On Success

I don’t talk much about what Fracture’s accomplished... I’m not sure why. I’m terrified of complacency and I love having a chip on my shoulder and having something to prove - I know that has something to do with it. Also, what we’ve done just doesn’t fit the media’s definition of success. We’re not worth a billion dollars. We’re not a unicorn. We haven’t raised ridiculous amounts of money. Honestly, it all made me feel like we just weren't good enough.

But this is wrong. What we have accomplished is, in fact, truly remarkable.  And I should speak more about it. Not sharing our accomplishments dismisses not only my efforts, but far more importantly the collective work of my entire team, past and present, over the last decade. And that’s not fair to them - they deserve better. 

So - Where did we come from and what have we done so far? Good question: 

- Fracture was born and raised in Gainesville, FL (204th largest city by population in U.S. according to estimates)

- Founded in 2009 in the heart of the Great Recession

- Founders didn’t attend business school

- Founders didn’t have graduate degrees

- Founders didn’t attend Ivy League schools or Stanford (graduated from The University of Florida - Go Gators!) 

- Founders didn’t have any prior full-time work experience (started Fracture as seniors at UF)

- Neither founder’s degrees are computer science, business, or marketing related (our majors were Integrative Biology and Chemical Engineering)

- Raised less than $2.5M in investment capital (average capital raised based on data compiled of 92 DTC brands in late 2018 was $54.3M)

- We are completely vertically integrated

- We’ve been profitable every year since 2015

- We’ve been cash flow positive every year since 2015

- Our average annual sales growth rate since 2014 is 85% (we did less than $1M in 2013 and expect to do $20M+ in 2019)

- Our Gross margins are consistently above 65%

- Our NPS score is 73

- Less than half of our team (30 out of 73 people) are “white collar” professionals such as software developers, digital marketers, etc. The rest of the team work in Production helping manufacture and ship Fractures worldwide.

Let’s be clear - we/I haven’t done everything right. It was difficult for me to write this list only because for every “success” I listed, I was taken back to the monumental struggles behind them and all the failures along the way.

It’s also important to recognize just how much we did have going for us. It would be the height of first-world arrogance to not acknowledge just how privileged we've been in so many ways. We were fortunate to even go to college, to have loving families who supported us and invested in us, to be safe, secure, and to have ready access to resources that most of the rest of the world couldn't possibly afford.

We're not finished yet - not by a long shot, but we have done great things, and I’m humbled by our journey so far. I’d like to share more about what we’ve done, mostly because I know there are people out there who are on their own business journeys and feel overwhelmed by trying to attain some glorified notion of success that they may simply never reach. I want to show them that success can sprout from the most unexpected of places and circumstances. I won’t be able to relate to everything people are going through - but chances are, I can relate to a fair amount. 

So - hi, my name’s Abhi. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Fracture, and I’ve done some stuff. Let’s talk.