MGMT Boston - W7, Q1 23 - Moxie Apparel // Campbell Brofft, Jellyfish
Moxie Apparel // Campbell Brofft, Jellyfish
TLDR:
Moxie Apparel - “Innovative Medical Apparel designed for nurses by nurses”, Moxie is a DTC startup disrupting the $94B global medical apparel market
Campbell Brofft, Director of Product @ Jellyfish - From CT to Wall Street to Harvard to Consumer to SaaS, Campbell is an intentional learner who keeps taking leaps
Other Resources:
Boston Tech Big Board - building out data on every Boston area venture backed software company I can find
Q1 Startups Highlighted - Jellyfish, Hi Marley, Goldcast & Paperless Parts
Q1 Operators Highlighted - Laina Crosby, Sheila Connolly, Jack McDermott, Nick Abate & Stephanie Roulic
Whether you’re investing capital, time (current or prospective employee), or dollars (current or prospective customers) everyone reading this is a potential investor in these companies. I’d like to introduce Moxie Apparel, a Boston based DTC startup making waves in the medical apparel market.
Moxie Apparel
Founder: Alicia Tulsee
Founding: November 2019
Mission: ‘Moxie’ defines the 'force of character, determination, and resourcefulness,' of the nurses across our country on the frontlines today
Employees: 15 & 25% Local
Workplace: Hybrid (Flexible)
Stage & Capital Raised: Pre-Seed & $2.4M raised
Investors: Angels in the Boston area including HBS Alumni Angel Association, TiE Boston Angels, and Armory Square Ventures
Key Customers: Nurses and healthcare professionals
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$25M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Moxie Apparel DBA Moxie Scrubs is “Innovative Medical Apparel designed for nurses by nurses.” “Everything this brand does is for nurses,” Founder Alicia Tulsee tells me. Born out of Harvard’s Innovation Lab, Moxie Apparel is a lifestyle apparel brand built by an entrepreneur who saw the hard work nurses put in daily over the course of years taking care of her chronically ill Dad & Aunt, two family members who each had extended hospital stays throughout her childhood.
Alicia had the idea to create a brand dedicated to nurses in late 2019 because she was shocked she couldn’t find one. She had a passion for entrepreneurship and, after some due diligence, set out to create a brand dedicated to nurses who are the largest & fastest growing segment of the healthcare workforce. Alicia says, “nurses deserve a brand dedicated to nurses caring for them the way they serve and care for us.” Nurses are key buyers in American households and repeatedly voted the most respected profession for the last 21 years in a row. But even with all their clout and significant buying power, they're an underserved market segment as part of the $94B global medical apparel market.
On the eve of Covid-19, Alicia began building Moxie Scrubs. The company launched as an official partner to the American Nurses Association supporting nurses and receiving acclaim in noteworthy publications such as Forbes, Fast Company, Nasdaq, Entrepreneur Magazine, and others launching the brand into the spotlight on its way to becoming an iconic nurse lifestyle brand.
A graduate of Tie Boston’s accelerator, MassChallenge’s accelerator, and the Harvard Innovation Lab Launch Lab X accelerator, Moxie has raised $2.4M in pre-seed funding and will look to their Seed round next. Everything the company does is around nurse wellness & self care.
Being in the market for under 2 years, Moxie Scrubs has some impressive momentum. The brand’s revenue is in the seven figures having grown mostly organically. They plan to continue scaling revenue while targeting profitability by the end of 2023 or early 2024. Paul Blum, former CEO of Kenneth Cole & Kate Spade’s former Head of PR and Communications, Johanna Almstead, are part of their impressive team helping take the brand to the next level. It’s obviously a unique time to be raising capital so Alicia and the Moxie team are carefully weighing the amount and structure of the round they’ll need to close in order to reach their next set of milestones.
As a DTC (direct to consumer) business, Alicia & team are focused on building new systems, partnerships, and growth levers that will deliver earnings. Because of the brand equity, physical nature and operational complexity that consumer startups demand, they’re often valued on multiples of their EBITDA or profit instead of a pure revenue figure. Recent medical apparel company Wonderwink was acquired by Superior Uniform Group and FIGS, another giant in the space, had a successful 2021 IPO. Medical apparel is a growing D2C vertical and shows no sign of slowing down. The global medical apparel market is expected to grow to $140B by 2027.
Moxie has already dealt with supply chain challenges through the pandemic that many consumer startups have faced. Their early stage investors want to know that they can manage costs as they scale revenue this year now that supply chain issues have subsided. Alicia tells me that she is focusing on “inventory & product expansion with healthy margins, increasing average order value, and of course revenue growth acquiring new customers.” They’ll be leaning on maintaining their strong LTV and managing customer acquisition costs as they scale. They’ve also recently partnered with Show Me Your Stethoscope, the largest online nursing community in the world.
