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The official CEO.com podcast featuring unfiltered conversations with the leaders shaping our world.
Clint Betts: Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show. You’re the founder and CEO of BRUNT Workwear. The company started in 2020, and the growth has been phenomenal. Congratulations on everything you’ve built. It’s really becoming an incredible brand.
Tell us how this all started. What was the inspiration behind BRUNT?
Eric Girouard: First off, thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.
The story happened pretty organically. It’s one of those situations where you could never have written the story looking forward, but when you look backward, all the dots connect.
I grew up in a blue-collar household. My dad didn’t work one blue-collar job—he worked two. At night, he built airplane engines for Pratt & Whitney. He’d come home, sleep for a few hours, and then spend the day roofing for a friend’s roofing company.
That was the environment I grew up in. My hometown of Bristol, Connecticut, was full of families just like ours.
When I was 14, I started roofing with my dad. After one summer, I decided I didn’t want to spend every summer on a roof, so I started my own little landscaping business. I thought I was going to do that forever, but I quickly realized I was underbidding jobs and working for almost nothing by the time projects were finished.
My parents never went to college themselves, but they told me, “You seem to have a knack for business. We can’t teach you what you need to know, so maybe you should go.”
I ended up attending a small college while all of my friends either entered the trades or joined the military. During summers and breaks, I’d still go back and work alongside them.
After college, I had an incredible opportunity to work as Chief of Staff for serial entrepreneur Ben Fishman, who founded Lids and later built Rue La La.
At the time, I knew absolutely nothing about e-commerce, branding, or retail. But I got a front-row seat to watching a company explode in growth.
Over the next several years, I saw businesses go from an idea to $1 million, then $10 million, then $50 million.
Eventually I reached a point where I thought, “I know my strengths. I know my weaknesses. If I don’t start my own company now, I probably never will.”
I had a five-month-old son, a brand-new mortgage, and every reason not to do it.
So in 2018, I left and began working on what eventually became BRUNT Workwear.
Ironically, the idea itself came from my childhood friends—the same guys I grew up with from nursery school.
Clint Betts: How did you realize there was such a need for a brand built specifically for tradespeople?
Eric Girouard: At first, I didn’t.
Looking back, it all makes sense, but at the time it didn’t fully register.
The conversation actually happened during my bachelor party. We were sitting on a dock, and my buddies said, “You work in fashion. Why don’t you build a brand for us?”
I asked them what they meant.
I assumed they were talking about trucks or knives or something like that.
Instead, they said, “We all wear the exact same work boots our dads wore, and our grandfathers wore. Nobody has ever built a brand that actually represents us.”
That idea stayed with me.
When I left in 2018, I started researching the market.
Every legacy boot company had been around for nearly 100 years.
Every website talked about 1889, 1909, heritage, history, craftsmanship—the story of the company.
My buddies didn’t care about any of that.
They wanted a brand that looked like them, talked like them, showed up where they spent time, and represented who they were today.
That became our entire thesis.
It was difficult convincing people that brand alone could differentiate us in such a crowded category.
But I believed that if we built something authentic, people would respond.
And they did.
Today, authenticity is probably our biggest competitive advantage.
Clint Betts: It’s fascinating because you started this in 2018. Back then, people probably thought building a premium brand for tradespeople was an odd idea.
Now, in 2026, trades are one of the hottest areas in the economy.
Did you see that coming?
Eric Girouard: I wish I could say yes.
It would make me sound like a genius.
The truth is, I simply knew there were far more people who looked like my friends than the customers I had been serving in fashion and beauty.
Today we have access to much better market data, and the numbers are incredible.
There are roughly 31 million tradespeople in America.
They literally keep the country running.
They pave roads.
Keep the lights on.
Build homes.
Repair plumbing.
Maintain infrastructure.
It’s a massive market.
It’s also incredibly resilient.
Fashion has ups and downs.
Technology has cycles.
Trades keep going.
Whether the economy is booming or struggling, people still need boots, pants, sweatshirts, and tools to do their jobs.
Now we have additional tailwinds with AI disrupting many white-collar jobs while trade school enrollment continues climbing.
That’s certainly helping us.
I have a saying inside the company: you can be lucky or you can be good.
At BRUNT, we try to be both.
Clint Betts: How are you using AI internally?
