Keith Bradley, Co-Owner of Made in KC (Interview 6/100)

Do you remember the story I told a little while back about hunting down a book by a local KC Royals baseball announcer, Joel Goldberg? Well, this is that store! It’s also the same store that sold me the mug I’m drinking out of during the episode and the necklace I’m wearing in the introduction video. Because of course I couldn’t resist supporting my (former) local community while I could. 

Let’s hear it for a true blue hometown business like Made in KC. Keith Bradley, Co-Owner of the store, talks about his experience starting and growing a business of selling goods exclusively made by those in Kansas City (see: the name of their store). Does it come with its own challenges? Yes. Does this locally owned business still remain connected to the global economy? Yes. Is it also thriving by lifting up the people that live right in its own neighborhood? Absolutely yes. 

Made in KC is fueled by their core values of: Teamwork, hard work, decentralized leadership, positivity, and servent leadership. These aren’t just words on the wall. These are true values that drive high level business decisions as well as the daily interactions with customers. Keith is open about mistakes made along the way and just like almost all of the leaders we’ve interviewed so far, he emphasizes continuing to learn and improve. In his words, “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

Whether you’re wandering the Plaza in Kansas City, looking for a souvenir at the airport, or just wanting a locally made item, I’d highly recommend shopping at Made in KC. 

Shout out: restaurant workers! Keith talks about how looks to those in the restaurant industry as folks that are working tirelessly to build strong stable businesses to feed our neighborhoods. 

Under the same family businesses, they also own Front Range Cafe, Outta the Blue, Sandlot Goods, and Rainy Day Books.

Bonus shout out: New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce (because, can we really post a podcast and not mention the Kelce’s or the Swift’s?)

Early and bonus shows as well as curated discussions and merch are available on Patreon.

Instagram | BioSite (with links to listen & more)

Transcript
Hey, folks, thanks so much for coming to the Capitalism for Good Podcast. It's here where we'll focus on exploring how we both make and spend our dollars to benefit the greater good. Folks, okay, so today we have a callback to a story that I told a while back about being on the hunt for a book by Joel Goldberg. He is a local announcer for the Kansas City Royals. And I was visiting Kansas City. I was staying on the plaza and I was trying to find his book. And I wandered into what I thought was just a coffee shop. Turns out it wasn't. I just needed to turn the corner. There was so much more to it. It was this store called Made in KC. Well, we're in luck.

Today we have one of the co-owners of that store, Made in KC. His name is Keith Bradley. And he is just another Kansas City guy who is here to uplift and support his local community, also his partners and his teammates within the store. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that not only do they have these, I think, 11 locations of Made in Kansas City, but they also are involved in a handful of other businesses that you will hear about. It seems like some other potential things on the horizon as well. And I'm just really excited to share this with you guys and for you guys to hear about it. I'll let him get into the nitty gritty of it, but in short, Made in KC is a store that, not so surprisingly, sells items made exclusively in Kansas City. So, enjoy. Let's learn more.

Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. To start, can you, can we start really simple with just a general overview of what Made in KC is, specifically for folks who may not live in Kansas City or just might not be familiar with the store?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having us and reaching out. It's excited that we always love talking about our business, and I always love also talking about the city that we live in, Kansas City. So, at its core, Made in KC is two things. We are a platform for local Kansas City artists, makers and designers to sell their products through. But we're also using that same platform. We have a mission to make shopping and supporting those Kansas City artists, makers and designers as easily and conveniently as possible. So, in the same way that we all have gotten accustomed to maybe loading up that Amazon cart or popping in the Target or going to a local grocery store, we want to have that same level of convenience for you to direct your dollars locally. To do that, we have multiple locations, we have a really great shopping experience, and we also have really great products by really great people here in Kansas City.

So, at its core, we're about being that great conduit for people who have a great product that they've made, that they've always dreamt about making and want to sell. At the same time, marrying that with an experience for the customer was like, I want to support local, I just don't know how to do it. But here's how you do it. It's right down the street. It's right in your neighborhood. You don't have to wait for a special event or a sale or day, you know, small business Saturday. You can do it every day.

Yeah. How did you come to be a co- is your title co-owner?

Yeah.

How did you become a co-owner of Made in KC?

So there's three of us, myself, Tyler Enders and Thomas McIntyre. So the three of us own and operate Made in KC, and a few other businesses that we might talk about later if it makes sense to. But we are all connected in some fun ways. Tyler and Thomas went to high school together and been friends since high school. Me and Thomas are related through marriage. I married his sister many, many years ago, and this is all of our first-each of our first business ventures. And so all of us came from various diverse backgrounds. I was in the non-profit world. Thomas was in accounting. He's an accountant by trade. And Tyler came up through finance and through some other startup businesses that he was a part of just on the initial level. So we all have very different backgrounds, but Made in KC was our first business venture. And kind of what brought us together was for a while after college, Tyler had moved away from Kansas City. He didn't want to get out, see the world, spend a lot of time in New York.

