From a single embroidery machine in the living room… to the garage… to a commercial space, Robert with the help of Danny and Tyler were able to launch this business all the way into a 40,000 square foot warehouse to continue its growth path! Robert Hamm is the Founder and CEO of HatLaunch, which is located near St. Louis in Collinsville, Illinois. He started this journey in 2017 with the idea of creating a great online source for quality custom headwear after realizing there wasn't a great option. At the beginning of 2023, both Danny Gifford (COO) and Tyler Smith (CFO) left their corporate jobs and boarded the ship of HatLaunch | Shirtlaunch to help sustain the operations, finances, and hands-on presence required to run a fast-growing business. Danny and Tyler were high school classmates and longtime friends of Robert’s who saw his vision of growing the business and wanted to provide their knowledge and experience to assist with the growth.  HatLaunch | ShirtLaunch are experiencing the best year since inception and currently predicting annual revenue for 2023 to be north of $10MM.    If you would like to place an order, check out their websites! hatlaunch.com shirtlaunch.com



Full Video

Robert Hamm: [00:00:00] Welcome to the circuit of success podcast, the circuit of success podcast with your host, Brett, Brett, Brett Gilliland, Brett Gilliland, visionary wealth advisory.

Brett Gilliland: Welcome to the circuit of success. I'm your host, Brett Gilliland. Today I've got Robert Hammamy. Robert, what's up my

Robert Hamm: man? What's up? How are you? I'm glad to be here. I'm good. This is exciting. First. Yeah. In person podcast. Is that right? I've done. Yeah. I like

Brett Gilliland: them a lot more. You know, you kind of feel the energy.

This is cool. Feel if somebody is actually going to continue talking. Are they not talking? You don't know. Sometimes you don't know what's going on. Can you hear

Robert Hamm: me? Am I muted? Exactly. You're on mute.

Brett Gilliland: Sometimes I get an echo. It's just, it's fun. These, these are a lot better. So, well, man, you are, uh, the founder of Hat Launch and, uh, and here's what I wrote down.

I think this is pretty cool. From your, uh, One machine in your family room in 2018. Yep to a few machines in your garage. Yep to 8, 400 square feet to soon to be [00:01:00] 40, 000 plus square feet all since 2018 dude. Yeah, so on hats

Robert Hamm: been a rocket

Brett Gilliland: Well, here's it's funny So here's how we met for those watching or listening is I get a call from a guy Tyler Tyler used to be an intern for me back in, gosh, mid 2000s, I think, I can't remember the year, maybe 2012, 2010, somewhere in there probably.

He calls and says, hey, I just want to come by for some business advice. I'm like, great. Yeah, you want to give back to a guy who used to, you know, used to work with you. Next thing I know, I'm buying hats. I'm like, what in the hell just happened? And he didn't do that. You know, it wasn't like he came to me to start selling stuff, but he's doing a good job.

So Tyler Smith, you did awesome. Connected us and now I'm a proud owner of hat launch and uh, yeah, man, lots of hats. We're gonna keep getting them So anyway, i'll be quiet And I want to turn it over to you, man, and talk about what has helped make you the man you are today. Cause you just don't go from your garage to 40, 000 square feet

Robert Hamm: overnight.

Yeah. That's a question. Uh, so my family, I guess I grew up in the [00:02:00] restaurant industry. So my family's owned restaurants since I was a kid. And my mom actually. We moved to Highland, uh, so that my mom could open a restaurant with my aunt and my grandma in Highland. And like, when we're there, the whole family worked there together.

Tyler actually worked there too. That's where Tyler met his wife too. Uh, a lot of marriages came out of that place too, which is super interesting. Um, but I, it's just always been hard work in the family, I think. And especially my mom and my dad are both really hard workers. My mom specifically, she works for me now.

So that's, we can get into that part of the story too. But, uh, she is like the hardest worker you'll ever meet in your life. Like just still is today. I think that's where I get my hard work and work ethic and ability to just. You know, like that, that's to do what I've done in the short amount of time.

It's, it's constant work and you have to be able to do that constant work. Otherwise it's, it doesn't happen. Um, so that's just like a brief little, where I've, where I've come [00:03:00] from and kind of my foundings, you know, like seeing my family. Break their backs running restaurants for not very much, you know, like that's a tough industry and Michael actually owns one right here.

