707: How Two Aussies Took On Samsonite & Rimowa - and Won ($100M+)
The Foundr Podcast with Nathan ChanShow Notes
Athan Didaskalou had bet everything on a one-year-old suitcase brand called July. Then Covid wiped out travel and nearly took the business with it. What happened next turned it into a nine-figure global company. Athan came from the agency world and sold out of two businesses to go all in; his co-founder Richard Li brought the manufacturing and supply chain muscle. They chose luggage precisely because it was hard to make and dominated by a single global player. They survived lockdown on drink bottles, kept every team member, and came out the other side with a two-year head start no competitor dared to challenge. Today July has 15 tier-one retail stores in Australia, is the official luggage of the Australian Olympic Team, and is pushing into Asia, the US and beyond.
In this interview, Athan breaks down his theory of why founder-led brands beat private-equity ones, the "irrational spend" that built July's brand equity from day one, and the counterintuitive reason physical retail became their cheapest customer acquisition channel.
What you'll learn in this interview: • Why July was their "15th race" - and how years of prior businesses made them lethal from day one • The irrational spend theory: why founder-led brands beat PE brands by overspending in emotional areas • How they landed the four-letter July domain and sub-five-letter social handles - and why it signals trust • Why luggage is a trust business - and how brand became their moat against the dominant global player • How drink bottles and personalization kept the wheels turning when Covid wiped out travel overnight • Why the two-year Covid shutdown handed them a head start no competitor was willing to challenge • The investor who wrote a cheque with zero due diligence - after they drove out to fix a customer's lock • Why retail became their cheapest customer acquisition channel - and the rent-to-revenue math behind it • Why the US rewards short-domain, free-returns DTC brands - and why the UK has been so much harder to crack • Why staying deliberately small is getting harder - and the first year they stopped knowing every employee's name
If you're building a DTC or consumer brand, trying to compete against a dominant incumbent, or rethinking whether retail belongs in your growth plan, this conversation will fundamentally change how you think about brand equity, resilience, and building something people actually trust.
SAVE 50% ON OMNISEND FOR 3 MONTHS
Get 50% off your first 3 months of email and SMS marketing with Omnisend using the code FOUNDR50. Start here → https://your.omnisend.com/foundr
SAVE 95% ON XERO FOR 6 MONTHS Simplify your business finances with 95% off Xero for your first 6 months. Start here → https://foundr.com/xero
WANT TO GROW YOUR BRAND WITH META ADS? Join the Foundr Operators Waitlist → https://foundr.com/operators HOW WE CAN HELP YOU SCALE YOUR BUSINESS FASTER Learn directly from 7, 8 & 9-figure founders inside Foundr+ Start your $1 trial → https://www.foundr.com/startdollartrial
PREFER A CUSTOM ROADMAP AND 1-ON-1 COACHING? → Starting from scratch? Apply here → https://foundr.com/pages/coaching-start-application → Already have a store? Apply here → https://foundr.com/pages/coaching-growth-application
CONNECT WITH NATHAN CHAN Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/nathanchan LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanhchan/
CONNECT WITH ATHAN DIDASKALOU Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/july/ LinkedIn → https://au.linkedin.com/in/athand Website → https://july.com/
FOLLOW FOUNDR FOR MORE BUSINESS GROWTH STRATEGIES YouTube → https://bit.ly/2uyvzdt Website → https://www.foundr.com
More from The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
Lukas Pakter filmed his bank account and posted it to the internet: $80,000 in debt, $100 to his name, an activewear brand quietly dying. A year and a half later he’s doing over $250,000 a day, on track for $70-80 million this year, and has turned his growth playbook into Tribe - a creator-sales platform now used by over 16,000 brands. The shift that changed everything was a single realisation: making other people money makes you more money. Instead of being the one guy filming TikTok Shop videos, he turned his best customers into an army of sellers - and built the software to run it.
I do a lot of enrollment calls for Foundr Operators, and I keep seeing the same pattern. A founder gets on a call doing a 5 or 6x return, literally printing money, and they will not scale. They are terrified to spend more. And if I had understood the principle behind this ten years ago, I would have made tens of millions of dollars more. That is a big claim, so hear me out.
Three best friends put in $250 each - $750 total - printed 100 hats in a garage, and sold out in 36 hours. No following. No ads. No business plan. Four and a half years later, Dad Gang has done over $40 million in revenue selling hats built around one idea: dads deserve better than goofy, frumpy products that make fatherhood a punchline. The craziest part? Grant, Bart and Ejay still run the entire thing with zero employees, a private Facebook group of 15,000 dads, and an equity partnership with Gary Vaynerchuk - and they're deliberately building it as a lifestyle business, not a rocket ship.
Ryan Thompson ran a restaurant for 25 years, sold a couple of quick-serve spots, built a financial services company, and even ran a motel before he noticed the craft distillery movement taking off and decided someone in Vail, Colorado ought to start one - so it might as well be him. He went to Moonshine University in Kentucky, learned distilling from A to Z, wrote a business plan, and scraped together every dollar he could. Thirteen years later, 10th Mountain Whiskey & Spirit Company makes seven spirits, runs two tasting rooms, and donates to military nonprofits - named in honour of the historic 10th Mountain Division that helped start American skiing (and, as it happens, Nike).
Hiring is tough, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But I was reflecting on this past year, and I have had a much better strike rate lately because of one basic shift. And sometimes it is the basic stuff that is easiest to forget.