I recently interviewed Fabletics Co-Founder and CEO Adam Goldenberg on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam Mendler: Our guest today is a serial entrepreneur whose roster of brands has generated more than $15 billion. Adam Goldenberg is the co-founder and co-CEO of Textile, the parent company of Just Fab, Fab Kids, Shoe Dazzle, Savage X Fenty, and Fabletics, where Adam serves as CEO. Adam, thank you for joining us.
Adam Goldenberg: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Adam Mendler: You started your first company when you were in high school and sold it to Intermix Media, best known for incubating MySpace. At 19, you were COO of Intermix Media, becoming the youngest COO of a public company in history. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and the trajectory of your success?
Adam Goldenberg: Yeah, absolutely. It feels like a lifetime ago, but I started my first company in 1996 when I was 16 in high school. And one thing I will say is, back then, it was not cool to be an entrepreneur. Today, there’s so much encouragement and so much support for it, but my parents just thought it was weird. Quite frankly, they’re like, What are you doing? Just go be a kid. But I started this company called Gamers Alliance. What we did was provide free web hosting and content management tools to gaming fan sites in exchange for them giving us their ad space. And back then, web hosting was really expensive, and it took off. And I got into it because I was into video games and just saw a unique opportunity. And I would say that experience probably had the biggest impact on my life because in 1999, at the beginning of my senior year, I actually had an inbound offer to have my company be acquired. And there actually ended up being two offers. One offer was for a million dollars in cash, which as an 18-year-old in St. Louis, Missouri, seemed like, oh my God, I’ll never work again. And then the other option was for $2 million in stock. And I didn’t really have any mentors at that point in my life, and I had no idea about diligence. So to me, this is the beginning of the dotcom craze, and two million sounds better than one million. So I ended up taking the stock offer, which in hindsight was probably the biggest mistake I could ever make, because that company and that stock are probably effectively worthless. But there was a very, very persuasive CEO. And he also convinced me to leave high school and move to Connecticut, which is where the company was headquartered. And the plan was just to do this for a year or two. You can finish high school by correspondence, you’re only short of credit, and maybe take a year off and go to college later. So that was never my life plan, right? My life plan was, okay, do well in school, go to college, and sort of have this turn where this hobby that turned into a business ended up with me leaving high school beginning of my senior year and moving to Connecticut for work. That was my college experience, which was from 1999 to 2005, when we were acquired by News Corp, working at and growing, and having incredible experiences at Intermix Media. While we were there, we got to be a part of and help integrate over 17 acquisitions. We launched many businesses. We failed at many businesses. We went public. We got delisted. Everything that could happen in a business period sort of happened in those five, six years, and it was the best education you could ever get. So that happenstance decision point that happened pretty quickly was one of the two biggest impacts in my career and my life. The second one is Intermix Media also acquired another company called Fitness Heaven in 2000. So they acquired my company back in 1999. We acquired Fitness Heaven in 2000. And that’s where I met Don Ressler, who became my best friend and now my business partner for over 24 years. And had we not been put into this company and those occurrences, that opportunity to meet would not have occurred; I would have had an entirely different life. So those two things really set me up on the exciting journey and path.
Adam Mendler: Wow, Adam, you shared so much that I would love to dive into. You mentioned the CEO of Intermix Media, who saw something in you. Most 16-year-old kids don’t have million-dollar ideas that they can go execute on. He was able to persuade you to join his team and talk about the learning curve, and there’s no better form of education than the School of Hard Knocks. And you were a student at that school from a very early age.
Adam Goldenberg: Yeah, one hundred percent, and it was actually funny because I actually never met anybody at Intermix Media when I sold my company because I was really nervous that, okay, hey, they’re not gonna buy a company if they realize a young eighteen-year-old kid. And then on the flip side, they were not nearly as successful or big as they wanted. So I don’t think they were that excited to fly me out to Connecticut and show me their corporate offices either. So I’d answer the phone with a deep voice, This is Adam Goldenberg, and try to portray myself a little older than I was. And I think they were trying to portray that they were a little more successful than they were. So it was a little bit of a unique match that ended up working out.
Adam Mendler: Sounds a lot like dating apps. Most 16-year-old kids don’t think that way you did. Can anyone adopt the entrepreneurial mindset? And if so, how?
Adam Goldenberg: I think people can absolutely adopt the entrepreneurial mindset, but it is also not for everybody. I do think there’s got to be something innately in you as well. I think one of the key traits that I had and I still have, probably even more so today, is a very small fear of failure. So when I started this hobby, which became a business, there was just one problem and challenge after another. And I just spent no time worrying about what happens if I can’t make payroll, what happens if these things don’t work. I just always put myself immediately into problem-solving mode. And whatever the problem is, you go throw yourself and do the best you can at solving it. And then you move on to the next problem. So I think a key part of that entrepreneurial mindset is just. You really can’t have any fear, and you just need to focus on pushing the ball forward.