Oh the O Town. Oh, yeah. He has that one. So Yeah, he's got the camera I was so excited when he told me he's doing that It's unique. Yeah. People always talk about that. Got the

Brett Gilliland: robots. So, I mean, you were, you had a normal job, right? Yeah. What I would call a normal nine to five job. You were doing that. I think I saw a video.

You said normal nine to five, you were in debt. Seemed like you wanted more in life. Yup. And you just had to do this hat thing, man. Yeah. And so for people listening, he, he's the, I mean, you want to be the number one, uh, custom hat

Robert Hamm: headwear maker in the world. Absolutely. Right? Right. If we're not already. If we're not already.

So

Brett Gilliland: think about that. The number one. Custom hat maker

Robert Hamm: in the world. Yeah, we, we want to be that. And I, the industry like apparel in general is like multi billion dollar industry. [00:04:00] It's crazy. And hats alone. Like if you look at the big, the big names and hats right now, like they're a hundred million dollar businesses, you know, we're since 2018 we've done, I think 13 million in sales.

So like we are just like peanuts. We're still scraping the surface when it comes to that. Um, but. Uh, it's, uh, it's, it's insane what you, where we could be and what our processes and what we're doing now is so much better than what's out there in the competition that all it's going to take is time and more people knowing about us to become the best and the number one in the world.

So it's super exciting. Um, just. It takes a lot of work and time and dedication, but yeah, I started, started out as a software engineer. So I went to Rankin, uh, graduated in 2010 and got my first job actually right over there north of Grumman. It's like the building, Oh, right there, shaped like a, a B2 bomber.

Uh, so like it was work, a contract working for the air force right there. Actually. I [00:05:00] didn't even think about that till now. That's pretty cool. Full circle. Bye. Bye. And, uh, yeah, it's, so I was a software engineer for about 10 years, uh, doing many different jobs between the government contract stuff, private sector.

And before I quit my job to work for myself full time, I was at Express Scripts. So I don't know if you know much about Express Scripts. Express Scripts is mail order pharmacy, uh, one of the biggest in the world and they have multiple locations all across the United States where they are fulfilling prescriptions for people.

Um, You might get your drugs from Express Scripts. I'm not even really know it because they're they're so massive So I was on the team that handled all of the basically pharmacy Automations and operations of getting that prescription From a pill to a bottle with a label on it into a box with the shipping label on it out the door using robotics and All sorts of really cool technology to make that happen.

I was there for Three years, about three years and being there, all of [00:06:00] my jobs added up, gave me exposure and experience to so many different industries and seeing how powerful technology could be when applied to industries for anything. And that place specifically just really showed me. How much money is out there, how many people are out there to sell things to, and how you can efficiently and effectively scale up an operation with, you know, utilizing labor and technology and robotics.

Right. So such a cool. Combination of things to work on and see happen and to build software and release it in that environment and watch it and improve a Process 10 20 30 percent is so cool. So that's you see the needle move, right? Yeah, they're not you so I'm so grateful for my experience as a software engineer and the jobs that I had because I took everything that I've learned from all those jobs and applied it to what we're doing with custom hats where any other hat, you know, embroidery shop, they're, they're not using [00:07:00] software.

It's like we're more of a tech company than we are actually a hat company because the entire operation is running on custom code that I've written. So from when I, when I applied my

Brett Gilliland: logo, my future here in your past logo to the website.

Robert Hamm: Yup. That's all code that I've written at three or four in the morning.

So that's 2018. So yeah, that's, that's, that's why we, that's also why we've been able to scale how we have. Have because without those processes and the automation and the code in place to make sure everything's happening, how it needs to like, you just can't do it. We'd be using pen and paper and expel spreadsheets and you can't scale with that.

It's not scalable. And that's not to say that things haven't broken throughout the way. Like every single time we hit a new growth, new, new phase and growth, like doubling revenues, part of the process breaks or part of the process needs to be automated. Or anytime something breaks, I look at how can I automate it, how can I make it easier,

Ver todos los episodios