Brian Smith is the Founder of UGG, the globally recognized sheepskin boots brand. Originally from Australia, he transitioned from a career in accounting to entrepreneurship after studying at the UCLA School of Management. Brian launched UGG Imports in 1978 with minimal capital and a bold vision to introduce sheepskin boots to the American market. Over the course of two decades, he built the brand into a cultural icon renowned for its comfort and quality — before eventually selling it to Deckers Outdoor Corporation.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:28] Brian Smith’s early fascination with gross margins — even in sandwich shop lines
- [3:53] How Brian discovered the US market gap for sheepskin boots
- [5:56] Why US retailers initially rejected UGG and how surf shops changed everything
- [10:17] The role of aspirational lifestyle marketing in UGG’s success
- [12:52] How rapid growth exposed financial knowledge gaps
- [15:52] Learning the importance of pricing and margin — profitless prosperity
- [20:08] Why Brian decided to sell UGG and how it aligned with a strategic partnership
- [24:26] The impact of Brain’s business travel on his family
- [30:46] Brian’s insights on modern product marketing and mentorship
In this episode…
Every entrepreneur dreams of turning their idea into a household name, but few consider the financial hurdles and missteps that can threaten even the most promising ventures. What do you do when your product starts to gain traction, but the business is financially drowning?
Brian Smith, the founder of a now-iconic footwear brand, shared hard-won lessons on breaking into a resistant market. Drawing from his experience as a surfer and former accountant, Brian explained how deeply understanding your target audience and reflecting on their aspirations can transform marketing outcomes. His breakthrough came when he stopped using professional models and instead featured young surfers in authentic settings. He also cautioned against the dangers of “profitless prosperity,” where rapid sales growth outpaces financial planning, and stressed the importance of sound financial literacy and timing when scaling a product-based business.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Brian Smith, Founder of UGG, to discuss how he created an iconic footwear brand. Brian reveals how surf culture shaped UGG’s early marketing, why selling a fast-growing business was necessary, and how he’s mentoring modern entrepreneurs today. Listeners will learn about Brian’s innovative marketing strategies and the critical role of resilience in business success.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Brian Smith: LinkedIn | Website | Email
- The Birth of a Brand: Launching Your Entrepreneurial Passion and Soul by Brian Smith
Quotable Moments:
- “Your most disappointing disappointments will always become your greatest blessings.”
- “You can’t give birth to adults; brands grow in stages just like people.”
- “I realized I wasn’t advertising the product; I was advertising the dream.”
- “Profitless prosperity: sales were growing, but we weren’t making money.”
- “Even though I was an accountant, I didn’t understand how money worked in business.”
Action Steps:
- Advertise the dream, not the product: Effective marketing speaks to the lifestyle or identity your audience aspires to. Creating emotional resonance can drive deeper brand loyalty and higher sales.
- Understand your financials beyond the basics: Even with a background in accounting, Brian Smith struggled with finance. Entrepreneurs must master cash flow and financing to scale sustainably.
- Test your marketing with your target audience: Early UGG ads failed because they didn’t align with what real users cared about. Validate your marketing concepts with actual customer feedback.
- Know when to raise prices: Don’t underprice your product out of fear. Brian learned that increasing UGG’s price didn’t hurt sales but improved margins and business health.
- Seek strategic partnerships for scaling: When faced with rapid growth, Brian sold UGG to a company with complementary strengths. Look for allies that can fill the gaps you can’t manage alone.
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about some of the highs and lows of entrepreneurship in building one of the most iconic brands, UGG, which I’m sure you’ve seen a million times before. My guest today is Brian Smith. He’s the Founder of UGG. I’ll tell you more about him in a second and we’ll hear his story in a second. So stay tuned.
Intro: 00:19
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:36
Alright. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of the show and you know, every week we have great CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies, iconic companies like Netflix and Grubhub and Gusto and Kinkos, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, many other episodes there as well. Today is no exception.
Before we get to that, this episode is brought to you by our company, Rise25, where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping companies to run their podcasts and content marketing. We are the easy button for a company to do that. We do the strategy, accountability and full production.
In fact, we invented what some are calling the Wix B2B podcasting. It’s our platform Podcast Copilot. And to learn all about it, you can go to our website and learn all about what we do there. All right. I’m excited because my guest today is Brian Smith.