Adam Mendler: How do you get to that place?
Adam Goldenberg: That’s a great question. Everybody’s wired differently and has different traits. I think a big part of getting to that place is knowing yourself. I think there are all sorts of self-assessment tools you can do. I think executive coaching is actually way underutilized. Now, I didn’t have that epiphany until, gosh, probably my early 30s. But I wish someone had given me executive coaching when I was 20. But if you think about it, the best athletes have professional hitting coaches, strength training coaches. But when it comes to business, people don’t think about, hey, should I have an executive coach? And a lot of executive coaching is just getting a better understanding of yourself. So you need to know how you’re wired to know what your strengths and weaknesses are.
Adam Mendler: Know thyself, self-awareness, is one of the most important variables, not only in being successful as an entrepreneur, but being successful as a leader. In your experience, what are the keys to successful leadership, and what can anyone do to become a better leader?
Adam Goldenberg: These are things that I wish I knew much earlier in my career, so I would define sort of 16 through 25, it was leading through just trying to do and just trying to solve everything, which in hindsight is not the way of doing it. The absolute most important thing you can do as a leader is to build an incredible team. And that foundation of the team is all around trust. So, you cannot have a high-performing team if you don’t create an environment of complete trust because you want your team to be open and honest with you. You want them to tell you what’s going good, but more importantly, what’s going wrong. And you actually need to have productive conflict and debate in order to make the best decisions. And none of that is possible without a great team that trusts one another, has very productive conflict and debate. And then when that debate’s over, you buy into it and you drive together 100%. And I think it’s not focused on enough that building a company is a team sport. And I’m not an athlete in any way, shape, or form, but my business partner is, and he has completely instilled in me the parallels between team sports and business. But if you’re on a basketball team or a baseball team, you work so much on building camaraderie and trust, and you practice how you work together, right? So it’s almost an orchestrated dance. But I think in business, oftentimes people jump right to, I’ve got to solve X, Y, and Z business challenges, or hit this product launch date. And they forget about what I need to do to build an incredible, high-performing team? And if you get the team right, you’ll be so, so much more successful at tackling whatever business challenges you have, and you’re going to have a million. The only thing that’s guaranteed in business is that things will not go as planned. So you’d better have a team that’s around you that’s going to help you solve those challenges.
Adam Mendler: What do you look for in the people you try to surround yourself with? And what are your best tips on the topic of hiring?
Adam Goldenberg: We joke about it, but we generally have a no asshole rule. So we want to have people who are genuinely good human beings that we like working with and enjoy spending time with, because you’re going to spend more time with your executive team and your coworkers and almost any other facet of your life. So I think that’s piece number one. And then piece number two is in our business, in particular, we need folks who are open to admitting when they’re wrong, taking significant risks. And not about the individual self or the individual ego. What I’ll say is that the bigger you get as a company, the more difficult hiring is. Because when you start hiring. VPs or CFOs with a dozen-plus years of experience are very good at interviewing. Nobody’s gotten to that point in their career by not being good at interviewing and saying the right things. That’s a challenge. And part of the way that I have tried to solve that, and we’ve tried to solve it at Fabletics, is at these executive level hires, we do what’s called a Harrison assessment, which is effectively one of many different personality tests, and really lets you know how an individual is wired. And that can help a lot in the interview process of knowing where to probe and what to spend time on. But hiring is very, very difficult. And the other part you have to acknowledge on hiring is that you are going to sometimes get it wrong. And you need to be willing to say, hey, I got it wrong. I’ve tried to do everything I can to make this individual successful, but not afraid to make a change. Because you will not, in a business, get it right 100% of the time on hiring. That’s a given. What will make you successful or not, though, is how quickly you realize it and you’re willing to make a change. And I can tell you, early in my career, I did all of these things wrong. Don and I have been loyal to executives on our team early in our careers to a fault, where we love them as human beings. They helped us take the business to a certain stage, and we knew they weren’t the right individual for the next level of growth, but we were so slow at making those changes. Today, we’re much, much faster and decisive on it, and we have a much healthier team as a result.
