love to figure out if we can maybe do an ambassadorship type thing here.”

He wrote right back. I think, literally, five minutes later, I had a reply saying, “Hey, man, that's awesome. I had no idea you were a Tar Heel. I just love the gear. I think it fits me better than anything else. I love your collars. I would love to chat.”

We set up-time to chat. John and I were on with Ben and his agent and got a deal going. We got to know Ben. We spent some time, had lunch with him in the city when he was coming through New York for a tournament and really, really liked the kid. Just thought he had a good head on his shoulders, really mature and good vibes. It was a no-brainer for us to say, “Hey, let's get this going.”

Advice for Starting a Business

KP: What would you tell somebody, or even what would you tell your former self who's just starting a that you wish you would have known when you guys started this one?

Bourne: One thing that I think has been a not obvious source or driver of our success is our willingness to be relentlessly focused within a niche. You could say golf, men's golf [and so on] … And that focus helps define or helps make it easier to answer so many questions. Basically, being in a business is just being able to answer questions quickly with high conviction and hopefully a high-quality answer.

That narrows the universe. We're not making tuxedos. What I would say to anybody starting a business is be really focused and very specific, as specific as possible on what it is that you're doing, who your customer is and how your business, your thing, your product is going to appeal to them.

Holderness: The other word is patience. I don't know if it's a generational thing, but I think especially younger folks want to see the success more immediately, and it takes a while. We're 11 years in, and like John said, we still feel like we get up every day with something to prove and a mindset that we're just getting started.