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Men's short-shorts may appear to be an unlikely product for an ecommerce startup.

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But for Chubbies cofounders Kyle Hency, Rainer Castillo, Preston Rutherford, and Tom Montgomery, it was once the most herbal factor in the world to begin a company based totally around retro-inspired shorts.

After graduating from Stanford, the place they all met, the four guys pursued jobs in different fields ranging from conventional finance to the startup world to company retail.

Back in faculty, the 4 guys would put on retro short-shorts they found in thrift shops and had passed down from their dads and uncles. "If you had a really cool pair of shorts, people would talk about it," Chubbies cofounder Tom Montgomery tells Business Insider.

So in 2011, a few years after graduating, they determined they'd had sufficient of their own jobs — they sought after to start their own company in combination, and they wanted to sell the short-shorts they loved dressed in themselves. "We all had the mindset of wanting to run something ourselves and wanting to do something that was a little more meaningful and a little more fun," Montgomery says. "It was such an extension of our personalities to start this company."

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It all started at a Fourth of July seashore birthday celebration

To check out the speculation of mass-producing and selling men's short-shorts, the cofounders made a few pairs of shorts and taken them to an annual Fourth of July birthday party at Lake Tahoe. Along with 20 friends all clad in red, white, and blue, the cofounders hit the beaches at Lake Tahoe of their Chubbies.

"That was immediately where we saw how impactful the shorts were and also how polarizing the shorts were," Montgomery says. Reactions ranged from "'Good lord, those shorts are the greatest things I've ever seen,' to 'Get off of my beach, men's legs belong under layers of fabric,'" Montgomery says.

The cofounders right away offered out of the few pairs of shorts they had brought with them right there on the beach.

"That's where we really understood that the product was fantastic in terms of the resonance that it had," Montgomery says. "The shorts struck the same emotional chord with other people that it struck with us. It reminded us of our dads; it reminded us of the weekend."

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When they were given home from the beach, the founders built out a web page and made a couple hundred more pairs of shorts. And in September 2011, Chubbies launched its web page. From the beginning, the founders were inundated, promoting out of their early merchandise immediately. "From day one we saw there was a very talkable, very shareable notion around our brand," Montgomery says. "We saw complete strangers who we hadn't told about the brand purchasing from us."

Recruiting faculty fraternity brothers

Montgomery and his cofounders introduced their company in September, simply sooner than winter. They started gearing up for March, which will be the company's first big inflection point. To be certain they started spring and summer time sales sturdy, the founders despatched emails to fraternity presidents and the heads of alternative social teams on college campuses, letting them know concerning the shorts.

"Invariably, the guys who responded to us were the fraternity presidents and heads of these groups saying 'Hey, I know a guy who's interested, and it happens to be me,' and immediately they were on board," Montgomery says. Today, Chubbies has an ambassadors program, and has plucked more than a hundred faculty guys to help it continue to spread the word on school campuses. If you walk round any big school campus when it is great out, you might be certain to see no less than a few guys rocking Chubbies shorts.

The founders spent all their cash to buy as many pairs of shorts as they could ahead of the March push. "We thought it would last through the summer, and we sold out in a couple days," Montgomery says.

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So a ways, Chubbies has taken very little challenge capital investment. In October 2012, Chubbies raised an undisclosed amount of money from Rothenberg Ventures. Two years later, in April 2014, the company raised a $4.4 million round from Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer, Rothenberg Ventures, Trunk Club's Brian Spaly, IDG Ventures USA, and other traders.

Beyond shorts

Since then, Chubbies has had a secure growth curve, Montgomery says. As the years have long past on, the company has expanded beyond their signature shorts, which have a 5.5-inch inseam. They've introduced swim trunks and even a Hawaiian-style T-shirt, called the Nutter. They're additionally experimenting with generating long-sleeve shirts and heavier-weight hotter pieces to let Chubbies shoppers wear shorts year-round.

"We're constantly building this brand around the weekend and the feeling you get around Friday at 5 p.m.," Montgomery says. "When a guy throws them on, the stress and rigors of the work week can be put on hold for a bit."

Rainer Castillo, who leads the merchandising, product design, and building teams for Chubbies, says the company always wants to innovate on shorts, and one way the it does that is thru riffs on nostalgic pieces. "When we were growing up, a big thing was tear-away basketball pants," he says. "So we made a tear-away short that guys could rip away and there was a Speedo underneath. We take items of clothing that people are familiar with and turn them into shorts."

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Some of the company's products also border on the absurd. For instance, Castillo says the company is operating on a complete outerwear collection, including items like a rain-jacket short, a puffer brief, and a sherpa quick. "These items are outrageous, but our customer knows they're going to find them nowhere else," he says.

Chubbies also tries to innovate on the client experience facet of the company too. Kyle Hency, who heads up the trade construction and finance teams at Chubbies, says that one of Chubbies' high-school consumers wrote to the company to let them know that he had his pair of Chubbies stolen from his locker at school by means of bullies. The Chubbies workforce, in return, despatched him karate classes. "We do a lot of those types of things to go above and beyond for our guys," Hency said.

Chubbies' American-made shorts come in a collection of patterns: there are the company's patriotic Americans shorts, in addition to shorts in any selection of patterns and colors. They value between $49.50 and $59.50 a pair.

What's subsequent for Chubbies?

Chubbies has additionally dipped into brick-and-mortar, with a physical retail retailer on Union Street in San Francisco. Hency says the company's been "pleasantly surprised and excited by the traction we've had in that store to date, and the other thing that's really interesting is that us owning that 'Friday at 5' time period. We're getting lots of people flying into the store from Thursday end of day through Friday who are going on trips over the weekend."

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In the casual shorts market, Chubbies faces lots of festival. Everyone from large brick-and-mortar shops like Gap and Abercrombie cater to the 18-to-35-year-old guys that Chubbies additionally hopes to promote to. But few different corporations — apart from the preppy Martha's Vineyard-inspired Vineyard Vines logo and equivalent area of interest competitors — are going after the "Friday at 5 p.m." mindshare like Chubbies.

Today, Chubbies has more or less Forty workers. Between its followings on social media and its mailing checklist, Chubbies' group has grown to a "couple million people," Montgomery says. In a couple weeks, Chubbies can have its annual "Fourth of Julyber Monday ” — basically a summertime version of Cyber Monday — and the company expects to do $1 million in sales on that day alone.

"Last yr on this identical day, we got shut, but didn't smash it, but this yr, we expect we'll eclipse it," Montgomery says.

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