Bretton Company

Joseph May was a lawyer who became director of operations and in-house counsel at Freshly Picked, a meal-kit company. He describes the legal work as cushy but not fun, and he found he enjoyed creating products and taking part in the design process. The idea for a backpack came to him while he was traveling and working in Italy, and it kept coming back to him. At 33, with four kids and a salary in the $70,000 to $80,000 range, he decided to leave and test whether he could build a company. His framing was simple: he would commit to one year and see what happened.

May learned about Kickstarter early and planned to launch in the morning, before his workday, while he designed the product. The bag is made of wax cotton with leather sourced from an Italian tannery that also supplies much higher-end luxury brands. The original campaign priced the bag at $249 with US manufacturing and had raised about $18,000 in its first week. May then moved production overseas, kept the same materials, and relaunched with a lower price point, which lifted the campaign to roughly $240,000 on Kickstarter. The best seller, the blue modern-day briefcase, retails at $199. He estimated production cost at about $65 per unit, with a gross margin of around $135 before marketing.

May used his Instagram knowledge from Freshly Picked and paid people with larger accounts to post about the product. He was introduced to Zach at Funded Today, a crowdfunding consultant with a large network, and used Funded Today from the start of his campaign. Indiegogo On Demand then extended the campaign for pre-orders, which brought total sales to about $280,000 across roughly 1,600 units. Instagram posts from one mommy blogger generated about 17 sales within an hour, and May estimated that he could tie at least 15 of them to her post. He also described a "long tail" effect in which followers bought weeks or months after first seeing the product. The account reached 40,000 followers within a year.

The campaign model worked because it validated demand before inventory was committed, and the Instagram engagement built a follow-up audience. Unit economics were healthy at the list price but thinner after marketing: May estimated $20 to $30 per bag in ad spend, which left roughly $100 of net margin per bag. He was also candid that attribution was hard, since Instagram's changes made much of the traffic show up as "dark traffic." He declined an outside investment offer of $20,000 for 10 percent of the company, saying he did not yet understand the business well enough to take the money honestly.

As of the interview, Bretton had two full-time founders plus contractors and used a fulfillment house rather than shipping orders itself. It was still bootstrapped, and May was planning to run four or five more Kickstarter campaigns that year to learn which products and customers would scale. He was focused on building an email list and moving followers through a funnel to explain the brand's story before asking for the sale.