After that first season, he came back to Kansas City and really had a desire to connect with a part of this city that had changed since he'd last lived there and had different friends than what he grew up with. And so for him, that was people in this artist and maker community who at the time in Kansas City was small, not really well connected in the nutritional sense and outside of his normal circle. And so as he got to know some people in that world, he kind of found a theme of like all these folks have great products, but they can't get anybody, any other shop to pick them up. And so they do these pop-up shows, they do these First Fridays events down in the Crossroads Arts District here in Kansas City. Or they do a spring or fall craft fair and they are lugging their stuff in their cars. And if it rains, no one shows up. And if it's too hot, no one shows up. And if they do get in the store, they're putting a little corner of the store that says, here's our local section and it's not really celebrated. 

And from that came, well, what if we brought these artists together? And what if we celebrated them? And what if we didn't make them lug their stuff around every show, but we bought it from them up front, wholesale. And then we sold it, we created this experience. And so that was really right there. That was the nugget. That was the core and the start of what Made in KC is today.

Can you talk a little bit about how you go about finding the vendors and the manufacturers and the creators? Because like you said, there's so many out there. Even if it's just someone that is starting out, I talked to Greg Moore a couple of weeks ago when he was talking about how Chase just started Charlie Hussle in his garage. Like so many folks just start that way, but it's difficult sometimes to find them if they don't have the marketing connections or whatever that is. How are you finding folks in making your decisions about who to carry?

We do it all sorts of ways. What's fun about Kansas City is we feel like we have a little bit of a wealth of creativity. We punch above our weight classrooms of size, partly because of Hallmark Corporation being based here. We get a lot of artists who have been, over the decades have been drawn here and set up shop here in Kansas City. But early on, we would go to those fairs. I was talking about those pop-up shows, follow us on Instagram. We would literally stalk them in some ways like, hey, we're here to see you. We came to the show just to meet you. Can we get coffee? Can we meet up and talk about what your goals are for your business? That was the first couple of years we were doing that, spending our free time, building that list. We started with 15 artists and within the first year, we had 100 artists in our Made in KC family. We grew that quickly. 

Since then, we have a more, I guess, professional way artists can apply online, then they meet with our buyer, they send in samples, and then we often will sit down with them again from there, like, here's what it means to be in our store. Just so we're clear, do you want to do this, are you trying to make this a full-time job, or do you want to do it part-time, or is this just a hobby for you? Either one's fine, but it helps us to know, to set the expectations, because if you want to grow, we can put your product in 11 Made in KC stores and the new Kansas City Airport that we have a store in. And then if you want to grow beyond that, there's potential there too, if people find your stuff in the airport and they think, ah, this would be a great product for another city or another market. We've seen some of our vendors grow outside of Kansas City, which we love and celebrate.

But really it's about that kind of application process, sending samples, looking at their packaging, looking at what our customers are looking for, what are things on trend on the national retail scene, is that product that exists in Kansas City, and then evaluating there. Every Monday, I sit down with my buying team and they bring me samples. They have some applications and we go through them once a week to see who are constantly adding. Even today, we're 10 years old, but we still add, I would say, probably five to 10 new artists every month in terms of their products and expand. And some people drop off because of life changes, but we're kind of always adding to the Made in KC family.

Love that. I'm also so interested in the e-commerce side of it because, and this is just a trend in the society that we live in these days, that now that we have that tool of e-commerce, both as customers or from the business side, your local pool is no longer just geographically local. Local can mean different things. I'm a great example of it. I've moved all over, but I'm constantly like, oh, I am feeling lonely or want a gift from when I lived there or something like that, to be able to just get online and purchase something, or buy a gift and have it shipped to someone somewhere, and how have you seen that change, if at all? The market, maybe both of your artists, but also who your customers are?

Yeah, that's a really good question. It's been an exciting change, not necessarily because of the pandemic, but that was when things started for us where we then had to really pivot and put a lot more effort and energy into e-commerce, and then we had customers who wanted to come support us, but they couldn't because we were closed for a season there. They shopped online, which was great. Then that same thing that you described, a lot of people during that time were feeling homesick or nostalgia. They couldn't travel, and so they would send things from, even if they didn't live in Kansas City, they were stuck. I can't come to you anymore, but what I normally buy for you for Christmas is a box of Chris Elbow chocolates. I'm going to send that to you from New York to Kansas City, even though you're already there, because that's what I normally would have picked up on there. We started seeing a lot of that to where it expanded who our customer was. We had more people feeling homesick for Kansas City.