I’ve seen him speak a couple times before, and he’s got such an amazing presence on stage and stories to tell, and you’re going to love it. He’s the Founder of UGG. He’s an Australian born former accountant who transitioned from a career in accounting to entrepreneurship after getting inspired to do it. He studied at the UCLA School of Management and founded UGG imports in 1978. With just a few hundred dollars in start-up capital.
Introducing sheepskin boots to the American market in over 20 years turned it into a national brand known for quality and comfort before selling it. We’re going to hear his story here today. Brian, it’s so exciting to hear you tell this story to my audience. And you know, I love to know what people are like as a kid and whether they were entrepreneurial and you were headed to a life in accounting. So you didn’t think about that kind of entrepreneurial stuff. But I love this story. You were waiting in line at lunch counters and calculating gross profit margin in your head. Boy, you were really destined to be an accountant at a young age.
Brian Smith: 02:28
Hey, John, thanks for having me, buddy. It’s great to be on a great show. Yeah, I never had an entrepreneurial bent as I was growing up, and the reason I became an accountant is that, you know, my father wanted me to have a steady job. He was a contractor. And I think he was trying to protect me from all the hard knocks of being, you know, working for yourself.
So he convinced me to be an accountant, and I didn’t know enough about it to reject that idea, So I started out and it took me ten years to graduate. And the day I graduated was the day I quit my job because I found out that I really hated accounting. But as you were mentioning, even though I didn’t really see myself as an entrepreneur, I’d find myself at lunchtime in the line waiting for my sandwich at the deli, and I’d be calculating the cost of the employees and the cost of the food and what they were charging. And I’d be running gross profit margins in my head and trying to figure out if it was a good business. And I did that for lots and lots and lots of different scenarios. So I guess I always had some sort of, you know, work for myself mentality hidden in me. Yes.
John Corcoran: 03:41
Yeah. Yeah. And so tell us about the inspiration behind UGG. How you ended up coming up with this idea. So you were a big surfer at the time. Tell us the story.
Brian Smith: 03:53
I, surfing is pretty much part of every kid in Australia who grows up on the coast, so it was not a really big deal, but it did sort of determine where I was going to go with my life. And when I had the moment that, you know, all the big trends are coming out of California, I just packed up my bags and headed for LA because all of the, you know, surf brands and skate brands and water brands and Levi jeans and, you know, all these things were coming out of California. And so I thought, I’m going to find the next big one and bring it back to Australia and make my fortune that way. And it was like 4 or 5 months of just hanging out in LA, surfing Malibu pretty much every day and, you know, looking at billboards and the Wall Street Journal and anywhere I could for, you know, inspiration for a new business. And, and it was like just turned October and the, the, you know, the water had just got cold and the wind was freezing and and after surfing one day with my buddy, I was pulling on my UGG boots that I brought from Australia, and I just got dosed with goosebumps like, oh my God, there are no sheepskin boots in America!
And 1 in 2 Australians wore some sort of sheepskin footwear. And so I looked at my buddy Doug and said, I mean, let’s go into business, man. We got we’re going to be instant millionaires, right? Everyone listening will know that feeling, you know.
John Corcoran: 05:24
Right? Right. And I grew up in Southern California. So I went to high school, one town over from Malibu, and every kid in my high school had UGG boots. Every single one, you know. Yeah. And it was I remember being such a funny thing because, you know, you think of, like, Southern California as being, you know, known for sunshine and beaches and stuff like that. But we have plenty of cold winters in Southern California. And so. Yeah. So, you came up with the idea. So what were the next steps after that? You came up with this idea. You got to source the product.
Brian Smith: 05:56
You said you, you know, everybody in your, you know, school was wearing them. It took 4 or 5 years for me to get to that place. You know, because Americans don’t understand sheepskin. They think it’s hot and sweaty and you can’t get it wet and or muddy or anything like that. But it’s really like you cannot rip a sheepskin. They’re that tough, you know? So I started opening up a few. Well, first of all, we got shut out at the shoe store level. Not a single shoe store wanted to touch us.
John Corcoran: 06:23
I remember you telling the story. You went from store to store trying to sell them. You couldn’t be interested.
