{"id":294241,"date":"2026-01-20T16:46:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T16:46:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/294241\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T16:46:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T16:46:12","slug":"down-arrow-button-icon-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/294241\/","title":{"rendered":"Down Arrow Button Icon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kyle Hency started Chubbies in 2011 <\/a>with three Stanford friends as a fun, weekend\u2011and\u2011beer\u2011vibe shorts brand. <\/p>\n

The irreverent direct-to-consumer clothing brand\u2014one popular item was a tear-away pair of shorts<\/a> with a speedo-style bathing suit underneath\u2014\u201dwas objectively maybe a bad idea,\u201d Hency says, half joking. Nevertheless, the company caught fire\u2014revenue went from $1 million to $8 million. And when Chubbies was acquired by Solo Stove<\/a> in 2021, it marked a rare retail exit just as the direct-to-consumer boom began to collapse.<\/p>\n

After spending a few years on the sidelines, Hency is back: He cofounded Good Day in 2024 with former Chubbies CFO Dave Wardell, and the startup just raised its seed round to solve one of retail\u2019s biggest problems: managing inventory.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an area in which Hency has hard-earned, first-hand experience. Despite its ultimate success (Hency says Chubbies now does $100 million or more in sales under its new owner), Chubbies almost ran out of cash three times, and at one point managed with negative $2 million cash for 18 months. Managing inventory became critical, and Hency says he struggled with the software tools available at the time.<\/p>\n

And in today\u2019s market, clothing brands are under even more pressure to run a tight ship and obsess about everything below the revenue line, Hency says.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery single brand now has to manage revenue all the way down to profits, because those profits are the only way they can fund their business,\u201d he says. \u201cThe lenders have gone out of business. The VCs aren\u2019t backing brands as much as they were before. If you look up how much VC investments into consumer deals have gone down since before that period, some numbers show over 90% reduction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Good Day has raised $7 million in seed funding from current investors like Ridge Ventures, FirstMark Capital, and Flex Capital, the company exclusively told Fortune. New investors include Long Journey Ventures, Adverb Ventures, and Seguin Ventures. This brings the Good Day\u2019s total capital raised to $13.5 million and current customers include Hill House Home, The Normal Brand, Margaux NY, and Kenny Flowers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Amish Jani, cofounder and partner at FirstMark, described Good Day as \u201cAI-native, ERP-lite\u201d\u2014an enterprise resource planning system that stands apart from traditional options. He sees an opportunity for startups to capitalize on the AI boom as retailers redesign their systems of record for this new era.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf agentic solutions are driving real utility and replacing labor costs directly, I expect e-commerce brands to be amongst the first adopters of these tools,\u201d Jani said via email. \u201cGoodDay is a good example of this in the ERP space, but you can also see this emerging very quickly in every major vertical SaaS category both in consumer and beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Hency\u2019s latest startup may seem more staid than the loud Chubbies shorts he once flogged, the entrepreneur has not completely left the attitude behind. An important part of Good Day\u2019s brand marketing is taunting established ERP competitors like Netsuite. <\/p>\n

\u201cDo you think NetSuite, created 20 years ago by a bunch of suits, is helping anybody during Black Friday, Cyber Monday?,\u201d said Hency.<\/p>\n

Hency\u2019s rhetoric isn\u2019t an accident, it\u2019s strategy. In the ERP jungle, he\u2019s aware he\u2019s new\u2014but he thinks he can get customers to switch from established competitor NetSuite. There\u2019s some evidence this could perhaps happen. Take Jimmy Sansone, co-owner of The Normal Brand and Good Day customer, who said via email: \u201cFrom an operational perspective, we did not have accurate visibility into our inventory balances, and our ops teams had to rely on offline spreadsheets and manual tools to move, fulfill, buy and receive inventory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hency\u2019s directness is part of his philosophy about business.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s so important when you\u2019re building a brand to be different,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s way more important than it is to be cool.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kyle Hency started Chubbies in 2011 with three Stanford friends as a fun, weekend\u2011and\u2011beer\u2011vibe shorts brand. The irreverent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294242,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[79,146377,18,236,19,23661,17,3439,256],"class_list":{"0":"post-294241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-clothing-and-apparel","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entrepreneurship","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-inventory","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-retail","16":"tag-venture-capital"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115928444598998017","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}