At the same time, we also had more people moving back to Kansas City as slowly as things settle down with the pandemic, where I don't need to be in this big city anymore. I can come, I'll establish my home base back home. They moved back and then they're still sending those things back to other parts of the country, which was super fun. But then the other thing that's happened here in Kansas City, which will be no surprise is we've, I feel like as a city, we've our profile on a national presence. And even to a certain extent, international presence has changed with the Kansas City Chiefs, with us hosting the World Cup next summer, with our tied in dating Taylor Swift, with all that sort of fun stuff that it created some small pockets of opportunity that we didn't really think about before. 

So for example, when Taylor Swift was on tour not too long ago, and she was in Australia, we started getting hits to our website from Australia, because they were trying to buy a piece of Kansas City. And one of the main things that was accessible to them was get a Travis Kelce licensed jersey from nfl.com. Well, Taylor Swift customer doesn't necessarily want that jersey. But they, you know, some time through the internet found us, and they're like, I want something more uniquely Kansas City that not everybody can get. So we opened up international shipping for the first time, like literally because of like Taylor Swift and her world tour, and people wanting a little piece of Kansas City. Same thing when the Chiefs went over to Germany and played a game there. We started getting hits from Germany, and we're like, oh, there's something to this brand.

And then with our kind of what Kansas City is most known for is barbecue. We sell a lot of barbecue sauce. And so we have pockets now of customers all over the world who maybe have come here once or twice. They have their favorite restaurant. Right now they order sauce back to their hometown in Florida or Australia. They don't order one, they just order by the case because they want as much of that sauce that they give out. 

And so that is to kind of your question that's expanded the pool of people who they understand what it means to support local, and they're doing it in different markets which is really fun to see. And imagine those customers in Australia or Florida or Chicago or New York who are buying from Made in KC. I know those customers are also buying from their local coffee shops or their similar local goods stores because they understand what that means to those businesses and they want to do that with any dollar they're spending.

Yeah, that it makes me think of that Kansas City in and of itself has almost become its own brand, and then we've got all these other things under it. But the city is known and not just the cow-towny way that it used to be known. When I was living there, when I was growing up.

Yeah. This hasn't been a thing that we could not have predicted. In 2015, we started that, yeah, I'm going to ride this Kansas City train as far as it goes, because someday it's going to be a big grown-up city. But it's been a fun, almost quiet evolution of a maturity, but also just some fun things happening that are easy for anybody to get excited about. A Super Bowl win, Pop Star hosting the biggest sporting tournament with the World Cup next summer, hosting the NFL draft, seeing certain celebrities have homes here because it was inexpensive to buy a home here and shoot a music video and they kept it. So little things like that, they raise Kansas City's profile. All the great SNL actors who have come up through, who grew up in Kansas City and come through and still rep their hometown. All those little things add up to make you think, there's something about Kansas City that's different than what I thought it was.

Can we talk about the not-so-great side of current events? Of you were just talking about expanding into international shipping and all of those types of things. I've been talking to a handful of manufacturers that are dealing with the tariffs that are going on right now. And while I recognize that you all specialize in items that are specifically made in Kansas City, are you guys feeling the effects of anything that's going on? Or even just like the volatility of recession? Like all of these scary words that are impacting the way in which people make money decisions these days?

Yeah, for sure It is a wild time to be in retail, but that's been the case for a long time now. Going back to what we mentioned about the pandemic earlier, and then even before that with the rise of e-commerce is a wild time to be in, or primarily in the brick and mortar retail space. And so a lot of the things that we have been experiencing and seeing are not necessarily unusual in our industry. But what is different about this time, and I think what is really important for us to, for other, maybe for your listeners to understand, is that we didn't get into this business because a product made in China is inherently bad and worse than a product made in Kansas City. We got into this business to support our neighbors, our friends, the people in this city, and we think there's some really good things that come from that.

But we are to the point now where, especially in our consumer culture, where everything is connected in some way, shape, or form, and whether it's a part of the, if it's the jar that the local candle maker is pouring their locally made candle in, that jar most likely comes from overseas. We're okay with that. We own that. That's totally fine because that's going to help them get better margin on their candle and the products started here and ends here in Kansas City is what we often say. But we're such a globally interconnected supply chain on so many levels that it will soon disrupt some of the local artists that we work with. We've already seen it happen with our local coffee roasters, our local chocolatiers, and the price of those raw goods.

We'll see that in other industries too, whether it's an apparel designer and their blank t-shirts are made overseas. They're printed here, that costs are going to go up. Then by extension, everything becomes a little more expensive and a little more challenging. Now, in our industry, local goods often already had the reputation of being more expensive than other goods. So we've been combating that since day one. The first complaint we ever got from a customer was like, why does this T-shirt cost $32? The $32 T-shirt. Now, you can't really find a decent T-shirt for anything less than that at all. People are comfortable paying $40, $50 for a T-shirt. But it is something that local goods have had the reputation of being more expensive because of whatever for all the reasons we describe, they can have the opposite of the reasons we describe. I think in a sense, we've gotten our customer acclimated to that already and it's more about the storytelling behind it, the shorter supply chains, oftentimes the more environmentally friendly supply chains, the fact that 90 cents on your dollar spent in our store stays in your Kansas City community and doesn't go to a tariff, for example, or to a shipping container company that's bringing shipping containers back and forth. The money gets sliced up so many ways on a fully made international product, that that storytelling that we've been doing is going to become even more important to help people understand the why and give them the option to spend their dollar.

