The Wild Story Behind SENIQ: From ACL Injury to REI Breakout

In this episode of Growth Mavericks, Adam Callinan sits down with Tina Thompson, founder of SENIQ, to break down the unconventional journey behind one of the fastest-rising women’s outdoor brands. What started during recovery from an ACL injury turned into a breakout brand now landing in REI and reshaping how women think about outdoor apparel.

Tina didn’t follow traditional startup advice. No deep customer research. No venture capital. No perfectly mapped strategy. Just instinct, grit, and relentless execution.

This conversation dives into what it actually takes to build something from nothing, scale into major retail, and create a brand designed to last 100 years.

If you’re a founder, operator, or building a consumer brand, this episode is a masterclass in trusting your gut and doing the hard things.

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

•  Why Tina ignored traditional customer research—and why it worked 
•  The real story behind breaking into REI 
•  How SENIQ scaled without venture capital 
•  The difference between DTC hype and wholesale reality 
•  Why building a “100-year brand” changes your decisions 
•  How injury and adversity can become your biggest advantage 
•  The role of instinct vs data in early-stage companies 

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Intro
 01:15 – Tina’s background and SENIQ origin story
 05:40 – The ACL injury that changed everything
 10:20 – Why she didn’t rely on customer research
 15:05 – Building the first products
 20:30 – Breaking into REI
 27:10 – Wholesale vs DTC strategy
 34:45 – Scaling without VC
 42:00 – Lessons on resilience and doing hard things
 48:30 – Building a 100-year brand

Growth Mavericks Podcast: https://www.growthmaverickspodcast.com

Pentane (Financial Command Center for Consumer Brands): https://www.pentane.com

 SENIQ: https://seniqbrand.com/

Creators and Guests

Host

Adam Callinan

Adam Callinan is the founder of Pentane, a financial and advertising command center that empowers brands to drive predictable revenue and intentional profit. Previously, Adam co-founded BottleKeeper, a bootstrapped consumer brand that scaled to $8M in sales within three years – without employees – and was later acquired in 2021 as an eight-figure business with a team of four, marking Adam's second successful exit.

What is Growth Mavericks?

This podcast dives deep into the tactical moves that drive business success, as well as the mental and physical resilience required to sustain it.

Hosted by Adam Callinan, a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple exits, an avid outdoorsman, and an family man with crystal-clear priorities, each episode unpacks real-world challenges, actionable insights, and the mental and physical disciplines that fuel long-term personal and professional growth.

Whether you’re scaling a startup or refining your mindset, disrupting your default is how business and life strike a balance.

Adam Callinan (00:25)
Today we are talking with Tina Thompson, the co-founder of Scenic. That's S-E-N-I-Q Scenic. Tina and her co-founder, Maddie, both came out of back country where they had access to all the best outdoor gear in the world and still could not find a hiking pant that they loved. Their founding story is pretty wild. Tina tore her ACL on her first ski run in Deer Valley. She's a snowboarder.

And while she was stuck on the couch during one of Utah's most insane snowiest winters on record, she had this idea for this scenic brand and it started to take shape. Now they moved back to Ohio to build out inventory, which they did in her mom's basement and launched with no customer research and pure gut conviction, which is not typically how these things go.

After that went hard into wholesale with their retail experience. They chased REI relentlessly, got ghosted by the first buyer, had some turnover, eventually got in and went hard.

are now the fastest selling women's hike brand for women under 30 at REI and have diversified their retail models are now selling direct to consumer. And they've done this without chasing VC and are trying to build a 100 year durable brand in the outdoor space. So we get into a lot of really important territory, a lot of which is around the important discussions around vulnerability and being realistic and honest about the things that we deal with as entrepreneurs in the in the wild.

ups and downs, not something that is outside of what we generally get into at Growth Mavericks. But Tina is really open and honest about some of the struggles, which I think is incredibly valuable and powerful. So we do spend quite a bit of time on that. it's a great conversation, highly motivating, building a business entirely differently than the way I built my last business. And it's a conversation that I really enjoyed. So let's get into it.

Adam Callinan (02:13)
Where are you located?

Tina (02:14)
I'm located in Santa Monica. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So your research is sharp and we just moved here eight weeks ago. So yeah, your research is correct. We've been in Ohio for the last three years of building the brand and we finally got ⁓

Adam Callinan (02:17)
really? My research had you in Ohio.

Okay, all right.

Tina (02:35)
inventory out of my mom's basement and we're freed from having to stay in Ohio and actually have the opportunity to live in the mountains again. So we're so excited.

Adam Callinan (02:46)
Amazing. So you, how did you choose LA or Santa Monica?

Tina (02:51)
Yeah, handful of reasons. It's sort of been on a bucket list, like a life bucket list outside of work for my husband and I. And we have family close by and a lot of childhood close friends nearby. And Santa Monica is that perfect intersection between like the nature, the water, the mountains, and you can get to the city quite quickly. So it was this perfect little spot.

Adam Callinan (03:12)
I, before moving to Montana, I was in Manhattan Beach, which is about 10 miles south of you for 15 years, 12 years.