For all of you operators reading this, the most important aspect of Seed stage startups is bringing the right people in to lay the groundwork and build a culture primed for rocketship growth. In the months ahead Moxie will be looking to hire foundational roles like a Chief of Staff, a Head of Partnerships, and a Chief Operating Officer to name just a few of the personnel needed for their next stage of growth.
Moxie offers an impressive selection of scrubs in different colors and sizes that feel like athletic gear. The brand launched as the most inclusive D2C brand in the D2C market. The everyday healthcare worker wears plus sizes so they offer a wide variety of fits at an affordable price point ranging from XXS to 5X with tall and petite sizes. Moxie is 30% more affordable than some of their major competitors, serving the everyday healthcare profession more inclusively. Their team is hybrid working remotely and out of the Harvard Innovation Lab. They plan on continuing to invest in Boston as their hub as the team continues to grow.
Operators to Know:
Moxie is just starting to build out the leadership team locally!
Key Roles To Be Hired (in the coming months):
Chief of Staff
Chief Operating Officer
Head of Partnerships
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the biggest operational challenges to scaling Moxie? For a Seed stage startup they’re building out a lot of new operational functionality
How does Moxie plan to expand beyond its flagship scrubs products? What’s the strategy for product expansion?
What does Moxie view as its competitive advantages? These are cornerstones to build around at the earliest stages
What are the most important roles Moxie needs to fill in order to scale? Each member of the team added is a critical hire at this stage!
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Moxie Apparel you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring wellness to our most treasured healthcare workers. All nurses applaud your efforts. If interested in learning more, please contact Alicia directly at alicia@moxiescrubs.com. See you around Cambridge, Moxie team!
Campbell Brofft, Director of Product @ Jellyfish
Campbell Brofft loves being part of a team. Whether it’s leading from the front as the oldest of five children, walking onto the Squash team in college, or building products for millions of people Campbell keeps taking on big challenges and smashing them for winners.
She grew up in Connecticut as the oldest of five children. As part of a big family, Campbell had to get comfortable with where the car was going, eating what was on her plate, and from a young age taking on the responsibility of looking after her younger siblings. After years of commuting to Manhattan, her dad took the leap to start his own company, a move towards entrepreneurship that in many ways inspired Campbell's career interests years later.
She left home earlier than most to attend boarding school in New Hampshire at St. Paul’s before moving diagonally West to attend Williams College as an Economics & Art History double major. Campbell has always enjoyed being part of a team so she tried out for the Williams Squash team and successfully walked on. Both her academic and athletic backgrounds were early, authentic representations of the skills needed to be a great Product Manager - the combination of analytical skills & artistic ways of thinking with a dash of competitiveness to deliver on time and above expectations.
All the while she was circling Boston. But first, she went back to the NYC metro to work at J.P. Morgan’s Private Bank. She helped C-suite executives of public companies with their concentrated stock positions as part of a customized approach to portfolio management. These clients were whip smart, ambitious, and direct. An incredible opportunity to learn from some of corporate America’s most impressive leaders. Her clients served as a powerful example to come prepared, communicate well, and have executive presence. J.P. Morgan was a formative experience in many ways but Campbell was drawn to the energy of the clients she served, the “builders”. She began to realize she would be best served in the next phase of her career by the energizing environment of building technology companies. John Pierpoint Morgan himself would be working on a tech startup if he were around today, wouldn’t he? She began to look for ways to reposition herself.
Business school made natural sense. She applied to programs with a more “generalist” curriculum and ended up at Harvard Business School. Located “in Cambridge” as they like to say. Campbell was excited for business school to help serve as a stepping stone to becoming more informed about the business world at large and help her chart a more intentional path. A consistent theme of Campbell’s we will be returning to.. Harvard absolutely delivered on those promises. Her classmates were people from all different types of backgrounds who were invaluable resources to helping her hone in on her next move. Yet it was the experience outside of the classroom where her new career came calling.
Campbell arrived at Spring, a Series B funded mobile shopping startup later acquired by Shop Runner, as an MBA intern doing general marketing. She helped clean up data sets, run LTV / CAC analyses, and other special projects. She had to learn how to beg engineers to get access to the data she needed, a valuable skill that any true non-technical startup employee needs to master. Quickly. Campbell entrenched herself on that side of the house and realized there was some really interesting work going on in the world of Product & Engineering. By the end of the summer she was attending every standup, going to sprint planning meetings, and essentially committed to a new career in Product.
After her graduation, Campbell sailed right down the Charles River to TripAdvisor as a Product Manager. She worked with the Machine Learning team and learned what it was like to be a PM for the first time. She got a real education from functional experts in whiteboarding sessions about the role machine learning plays at a public consumer tech company before later rotating through a B2B product group. Then, as Campbell has since come to learn about herself, she started to feel the startup itch.