On the flip side, we might see some of those other products, alternatives that are made overseas become more expensive, and then the local alternative doesn't seem as bad as it did before. But that's still too early to tell on a lot of those things right now. So just wait and see and been doing what we've been doing, which is celebrating all the good things going on in our city right now.

Yeah, that seems very similar to last week I spoke to Emma Groves. She is the co-founder and CEO of two sustainable manufactured brands for toothbrushes and then for straws. And I asked her a similar question and she was like, you know, if not this challenge, there would be something else. Like that's all a part of being a business owner. So while it is difficult to make future business decisions now, if it wasn't this, it was going to be something else. And you just have to kind of like roll with it a little bit.

Yeah, I agree with that 100 percent.

From that standpoint, you know, so many things that at least the folks within my network are always talking about is like, well, what can we do to help? Like if we're not an employee of your store, if we're not the buyer, if we're not the creator, if we're just the customers, like what can we do to help? Are there, is it helpful from like a supply and demand aspect to help creators scale if we're focusing on our energy on these smaller markets or on local creators or is there, is there, like what can we do to leverage the customer power, if anything at all?

Yeah, that's a really good, that's a really good question. I've never, on the easy answer, I guess I'd say is shop local, right? It's kind of, we say it all the time, but like we challenge people to redirect one, at least one of your daily purchases, your regular purchases, right? So maybe it's a certain type of soap. You always buy zest from whatever store because it's cheap and you just use it, whatever. Find a local option that you can maybe spend a couple of dollars more on, but then that becomes a part of your life, a part of your habit. So we've been really trying to cultivate that habit change. And we learned this, we have several coffee shops that we operate. And we learned when you open your coffee shop, it might be cool and you have a great product.

But what you're really asking the customer to do is change their morning routine, which is really hard for people to do. And it happens over a period of not just weeks and months, but years, and eventually your coffee shop has a robust customer base. And they all used to go to another coffee shop. That's how, it's not like when you open a coffee shop, you're not getting first time coffee drinkers like, oh, I've never had coffee before. I think I'm going to try it right now. You're really changing their habits.

And so with local goods and supporting local arts makers, it's the same thing. I find that one thing that you're like, I absolutely love this honey from Mezner Family Farm. It tastes better than the store-bought honey that I can get for $1.99. And so anytime I buy honey, I'm going to buy Messner Honey. And have that one habit. And then you become a fan and a spokesperson for that brand and that product, and you're buying it for your friends every holiday. And they get sick and tired of you because you're always bringing them Messner Honey. But eventually it changed something in you that makes a difference. What we saw firsthand, and this was true in Louisville as it was in Kansas City and many parts of the world during the pandemic, when people had to make the decision, do I close my business for a period? Do I close my business for good? We saw firsthand in our community, if customers did not go to a particular local restaurant, people thought it went away. And it was once a week, there was another, they closed, they closed. But there's a lot of tons of restaurants that didn't close. People made the decision to go there and support them. And during that time, people weren't worried about their neighborhood McDonald's closing, or even, they knew they'd be fine. They worried about their neighborhood Italian restaurant, or their neighborhood bakery, or the neighborhood coffee shop. And in Kansas City, our experience was that people showed up, and they really, they value, they didn't want their community to change, they love that place, and they showed up for it. And so I think harnessing that, whatever that was in them that motivated them to, I don't want to see this go away, I want more of this in my life, I want this to be a part of my city's fabric.

And the only way I know to do that is to, I'm gonna redirect my spending, then that's what it takes, and that's what happens. So that's one kind of way to answer your question. On a bigger scale, one of our ideals, kind of blue sky ideas that Made in KC is, you know, Kansas City is a mid-tier metropolitan area. We've got about 2 million plus in our metro area, you know, both sides of the Kansas-Missouri state line. Not the biggest, I think we're 25th, 26th or something in the country, not huge by any means. But yet we've been able to grow our business to where there's 10 Made in KC stores. There's an 11th one inside our airport. There's 11 ways that you can buy different locations, that you buy local products every day. There's not another city in America, bigger or smaller than ours, that has 11 of the same local branded stores. There's places in Louisville, I'm sure that you know, that are similar to us. They don't have 11 in Louisville. Our hope is if we can do it in Kansas City, we can certainly do it in Louisville, in Cleveland, in St. Louis, in Los Angeles, in New York, you know?

