Lessons Learned on the Journey from Professional Athlete to CPG Entrepreneur

Join Molly Baker, Founder of Indie Consulting and Chris Hanson, co-founder of RIA Eyewear as they discuss what makes direct to consumer sales such a unique experience. Chris answered questions about how the idea for RIA was born, and what it took to take the company to the level it is now. 

MB (Molly Baker): Without revealing yourself, tell us a little bit about what's top of mind professionally right now.

CH (Chris Hansen): You know, I mean, we sell 99%, direct to consumer, with our business for our products. And, so as you can imagine, the holiday season is upon us. It's all consuming. Just trying to get our segmentation done, get our offers tight. We don't do anything crazy at the holidays, but seemingly you can never prepare enough. We're in our 5th year as a business. Every year we try to ask ourselves how we should better prepare for Q4, and always seemingly forget something. It's such a tight window to focus on, the customer experience, having the right products ready to go, and just and just getting through December 25th. We have a lot of new products coming out in 2025, which is really exciting, but I am trying to wear a lot of hats right now. So it's just a juggling act. I really enjoy it.

MB: How do you plan for Q4 for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all the holidays, but then also plan for 2025 at the same time so that you don't show up in January and think, oh god.

CH: I haven't even started thinking about this yet. Oh, it's such a weird feeling because we have pretty lofty growth goals. So I look at what we need to do for Q4, and then I'm like is 2025 actually more important than what I'm doing right now? And trying to juggle those things is quite difficult. I think we put ourselves in a decent position. Our customer base and our prospect base, they react very well to a one time sale from us. From a product inventory standpoint, any of our ongoing partnerships and marketing initiatives need to also be planned. So I'll probably take Christmas off and then just right back on the 26th. 

MB: What are you really good at? Brag about yourself. 

CH: What am I good at? Well, I still hold this over my business partner's head. Our number one performing meta ad was shot on an iPhone and it was edited by me in Canva. And the thing is still going. It's the perennial winner. It does not get beat. It is amazing. And I always puff my chest, whenever I see it. But I also sit there and I'm like, why can't we beat this thing? We're constantly trying new creative and seemingly either meta or our customers just love this ad. We've tried to replicate it. Doesn't work. Our ad buyers have asked that I just keep it rolling. 

MB: So you spoke a little bit before about customer feedback and community feedback. How important has that been to you and your team as you've continued to build out your product line and your brand? 

CH: No. It's been super important. There is a balance, to be struck where you set out to build a business, create a brand, and you have these foundational principles and products you want to build because it's your company. And that's really fun to build something that you want to build. At the same time, especially being in ecommerce, the tools that are available to get constant customer and prospect feedback are just incredible. That's what really helped us to get feedback from users on what they do like and more importantly, what we didn't get right in our first product that we made. You know my cofounder is such a rock, and he was just like, we built the best product. The first product is the best product.  And I'm freaking out worrying about if it doesn't have something that the customers want. And he said “Okay, over time, we'll aggregate this data and we'll start making more informed decisions.” We went from one product in 2020, to 2 products by 2021. So we were very slow in that development. And at that point we felt like we had enough customers to really start to take more. I call them risks just because they're investments in a product. And now we have 9 or 10 products that are meeting different needs. So that is all to say that there has been a lot of customer feedback that's been aggregated as to what we can improve on. The customer feedback really actually allowed us to make tweaks to something that we already thought was foundationally what we wanted to do. It's those little things I think that really make a product differentiated. But at the same time you can't listen to all your customers. I wish you could.

MB: What relationship has been most impactful on you professionally?

CH: I would say, given again our very, very small team, it would be with my cofounder, Jordan. We went to middle school together. We were friends in high school, but he went to a different high school a little bit away from me, but we stayed very close. We went to different colleges, but we always stayed in touch. He was in New York City after school. I was just north of New York City. I pitched him on this idea that I had to start this business. And he was kind of looking at getting into the startup space, and he agreed to help me out for a couple months.

I said that sounds good. Just give me a couple months, and here we are. And that was 2017.

Almost 8 years later. It's been great to start a company with a cofounder that has a different style than I do. It has been very impactful for me to not just be the solo person at the helm. I played professional squash, and it's an individual sport, and I'm responsible for winning and losing. And all of a sudden when we started this business, that's not the case anymore. We're in it together. It's just been an awesome experience for me. It was definitely a learning experience. I was still on tour, and I was doing a lot of things that were focused on still being able to perform at the highest level. That was probably very hard for Jordan at that time because starting to focus more and more on this, and he was wondering when I was going to make that same decision. It was hard for me to stop playing. I think any pro athlete will say that it's difficult to give it up.

