Well, you know, I was very lucky I got to Warnico because the fellow that was the CEO there had taken it out of bankruptcy. He's the same guy that I worked for at Brooks Brothers, as I like to say, at the turn of the century in 2000. So he asked me to come there. It was a $2 billion wholesale company. They had some legacy brands. They also had licenses for Calvin Klein underwear, Calvin Klein Jeans, and Speedo North America, and predominantly, like, 95% of the sales or more were done to other retailers. In the wholesale vein, we had a digital business, but it was very, very small for Calvin Klein underwear, for jeans, and for Speedo. And that was kind of my domain.
Mark Friedman:
They were on a really small mom and pop kind of platform. We ultimately replatformed with the idea that we wanted to try and grow these businesses digitally, although we weren't quite sure what that really meant, because we were a wholesaler, we were competing, like many brands were. We were competing with the retailers that were also selling our product. Speedo was available in albania telegram screening tons of stores, Calvin Klein underwear in Macy's, and all the major retailers. So we had to find our way there. It was hard to find people that knew the technology. It was hard to find people that knew how to drive traffic to sites. Although there was technology available, it wasn't the shiny object syndrome, kind of a timeframe that we live.
Ben Marks:
Mean. If you look at the period of mean Google Analytics was in, its mean. There was no Facebook for driving a know. So you really had to kind of make all that stuff up. And I think that was great experience for you going into the very long term. You did at Steve Madden, right? You were there for about seven years, right?
Mark Friedman:
And they were very early to digital. They had been doing some things. I got there in 2011. They had already been doing return to store. They'd been doing ship from store. They had a homegrown net platform with a homegrown team in marketing. And they also were a wholesale business, predominantly great brand, lots of longevity.