“The action is the juice”: the Huckberry origin story
Five years ago, Rich and I were freezing our butts off on a rickety chairlift on the backside of Squaw Valley when we decided to go for it.
Looking back, we were far too naïve to know exactly what it was, but we definitely knew what it wasn’t — cranking out spreadsheets for 90 hours each week for the rest of our lives. Still, gaining the courage to leave our safe, lucrative jobs wasn’t easy. As Jerry Seinfeld might say, it was like tipping a vending machine — you don’t just push it over, you have to rock it back and forth a few times.
Having discussed our idea over countless Anchor Steams after work, we knew in our bones that Huckberry needed to exist. There were men’s stores, sure. Adventure magazines, too. Yet nothing out there spoke directly to us — 25-year-old guys who lived in the city but lived for the outdoors — and we envisioned a brand that was equal parts store, magazine, and inspiration to help guys suck the marrow out of life.
So in the summer of 2010, we left our jobs, invested $10,000 each from our savings to form Huckberry LLC, and set out to scratch our own itch.
We chose the name Huckberry because we both loved Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and thought Huckberry was the perfect totem for the spirit of adventure we wanted our brand to embody. More practically speaking, Huckberry.com was available on GoDaddy for $9.98 and Huckleberry.com was not.
We hit the trade show circuit and sold our favorite brands on our vision. Most looked at our self-designed business cards, smiled with amusement, and said no. But enough said yes, presumably taking a chance on us not because of where we were, but because of where we were going.
Inspired by 37 Signals’ (now Basecamp) Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Proud blog post series, we decided not to pursue venture capital. We wanted to build our business on our terms. Towards Patagonia and its organic Let My People Go Surfing brand, and away from the VC-fueled boom-or-bust brands that were chasing it.
So we hustled. Working out of our apartments, we read Photoshop for Dummies cover to cover, and designed Huckberry 1.0. Our friend’s younger brother, Jimmy, helped code it between classes during his junior year at UC Berkeley. Our first website wasn’t pretty, but it worked, and as a mentor once told us, you always throw out your first pancake.
In April 2011, we flipped the switch, and Huckberry.com went live.
Our community began to grow…slowly. We couldn’t afford to advertise so we got creative and partnered with the Art of Manliness (thanks again, Brett
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