Introduction
This is the Knix success story. In this post, we dive deep into the conversation with Joanna Griffiths, the founder of Knix. She shares how she turned a $20,000 business plan competition win into a $50 million dollar intimate apparel empire. From a massive first-order mistake to a bold pivot away from wholesale, Joanna’s journey is a masterclass in resilience, focus, and mission-driven brand building. This post extracts the exact Q&A from our podcast interview, giving you an unfiltered look at the strategies, challenges, and decisions that defined the Knix success story.
Founder Success Story QnA
How did you get your job?
I had to make it for myself. Yeah, no, that’s the truth.
How did you find yourself doing the work you’re doing today? Was Knix the first company you started?
Yeah, Knix is my first company. So I founded the company a little over seven years ago, so I’ve been at this for a while. In my previous life, I worked in the media and entertainment industry. I was a music publisher publicist at Universal Music, worked in film and television, and ultimately went back to school to do an MBA with the thought process that I would someday run a media company. And within the first week, really, of being at school, I was chatting with some classmates about an idea I had, which ended up being Knix. And so, really, in the beginning, Knix is an intimate brand, for those who aren’t aware. And the first set of products that we started making were really great-looking, leak-proof underwear. Not a sexy problem, but definitely a universal problem. And when I was at school in those first few weeks, I just really became kind of super passionate about solving this problem and took every opportunity I could to really do research, interview people, make progress, and ultimately kind of passed the point of no return where it seemed like a bigger risk to not do it than to do it. So I guess I’m an accidental entrepreneur in that regard.
You talked about how it was a bigger risk not to do it. Why?
I think I’m one of those people that really follows their heart and their passions. And I think I was so fixated on the concept and I was so passionate about it that if I didn’t do it, I would have this constant risk in my life that I would be looking back and asking, “What if?” And at the end of the day, when you’re talking with family or talking with my male partner about it, the prospect of always wondering what would have happened and sort of carrying that with me for the rest of my life felt like a bigger risk to take than saying, “Okay, I’m going to give this a year. I’m going to see what happens. The worst thing that could happen is it goes nowhere, but then at least I’ll know that I tried.”
Were you in a position where you had a lot of capital to get your first order? How did you get funds to make the placement for the first MOQ?
I ended up doing a business plan competition at my school and won that. And so one, the first $20,000 to kind of start the business. And I came back to Toronto, which is where I’m based, and worked part-time for the first few months until really I felt like my time was the limiting factor, where I was the person who was holding back decisions being made or progress being made. And with that twenty thousand dollars, I actually got pretty far. I got all the way through prototype development, made a lot of progress, and then ultimately ended up doing a small round before launching and then doing an Indiegogo campaign. I sort of launched Knix right at the peak of crowdfunding. So I did an Indiegogo campaign. And I mean, to be honest with you, the first order that I did was probably one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my company’s history. I just had no idea what I was doing. The minimums in underwear are really, really high. I think I bought, I don’t know, 40,000 pairs of underwear or something. And you know, you don’t get everything perfect out of the gate. I think any entrepreneur will say that it’s progress over perfection. But when you have 40,000 units of underwear just kind of like burning a hole in your back pocket, I joke that like I still feel like we have those early pairs kicking around because we obviously got feedback and made improvements to the product and all these different things along the way. But I needed a decent amount of money to buy that much underwear.
In the underwear space, 40,000 is the MOQ, and you did you sell that many? Did you move them? Eventually, but it took a while?
Yeah, so when you break down like styles and colors, yeah, it adds up pretty quick. Yeah. Okay, interesting. And yeah, it sounds like you’ve got a really great story of kind of just working things out along the way. What about, you said you raised a very small seed round. Was that from friends and family?
For clarity for everyone watching, can we quickly fast forward to today before we look back? Just around the traction and where is the company at today? Can you share any notable figures: annual revenue, unit sold, team, anything at all, market share?
Yeah, for sure. So last year we passed $50 million in revenue and we’re growing at about 50% year over year. So we sell a Knix item basically every six seconds, which is faster than I would have thought. My team is 85 people. And we sell 100% online, with the exception of we recently started opening our own Knix branded retail stores. So we have two of those at the moment. Well, the plan was to open more, but that’s been on pause since COVID. So that’s where we are now. I’d say the first couple years building Knix, I was really focused on the wholesale channels. So I spent three years on the road at trade shows and different things like that. And in 2016, having done that for a few years, I made the decision to totally pivot the business and to move out of wholesale and focus on selling online. So I pulled out of over 800 retail stores, basically started over, and launched as a direct-to-consumer brand first. And so all of our growth has really been since I made that decision. We grew just under 4,000% in three years. And yeah, it was one of the bolder moves I think that I’ve made, but it was definitely the right one.
That’s a very common theme that if you once you get a little bit of traction, if you really want to scale your company, you just need to do less and focus. It’s crazy, which you can only learn through experience.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s a sign of, I guess, entrepreneurial maturity. It definitely takes a while.
Why did you decide to do an Indiegogo campaign for this particular product?