Adam Mendler: Adam, you shared so much great advice, and diving into that last piece of advice, you are going to hire people who you invariably are going to like a lot, because if you’re a successful leader, that means that you love people. You love being around people. You love helping people become the best versions of themselves. If you don’t really love people, you’re probably not going to be a successful leader. So understanding that bias, it’s critical to separate your personal feelings for a person on your team from being objective and recognizing, is this person the right person right now? Because as a leader, you have a responsibility not only to this person who you’re leading, but to your entire team. And if you have the wrong person in the wrong place, you’re letting everyone else down.
Adam Goldenberg: 100%.
Adam Mendler: I also love the framework that you shared around what you look for in the people you hire. Starting off with recognizing that if you bring in people who are rotten human beings, they might be really good at a specific function. They could be a great salesperson. They could be a great software developer. But if they’re just a bad person and someone that other people don’t want to be around, they’re going to ultimately take away more value than they’re going to add.
Adam Goldenberg: 100% and don and I we talk about it all the time but emotions are contagious so you’re sitting next to someone and they come in and they’re excited and they’re energized and they’re ready to tackle challenges that energy and that emotion has an impact on you and if on the flip side you’re sitting next to somebody who comes in and man I hate my job and I know we got the wrong strategy and this is never going to work There’s no way that people sitting around them can do and deliver their best work. We’re interconnected human beings. And Don, my business partner, has the highest EQ of anybody I know, which balances me, which tends to be a little low on the EQ spectrum. And he really understands that. And we try to find folks that have the right intentions and do the right energy that’s going to be conducive to building a business.
Adam Mendler: Emotions are contagious. Energy is contagious. What you bring to the table every day impacts not only you, but everyone around you. And as a leader, there are a lot of variables that you can’t control. And oftentimes, leaders get into trouble because they try to control things that they ultimately have no control over. But one thing that you can control is how you show up every day. Are you showing up with positivity? Are you showing up with the right energy? Are you showing up intent on making the kind of impact that you want to make? And so much of that comes down to your mindset, your attitude, things that you control 100%.
Adam Goldenberg: That’s right. That’s how we feel about it. I’d say the other thing that I think is really important and it can be scary and hard at first, but then you realize it’s the easiest thing in the world. When you lead, you have to admit when you are wrong, and you need to do it very clearly and articulately to the team. And what that is going to do is if you as a leader say, hey, I was wrong, I made the wrong decision, or hey, you know, if you get hot in a meeting, and the next day say, you know what, I got a little fired up in that meeting, I had some stuff going on outside of it, and I didn’t show up the way I wanted to. That vulnerability creates trust, and it also allows the other leaders on their team to say, you know what? When I make a mistake, I’m going to let my team know. That’s not showing weakness. That’s actually showing strength, and it eliminates this fear of failure. One of the things that Don and I always talk about, we’d rather make 100 decisions and have 80 of them be right. Then make 10 decisions and have all 10 be right. Now, not all decisions are equal. Some things are really big. You’ve got to spend more time on it, but you can’t have much fear of failure. You just have to go after it and be decisive. And of course, with that, continue to learn. But I can’t stress enough how critical it is to admit when you’re wrong with the team. And that’s going to actually encourage people to take chances and be transparent.
Adam Mendler: You mentioned that you’re constantly making decisions. Some decisions are bigger decisions than others, but all decisions have an impact. What is your approach to decision-making, and what advice do you have for anyone on how to not only get to a place where they can make decisions but also make effective decisions?
Adam Goldenberg: Yeah, I think everybody’s wired a little differently. I have plenty of weaknesses, but one of my strengths is that I’m pretty good at analyzing pitfalls, and I’m very analytical. But when I look at my Harrison assessment, I am also pretty high on distrusting my gut instinct. So, this almost happens second nature, but I pretty quickly size up at first. How mission-critical is this decision? And by doing that, what’s the worst that can happen if I get it wrong? And if the answer is, OK, the worst that happens and I get it wrong is not that huge, not that disastrous, then I already know I’m going to make the decision pretty quickly. I’m going to look at all the data that’s available. I’m going to trust my team and their opinions, and I’m going to make a call on it. You can definitely overanalyze it. At some point, you’ve analyzed all the data that is there. And once you’ve analyzed all the data that is there, and there’s no more information to get. You just have to make a decision. In my mind, there’s no benefit to sleeping on it another night or procrastinating a week to make that call. So that’s how I’ve always approached it.
Adam Mendler: It’s a great approach, and what I like most about your approach is what you shared right off the bat, which is that in order to make effective decisions, you have to understand yourself. You have to understand your strengths, your weaknesses, and your biases, and be able to account for them.