Eric Girouard: We’re adopting AI across the organization.
Honestly, almost every team is using it.
We’re actually trying to establish some guardrails because adoption has happened so quickly.
Personally, I use Gemini and Claude every day.
For me, AI is about efficiency.
If you expect it to do all your thinking for you, you’re going to end up in trouble.
But if you use it to accelerate work you’re already doing, it’s transformational.
Things that once took weeks or months now take hours.
Our product team is another great example.
Previously, creating product samples required physical prototypes in different colors and materials.
Now we can generate incredibly realistic renderings in minutes.
That saves weeks of development time.
Our operations team uses AI to optimize shipping containers, which has literally saved us millions of dollars in logistics costs.
Every department has found meaningful ways to use it.
If I were starting BRUNT today, I’d build the company very differently because AI changes everything.
Clint Betts: What goes into building a brand?
I think you’re uniquely qualified to answer that.
Eric Girouard: A lot of people confuse branding with marketing.
Others confuse branding with product.
They’re all different.
Most founders begin with a product idea.
We were different.
We entered probably the most crowded product category imaginable.
Every type of work boot already existed.
Every price point already existed.
The product itself wasn’t the opportunity.
The brand was.
To me, a brand is how people feel about your company.
It’s what they say about you when you’re not in the room.
It’s how you show up.
It’s how you communicate.
It’s how you make people feel.
Marketing simply amplifies that.
Great marketing can’t save a mediocre brand.
A great brand with mediocre marketing still has a chance because people genuinely love it.
That’s why we invested almost everything into brand before we ever sold a product.
A full year before BRUNT launched, we started a podcast featuring successful people in the trades.
We wanted to create value before asking anyone to buy anything.
By the time BRUNT officially launched, people already knew who we were.
Even when developing the brand itself, I relied heavily on my childhood friends.
Every tagline.
Every mission statement.
Every message.
I ran everything by them because they were the audience.
The logo and colors came last.
People often start there.
That’s backwards.
Your brand comes first.
Then you build the visuals around it.
One thing I worry about now is becoming what we originally disrupted.
Legacy brands spend all their time talking about themselves.
I never want BRUNT to become that.
Clint Betts: It’s interesting that you started with a podcast.
You really built a community before you built a brand.
Eric Girouard: For us, those two things are inseparable.
Our original community consisted of respected people in the trades—great plumbers, builders, tool reviewers, contractors.
Today that community includes our customers.
Every Thursday, we open the garage attached to our headquarters.
People come by to hang out.
Some don’t even shop.
They just want to spend time together.
Beyond that, we constantly ask ourselves how to stay relevant the other 361 days each year when customers aren’t buying boots.
The answer is content.
Education.
Entertainment.
Stories.
We feature people like Travis Pastrana rebuilding ramps.
We work with Hannah Barron, who’s famous for catfish noodling but also builds houses with her dad.
The goal isn’t always selling products.
The goal is staying connected to the community.
When someone eventually needs boots or workwear, we want BRUNT to be top of mind.
Clint Betts: Walk us through bringing a product to market.
This isn’t software.
You have manufacturing, supply chains, testing—there’s a lot involved.
Eric Girouard: Our process is fundamentally different than most consumer brands.
Today we have incredible product leaders with decades of footwear and apparel experience.
They’ve built world-class supply chains.
But philosophically, we still operate differently.
Most brands begin with a creative director deciding what customers should want.
We begin with the customer.
There are no ivory towers at BRUNT.
Our customers know exactly what they need.
Our job is extracting that knowledge.
We start with qualitative research by spending time directly with customers.
Then we validate those findings quantitatively across thousands of customers nationwide.
Once we have confidence, we begin designing.
We show early concepts to customers.
We gather feedback.
We create prototypes.
Customers wear-test products for months.
Only after all of that do we move into production.
It usually takes anywhere from 10 to 18 months.
The customer participates throughout the entire process.
The only product launch that really missed expectations happened because I skipped one of those customer validation steps.
That mistake was on me.
We’ve never repeated it.
One of my favorite examples is our Marin boot.
It’s named after my childhood friend Matt Marin.
He told me exactly what frustrated him about his boots.
They were too expensive.
They took forever to break in.
The soles wore out too quickly.
So we solved those three problems.
Today, the Marin boot has sold more than two million pairs and remains our bestselling product.