Tina (03:18)
my gosh,

such a beautiful place. I just visited there's a beautiful mall there. I just visited for the first time the other weekend. So it's gorgeous there. I'm jealous you got to live there. I need to spend more time.

Adam Callinan (03:25)
Yeah.

That's exciting. Santa Monica is a fun place. That's quite a departure from, where were you in Ohio? Okay.

Tina (03:36)
We were in Columbus, so

one of the bigger cities. But yeah, total night and day when it comes to outdoor activity and getting to actually live and breathe our product and our brand.

Adam Callinan (03:46)
Yeah, how did you get into, mean, let's go into your mom's garage. How did that transpire?

Tina (03:51)
Yeah.

Like how did we get her to agree to let us use her home as our warehouse?

Adam Callinan (03:58)
Yeah, I

I guess we could maybe go back further to that, your sort of aha moment and founding story.

Tina (04:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

So my co-founder and I, actually grew up in retail households. Columbus is this weird retail little epicenter in the Midwest. A lot of them, all brands of the world are based there. I don't know if you're familiar with. And our moms actually both have careers in the retail industry. So we really grew up and have retail in our bloods. It was conversation at the dinner table every night and

My mom and my family comes from more of the production sourcing side. Maddie, my co-founder's mom, comes from the finance side. like these really well-rounded different approaches too. so started our careers in retail as baby merchants at Victoria's Secret on the sport team. And that's really where we both fell in love with developing product that has an end use, not just garments or apparel, just for apparel sake, but actually has a proper use.

After that, we both ended up landing roles at a company called Backcountry in Utah. And Maddie and I moved out there pretty closely together. Maddie was buying for all the branded women's labels. So from Patagonia, Haley Hansen, Arc'teryx, all the brands. And then I was developing the Backcountry private label brand for women's. And we got to move to Utah for the first time in our 20s.

We never really had a need for a proper rain jacket or a proper hiking pant or a proper hiking boot and we were stoked to build out our gear closets and we had all the access to the best products in the world working at backcountry with that discount and there was not a hiking pant that we were in love with fit wise aesthetically price point functionality like we had all the access in the world and like there still wasn't a piece that hit the mark so

decided to develop it ourselves. And when we decided to leave our full-time corporate careers and jump into our building our own business, we moved back from Utah back to Ohio where we knew we had bigger basements and free family help and just a network and resource of people from our childhoods to help support. So that's kind of the story of how we got there. I'm glazing over a ton of topics, but happy to do that.

Adam Callinan (06:16)
Yeah, I know.

Hey, and we're gonna dig into those. There had to have been a span of time or let's turn this into a question as opposed to a statement. Was there a span of time where you were still working for back country while you were developing, or starting to think about or develop these concepts? Or did you literally just like clean break, stop this, no more income and jump into this other brand new thing?

Tina (06:41)
Yeah, so it's an interesting story. There was no overlap, but at the same time that we had moved out to Utah, I also had experienced my first ACL repair surgery. I'm a snowboarder, and all the girls wanted to go up to Deer Valley one day. We had friends from out of town, and I was like, like, fuck it. I can ski. Like, I don't need a lesson. I've been snowboarding my whole life. And it was the first run.

The first run at Deer Valley, one of the first greens is called success, which is like so iconic. Of course, I was like the opposite of successful and tore every ligament my right knee. So when I was at backcountry, I was I was like going through that physical and mental battle of not being able to walk. And it really opened up my eyes to how healing the outdoors is for your mental health. And

I ended up actually like quitting backcountry because I took another role with another corporate company because I was super burned out and wanted to leave that sort of culture and then ended up pulling out of that opportunity that I had accepted and found myself without a role because that didn't end up feeling right and sort of meditated just for a month without any work, any plan and

sat still because I couldn't move. And this was during one of Utah's snowiest winters on record. And everyone was out on the powder, like on the mountain every day. Every day was a powder day. And all of the, like as I was sitting still for the first time in my life, all of these ideas started to percolate because I'm like constantly going 100 miles an hour. So it wasn't this like, we thought of scenic immediately while we were working at back country and we quit back country and started scenic.

The next day, was like a total, there was like quite a mental metamorphosis that happened to lead us to the concept of scenic and actually developing the first piece. And then, oh, shit, like there might be more here and let's go find funding and a team and da da da. It was not like, it wasn't premeditated. It kind of took a life of its own. And once we realized there was something there, then we wrote the business plan. Then we took it seriously, adult strategy. But yeah, it kind of came up organically.

Adam Callinan (08:50)
How did you prove that there was something there?

Tina (08:53)
We didn't. We just knew it. We felt it. It was a gut feeling. The moment that we did. And this is a was a huge gap, I think, in our strategy. didn't do really any sort of like community customer research or focus grouping. We just developed a first great collection and we found an amazing partner, thankfully, because we had a head start from our corporate careers. We had relationships built in in the manufacturing space. So.

Like the minute we saw first protos, they looked like final protos. And it was that was like the validation that we needed. Like you can create great gear that's functional and fits the modern woman's aesthetic and needs. And we decided to unveil it to the world and like go. But yeah. And then, of course, we've gathered data points along the way. But we kind of went off of our own gut feeling first.

