Hey there,

Crazy to think we’re nearly half way through the first month of 2025. Shit’s already gotten crazy and if you’re out west, just know I’ve been praying for you and your LA friends & family. I’m lucky to have no immediate family out there, but have several friends suffering and just trying to think about how they recover from this.

It was really inspiring to see the way our Founders Club community came together last week with some people even offering up their homes for months at a time. I could not be more serious, if you’ve been affected by the fires and think myself or somebody in our community could be of assistance, I’d love to be there for you.

Without further ado, I took off last week from writing because it didn’t feel right to hit publish. So as they say in show biz the show must go on. Let’s get into it.

Upcoming Events:

This will be a new section of the weekly newsletter that I will add in 2025. I am overrun with daily requests for information about our next Founders Club meet-ups, so the easiest way is to distribute them in this newsletter. If you see a date near you, RSVP quickly. We only allow 10% of attendees to be non-Founders Club members.

Toronto - 1/23

Vancouver - 2/5

Denver - 2/13

NYC - 2/18

We’re Launching in Target 🎯

After seven years of trying, CROSSNET is officially going to be on shelves in Targets across the country starting this February. This is an incredibly big deal as not only is it one of my favorite stores in the world but it is the perfect demographic for the ideal buyer persona.

To secure this deal, we decided to create a brand new SKU priced at $69.99 rather than our traditional $99.99 product. According to market data, the $50-70 price point is the sweet spot for the sporting goods category, and we should be able to crush it on velocity this summer.

In a world where everybody is raising prices, we have taken the opposite approach and done everything possible to make our game more affordable and accessible to the end customer.

2020 Prices - $149.99

2022 Prices - $99.99 + Selling an upgraded $149.99 SKU

2024 Prices - $69.99 Limited Run + $99.99 Standard Pricing + $149.99 Premium SKU

As I sit and type this in my backyard its’s really a pinch-me moment. Back in 2017, we moved to Florida with our life savings and simply a hope & dream. We had no idea what is meant to “create a sport” or manufacture hard goods from China. We just knew this was the best idea we had to change our lives and we wouldn’t be stopped.

Now we can sit back and smile saying CROSSNET has been sold in DICKS, Walmart, Target, Costco, Sams Club and thousands of more stores. 53 countries of distribution. Four global warehouses. Four square meets volleyball is alive and well in 2025.

Ps. The first person to send me a photo of them buying a CROSSNET at Target, I will personally reimburse!

PPS. Most of our retail deals came from straight cold DM’ing the retail buyer on LinkedIn. If you’re not on LinkedIn, stop reading this, make a profile, and start adding your dream partners right now.

Learnings From $100M Brands 🚀

This past Thursday & Friday, we hosted two Founders Club events with our Miami community, and damn, was I impressed with the conversations. We had some of Miami’s largest brands like Truvani, No Days Off, Prize Picks, Comfrt, and dozens more doing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue show up.

The second night, we pulled off what was our biggest challenge yet. With two weeks to notice, we decided to host a 40-person entrepreneurship masterclass we called Miami Nights at a beautiful gym one of our Founders Club members owns in Miami.

Friday night. 8-10PM. In Miami.

Would people show up? Do they even care?

Oh baby! Did they show up!

My three biggest takeaways from founders doing more in daily revenue than I’ll do in monthly revenue:

1) You’re not posting enough. Even if you think you are.

2) No matter how “successful” you are, the sense of loneliness as an entrepreneur never goes away

3) There’s so much opportunity to grow your brand internationally

Heading International 🌎 

If you’re reading this and were affected by the Mexico 321 changes, I’m really sorry. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read this article. It’s a good one. 

A few years back, when we opened our San Diego warehouse during peak COVID, we considered opening a Mexico warehouse instead. There were a ton of benefits, like cheap labor and the ability to avoid USA tariffs, which would have massively increased our profit margins.

Imagine this: we can pay up to $15,000 in tariffs for every container we import. If we import 30 containers a year, that’s $450,000 a year going directly to our bottom line, not the US government.

Mexico seemed like it was cool with this loophole as it helped create more Mexican jobs and real estate development…until they weren’t.

They just shut it down, effective immediately, and tens of thousands of brands that are doing this are now frantic to find new warehouses.

If you’re in this situation or, even better, looking for an affordable way to avoid storage and potential tariff costs, a company called Portless might be able to help you out big time.

Portless has warehousing partners throughout China and Vietnam, to which thousands of companies are now shipping their products instead of going the direct import route to a USA warehouse. Rather than paying a massive storage bill monthly, brands are sending a few months' worth of inventory to these warehouses and then air-shipping the orders directly to customers.

It makes a ton of sense. It is essentially the same thing brands were doing with Mexico 321 without having to deal with warehousing and Mexican labor.

The best and most important thing is the customer gets their order super fast and you avoid crazy storage fees, expensive operation wages, shipping & container rates, and tariffs.

We just started using it on a baby brand I’m involved with called Vonu. We saw a ton of comments in our ads asking if we were available in Europe and Australia. Rather than setting up a warehouse and finding workers out there, we just flipped a switch with our Facebook ads, started running ads internationally, and used Portless to deliver all the orders. Quick and painless to unlock international growth. 2025 is crazy.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve become close with the Portless team as they take on hundreds of new accounts many from The Founders Club. If you want to skip the line hit up my guy Ryan - [email protected] or simply hit the link here. You won’t regret it.

Onward & Upward

I can’t thank you guys again for reading this each and every week. It’s humbling that you guys are still sticking with me and reading every issue three years later. If you have a friend you think could benefit from reading this newsletter, simply forward them this - it’s the best way to return the favor.

I never dropped the new Founders Club logo in here. What do you guys think?

As promised, here are a few of my favorite 2025 goals that you guys replied back with last week. They all seem very attainable, so let’s get after them:

• Sell my business for 7 figures

• Find a new co-founder

• Start my dream project I’ve been waiting four years on

• Start a family

• Snowboard 45 days this year

• Buy my first real estate property

• Join The Founders Club (Lets make that happen, just apply)

My personal New Year’s Goal is to be even more helpful to the start-up and high-growth community. I’m going to be opening a weekly block for FREE consulting calls for founders doing over $1M in annual revenue. I’m thinking 2-3 per week, completely for free. I usually charge $500/hour so I think it’s a fair way to give back and something younger Chris wishes he had at his disposal.

The special consulting calendar link is coming next week; for now, the first two people to respond back get it!

All the love in the world,

Chris