And so there's something there on a bigger, whether we're talking about a legislative agenda or some sort of tax incentive, there's something there about, we've opened the door that there's the possibilities that your community, your suburb, your street, doesn't have to look like every other one in America. It can be different. And so I think on a bigger scale, way bigger than what we can even do or imagine, like having Made in KC in every community, that's tailed their community is a possibility. And I'd love for someone to pick up the baton and be like, yes, I'm going to go, I'm going to open 10 Made in St. Louis's. I'm going to open these. I'm going to crush it in New York and Chicago and show them that we're more than just whatever.

And so I think that's kind of on that bigger scale to answer. How can you support? Well, I think just dreaming of a different type of community where your local industry is robust and diverse and you've got manufacturing, you've got local goods, and you're going to have some national retailers and that's great and that's fine. You need them. They employ tons of people and it's a beautiful thing, but it doesn't have to dominate your suburb, your city, your experience, you know. 

I often tell people in doing kind of similar talks like this of like, think about the last time you visited another city, you were excited to check out the local restaurant, you weren't excited to go, I can't wait to get the Cheesecake Factory, that's just like my Cheesecake Factory, or you want to go to those local places. Well, do that here in Kansas City, you know, do that here in your own backyard every day, do that here with your business. You know, what coffee are you buying for your office? That's an easy change to make. Buy a local, buy coffee from a local roaster, and your office coffee for your 120 employees, you will change that roaster's life by ditching Folgers and supporting your local roaster. Like that will cause the roaster to be, oh, I've got to, I maybe need to buy another roaster. I need to employ another person. I need to get better packaging. I need to get anything that we're pricing. All of a sudden, that one decision that you've said, I'm not going to buy the cheapest option possible.

So that's where people often look. I need to buy the cheapest option possible, and that equates to good and value and progress, whatever. They said, what can I do to support someone in my backyard? Okay, this coffee is going to be $5 a pound more expensive, but I can afford it. Now, my 120 employees, they might go check out that place on the weekends. They might really love the coffee. They may start buying it for their home coffee because everyone buys coffee at home and at work, and they still go out for coffee. So that one decision where you're not purely looking at the bottom line has a ripple effect that is in many ways hard to calculate for good.

Yeah. In shifting from dealing with the external chaos that we all have to deal with to what ends up being internal chaos of just what it's like to have a business full of humans, full of all these things. So what's your management philosophy specifically when it comes to creating stability in such a chaotic and ever-evolving, changing world?

Yeah, it's a good question. A couple of years ago, we had a group of advisors come alongside us and help us take the next step as a business. We had a realization that this is about five years ago, that our next five years aren't going to look anything like our first five years. But there's some people out there who probably know what our next five years could look like. They're out of the startup phase, they've been in other businesses and whatnot. We brought along some people who provided some really good advice for us that we stick to.

One of those was like hire an office administrator. We never had one, never crossed our mind to have one. Didn't think we could afford one, but they're like, no, do it and let that person handle some of the things that you guys are getting tied up with, so you can start to do some other things like, what is your management philosophy? Think about those things versus just putting out fires and all that stuff. But then the other thing they really advise us to do is get together. The three of us are partners and really identify what are your core values as a business.

It sounds very business booky, very hokey, but we've identified core values that are very familiar to other businesses. The thing that we've done is we've actually stick to them. Teamwork, hard work, decentralized leadership is one of our main ones. We talk about the most. We put together these core values and we put them at the top of every email that we send out to our team. We hire people based on them. We give all of our hourly team members get a six-month review and six months raise every six months, and they're graded on those core values. How are they doing with hard work, teamwork? How are they doing with decentralized leadership, servant leadership, and positivity? Our five are teamwork, hard work, decentralized leadership, positivity, and servant leadership. We talk about those every day and we lean into those. I think our team has really grown to adopt those themselves, and it helps. Really leaning into those core values gives us stability. When we're having our time making a decision, well, is this person, are they leaning into these core values? If they're not, the decision is made for us. Are we going in this direction? Does it align with these values and it makes those decisions for us? It took a lot of work to get that point, but then once we've got those in our toolbox and we use them regularly, they become really good tools.

Yeah, I'm interested. You said your background was in the nonprofit world, which as is mine, I've spent probably 15 plus years in and around the nonprofit world. Started out as a fundraiser, grant writer, became program manager, have been all over the place.

But one of the things that I am really passionate about and talk all the time about is, one, misconceptions when it comes to nonprofits and just trying to walk people through some of those things. But a piece of that is, I have found within my experience in my career that the way in which nonprofits function is not all that different than the way in which for-profits function. We have our own unique challenges. There are some things that are specific to it. There's also specific counting practices that are a little bit different. But on a whole, if we just look at it from baseline, they're not that different. Can you talk a little bit about any of the parallels or the things you've taken from that part of your life to what you're doing now?