Adam Callinan (09:48)
That's bold. I you for that. That's a risky bold move. I like it.

Tina (09:49)
It is.

I feel like every day, still, even like we're two years and like three weeks in to the brand being live and it still feels like every day is like risk it or die. Like if we're not taking these like giant big risks, like what are we doing? Like nothing's moving forward. So it's, yeah, that's.

Adam Callinan (10:07)
Yeah.

Kind of the beauty

of the startup space though, I mean, that's kind of your superpower is your capacity to do those things and move really fast. And the reality is like, if a risk doesn't work out, you're not gonna die. Like generally speaking, like you're not gonna die. So that's good.

Tina (10:19)
Yeah.

Totally.

Totally.

it's like we don't have a team of a hundred relying on us that we like, we can still play and test and try new things, thankfully. But now that we have quite a wholesale foundation built and it's starting to, you know, we can't take as many risks in that world as we did two years ago. So we're evolving every day, but it's still super high risk, high reward, feels like.

Adam Callinan (10:51)
It will be for a long time. That's benefit of it. Like you're, trying to seek out these asymmetric outcomes where you have this, try to minimize the risk. Everything we do is like mitigate risk, mitigate risk, mitigate risk, maximize upside. that, that's the name of the game. And it is the beauty of being early on, which can, you can be late on and still have that structure if you structure it right. Where you can just move fast and break shit. And that's, that's what makes it so number one, fun and makes it.

Tina (10:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Callinan (11:18)
where you can create that really asymmetric outcome.

Tina (11:20)
Yeah,

I think the challenge is to like, because we come from a corporate background, like, it's not ingrained in Maddie and I to like, take risks every day. Like, that's actually a challenge is to like, live in that mindset and build that muscle of like, this is what we should be doing. This is how we grow and build and do meaningful things. So yeah, it's a total mindfuck.

Adam Callinan (11:44)
How did you make that first product? You said that your prototype was basically like a functional product, which is also rare. That's not normally how it works. How did you make the first product?

Tina (11:51)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So first product, it started as a PowerPoint slide. And it was basically a product brief that we'd been making our whole careers and would pass them off to design teams. But we didn't have a design team right yet. So we made the product brief. We're so excited about it. We messaged.

a handful of designers at Outdoor Brands that we loved and we said, hey, do you have any friends who are looking for extra work, freelance work? And someone responded within like two days. It was the first girl we interviewed, first designer, freelance that we interviewed and fell in love with her right away. She's been with us since month three of concepting the brand and still with us today. And she helped create a tech pack.

We sent out the tech pack and a brand deck to probably 30 vendors. We ended up getting responses from five, got to the costing stage from three, and the one that cost it out, we went forward with, and the proto ended up being great.

Adam Callinan (13:00)
How did you translate prototype to production? Are you producing it in the US or did you go overseas? Okay.

Tina (13:07)
All Asia. ⁓

It, it, there are their masters at it. Like, once you're saying bulk production, how do we translate the prototype to bulk product?

Adam Callinan (13:16)
Yeah,

like, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I've built been in a number of different companies and build things, but like and done that overseas. So I am familiar, very familiar with like the prototyping to product, but I've never done it in clothing, which I have to imagine just adds a whole nother level series of levels of complexity.

Tina (13:27)
yeah.

You know what's interesting is, so the same vendor that prototyped ended up producing the bulk and the prototyping is the hardest stage. And typically once your prototype is perfected and you love it, those measurements get plugged into the bulk production cutters and then the sewers get trained and that happens on the vendor end. So it's actually quite a light lift going from proto to bulk. The heavy lift is like.

perfecting, refining, fitting, tweaking, multiple fit rounds of a prototype.

Adam Callinan (14:04)
Did you raise capital to fund the first inventory run? Okay.

Tina (14:08)
Yep. So

all the fundraising we've done today was Maddie and I put in cash from our savings and then we interviewed or interviewed. sent out a request to every person that we basically knew, friends and family in our life, pitching the brand and captured three angel investors. And they've been with us since and have extended a line of credit that have allowed us to just keep, keep floating and hoping to try and bootstrap in that way.

But yeah, there's a lot of pressure as a new founder, especially in the outdoor space, to raise P.E. or V.C. And we just have such an insanely strong vision for the brand. The concept of giving any of that up is tough. It's something that I think we'll maybe potentially be more open to as we grow the brand a little bit further. But today, the goal is just like...

trying to bootstrap it as much as possible and maintain as much equity and sacrifice some of the quicker growth for that slower long-term growth. We're wanting Scenic to be a 100-year brand.

Adam Callinan (15:14)
So the capital that you took wasn't in investment capital, it was line of credit. I was both, okay, got it. Understood. Okay, yeah, I mean, the general thesis and this has changed a lot and it will vary depending on who you ask and what articles you read online, which are all largely garbage. The concept of taking...

Tina (15:20)
Nope, it was both. We have both. Yeah. Yep.