I started with Indiegogo. I did the opposite of you and then later went to Kickstarter. And I guess, when I watched Knix kind of bunny was just starting to kick off, I really didn’t have any experience or background in apparel. And so going into making that first order, which was huge, as I mentioned, I felt like I couldn’t mess it up. And so what I viewed crowdfunding as enabling me to do was to get feedback before I committed to the order, to understand what customers would be looking for in terms of styles and sizing breakdown and silhouettes and whatnot. And I learned a ton from that experience. I would have ordered not the right things without the feedback and input from those first, I don’t know, a thousand customers or whatever it was. And then I would also say that it really ingrained this philosophy and approach that we’ve taken at Knix ever since, which is a true, like, community approach to building our company and our brand and not being afraid to ask customers what they’re looking for and to use them as kind of like the inspiration for products. And so I was able to learn that early on through the crowdfunding process. But we were an outlier, definitely. And I think it was just what you did at the time. Does that make sense? It was like peak hype. It was like, I feel like 2013, 2014, that was like the year that people did crowdfunding campaigns to launch their businesses.
So you launched on Indiegogo, that was how you got your first 1000 customers?
Yeah. Okay. That’s actually smart because they have an audience of buyers. That platform has an audience of buyers, as opposed to running Facebook ads or you know, do the PPC play. You just went to a market where people are looking to buy.
What ultimately made you pull out of wholesale?
Two things. So we later went back and did another crowdfunding campaign, a Kickstarter campaign. And that was when we were expanding our products and getting into bras. And so I went back online and we sold more in 30 days than I did in the first three years of the business. We actually had a really successful campaign. We did about $1.7 million dollars in pre-sales for probably like the most unlikely product of all time. It was a bra. It was not a gadget. It only appealed to a certain percentage of people on the platform, but it went really well. And so my eyes were kind of open to the fact that, wow, this is really like a product that people were interested in buying online. So that was part of it. The other piece is, you know, we’re a very mission-focused company. Part of the reason why I was so passionate about starting Knix in the first place was because I really saw the opportunity to have a positive impact on women’s lives. And what I found over the course of being in wholesale and building Knix was that we’ve really been at the forefront of a whole bunch of movements. You know, size inclusivity and body positivity to begin with. And from our early days, we always offered a pretty wide size range. And what I found was our retail partners just weren’t ready for it. And so the more that we as a brand dug into storytelling and more like purpose-driven marketing, there’s such a huge disconnect between what we would say on our Instagram page, as an example, and the experience that a Knix customer would have at a store where they would be turned away because they didn’t carry their size or they would have this really negative experience. So ultimately, because of really a lack of brand alignment, we decided to cut off that main revenue channel and to try and do something different.
During that three-year time period, did you have to let anyone go to restart?
No, because we were so small. I was under five people until 2016. It was tiny, tiny, tiny. So when you have like one person in operations and one person in marketing, there’s no one to let go, really. I will say that there was a moment when there was a natural transition within the company and our team where I started changing the way that I hired. And instead of going for people who maybe had had a lot of wholesale experience and that came from the retail and apparel space, I really went for more entrepreneurial, kind of startup growth-minded people.
What did you do the second time around with Kickstarter that made it so successful?
I still don’t know if we did it that right. I think we had our own community that we brought to the platform. So I’d say that was a big thing. So when we launched the product, we had the first few thousand people that were really excited to buy. And then, as you know, it’s like all about the algorithm. So if you start getting great traction, then you all of a sudden become like a top pick or like one to watch or you get in the email newsletter or you’re on the homepage. And so it sort of becomes this like self-building prophecy. I did a lot of work on the prep around PR pitching. And we got really lucky. I used to work in PR before I started Knix, but one of my hacks, I guess you could say, is I’m like a huge fan of finding interns that work at publications that are writing. So maybe they’ve written one or two articles, but no normal PR agency would have their contact information or pitch them. So I did that. I found an intern at Mashable who I think had written like one or two articles, and I pitched her on LinkedIn because I didn’t even know her email. And she wrote a piece that got picked up because it was like, at the time, if Mashable wrote something, a whole bunch of places would pick it up. It got picked up by so many places. And so that was like a huge breakthrough for us. Really putting polish into the video and all the photography assets was really important. And then I always used to, you set your target really low. You create early bird pricing deals where if you sell out early bird, you automatically hit your target. You try and crush your target in the first 24 hours. And then the thing kind of has like momentum and a life of its own.
What was the first channel that you guys started with for online marketing? Was it Facebook ads?
It was Facebook ads for us. I think, coming from the crowdfunding world and really getting great at those like problem-solution videos, it was prime for 2016, 2017 marketing on Facebook. So that was how we started. And then it sort of seems like every 10 million in incremental revenue that you do, you need to find a new channel to break through on. And so it’s just consistently finding new channels as you grow.
What was the next channel after Facebook ads?
We started finding some great brand ambassadors, built out an ambassador program, so that worked really well for us. Started doing better at PR. Really good customer service, and that way word of mouth picked up and repeat purchase rates picked up. And then I’d say more recently, it’s been TV marketing, like TV advertising.
TV advertising works?
Yeah, totally. We work with an amazing partner that’s called Tatari. And it’s actually a company that’s founded by the guy who started Shazam. And they sync up with your Google Analytics and basically you get a cost per visit and a cost per acquisition of every single TV spot that you air. And then you can refocus and reallocate your dollars based on the shows, the time slots, the day of the week that are performing the best. And so it takes like the blind guesswork out of TV marketing and lets you do it in a much more performance, kind of programmatic way. And so yeah, it’s very cool. You would happily spend dollars there because you can measurably acquire customers at scale.
How do they track that within Google Analytics?
They look for the spikes, the traffic visit spikes. And then they monitor those people who come in and visit the site and then they monitor for 30 days trailing to see if they come back and make a purchase. So they look