Yeah. That's a really great observation. I say the same thing often too, and especially when you throw in our startup small business being heavy in retail. Both retail and non-profit, we make all our money in the fourth quarter.

Yeah.

In the last weeks of the year. We're almost always trying to hold on for the whole year until we get to that part of the year. You know that from fundraising and grant and things like that. We all rely on the generosity of others. There's plenty of non-profits to give you a dollar too, plenty of other places to shop and even other places to support local. People come to you because they want to. They feel like they're part of a better story, a bigger story, a different mission. Behind the scenes, we're in the people business, and that's what the non-profit business is as well. So we got to take care of our employees in the same ways.

Our employees are looking for the same things. People work for non-profit because again, they want to feel connected to the mission. People work at Made in KC because they don't want, not because they just like retail, but they could also work at Target, but they want to be part of a bigger story. They want to be part of a mission. So there's so many overlaps and parallels on the other thing that's, I imagine and hope is probably similar in Louisville, but here in Kansas City, the non-profit community is very robust and I would say healthy. It's very well connected and people are not afraid to share secrets, share best practices, to work together.

They want to see everybody do well. There's a non-profit executive who I'm close with and she used to work in the Chicago market and it was very more cutthroat and don't share and everyone's fighting for the same thing. Here it's collaborative and that's the same thing in the small business world We want to see all small businesses thrive and that's good for everybody. We don't celebrate it when a small business goes out of business and think, oh, that's more customers for us. No, that's not how it works for one and two.

We need more small businesses, not less small businesses. And so there's so many different parallels between the two. And that is one of the things I think that really helps us have some early success. Made in KC is one, we didn't know we were doing. And so we weren't doing it the way, the traditional way. And two, we approached it with a little bit of a nonprofit lens. Like, let's work together. Let's listen to our customers. And our customers are not only our customers, but they're our vendors. Those are also our customers. Let's see what they want. Let's, you know, we view every sale that we make as precious and valuable in the same way.

And fundraising, every dollar you view is precious and special as $1 or $1,000 or $1 million. And so we kind of had that lens where we were scrappy and appreciative and collaborative in a way that you expect or see a lot in the nonprofit community.

Yeah. Yeah. I also think often that startups in general function much like the poverty mentality of nonprofits and that there's so much of this, like you're going to do more with less because you're always trying to like truly maximize your ROI. But like that's not that different than not just a startup, but like any business. But it's just there's an added layer of everyone's looking at you being like, I'm looking at your overhead rate. I'm looking at what you're doing here.

That's exactly right.

Yeah. Can you also talk a little bit about, so you were talking about how you guys started with like a little bit of a non-traditional lens in the things that you did. When I'm looking for businesses and leaders to talk to, I'm always looking for those that make those against the grain decisions. You guys wanting to focus very locally on your creators that are in your backyards, and being able to support those and uplift them and be available and approachable with having so many locations. For other entrepreneurs or potential owners or founders out there, who are looking to make those against the grain decisions, to be like, I want to do things a little bit different than our Walmarts and our Amazons or whatever. What advice do you have for folks like that, that kind of want to follow in your footsteps?

I think in those decisions and in those early years, we made a ton of mistakes and we experimented a lot. I think that's what often gets missed in a lot of small business or entrepreneur stories, especially on the success side. People, they see the end product and they see where you're at currently. But it's easy to forget all the different mistakes. One of the non-traditional things we did is we experimented a lot. We weren't afraid to make mistakes. Then we pivoted and learned from them. A small example is anytime we got a request in the early days to do a pop-up show, can you pop up at this business or that business? Can you bring Made in KC to our office park or whatever? We said yes to all those and half those we lost money on. But we learned from them. We got in front of them.

We learned what we liked and what we didn't like, who we like to work with. We just learned about that and we weren't afraid to lose money on that versus the traditional approach would have been, you're going to calculate it all and you're going to only say yes to the big ones, and those might not even be successful. Maybe just try one and don't do it. We, in our second year of business, towards the end of our first year, we partnered with one of the biggest retailers around the Hallmark, and we partnered with Hallmark Corporation because they asked us to, and they said, hey, we see what you're doing over there with local goods. We want to put local goods in all of our Hallmark stores around Kansas City. This is our backyard. We just said yes to that, even though we didn't make any money, we were brokering. We would buy local good X from vendor, and then deliver it to Hallmark and sell it through them, and we had no markup, no margin in the middle. Not a smart business decision. We were driving around town all the time. I was doing a lot of the deliveries. But from that experience, we learned, this sounds really silly now, how to barcode our products. Because we didn't do that. And we learned the importance of keeping track of inventory. And we learned the importance of margin.