Adam Callinan (15:37)
large outside funding seems sexy. And that's what all the media outlets want to talk about at Bottlekeeper. We never took on any funding and we would we were and I had a PR person at you know, the point that we were doing 10s of millions in revenue. And they big news outlets would not write about us because we didn't have a funding round to talk about it. And they were very upfront about it. They're just say like, No, unless you have a funding thing you can talk about, or some valuation milestone or some thing resolving revolving around funding, we will we have nothing to write about you.

Tina (16:02)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (16:05)
I think it's the most insane backwards, kind of like disgusting part of business. So I would absolutely not chase that as the shining star. If you're gonna do it, push it off for as long as humanly possible, because you'll get more and give up less and retain more control.

Tina (16:08)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah,

that's the goal. And I think it'd be different, right? And I don't think there's a right way and a wrong way, but if we didn't have such a strong vision and idea of how we wanted to grow this into so many different worlds and needed to bring it outside of advisement and help, I think there's ways in which it's beneficial, but we're staying the course.

Adam Callinan (16:44)
Yeah, that's good. Do that for as long as you can. So how did your how does your DTC then function? Did you did you at the beginning pop up a Shopify site?

Tina (16:45)
Yeah.

We did. Yep. Popped up a Shopify site and hosted 30 events around the country our first year. Events.

Adam Callinan (17:01)
What does that mean?

Yeah, you hosted 30 events, what kind of events?

Tina (17:06)
Various events, hike gatherings, community hike events where we would bring product and sell product. There's a handful of pretty strong outdoor events across the country. Have you heard of Outside Days in Denver? Is it an example of one? So we showed up to the first one that they ever hosted and we did $10,000 of sales in our first weekend and that was like our fourth month as a brand. So it was pretty like mind blowing to us.

So yeah, a mix of Shopify and some in-person activations to sell product.

Adam Callinan (17:38)
For

those in-persons, are you generally going to other already organized events or are creating events, like building community?

Tina (17:44)
We ⁓

did a mix of both and quickly learned that we had no base or foundation of community. So where we popped up just ourselves was totally unproductive and inefficient and was a huge mistake. And we uncovered every single mistake stone and still continue to do so. But yeah, it was a mix.

Adam Callinan (18:04)
That's where all the education is.

So what do you do about community now? And I will caveat that this is an area that I have never been remotely good at ever. It was a huge hole in our strategy at Bottlekeeper. We way too dependent on paid ads. And granted, this is at a time where you could be dependent on paid ads and it got painful, but you could function a business on it. You can't anymore. It's wildly different. So how do you now...

Tina (18:26)
Oh my gosh, and bottle keeping would have been such

a fun one to have a whole like community strategy around too. It would have been great. It's so hard. We definitely over-indexed on it our first year and felt like the amount of time and effort we were putting into it was definitely not worth the return. So we dialed it way back year two and now into year three, the goal and focus for us is to have like two to three banger

break the internet events that we hopefully have a mix of community members, creators, potential buyers, and brand partners at the events. And it's really about less is more, higher quality events and way fewer of them. So we're getting ready to or to host our first spring summer event in May, which is in partnership with

We're launching a new collaboration collection with an athlete and creator. And then we're hoping to plan some sort of really great ski event for this winter. So that's kind of how we've shifted it and how we manage it is like just super scrappy. We don't have a dedicated person or team to it. It really is like all hands on deck to concept, create, reach out to brand partners, make sure we secure guests and then market to it.

Adam Callinan (19:46)
So are you then in doing that with a brand partner, is the intent then to be able to leverage their already grown sort of audience?

Tina (19:56)
Totally, yeah, that's a huge initiative or it's even to build a relationship with that brand that could potentially turn into a collaboration someday that again should just help broaden our brand awareness. Yeah, or even like to help build credibility with our brand. think as a new outdoor brand, that's one of our biggest hurdles is we're building pretty insanely technical product.

And it's hard to communicate that when we don't have a roster of these like top tier athletes who are taking it out to the back country and getting these insane shots and images and videos every day. building credibility is a huge initiative for us. And an easy way to do that is partnering with these heritage outdoor brands that have the trust and the credibility from their community. And if we can piggyback off of that, it's like a win-win.

Adam Callinan (20:47)
That's smart.

Tina (20:48)
Yeah, it's hard. It's of course like a, it's a long game. Like it's gonna take years and years and years and people trying the product over and over and over again to think like, okay, Scenic is as credible as my Arc'teryx shell. And that's like, that's the game that we love. And that's why we're here and building in like just innovating in product is like our biggest passion point. So.

It's fun to be able to do that in collaboration with other brand partners too.

Adam Callinan (21:16)
How is it working alongside or trying to connect community relationships with companies like Arc'teryx and these companies that have been bought? mean, they're all, they're not boots or anything where they all got bought by these private equity groups. Basically all of them have been acquired at this point.

Tina (21:33)
Yeah.

Yeah, how is it trying to team up with them? That's your question.

Adam Callinan (21:39)
Yeah, when

they're not really, I mean, are they still running the show or is it, do they, I wonder how they look at things differently from a community and partnership standpoint and innovating their own brand when they've, they are post liquidity.