Brian Smith: 06:28
Them. And eventually I twigged on the surf shops because all the California surfers had been to Australia, had bought pairs back for their buddies. So it was pretty well known. So I opened up several surf shops, but, you know, just dribbled the boots out for the first year. And the next year I advertised with these models that I hired and put them on the beach at wind and sea and posed them with the, you know, the tall white boots, like the major part of the ad and the sales went to 15 20,000. It should have been way, way more.
John Corcoran: 06:57
So you hired professional models. I remember this story also. You’d hired professional models and you’d put all this effort into these, like flawless ads and it didn’t move the needle.
Brian Smith: 07:07
Perfect. Yeah. And because that didn’t work the next year, I got better looking models. Right. And did it all over again.
And the sales went to like $30,000. And you know, it got so bad that that following year I was getting summer jobs. Every year I was working on a golf course. And I thought, you know, I’m just going to get out of the business. It’s too hard.
Americans don’t get it. It’s, you know, it’s not working. And then it was like October when that first storm hit the coast. And I got home after work on the golf course. I was sopping wet and the answering machine had like 25 messages on it.
And everyone was like, Brian, Brian, you know, the store’s been full of people asking for UGG boots today, you know? The weather’s turned and. And I’ve run out of boots. Can I come and get more? You know.
And every one of the stores that I had over wanted huge amounts. So I really couldn’t even go out of business properly. You know, I called up Australia and ordered another thousand pairs and started shipping out to everybody. But the following year, and this is about when you would have discovered UGG, is that instead of doing these fake or these ads that I thought were perfect, I called up a buddy who was one of my retailers and we had a beer and at his surf shop, and, and I was explaining this advertising dilemma and he said, oh, shut up, Brian. And he calls out back to all these little 12, 13 year old kids who store their surfboards in the shop, you know, and he said, what do you guys think of UGGs?
And every one of them just went, oh, man, Those UGGs, they’re so fake. Have you seen those models? They can’t surf like that. Instantly I realized I’m sending the wrong image to my target market. And when I saw my ads through their eyes, I couldn’t believe I was embarrassed how fake they were.
And so I called up a buddy, Pete Townend, who is a former world surf champion. He was running a scholastic surf association in Orange County, and I said, Pete, you got any young kids who are going, you know, going pro? And he gave me two guys, Mike Parsons and Ted Robinson. And this time I just went to trestles, which is in San Onofre, and Black’s Beach in La Jolla. And each one of these surfs is about a mile to get to the water.
And you can only walk. There’s no driving. And it’s always good surfing there. And I figured that every little kid who reads Surfer Magazine would just be dying to be walking along that path with Mike Parsons and Ted Robinson, right? And so I just took a couple of shots with my own little camera, and I selected them and ran them in the October, November, December issue of Surfing Magazine, and Surfer and sales went to 220,000.
Like, it was just like, so easy. And what I’d figured out is that you never advertise your product, you advertise the features and the benefits and and like what I advertised was this scene that every little kid would just die to be walking along that path with Mike Robinson.
John Corcoran: 10:17
Yeah, it’s the kind of the lifestyle, the dream, especially if you’re some kid in the Midwest and you’re not near the coast. Like, imagine that you open up your issue of Surfer Magazine. It’s like the life you want to be living.
Brian Smith: 10:27
It totally is. And so, in a funny way, we were using influencers, you know, 40 years ago, you know. Yeah. But what happened then was like every little kid. Because the kids have got no money, right?
They’re in high school, mom, mom. All the cool kids in high school got a pair of UGG boots. I need to get a pair for Christmas, you know? And so the mom started walking. You know, they started with the malls who didn’t even know what UGG boots were, but they eventually figured out the surf shops had them, and it was just like a blowout.
And so it just made me realize that, you know, you must figure out what it is that your target market is looking for. I was trying to ram this photo down their throats, and I was turning off more and more customers than I was ever attracting until I hit that right formula where these kids were just wanting to be in that photo. And I was able to duplicate that into snowboarding because that had just started at that time. And then back east, you know, I got into all the youth hockey programs in the, in the ice rinks, you know, and it was just the most incredible marketing campaign for me.
John Corcoran: 11:36
When you say duplicate it, did you look for someone similar like Mike Parsons? Like a similar kind of equivalent. I am authentic.