MB: So tell us who you are. What do you do?

CH: My name is Chris Hanson, and I'm a co-founder at RIA Eyewear. We make sunglasses, MB: What does an average day look like? 

CH: It actually starts the night before. I try to write down a lot of the things that I'm working on that are outstanding, just things that are important. I try to get them out of my head at night, so I can sleep properly, which I do, apparently too much. My wife, Megan, loves to tell me that I look too rested for a startup founder and that I sleep far too well. I prioritize that and then, I just get up. I try to get up before our 1 year old daughter gets up and starts making demands of me. I just have a coffee. One of the things I started doing this year that has been very helpful is, pretending as if the day is gonna end at noon. I absolutely pack work into that point. And then anything afternoon is a win. Not to say I stop working. I keep working but that's generally when I'll have some meetings. I'm wearing so many hats these days that if I let the early hours get away from me then I just find myself falling behind on a lot of things that we're working on. I just try to have consistent days. I keep the panic attacks to a minimum. 

MB: How do you and Jordan split who's in charge of what at a high level?

CH: he's more on the operations inventory side, our finance side. We both touch everything essentially. I do a little bit more of our marketing or our website development. But he comes over into that because he's responsible for a lot of our athlete partnerships. So just structuring the content we're trying to get, I'm more looking at how we get that into finished content, working with the ad buyer. I'm responsible for our email marketing, so that takes up a lot of my time. 

Especially as we head into Q4. It's almost like a finance ops kind of focus for him. But he comes over into marketing, and then vice versa for me. It is this kind of fluid relationship with some focus for each of us. But we're pretty aligned on generally what needs to get done for us to be successful at this point. We actually also brought in my sister, my sister, Meredith. She runs our prescription program, which is a very high touch side of our business. People are sending you their prescriptions, and you're helping them put in order that double or triple the price of a regular pair of eyewear. So, we felt it was necessary to bring her in for that. She crushes it, but that's our little team.

MB: At 21, did you think you'd be doing this?

CH: I was focused on being the best squash player in the galaxy, but I always felt like I wanted to start a company. Obviously, I didn't know what I know now, so I don't know if I would still be thinking that just from what it took to get us here. And obviously, you can look back and be very proud of what we did. And I would definitely do it again. But at 21, I was so focused on playing squash and seeing that be my career path, that I wasn't necessarily thinking about this. I always wanted to do something after my professional sports career. I didn't know what it would be. But, I always knew it would be difficult, exiting a professional sport at 29 years old. At the time, my goal was to play until 35. I always thought it's probably going to be something I need to build myself because I'm almost reinventing myself at 30 years old. So while I was playing, I essentially was always thinking about what I wanted to do.

MB: Why eyewear? 

CH: Professionals don't have to wear protective eyewear in squash. And the one tournament that eyewear is mandated, or at the time was mandated, was US Nationals, which was the most important tournament for me. So, I play the whole year with no eyewear on, and these guys make me put these silly goggles on. This is ridiculous. It was 2016, and I essentially used 5 different pairs throughout one match because they were just so bad with fogging and scratching.

So you are telling me that I'm making a decision between my performance and protecting my eyes. That there's nothing that I could wear that does both. I think that's ridiculous. Because then the answer for every pro is just to not wear them, but that's silly because in squash, while it is few and far between, if you get hit in the eye, it's pretty much catastrophic. Then we realized that this applied to pretty much all racket sports. You know, tennis is a little less about impact, but honestly, it's about UV protection. Golf was very complimentary to racket sports, and pretty much played in the same kind of space and a similar customer base, but enough difference to be worth a full new product. So, yeah, that's how we landed here.

Trendy or Tragic: 

Winter Iced Coffee Drinkers:

Actually, I'm okay with that. I think it's a totally different beverage than hot coffee. I will have a hot coffee or 2, and then I'll have an iced coffee midday. Anything coffee related is great.

Emails written by AI: Oh, I haven't tried it. My gut is I'm not a fan. People would say it's faster. I think people still need to write their emails and just communicate the way they feel. There's almost like a gut when you start writing that you just wouldn't get with AI. I think tragic. People can tell. We can tell when you're when AI wrote your email. 

Travis Kelce

I don't know. He was at the Yankees game last night. I'm a huge Yankees fan. So I'll give him trendy because he was there with Taylor Swift. I think he's a fun guy.

Find Chris Hanson on LinkedIn, and shop RIA Eyewear. 

As for us, follow @namedrop.pod on Instagram & LinkedIn and @molbakes on Instagram for all future episodes and insights.