Tina (23:16)
Yeah, I think it just depends on the type of retailer. I think it's obviously harder as an apparel brand to partner with other apparel brands. But where we have easier times is with footwear brands or backpack brands or like adjacent gear brands. And they most of the ones that we've been in contact and have a relationship with have have their own incredible teams that our whole entire community teams that are focused on.

building these grassroots connections. And yeah, there's been a lot of openness to actually partner and lift up women-founded brands in the outdoor industry because it's been deprioritized for so long. So we've found it to be pretty welcoming from the bigger brands, which has been wonderful.

Adam Callinan (24:00)
Yeah, that's great. There's no question a need and you're starting to see, you know, lot of female focused. wouldn't call it nuance because it's not nuance. It's the outdoors. But like I spoke recently with the founder or co-founder of a company that is doing a very specifically women's focused. It's more like outdoor technical for landscape tradesmen.

Tina (24:25)
Cool.

Adam Callinan (24:27)
but it's in the very, very same vein. And I mean, my wife struggles with the same stuff. We spent a lot of time in the woods and the outdoors here in Montana and fit is really difficult for technical gear.

Tina (24:30)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Fit is difficult.

Honestly, like function is difficult. Like I remember specifically being at Backcountry and we were working on one of the ski collections and I brought up the problem of boob sweat, which is like not something that I was the only woman in the room and none of the other guys had ever experienced it, probably ever talked about it, were comfortable talking about it and I would. No, you don't.

Adam Callinan (25:00)
Yeah, no, we don't have that. We don't know what

that is.

Tina (25:03)
You

don't look like you do in other places, you know what I mean? totally. But like I was more or less laughed out of the room and that it was like those little things that like fueled this fire to start the brand right. And now like we have this whole collection of tops that have.

Adam Callinan (25:06)
Yeah, yeah, we'll talk about that though. That's different.

Tina (25:23)
Power mesh built-in sports bras with removable perforated cups that like our best-selling top. yeah, it's really not just fit and it's not just color theory. There are problems that women have in garments that can be solved through innovation that just like hasn't been done yet because it's not been a priority.

Adam Callinan (25:39)
Yeah. Are you spending time as you innovate and create these things on patentability or intellectual property?

Tina (25:47)
We haven't. A lot of it's...

A lot of it is not patentable because, and I should probably explore more into this world. One, like we don't have major deep wallets to explore it. And two, a lot of the concepts that we're building and innovation that we're building are coming from places that have already existed. Like the waistband on our hike pants is actually inspired by Swedish military garments. It's called a Gurko waistband that's been used for

decades but just hasn't been used in the women's silhouette that fits the shape of our bodies. So it's something I'd love to explore but we haven't gotten there yet.

Adam Callinan (26:24)
Yeah, it would be an interesting, it would be an interesting, you know, additional rabbit hole, not that you have more time for rabbit holes to go down, because there are ways to go and, and get some temporary coverage very inexpensively for things that make sense, not for every little like nook and cranny thing like that doesn't make sense. But, but for some of the bigger things that you are innovating on, and even I will caveat that I'm not a patent attorney, I have a lot of patent experience, unfortunately, but

Tina (26:31)
Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

Adam Callinan (26:50)
a lot of the things that you're building and innovating on, even if they already exist in some other product, not, patents aren't first to use, they're first to file. So it doesn't mean you can or can't, it just, does open the door for different or something that may already exist in another form fitter function that you're now using in a different way, does expose opportunities for some protection there. And I just look at it as one of the many ways to build value in a brand that someone will always want to acquire.

Tina (26:59)
and insane.

you.

Love it.

Yeah.

Yeah. absolutely.

100%. Absolutely. And yeah, I'd love to pick your brain more about it if you have experience on it. Because I think that's another reason we probably haven't explored it yet either is like, it's never been a part of our roles or our world or any of our conversations. So it's just a foreign, a bit of a foreign concept.

Adam Callinan (27:35)
Yeah, I mean, you get into this space where you can file what's called a provisional patent, which is basically a 12 month placeholder patent after doing a patentability search, which is not, I mean, it's not free, but it's not expensive. And the provisional patent itself is also not expensive. It's like $1,000, $1,500. And that gives you the ability to prove it.

Tina (27:45)
Cool.

Amazing, great.

Adam Callinan (27:57)
whether or not this is a thing you want to pursue over the 12 months and then you can file to convert it into a utility patent. And then you can take that utility patent and once it issues, leave it what's called open and then you can innovate that utility patent to like expand its coverage, which is how companies like mine at Bottlekeeper, we had 42 patents when we got acquired that was built on three single products. And it's because you leave these things open and they, it's this whole like intellectual property strategy that we probably need to spend too much time on here, but.

Tina (28:18)
Wow.

So cool. ⁓

Adam Callinan (28:25)
It is the

whole world that you can immerse yourself in. It can also be a painful and expensive one once you have to start fighting about those patents, but they become valuable. They become really valuable.

Tina (28:32)
Yeah. Sure.

Yeah, it's great advice. Thank you so much. Yeah, it hasn't been on my radar, so I appreciate that.

Adam Callinan (28:41)
How did you get into wholesale and where did that sit in your sort of startup phase?