And we also learned not to be afraid of big business and be afraid of our competition. We tried selling on Amazon for a while. We're like, let's figure out how Amazon does things. So we went through, did some FBA classes, and tried to get our local goods on Amazon. And that was a flop. It just didn't work.It didn't translate. We learned a lot about Amazon and how they do what they do and why they do what they do through there. So some of the things now that decisions we know, we would never do that. We can evaluate it pretty quickly. And even back then, we were smart enough to know this probably isn't going to work out and make money, but let's do it anyway and let's learn as much as we can. And so that would be my advice is constantly learning.

And you learn from your successes. You also learn from your failures and that's okay. We talk about our failures way more often now to our team member, to the public, than our successes because we just learn so much from those. So that would be one piece of advice of don't be afraid to make mistakes, which again, sounds fairly cliche, but if you don't, you're going to stay in one spot. And we took this approach, if you're not growing, you're dying. And so we really wanted to do that. We opened three stores in our first year of business. We would not do that again, but we had the opportunity in front of us. We didn't know, we didn't know.

And again, we wanted to make shopping local convenience. We went to the people, right? And our hope was that if we're going to succeed in retail, we need to become a household name. And so we need to make it seem like Made in KC has always been around, even though we just started. And I think to a certain level, we've succeeded with that. Although if you were to line up 100 Kansas Cityans, and you ask them about Made in KC, I think you only get 10 to 20 yeses. If you tell people about Hallmark, you're going to get 100 yeses. Yeah, I know Hallmark. And so that was our standard of like, well, they've been around for 100 years doing similar stuff to this. So how do we learn from that? And so, yeah. I always think about, there is a perception sometimes that those you were talking about like doing an event and you're losing money on it, like that can be looked at as a failure because you lost money. But if you learn a valuable lesson out of it, are you really failing? Is that really a failure? It's monetarily maybe, but in the long run, maybe not.

Yeah, that's where I think we have such a, and rightly so, and this is true in the nonprofit world, we view successes and failures purely on dollars, and made or lost, and that's a really not always the best metric to view success or failure, and it certainly shouldn't be the only metric, but that has become kind of the core bottom line in our society, whether it's personally, professionally, or whatever industry you're in, do you have high income? Do you make money? Do you lose money? Are you bad with money? And we're so much more than the dollars that we spend and that we have. And, but it's hard to think outside that is success or failure. But I think to what I've learned about your podcast is like, that is kind of the point, right? We're just not, there's this capital C capitalism that exists, that we've kind of become beholden to, and in and of itself it's not a bad thing, but we've kind of put it in a place where it doesn't necessarily belong. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. So many people are turned off as soon as I start talking about it. So many people are like, oh, you're talking about capitalism. I'm out and I'm like, no, no, no, hold on. Hear me out. Hear me out. We're talking about the parts where we're like, we've got some power and we've got some ability to make some change here. Yeah. Can you also talk about, so you mentioned at the very beginning that you all have some other business ventures that you've got together. Do you want to talk a little bit about those and maybe also how you've taken some of these lessons that you've learned with this venture or with anything else that you've done in the past and applied it to any of the other stuff you're working on?

Oh, yeah. Really fun. One of the exciting things that none of us could have seen 10 years ago started with Made in KC is all the other fun stuff that we've gotten involved in because of what we've been asked to do. Put your hat in the ring for this or come to this or try this. What if you open the store here? We don't want to open a store here, but we want to open a coffee shop here. Would you be open to that? In our family and businesses right now, we have a coffee shop and bar called Front Range Coffee House. It's Colorado, Cabinie, Woodsy theme cafe and bar experience.

We have two of those and we bring in the best local offerings that we have in our town in terms of liquor and coffee and food and pair them with some of the international beer companies, cocktails, whatever that you'd experience. But we've created really great communities in these unique experiential retail environments. That's all about bringing people together over a good experience. We don't do drive-throughs. We aren't very fast with our service at times, but we're about coming and staying, stepping outside of your day-to-day. We have another concept that's not mounting, but beach theme called Out of the Blue, where we have tropical plants and palm trees and swings that you could swing while you drink your latte or sip your orange wine.

Again, it's a place where you just want to get away a little bit from your everyday experience. Those are some of the more fun creatively on the, one of the things that one of my partners is really great at is designing spaces because he's been a great vehicle for like, let's just design this space a little bit outside the box, a little bit different. What if? What if there was swings here? What if there was palm trees here in the Midwest type of thing? But then beyond that, there's been two particular companies that we've either admired from a distance or worked along the side that we've become owners of and heavily invested in.

So one of those is Sandlot Goods, and they are a hat manufacturing company here in Kansas City. So they started making leather goods, high-end leather goods, wallets, belts, journals. Through the pandemic, pivoted to making masks because they had sewing equipment. Then as need for masks went down, we pivoted to making baseball caps, 100 percent made here in the United States, here in Kansas City, from cutting the fabric to this stitching. You kind of see a picture behind me here of Sandlot Goods. And so last year we made over 100,000 hats and we have partners across the country and different licenses. And so we're part of that. Kansas City used to be one of the largest textile manufacturers in America back in the early parts of the 19th century. And so this is a little bit of a nod to that part of Kansas City's history.

