Sunday Citizen co-founder Mike Abadi on expanding beyond its DTC roots

Bedding brand Sunday Citizen first started in 2018 as a small side hustle. In 2018, Mike Abadi was living in China and helping connect entrepreneurs with product suppliers. The owner of a boutique hotel asked him to make a soft yet hearty blanket. Abadi met the request and realized he had stumbled upon a pretty great product.

A year later, that blanket became the beginnings of the brand Sunday Citizen. And today, Sunday Citizen has grown into an eight-figure business that makes blankets, pillows, bedding and more. It's sold online, in stores like Nordstrom as well as in its own store in New York City. Abadi joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about the company's growth and expansion plans.

In many ways, Sunday Citizen is a very traditional DTC brand. It chose to be online-only from the beginning, despite having a product intended for business purposes. According to Abadi, this is because of his background in brand building and digital marketing.

"I felt comfortable at the digital advertising game -- acquiring customers online," he said. "And my wife, her background was also on the website side of things. So we both felt that that's where we felt a little bit more comfortable."

This online-only strategy worked and helped it stake its claim as a premium bedding brand. In fact, he said this helped Sunday Citizen ink wholesale customers. "Most of the wholesale partners that we've had, they've come to us," he said.

But now the company is hoping to grow beyond its online roots. While wholesale represents only about 5% of its business, "the wholesale business is growing faster than our website business at this point," he said. And with its new store, which opened in December of last year, the hope is expand its customer base even more.

The secret to growing the brand, Abadi said, was in creating a product that people would remember. "The way we've always developed product has been: we start with engineering," he said.