Tina (28:48)
Yeah.

So when we wrote our business plan, we were crystal clear that we wanted at least the first five years of the business to go hard as hell after wholesale. We really believe in it because we've worked in it, working at Backcountry, and can see the power that it can bring and the eyeballs that it can bring to new small brands. So thankfully, because of our experience, like Maddie was a buyer at Backcountry and knew a ton of reps, had existing relationships.

So we had a bit of a shortcut and we leveraged every resource that we already had

And we got our first wholesale order from a company called Sporting Life based in Canada. They bought our first ski collection year one. So which was fall, winter 2024. They bought pretty much our whole stock because we bought minimums from our vendor. I think we were left with like five size runs per kit colorway and for our own D to C. And then we were really

chasing REI super hard. When we launched the brand in spring of 2024, we linked and stocked every single person we could at REI, try to get our product into the hands of the right buyers. It took us about six or seven months to finally get the right buyer our product.

She wouldn't call us, she wouldn't answer us. She accepted the product though. The minute she tried the product, she finally called and was like, this is great, let's get on the phone. We got on the phone, she was basically like, love your product, but I need to wait a year, like too soon. So we launched another Hike Spring collection in spring of 2025.

REI does a complete turnover, new buyer comes to the seat. She calls us like week one or two of the job and is like, I'm not waiting. How much stock do you have? I want to get you on the site and in top doors in the next 30 days. And we were like, we were like, no, no, no, no.

Adam Callinan (30:47)
That's insane. That is not typically how that works. Normally

the buyers turn over and you start completely over. They just, all of that history vanishes. That's cool.

Tina (30:55)
Totally. But I will say, like, I think it's a

lot of the brand legwork that we had done that year one of being out on trail, hosting 30 events, getting the name out there, building this beautiful brand identity through socials, that there was this confidence that once she came into the seat, she had this confidence. granted, like, we had...

It wasn't just like we went through one back door. Like we had opened every single door and talked to every single person we possibly could. And yeah, it was crazy. And the test was it was basically like, if you guys hit a 70 % sell through in the first three months, we'll expand your door count to 13. And we sold out in three weeks.

in all stores and online and they just kept reordering since. So it was a crazy story, but it totally drained our D2C inventory because we didn't pre-plan or pre-buy for REI. So last year was like a pretty big focus on wholesale and like actually getting an ERP system and getting our foundations built because we saw how quickly that channel was going to grow. And we also didn't have the inventory to really like put time and effort behind marketing.

marketing for DTC. And we chased product as quickly as we could, but by the time they had snagged product, we would have gotten more hike product when ski season was starting and we wanted to transition the marketing conversation over to ski so it didn't make sense to like do both just yet for us.

So long story short, last year was like a whole wholesale deep dive. And then this year is really like a master class in, or like a master's education in D to C. And it's our first time dropping product every single month and telling new stories and photo shoots and like connecting the product to athletes. So yeah, wholesale was, it was a pretty crazy, like crazy story, crazy experience. And once REI moved, then...

everyone else had confidence. So quickly after that, Christie called. We were already on back country at the same time as REI. But Christie, Sports, Paragon, Shields, a handful of other big players were confident then to make the move.

Adam Callinan (33:00)
Yeah, once you get that anchor,

it's so helpful to be able to point out.

Tina (33:03)
very.

Yep. Yeah. So yeah, wholesale has been a ride and

It's been really cool and interesting. I've never been on the brand side of it. We've only been on the back country side of it. getting to see how each retailer manages the relationship and amplifies you differently and who's willing to give you marketing budget to tell the story to their audience and who's not. And there's so much nuance to it. It's crazy.

Adam Callinan (33:31)
Yeah, as you get and venture into the DTC space, mean, what you're doing is the polar opposite of how we operated. We went straight DTC mainly because I didn't want to employ anybody. So I didn't want to have to hire people to like operate wholesale. So we said no to it for five years.

Tina (33:46)
I love it

for you, I love that. And I heard your story too about how the company you worked at before was like, there were so many people and it was so stacked. Yeah, and it really is such an interesting and refreshing concept to see like how you can build something on the leadest team possible. It made me think a lot.

Adam Callinan (33:53)
Yeah, I was big and heavy.

But

the cool thing to me is that there's not one way to do anything. Like how you're doing it is incredible. And there are so many benefits to doing it that way versus the D2C that don't get talked about and don't surface for the same reason that companies, media outlets only wanna write about companies that are raising money. Because it's like, it's not sexy, but it's smart. The marginal difference, and I'm a nerd out here for a second.

Tina (34:08)
Totally.

Mm-hmm.

Totally.

So,

yeah.

Adam Callinan (34:29)
The

margin difference when you go wholesale versus direct to consumer, may, if a product cost a hundred, a retail like MSRP on a product cost a hundred dollars and you make the product for $25 and you sell the product for $50 to REI, obviously I don't know your numbers, I'm entirely just making this stuff up. And you sell that to $50 to REI, you make $25 of what's called contribution profit in that order. That's what contributes to pay for your.