She returned to New York for a Product role at Zola, the wedding registry startup. It was at Zola where Campbell felt like she really grew up as a product person. Their team was lean, they had just raised a Series D round of funding, and she walked in the door as the 3rd Product Manager on the team. She inherited their flagship offering, the registry product, built by Zola’s co-founders. Campbell describes working on registry as “the most incredible learning experience”. Over her four years at Zola she ended her tenure as the Director of Product running the Commerce business. This portfolio consisted of Zola’s revenue generating products - save the dates, invitations, wedding albums, & the home store which was launched during Covid. She detailed that it was a pretty wild experience to think about the roadmap impacts of a pandemic across their product portfolio. And she got married during Covid too! That’s some major dogfooding of the user experience right there.
And then, through a series of personal and professional events, Campbell found her way back to Boston. Her husband had graduated from business school too and landed a job offer he couldn’t pass up. Thankfully Zola was supportive of the move! While circling Boston growing up she always loved the city & local tech presence. She appreciated the livability and, if the suburbs ever came calling, they were a lot closer than New York City. In the meantime she loves the South End. She’s living in her 3rd apartment in the neighborhood and hopes to stay there until she’s dragged out! She loves spending time outside with her husband & one year old son. She takes advantage of the accessible public tennis courts with friends and sometimes shoots over to The Delux, a retro neighborhood dive, for the early bird special. Even life with young ones can’t stop an occasional cocktail hour.
With all the rapid growth and other changes she’s lived through the past few years, Campbell started to get that itch again as her learning curve sloped down ever so slightly. Coupled with the huge life change of having her first son, she decided to take another leap. She took 7 months off to recharge, adjust, and build her new family.
In a new city with some time off (professionally) to think through her next step, she wanted to be incredibly intentional about her next career move. She went through a period of introspection around what was most important to her over the summer months. She knew she wanted to be somewhere where she was pushed to learn out of her comfort zone, somewhere she could still grow her career in Product, and also aspired to join another fast growing startup.
She was aided by having the good fortune of looking at a time when most companies were still hiring but you could begin to see the macro shifting. It was a little easier to see leading indicators of which companies would be able to sustain themselves through the tightening economic conditions. This helped her vet roles & companies in a higher quality way than she might have been able to in 2021. Campbell looked critically at different business models to see how they’d hold up in a recessionary environment. She looked at fundraising history to see which companies had the balance sheets to live through the next couple of years. And she spent time getting to know interesting startups through educational conversations and backchanneling with peers & investors to determine company health.
This culminated in her move to Jellyfish, a role she’s been in for almost 6 months as a Director of Product. Her first SaaS Product role, she’s again been pushed out of her comfort zone to build products for businesses helping turn engineering teams into business leaders. As a product leader at Jellyfish, Campbell supports product development teams that drive continuous value delivery for the tool's users - tooling that makes engineering management tasks such as delivery management, team effectiveness, strategic alignment, and capitalizing software far less daunting. Passionate about all things product development, she brings a consumer perspective to the way the org thinks about crafting a strong user experience.
Here are three insights Campbell shared with me that have informed her work and career:
Optimize for Always Learning - Campbell has learned that her intuitive source of energy is to continue to learn. She shared “at every inflection point of my career I’ve pushed myself to do something totally new. I went from being an analyst at JP Morgan to business school being an incredibly different challenge to learning Product at a consumer tech public company to learning how to manage and be a leader at a growth stage consumer tech company. And now I find myself at a SaaS company which is incredibly different on multiple dimensions. Living an entirely different challenge there”. Product is a purposeful place for her to always be pushing herself and learning
Don’t Be Afraid to Take a Leap - Change is inevitable. She’s found strength in taking leaps and figuring it out as she goes. Even if it’s not intuitive. “I get nervous before a big change but push myself to do it because I haven’t let myself down yet. Having the courage to take the leap is important”. With her intentional push to test the limits of her comfort zone, a reminder to fight the fear that comes with it is a good companion!
Be Incredibly Picky & Intentional - “Whether it’s an internal move, a job switch, or industry switch you’re playing the long game when it comes to your career. Another 3 months looking for the right thing to get to the place you want to be is nothing in the long run. It’s not a bad thing to turn down a job offer or to not have a job for a little while. If you give yourself the space and time to be intentional and invest your energy in the right things that will pay off”. Direct from Campbell, why would I add anything else??
Campbell sees herself working in Product for tech companies for a long time. After 6 months at Jellyfish, she’s really excited about the future of the company. She isn’t sure if eventually leading a product organization at a growth stage company or trying to be a part of something earlier stage sound more interesting as a later chapter. Tenets of both sound very exciting in their own way. Campbell is a builder in the truest sense!
For more about Campbell, feel free to reach out to her on LinkedIn. Maybe you’ll catch her on the courts of the South End or taking in an early cocktail at Delux. Thanks for sharing. Can’t wait to see what limits you smash through next!
Any feedback for me? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt