Overalls are on the rise to becoming fashion’s most covetable statement. Once synonymous with the rugged working man, from farmers, miners to hammer-swingers alike, the overall has now undergone a total revamp with two elements that one might deem an oxymoron: fashion-forward and crazy comfy. Combining two of the most common apparel concepts, sweatpants and overalls, Swoveralls are cool, functional, and extremely comfortable.
Grit Daily talks with Kyle Bergman, founder and self-styled “Chief Swoverall Officer” of The Great Fantastic, the company that created “Swoveralls,” and is on a mission is to create the world’s comfiest apparel items using sustainable resources and ethical manufacturing processes.
Grit Daily: You have your own interesting adventures before Swoveralls. Share those.
Swoveralls debut on Shank Tank.Kyle Bergman: I’ve been fortunate to have had a pretty exciting professional and personal journey so far. After graduating from undergrad at Drexel University, I started working at Bloomingdale’s within their executive training program.
While there, I was also invited to try out and made the Israeli Men’s National lacrosse team. Every vacation I took during my four years at Bloomies was spent traveling the world, playing in world championship tournaments with the team. After four years at Bloomingdale’s rising through the merchant ranks from assistant buyer to senior assistant buyer, and then merchandise planner, I left to become the Men’s Grooming Buyer at Birchbox.
Also at this time, I started my part-time MBA journey at NYU’s Stern School of Business. That was when I began coaching group fitness class at Orangetheory as a part-time coach. It’s kind of hard for me to stand still.
GD: Let’s talk numbers. How are sales looking so far in 2019?
KB: 2019 is looking to be our best year yet. Shark Tank was a big moment for us, and we expect there to be a longer tail in terms of traffic continuing to visit the site, and new customers to ultimately join Swovie Nation!
Due to an incredible bump in exposure, our sales are already 230% over LY for the year…and this time last year we still had our Amazon channel open. Due to selling out so fast over this recent holiday timeframe, we haven’t been able to turn on our Amazon channel again yet, but hope to do so going into the second half of the year.
Our goal is to do $500k in sales this year between our site and Amazon, and things are looking pretty good!
GD: Which social channel is yielding the most in terms of sales leads? Why?
KB: Instagram is the best social channel for us, and this is through a combination of paid and organic content that we create. We don’t take ourselves too seriously and love to have fun with our posts, which result in some nice engagement/conversations.
We have a unique product, and try to lean into our advantage by being quirky, yet familiar, approachable, and inclusive.
Outside of social, organic search from Google is our biggest traffic driver. Whether it’s people looking for sweatpant overalls or typing in our actual product name “Swoveralls.” We do well at being the authority in these search terms organically, and it’s incredible articles like this that continue to give us the competitive advantage from an SEO standpoint.
For more of Grit Daily’s featured news on Entrepreneurship, click here.
