What's up everyone, I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal and Entrepreneurs personal diary made

public for the world.

Before we hop into the episode, I wanted to say thank you for the thousands of messages

that I've gotten from listeners since the relaunch of the show just a few months ago.

I have responded to all of them at this point, that's what I did for about seven hours of

my honeymoon flight home, so if I haven't gotten back to you, your email probably fell through

the cracks of my computer.

Today, I am trying a new show format.

It is a modern business case study where I take an interesting brand, I tell it's story,

and I share lessons that we can pull out and apply to our businesses as builders.

If there is a business you would love to see me do a case study on, shoot me an email

at Alex at MorningBrew.com and let me know what company that is.

Now for today's episode, I am talking about the meteoric rise of the Hoka brand and lessons

any builder can learn from it.

Let's hop into it.

In 2012, the oversized sneaker brand Hoka was doing around $3 million in revenue,

and it was bought by Decker's, the owner of Ugg and Tiva and a few other brands, and

Decker's bought Hoka for a reported million dollars.

This was the acquisition of the century, given Hoka crossed the $1 billion annual revenue

threshold this past year.

I want to talk about its meteoric rise and how a niche French brand broke through to become

...