Tina (34:48)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (34:57)
payroll like your operating fixed expenses and what's left is your net profit. The kicker in the direct to consumer world is that even if you sell that product to the consumer at $100, you have to pay to ship it to them. You have to pay credit card fees. You have to pay marketing agency fees. You have to pay advertising expenses. And the reality is that what's left in that contribution profit is probably gonna be less than the $25 you have on that wholesale order.

and can almost guarantee it. Like if it was that'd be a 25 % what's called contribution margin, which is super high after advertising. just, the cost to acquire a customer on that direct to consumer side generally eats up most of the margin. So there's a good balance. Like most cases, there's a balance because that direct consumer gets you new eyeballs that then see your product in the store and know what it is and have that sort of connection to it. So there's a way to float the two things together, but.

Tina (35:26)
Thank

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Callinan (35:50)
It's great, it's really interesting how you've been able to do that starting primarily with wholesale because it's not typically how it goes.

Tina (35:57)
Yeah.

And it's like, don't think we would have probably taken that approach if we didn't have a background at Backcountry and didn't get to see firsthand the power of it. And oh, by the way, that credibility is almost, you can't buy it. There's no meta ad that's gonna buy the level of credibility for your brand versus a customer seeing it on the Rack and REI. You almost can't quantify the value. So yeah.

see. We're still so like we're still so fresh. There's so much to learn and we have so much ahead. But it's been it's been really cool to see and one step that we actually learned from the REI team is that Scenic is now the fastest growing brand for the women's hike category for women under the age of 30. So like, which is not a huge part of their demo, right? But it is

Adam Callinan (36:47)
Epic. Congrats.

Tina (36:54)
hopefully their future. So we're like hanging on to that by a thread, you know? That's like the best, most validating.

Adam Callinan (36:58)
Yeah, no, that's incredible.

that's an amazing indicator that you have something really compelling.

Tina (37:05)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Callinan (37:09)
So shifting gears a little bit, how do you deal with like all these wild ups and downs? What do you do? You escape to the woods? I mean, you now you're in Santa Monica, you escape to the beach.

Tina (37:24)
Gosh, you never came to the woods out here? There's like, there's like an amazing wood. ⁓ my. You didn't have a bike? You had a bike.

Adam Callinan (37:28)
No, was in Manhattan Beach. Do know how long it took to go 10 miles in LA? It would take an hour to get from Manhattan to Santa Monica.

Yeah, I did ride a beach cruiser one time from Manhattan Beach up the coast all the way to Santa Monica. And back it took, you know, at like seven miles an hour. took the entire day. was awesome. Yeah.

Tina (37:44)
Well, you know, everyone

has their e-bikes out here now, so you could do it a little bit.

Adam Callinan (37:48)
Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I operate

under calorie power.

Tina (37:52)
I love it. I'm terrible. Like, I'm going to be really honest with you. I and the episode, one of the episodes that I listened to from one of your past podcasts was.

talking about how you gave your all to that first company that you were working in of yours for the long time. And a lot of it reminded me of me and how I'm just like, it's so hard because so much of scenic is me. And I feel like it, it.

I have this total co-dependence on it and I'll live and die for it. every single day, my biggest challenge is to find the balance and reinforce to myself that I am better, faster, smarter, stronger, sharper when I have space and build that in. yeah, ways that I've been able to manage the highs and lows are I've tried to

to at least take a few moments every morning and journal at least one page of notes. And it's just truly like a brain dump. It's not like I'm writing about my feelings or anything. I mean, that comes up a lot, but there's no brief. It's truly just like brain dump anything out on one page. Hiking on the weekends has been hands down my biggest relief. And then I would say to just trying to find time to move my body

during the week, I'm so glued to a screen and a desk that even like 45 minutes of a Pilates like right by the WeWork totally changes my mindset or even like I thankfully get to walk from home to the WeWork. So that 20 minute walk each way changes the chemistry in my mind. But yeah, it's something I'm not good at and I'm so excited to learn how to become better and stronger. And I'd love to know if you have any tips or like how

you figure it out how to manage it.

Adam Callinan (39:39)
I don't think anybody ever figures out how to manage it. I think we find opportunities to implement new things based on pain and the experience that comes from pain because pain is an incredible educator. And sometimes, and a lot of times that pain is, it feels physical but is really emotional and anything that we can do to get.

Tina (39:42)
He

Yeah.

Totally.

Yeah.

Adam Callinan (40:07)
outside of our own heads and get out and breathing the fresh air wherever that is for you. I mean, I live in Montana, that's great. Not everybody has access to the mountains of Montana or the mountains in Santa Monica. So I think a lot of it is just about finding what that is for you. And for me, I have found if I have something that I'm training for, that I'm some big hairy thing that I need to physically accomplish,

Tina (40:17)
Totally. Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Callinan (40:33)
it at least it keeps me on track a little bit. Like right now I don't have one of those things. Like I missed the big rut sign up this fall. And so I'm finding myself being a lot more, a lot less focused on that physical part. I'm still active and I still will train for, and we have archery season starts in September. So I have to be in reasonably good shape to not die then. Yeah.

Tina (40:55)
You said archery season?

Cool. Whoa, that's epic.