Brian Smith: 11:44
Photos in the snowboarding industry. We found out who the young kids were. We got a young Canadian. His name escapes me right now, but we got a young Canadian kid and then went back east. Took me a couple of years because I had no idea what the kids back East did for sport in the winter.
And I was with a sporting goods store owner one day and I said, well, what are the kids doing? He says, oh, they play hockey, you know. He rolls his eyes, and when I looked into it, I thought, oh, my, hockey’s twice as big as surfing. I had no idea because I’m from Australia. We don’t have it down there.
And so I found the youth magazine in Minneapolis. And then that sort of brought the whole East Coast on. So yeah, it was a very simple formula. But once it took me four years to get it, and once I got it, then I was able to use it in every, every avenue.
John Corcoran: 12:32
Now, I remember when I saw you speak that you talked about some of the constraints that success brought you. Also, you have to source more material. You have to get a supplier who can, you know, reproduce it and produce, you know, many more versions at the same quality. You know, cash constraints. Talk about some of those challenges.
Brian Smith: 12:52
Yeah. Well, that’s where my greatest lack was, in the whole business adventure I didn’t understand finance right. Even though I was an accountant. I didn’t understand money and how it works. And so we’d just sell $1 million in one year and we’re broke.
Right. So my accountant brain kicks in and says, okay, well, we’ll sell 2 million next year. And believe me, after 2 million in sales and actually were twice as broke because we had bigger warehouse, more staff, more advertising, more delivery costs, the cost of financing the product itself was humongous. And so the The. And this is a real, real trap for anybody who’s in a product based business.
Your success will become your biggest obstacle once you start needing extra finance to buy a product, right? You think you’ve got twice the orders for next year and everybody thinks, wow, that’s fantastic, but that can be a kiss of death if you don’t have your financing in place. And it took me many, many years to learn that. And I’d say that my biggest failing as a business person was not really having an idea about finance. Back then there was no EO or IPO or anything like that.
And, you know, now I’ve spoken to like 30 EO chapters and I always have dinner with the board, you know, and I meet all the people at the, the, the events and, and I’m amazed at how much knowledge gets passed around within these groups and the forums and everything. And if we had had a forum or something, if I had had a forum, who knows, I might still own the company today. But you know, that was one of the things I just felt. I was Robinson Crusoe out there, the only person that ever had this problem.
John Corcoran: 14:46
Right.
Brian Smith: 14:47
And really, it’s the most common problem in business.
John Corcoran: 14:50
And your buddies are surfers, so they’re not providing any help.
Brian Smith: 14:52
That’s right.
John Corcoran: 14:53
Yeah. So what did you do about financing and cash? Did you go to different sources?
Brian Smith: 15:02
Well, it got down. I was too big for friends and family, you know, and the banks wouldn’t touch me. They kept going even after ten years. Oh, it’s a fad, Brian. It won’t be around next year. You know, and I’m going to. It’s not a fad. Look at the history we have. Oh, yeah. But, you know, fashions change.
You know, you probably won’t be here next year. So banks were out. And so it just became, you know, people who had wealth that I thought I might be able to, you know, get a couple of hundred thousand or half $1 million invested. And and that’s pretty much how I sort of leapfrogged it for a couple, you know, probably 8 to 10 years without really getting solid investment in.
John Corcoran: 15:41
Wow. Was it hard to do that and then have these thin margins or not even be profitable and feel like I’ve got this massive, you know, success on my hands and yet I’m not able to reap any rewards?
Brian Smith: 15:52
Yeah, that’s another issue where I wasn’t good because it was a very expensive product, you know, selling, you know, in a surf shop, you got flip flops, you know, or you got UGG boots. And the cost disparity was incredible. And so everybody, because the pressure was on for price, I had to have really low margins. And that never helped me. And in fact, when I got my final financing the guy who came in with the money looked at the margins and he just looked at me and said, Brian, you know, that’s Profitless prosperity, right?
You ramp up the sales, but you’re not making any money. So what’s the point? Yeah. Profitless prosperity. And that term stuck with me from then on. And once. Here’s the really weird thing. When I finally saw that, I put the prices up quite considerably. Sales didn’t affect it at all. They just kept going out the door. So if only I hadn’t known that ten years earlier could have been a different business.