But we're really kind of putting our money where our mouth is in the Made in KC side. We don't make anything. Great people in Kansas City do, but this is us investing in one of those companies that we hope to grow beyond Kansas City. So super great company, great story. They've made hats for Jason, Travis Kelce, and the New Heights podcast and lots of fun projects with that. And the other one that is really a treasure in any community, but there's a local bookstore here called Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas. And they're turning 50 years old this year. A couple of years ago, the founders and owners were ready to retire. And so we reached out to them and offered to buy their bookstore and carry on their legacy of literacy.

And so we also own Kansas City is one of the most well-known independent bookstores, recognizing that's an important pillar in any community, having that independent bookstore. It's also fits very much in line with our Made in KC kind of ethos and retail philosophy and all that good stuff. But it's also one that brings a lot of pride to Kansas City because of all the author and public connections that we've developed over the last 50 years, where we bring in authors to come and celebrate Kansas City, who might not come here if not for Rainy Day Books. Like I'll just go to Chicago or New York. Nope, I want to start my book tour here in Kansas City. It's another source of great city pride for us to be part of that business as well.

I love that. That's all so exciting. I had no idea.

Yeah. Very fun stuff that all started with those 15 artists and makers we worked with 10 years ago, Made in KC.

I love that. I'm going to end on continue that positive trajectory there. My last question for everyone is, who's another business or a leader out there that you see things that are doing it the right way that you want to shout out? It can be anyone from an old boss of yours, a coworker, someplace that you're a customer of, or absolutely anything.

Oh, wow. Man, that's a really good question. I'm sure you put that in your notes. I should have thought more about it. I don't know if this is going to be a great answer, and I may be thinking of one later and come back and send it to you. But I really admire it. I've been in small business for 10 years now, and I mentioned we're in the coffee business and have these coffee experiences. One thing we've never stepped foot in is the restaurant space, full-on food service industry. It's such a challenging environment. My answer is anybody in that space that's doing it well, and that has done it for more than 10 years, I admire.

There's so many variables. Prices are constant, changing customer demands, but the legacy restaurants, and they exist in Louisville, like they exist in Kansas City, like those business owners, they're in it, and they love it, and they've built spaces that people talk about. Before they go to them, while they're in them, you're talking about it, and then after they leave, and it's an experience you can't quite capture with the kind of retail that we do. And I just admire the hell out of those people who work in day in, day out, and it's a volatile industry, but it's one that brings such great pride and joy, and to any city that has those great restaurants. We've got the great barbecue restaurants here in Kansas City from Arthur Bryant's, to Joe's, to the Gates family, to Jack Stack, and we've got our smaller great restaurants: Fox and Pearl, and others that come up all the time, that it's just like those people, I'm in this similar world, not quite overlapping, I couldn't do what they do. And you can't cut corners, if you cut corners, people call you out, and you got to keep staff, you got to pay them well. Everything that takes to run a business right, you've got to do perfectly in a restaurant to succeed. And so you know those that are doing that are doing it well.

That's such a good one to call out also because even I think about like the barbecue restaurants in Kansas City and there are those big ones. There's the Jack Sock and the Arthur Bryant's and Q39 and all those. But I also feel like every time I'm back visiting or if I'm with someone who's like from a different suburb or something like that, like there are, there's always one that I haven't heard of, there's always my family swears by one out in Green Valley called Porky's that is like this tiny little hole in the wall. It is so small. They often run out of meat every day. But it's like, I, no one else probably outside of Green Valley or at least someone's ever heard of it.

I've never heard of it. Yeah. I've never heard of Porky's. I'm going to, I want to check it out now.

Yeah. I mean, if you live like in Kansas City, you got to drive to get out there. So give them a call first to make sure they've got anything. But so, so good.

Yeah. They stick with it. It's such a tough industry and I admire them for it. Every blood, sweat and tear goes into those restaurants.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate this. I wish you all the best and this has been really great to talk with you and learn more about you and everything you guys are doing.

It's been very fun. I appreciate the opportunity and thanks for all that you're doing. Next time you're in town, give us a call. I'll call Joel Goldberg up and we can all hang out together.

Love that. That sounds great.

Folks, thanks so much for listening to the Capitalism for Good project. Just a quick reminder that this project is supported through patreon.com/CapitalismForGood. There are weekly Between the Interviews episodes, early releases of interviews, merch and other bonuses for those that subscribe through the patreon. Support allows for this project to continue to move forward without the potential bias of traditional ads. Thank you so much for anyone that's already in that community and for anyone considering joining. As always, please let me know what you think and also if you have any recommendations for leaders that you see out there making a positive impact on their internal and external communities, I would love to shine a spotlight on your favorite folks.

All right, that's enough. Let's go leave this place better than we found it.