My guest for Ep199 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Jaimie Fuller.

Jaimie’s journey has been full of highs and lows.

He is best known as the former CEO and Executive Chairman of compression apparel company SKINS.

SKINS was a global phenomenon with elite athletes and sporting teams all around the world using their products. The business had incredible global growth before ultimately filing for bankruptcy in 2019.

Outside of his work with SKINS, Jaimie was also an activist within sports, through #ChooseTheRightTrack tackling doping in sports and #NewFIFANow to call out corruption in football leading to a number of arrests in FIFA in 2015.

Jaimie is now back with his latest company, eo, which is helps accelerate human progress through innovative sports technology.

In this episode we covered a range of topics including:

• The ups and downs of the SKINS journey
• How he personally dealt with the fallout from filing for bankruptcy
• How SKINS was able to use brand to build a premium offering and compete with the likes of Nike all over the world
• The vision and mission behind eo
• and much more!

Timestamps:

• 1:49 Jaimie’s background
• 3:33 His first printing business
• 7:25 The challenges of growing at a rapid pace beyond 250 employees
• 13:49 Doing the right thing in business
• 26:10 The founding journey of SKINS
• 32:56 What gave him the conviction to go all in on SKINS
• 42:53 Importance of brand and storytelling
• 52:01 Maintaining a challenger brand ethos as you scale
• 1:05:32 replacing himself as CEO
• 1:08:01 Filing for bankruptcy
• 1:21:13 The decision to start again with eo
• 1:26:15 The mission of eo

Our partners:

A big thank you to Dean Hawkins and Anthony Gregorio for their help with this interview!

Also a big shout out to our partners for the show:

Scendar 

Scendar is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business’ life. If you’re busy running your startup, you don’t have time to do your own books and forecast. Instead, fully outsource your finance function, giving you time and resources back to focus on what you do best in growing your business. Find out more at Scendar.com

Vanta

Vanta helps businesses get — and stay — compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in-demand compliance frameworks. And with over 300 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on.
Join over six thousand fast-growing companies that use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time.
Startup Playbook Podcast listeners get access to an exclusive offer of USD$1000 off their plans. Head over to vanta.com/playbook to get access to this exclusive discount.

Links mentioned:

Jaimie’s links:

• Jaimie’s LinkedIn
• Eo Lab’s website
• Eo Lab’s Instagram

People mentioned:

• Rupert Murdoch
• Dean Hawkins
• Bradley Duffy
• Mike Stone
• Graham Arnold
• Cristiano Ronaldo
• Lionel Messi
• Anthony Gregorio
• Steve Waugh
• Robert Louis-Dreyfus
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Companies mentioned:

• SKINS
• Essendon Football Club
• Nike
• Adidas
• Puma
• Eatbigfish
• NSWIS
• UBS
• Amazon
• International Athletics Federation
• Sport 2000

Feedback/connect/say hello:

Rohit@startupplaybook.co
@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Paycheck

Other channels:

Find all of the links for the podcast on Linktree here

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