Adam Goldenberg: And I think it’s knowing your team well, and this is where that team building and building that trust and really knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses is critical. Don and I’ve been partners for 24 years, and we are at this point 100% know these are the things that Don is a million times better at than I will ever be. And then there are things that I have much more strength in. So we always talk and debate about the big decisions. But depending on the area, we know each other’s expertise. We’re going to heavily defer. To the person who’s better at that, it’s almost the same thing. If you’re in a basketball game and you have your star 3-point shooter, and you’ve got to hit a 3-pointer to win, but that’s who you’re going to give the ball to. So it’s a little bit of that same thing. And that goes across the board to our creative directors or to our CFO is trusting them. And then being able to more heavily weigh the opinions of those who are the experts in that area. Now, that’s not to say. They’re always right, and you shouldn’t challenge them or you shouldn’t do something different. But you got to as a leader give a lot of weight to your teams that are the experts or your partner who’s the expert in their area, because that’s why you have them.
Adam Mendler: You and your partner, Don, whom you’ve spoken about a lot, have had incredible success incubating, building, and leading brands. The one that you’re most focused on now, Fabletics, is a great example. What are the keys to building successful brands?
Adam Goldenberg: That’s a big one. We could spend a couple of hours on it. At a high level, one thing that Don and I, we always talk about is you gotta start with A big idea that has a larger dress full market and a real need and that sounds obvious but it takes just as much work to go build a business around a small idea as a big idea. So in the case of Fabletics and a lot of the genesis for this brand actually came from Don’s wife, Ginger, who’s also one of our co-founders. And there were these three big needs in the marketplace, and this was back 12, 13 years ago. So one is that the world’s best lagging shouldn’t cost $100. We looked at what Lulu Lemon and others were doing, and we fundamentally believed and did the research that we could build a lagging that was every bit as good or better, but at a much more affordable price. The second, if you could go back in a time machine and look at women’s active wear 13 years ago, it was boring. It was black, navy, and gray. It wasn’t like today, where people are wearing their active wear everywhere. So we believed that we could infuse fashion into the category with colors, prints, celebrity collaborations, and newness every single month. And from a brand positioning standpoint, we saw Nike marketing to women the same way they marketed to men, all about dripping down sweat, just do it, running marathons, which is great, but we felt like we could create a different brand. And then we saw Lulu being intentionally and really offensively exclusive back then. So we said, look, we want to create a brand that’s about feeling good, positivity, and inclusivity. And those three things resonated so well combined with a great product and a great team that we’ve been very fortunate to have success. But what I will go back to again, when it comes down to what it takes to build a great brand, it takes a great team. So you need a good product, but then you need a great team that can execute. And Don and I also do a lot of angel investing. And so many times we’ve actually lost on our investments where, gosh, this product was incredible, but they couldn’t execute. Where I’ve actually seen companies do better with an average product, but an amazing team and amazing execution. And they’ll actually eventually get to an amazing product because they’ll learn and they’ll adapt. So I can’t stress enough the importance of culture and team.
Adam Mendler: A common thread, not through all of your brands, but through many of your brands, has been your collaboration with celebrities. Kate Hudson with Fabletics, Rihanna with Savage X Fenty, A lot of companies try to partner with celebrities, and it doesn’t work out. Your collaborations have been successful. What are the keys to collaborating with celebrities in a way that ultimately leads to success?
Adam Goldenberg: I’d say there’s a couple. One is that celebrities can’t make a business or a product successful. But they can amplify a business or a product. So if you have a great product, the celebrity can actually bring attention to it and amplify it and make it even better. So oftentimes when you see celebrity brands or companies fail, it’s not the fault of the celebrity, just the actual execution, or the product itself wasn’t amazing. So one is that they can amplify. And then two, and this is really where Don has been an absolute genius, is you’ve got to find the right celebrity who is authentic, and truly believes in what you’re doing, because consumers are smart and they can tell if it’s a real natural fit and if that celebrity really believes. And Kevin Hart’s a great example. We launched the men’s business with Kevin. Kevin is in our office all the time. Even though he’s an actor, he’s incredibly into health, wellness, and fitness. And it’s authentic and it’s real. And that’s been such a key part of the success.
Adam Mendler: Authenticity, another core element of successful leadership and a universal component of success in whatever it is you’re trying to pursue. Most people out there are going to be able to see through you if you are not your authentic self. And it’s not that different when you’re selling a product. Customers understand whether this is real or not.