Adam Callinan (41:01)
It is in a very special time of year to be out in the woods where the leaves are changing and the elk are screaming and yelling and it's a really special, special thing. But it's hard. It's very, very hard. And you get into some hairy, you know, some reasonably difficult situations when you get animals down and you have to figure out how to get them out from three miles back on foot.

Tina (41:09)
Super cool. my god.

my gosh, I believe it. My husband and I watch alone every night and we're like, when they get the moose, like, how are they doing? It's the best. That is my that's actually another answer to this question. Like that for some reason, something about that show is like turns everything off.

Adam Callinan (41:26)
That's such a good show.

It really is.

I mean, you get to see like the full range of human experience from like excited and into it. then 45 days later, they're like, fuck my life. is, and you know, but, but then the person next to them, you know, two miles down the stream or whatever is doing the same stuff, but the mentality is entirely different because they're wired differently. They have different experience spaces that have led to that, that point. I think there's actually a lot to be learned.

Tina (41:41)
You do.

Yeah. And like mental toughness

being the foundation of success is like, it's so crazy to watch on such a physical challenge. It's like, it's good. It's like, I like it as a reminder for myself, because I'm what I need it. I'm like, need to remember to just continue to hone and strengthen mental toughness and balance and like health over just physical.

Adam Callinan (42:24)
Yeah, it's all to me, it's all about just moving forward. Like if you get stuck in the rut, like literally do anything, take whatever. mean, you hear about authors talking about being in sort of like, I don't remember what they call like brain lock where they can't write anything, just write anything. Literally doing anything is better than doing nothing. And it's that action and activity that that like gets us through to the next thing and the reality inside of business. And that's a lot of why we spend a lot of time talking about.

Tina (42:27)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Adam Callinan (42:53)
this specifically on this podcast, businesses don't like the business itself doesn't get murdered. Like it doesn't get killed off. It's the founders or operators stop doing it for a whole host of reasons, right? That's why businesses fail. But the reality is most of the, when those businesses fail, it's usually because they haven't hit that first or that second real inflection point. And it takes time to get to that. Like to that one where it's just like rocket ship.

Tina (42:59)
Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Adam Callinan (43:21)
you know, until the next time you get into hardship. So if we can physically and mentally stay in the game for as long as possible to let that inflection point happen, I mean, that's the name of the game. Just like, how do we stay in it for as long as possible?

Tina (43:23)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. Agree.

Adam Callinan (43:38)
Unfortunately, there's not a silver bullet for it. There's no like magic formula. You know, it's all it's all part of a human experience that we're all figuring out as we go.

Tina (43:46)
Yeah.

That's been the biggest learning, I think, for us. Just from the outside, without having built something, it just seems like there's like, you have to do like X, Y, Z, and it pops off. But now after being in it, you're like, my God, no, it's like 18 hours a day, every day, we like, that makes things work and jive. then like, eventually you'll see return. it's, yeah, it's really, it's such an experience, this building thing.

Adam Callinan (44:13)
Yeah, it's never three things that add up. It's the accumulation of 10,000 tiny little things that build over time into something that matters, that makes a difference. But it's hard to see the individual things that you're doing and adding into that bucket of 10,000.

Tina (44:15)
You

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I agree.

Adam Callinan (44:31)
So where do you want people to find you? Find Scenic, mean, physical stores, online, go nuts.

Tina (44:34)
Yeah.

Yes.

So

scenicbrand.com, S-E-N-I-Q brand.com. We put a lot of love and soul into our socials. So at S-E-N-I-Q on socials, Instagram and TikTok specifically. We did just start YouTube. We're really excited to grow that channel and start to build some fun visuals. then physically we are in 13 REI doors across the country. There is a store locator list at the bottom of our website. We're also in back country doors, Title IX doors, Christie's

We'll be launching in Shields next month. A handful of outdoor specialty shops around the country as well. So yeah, those are the main spots.

Adam Callinan (45:17)
Amazing, we'll make sure that there are links to all of that in the show notes. And thank you for coming and being honest and vulnerable. It's like the stuff that people don't talk about enough. All they wanna talk about is all the highlight reel, which doesn't even remotely scratch the surface of all the stuff that happens in the dark. It's so much more helpful.

Tina (45:22)
Thank you so much.

⁓

And it's so boring. It's like, whatever.

Like, let's hear it. Let's hear the real raw, especially women. Like, I think that's another unique position in the outdoors is like.

You don't hear a lot of women talking about the struggles and airing some of it out because we do have to keep it so close to the belt and remain tough so that we're taken seriously incredibly. like, I think there's a lot of opportunity to elevate the conversations coming from women too about the pain points. So yeah, thank you so much for reaching out. And yeah, I absolutely love, love the podcast, love the guests. I love your story.

Adam Callinan (46:05)
I agree.

Tina (46:12)
It's really insane. And yeah, like the way you've built with so little is so wildly impressive. And I can't wait to learn more. And hopefully I might need to pick your brain too about that.

Adam Callinan (46:26)
Yeah,

Awesome. Thank you, Tina.

Tina (46:28)
Sweet.

Thank you.