There’s not a lot of similarity between creating comfortable men’s underwear and hawking medical equipment, but that’s the path Tom Patterson took when he created Tommy John 15 years ago.
Together with his wife Erin Fujimoto, the couple has built a business with sales in excess of $100 million that has attracted some well-heeled investors, including actor Kevin Hart; Manny Chirico, the former PVH Corp. chief, and LNK Partners, a private equity firm in which he is a partner. Chirico also took a seat on the Tommy John board last year to help the business expand.
Although it started out as strictly a men’s underwear brand, Tommy John has expanded into loungewear and womenswear with a healthy direct-to-consumer and wholesale business.
Now, with 15 years under its Stay-Put waistband, the couple has mapped out a game plan for growth that includes adding more physical retail stores and product categories as well as international expansion.
Although they have built a sizable business in a highly competitive category, Patterson and Fujimoto manage to retain their sense of humor.
“I’m a former medical device salesman — think of Will Smith in ‘The Pursuit of Happyness.’ But instead of selling bone scanners, I sold pulse oximeters. So you could say it was a very logical and natural transition to underwear,” Patterson said, tongue firmly in cheek.
During the years he was selling the medical products, Patterson wore a suit every day. But under the suit jacket were baggy dress shirts and undershirts. “All the shirts were boxy and baggy and I wanted to reinvent an undershirt that stayed tucked in, didn’t stretch out, didn’t yellow as quickly, was more breathable and more fitted — not shapewear, but not the traditional oversize undershirt, either.”
Although they had no background in fashion, Patterson and Fujimoto, whose background was in finance, worked up a sketch of an undershirt and brought it to a tailor at their local dry cleaner in San Diego, where they lived. Fujimoto, who worked for J.P. Morgan, had some experience as an entrepreneur, launching an organic products website. Although that business ultimately failed, she learned a lot from the experience that she could apply to Tommy John.
So they patented the Stay-Tucked undershirt design and found a manufacturer in downtown Los Angeles to produce it.
“That’s how Tommy John was born,” he said.
When the stock market crashed in 2008 and the recession hit, they left their careers, and put all their energy into this nascent underwear brand.
“I read an article that there’s no better time to start a company than during a recession,” Patterson said. “So we launched Tommy John in 2008. We financed our company in the early days on our 401Ks, our American Express, Visa and MasterCards — all the things you’re taught not to do in school. But we were focused on solving a problem.”
A year after it launched with the undershirt, the company added underwear, followed by men’s loungewear.
The name of the brand is unrelated to the baseball player of the same name whose shoulder surgery has become a household name. Instead, it’s named after Patterson. “I was a pitcher in junior high, but there’s no relation to the brand,” he said “I just saw Ralph Lauren and Michael Kors and didn’t necessarily want to use my full name, but everybody knew me as Tommy and John is my middle name.”
Patterson said that while only 4 percent of companies make it to their 10th anniversary, Tommy John has bucked that trend by filling a void in a market dominated not only by mammoth heritage brands such as Hanes and Jockey, but a long list of upstarts.
“Underwear has always been kind of an afterthought,” Patterson said. “And I think we were one of the leaders in allowing it to be a more considered purchase. We felt the men’s underwear category had not evolved. So we took a problem-solving approach with the no-roll waistband, a horizontal fly that’s more functional, multidirectional stretch fabric to move with you, not against you. It doesn’t ride up your legs, it stays in place,” he said.
At the same time, they also “infused our brand with wit and humor,” Patterson continued, with the “no wedgie guarantee,” a “quick-draw fly,” hammock pouch and television commercials that tout high-end for your rear end or show guys constantly adjusting their underwear in comical situations.
“We have fun with the category,” Patterson said. When the brand launched, the underwear market was “very serious. We’ve just taken a more playful approach to it and it really resonated with people.”
Also helping put the brand on the map was one of its earliest fans: Howard Stern. The radio host had discovered the brand and started talking on his show about how it was the greatest thing he ever put on his body, Patterson recalled. “He even designated in his will that he has to be buried in his Tommy John. Is that the best testimonial ever?”
On a more serious note, Patterson and Fujimoto realize that Tommy John has a long way to go to reach the size of some of its competitors. “We’re still a teenager in a lot of ways,” he said. “It takes decades to build the best brands. We’ve just subscribed to this formula of being profitable — we’ve been profitable every year we’ve been in business.”
To appeal to a wide range of customers, the brand offers a variety of options. The offerings range from the breathable Cool Cotton to the 360 performance fabric for workouts. For those who sweat a lot, the brand offers the Air collection, which dries quickly and is antimicrobial. And then there’s Second Skin, its largest franchise, with its soft Modal/polyester/spandex blend that is used in both underwear and loungewear. “Second Skin has almost become a brand itself,” Patterson said.
A decade after the launch, Tommy John took the plunge into womenswear, with the same basic approach: to offer comfortable and innovative alternatives to the behemoths in the market such as Victoria’s Secret. In five years it’s grown to represent about 45 percent of total company sales.
“For the first 10 years, we were men’s only,” Patterson said. “And we thought for a very long time that we might stay a men’s-only brand. But it was really our own customers asking when we were going to make something for women. So we said, ‘OK, let’s try it.’ So we used our best core fabrics, starting with Cool Cotton and Second Skin, and started out with a basics line. It’s become the fastest-growing division for our brand and opened up a whole new customer base.”
Looking ahead, Fujimoto believes Tommy John can continue to expand within the intimates and underwear space by focusing on innovation. “We feel like there’s still so much work to do — 15 years is still so young,” she said.
“Underwear is a category with a high degree of loyalty,” Patterson added. “Any great marketer can sell a product once, but only a great product can sell itself twice. That’s one of the things we like most about our business model — we can be experts at what’s next to the skin: bras, underwear, socks, T-shirts. We’re always trying to deliver something new to the customer that they didn’t know they needed.”
Over the past year, the brand doubled its wholesale distribution and the Tommy John brand is available in more than 3,000 points of distribution, ranging from Nordstrom and Dillard’s to Dick’s Sporting Goods. It also operates five of its own retail stores in Scottsdale, Arizona; Houston; Southpark, North Carolina, and Green Hills, Tennessee. Three more are on tap for later this year in locations yet to be revealed.
Nearly all of the business comes from North America, and it will probably remain that way for the foreseeable future.
“There’s a lot of time, money and resources that need to go into developing and growing overseas businesses,” he said. “So I wouldn’t say it’s a focus for us at this point.”
Although Patterson and Fujimoto remain the majority owners of the company, the addition of Chirico and LNK as investors leads to the question of whether they would ever consider selling the business or going public.
“As long as it’s fun, and we’re growing and making an impact, we’re taking it one year at a time,” Patterson said. “But never say never.”