All because we listened.
Clint Betts: E-commerce has had a rough few years.
Tariffs, rising acquisition costs, Amazon copying products—there are a lot of headwinds.
Yet BRUNT has exploded.
What’s your perspective?
Eric Girouard: Overall, e-commerce has definitely become harder.
Ten or fifteen years ago, if you understood Facebook advertising, you could almost print money.
That era is over.
The businesses that survived were the ones that built real brands.
Companies like Warby Parker, Gymshark, FIGS—those brands endured because people actually cared about them.
If your business was just a marketing machine selling generic products, you got washed out.
That’s the difference.
Brand lasts.
Tactics change.
Amazon can copy products.
That doesn’t really concern me.
They’re excellent at operations.
They’re not in the business of building emotional connections with customers.
That’s what brands do.
Clint Betts: What does a typical day look like for you?
Eric Girouard: My oldest son wakes up every morning at about 5:07.
Almost exactly.
He’s ready to start the day.
My younger son would happily sleep until 10 if we let him.
My wife and I get them ready for school.
During that time, I’m already working through email and identifying any overnight fires.
I intentionally built our home about half a mile from the office.
After the kids leave, I’m at work in about 30 seconds.
Every morning, I make coffee, grab a sheet of paper, fold it in half, and rewrite my priorities from scratch.
I organize them by business function and then identify the three or four things that absolutely must happen that day.
Most days begin with putting out fires.
After that, I focus on the highest-impact work.
The middle of my day is packed with meetings.
Around dinner time, I go home, eat with my family, and then return to the office while my wife gets the boys ready for bed.
Later, I go back home to read bedtime stories to my youngest son.
After he falls asleep, I return to the office and usually work until around 11.
It sounds crazy, but because I live so close, I get to have breakfast, dinner, and bedtime with my family while still getting focused evening work done.
That’s my version of work-life balance.
Clint Betts: What leadership lessons have stood out to you?
Eric Girouard: The biggest one is that people really are your greatest asset.
I used to hear leaders say that and think it sounded nice.
Now I know it’s absolutely true.
Great hires make the company exponentially better.
Bad hires consume enormous amounts of time and energy.
The second lesson is never tolerate toxic people.
Every time we waited too long to deal with someone who was damaging the culture, the entire organization suffered.
Protecting culture matters.
The third lesson is discipline.
As companies grow, opportunities appear everywhere.
You can launch more products.
Enter new markets.
Chase shiny objects.
My job is actually the opposite.
Stay focused.
Stay disciplined.
Keep everyone working on the few things that matter most.
That’s been one of the biggest reasons we’ve been able to scale.
Clint Betts: What trends are you seeing in the trades and in the broader economy?
Eric Girouard: The trades are finally getting the attention they deserve.
For years, they were overlooked.
Now people recognize how essential they are.
AI is going to transform the world.
But there are many jobs that require both physical skill and mental judgment.
Those jobs are much harder to automate.
Construction.
Electrical.
Plumbing.
Carpentry.
Those careers aren't disappearing anytime soon.
Meanwhile, much of the administrative work surrounding those industries is changing rapidly because of AI.
From a macro perspective, our customer base remains remarkably stable.
No matter what headlines are saying, roads still need paving.
Buildings still need repairs.
Homes still need plumbing.
Even during the pandemic, construction workers were quickly classified as essential because society literally depends on them.
That gives us a lot of confidence about the future.
Clint Betts: Finally, we end every interview the same way.
At CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes.
Who gave you a chance that helped get you where you are today?
Eric Girouard: Without question, Ben Fishman.
He hired me as his Chief of Staff when I was 22 or 23 years old.
I had no experience in e-commerce, branding, or business.
I was competing against people with MBAs and investment banking backgrounds.
I simply told him, “I’ll outwork everyone. My job is to make your life easier.”
He took a chance on me.
We worked together for years, started multiple businesses, and when I launched BRUNT, he became one of our first investors.
Today he sits on our board.
He saw something in me long before I had any credentials to justify it.
That opportunity completely changed my life.
Clint Betts: Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a fascinating conversation.
What you've built is remarkable. At a time when e-commerce has been struggling, BRUNT has done exactly the opposite. Congratulations on everything you've accomplished.
Eric Girouard: Thank you, Clint. I really appreciate you having me.