Adam Goldenberg: 100%. And I think the other thing that we have done that’s been a key part of our success, and I would recommend to everyone, is to spend time with your customers. So at Fabletics, we have every single employee required to work in the retail stores every year. We call it TRX, the retail experience. We bring in 50 to 75 customers a couple of times a month to do continuing market research with them. We’re having product teams meet with them about new merchandise. We’re having technology teams meet with them to demo new website features and functionality. And again, your customers know best. And especially in such an analytical and digital world, you can very quickly forget that there’s a real person behind every single number that you look at in your KPI or your financial reports. So we really try to ensure that, ourselves included, all the way from the top leadership down to the folks in accounting, they spend time with real customers and understand who they are. And they’ll tell you what they need. I mean, if you spend time with your customers, they will tell you very bluntly what they love, what they hate, and what they want you to develop. And so much I would attribute our success is just listening. If you think about our expansion into men’s, into scrubs, into the different product categories, it’s all been led by what our customers are telling us they want from Fabletics.
Adam Mendler: And Adam, that’s universally applicable advice regardless of the business you’re in. You don’t need to be in the e-commerce business. You could be selling any product through any channel. You could be in the service business. Customer centricity is essential to success regardless of what you’re pursuing.
Adam Goldenberg: 100%. This definitely applies to all businesses. If you have a customer, which, if you’re in business, you have a customer, it definitely applies.
Adam Mendler: Do you have any tips specifically for those in the e-commerce space, whether they’re entrepreneurs building and running e-commerce businesses or people working for e-commerce companies, trying to help them get to that next level?
Adam Goldenberg: There’s a lot. I would say one is AI in data is going to continue to transform e-commerce. And I’ve done a number of talks on this. We really believe at Fabletics that personalization is the future of e-commerce, where, if you think about traditional retail, you have one store set up so everybody in the store sees the same product in the same layout, versus an e-commerce site. What we’re moving to is that you know so much about that customer when they come and visit your website. Everything should be tailored specifically for them, the imagery, the products they see the promotions that they get. And the keyword five years ago was segmentation. You might be creating 10 or 15 or 20 different segments that get different experiences, but everything now with data and AI is going to be about one-to-one personalization. And that’s critical because so much of e-commerce now happens on your mobile device, on your cell phone. People have very short attention spans. One second, you’re shopping, the next second you get a text message from your girlfriend, and you forget what you were doing, and you don’t go back. So you really need to make the most of that visit by showing customers exactly what they want. And I think regardless of what category of e-commerce you’re in, that’s going to be very true.
Adam Mendler: Adam, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?
Adam Goldenberg: The simplest one I would say is to worry less and do more. So I’ve been married for 21 years, and that’s where I realized everybody’s wired differently. My wife is a natural worrier. So I would just say worrying about what can go wrong or being afraid is not that useful of an emotion in business or your career. So I would just generally say worry less and throw yourself into what you do. Take chances. Don’t be afraid of failing. And when you fail, learn from it and also admit that failure. And the other one, I would just say, and I think this is sometimes a little bit of a Gen Z or millennial thing, where a lot of folks are wanting their leaders to be responsible for mentoring and growing their careers. And that is true. I do believe that your manager has a responsibility. But you need to take accountability for that as well. And the best way to be successful is to give it your all and put yourself into unique situations where you can shine. That’s true if you are the entrepreneur running the business, and it’s true if you’re somebody getting started in your career and working at a company.
Adam Mendler: Worry less, do more. The first part is going to be hard for some people, such as your wife, such as a lot of people who I know. But doing more, that’s something that all of us can do. That’s something that all of us can control. Get into action mode, get started, make things happen. We can all do that.
Adam Goldenberg: I’ll give you a story. I don’t think anybody noticed it but me. But when I first moved to Connecticut to work for Intermix Media, just turned 18, I looked like I was 14, left my friends, and left school. I’m like, I’m going to throw myself into this. I’m like, look, I want to be the first person in the office no matter what, and I want to be the last person to leave. And the freaking accounting team would always get in there by like 7 am. And there’d be technology folks that would be sometimes there till 8, 9, 10 o’clock. But I did it for the first nine months of that company. I’m like, I’m going to be in there first or as close to first as I can be. And like, I slept under my desk a couple of times. I’m like, well, they’re not leaving, so I’m not leaving. And I think that put me into some unique opportunities to grow and meet people, and do things. So it’s a little bit extreme, but I do think things like that matter where your managers will notice the extra effort, and you just have to go after it.
Adam Mendler: You analogize business to sports, and I’ve interviewed so many of the most successful athletes across just about every sport, and a common thread is. They show up first, they leave last. They’re always on, they’re always focused on getting better. They’re always practicing their craft. They’re always putting in effort. And that work ethic, whether you’re trying to become an Olympic gold medalist, whether you’re trying to become a great baseball player, great football player, or great at business, is universal to success.
Adam Goldenberg: You’re absolutely right. It really is universal.
Adam Mendler: Adam, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
Adam Goldenberg: Thank you for having me.
