Case Study: The Ridge and CEO Sean Frank

Introduction.

If you have spent any time on the internet in the past 5 years, especially on social media sites such as Instagram, YouTube, Twitter (er..um..X?), or Facebook, chances are you’ve heard of the men’s accessory brand known as The Ridge. If you haven’t heard of them, simply google “Best wallet of (insert year between 2016 & 2023 here), and at the top or somewhere near the top, you will see The Ridge’s original and flagship product, their men’s minimalist wallet. That is the product that started it all. Back in 2013, Daniel Kane with the help of his father Paul, created a product to combat the giant, overstuffed, leather monster that used to sit in every man’s back pocket. Crafted from high quality aluminum and elastic, the Kanes’ created a sleek, minimalist, option for men’s everyday carry. That same year, Daniel and Paul began a Kickstarter fundraiser, and it seemed that many others were also fed up with the back pain from sitting lopsided on a mound of old receipts and used gift cards. They raised $270,000 from that Kickstarter and invested that money directly into marketing (more on that later) and production. From that point on, they have been a bootstrap brand meaning they have had no other outside funding. Fast forward to 2016, enter Sean Frank as CEO. He has taken The Ridge from a new but growing wallet brand to a complete men’s accessory line doing over 100 million per year in revenue in 2022.

///Sean Frank, CEO of The Ridge

Product Quality

Sean likes to attribute his success with The Ridge to two main points. Marketing and product quality. As I mentioned before, The Ridge has expanded their product line over the years to include watches, rings, backpacks, key cases, phone cases, pens, and apparel, all backed by a lifetime manufacturing guarantee. If any of their products break due to a manufacturer defect, they will replace it or help you fix the issue for free. Also, all of their products are built from the highest quality materials. Variants of their wallets include titanium, aluminum, leather, gold, and even carbon fiber. The use of these top notch materials plus their lifetime warranty provides an unquestionably solid experience to the customer once they are interested in the product but getting them interested is tricky luckily, marketing is where Sean’s leadership abilities really shine.

Selling Wallets

First off, selling wallets is not very easy. In one podcast, Sean states that “The average man gets a new wallet every 7 years and doesn’t know where it comes from.” Now he may be partly joking there but the sentiment is true. Wallets are not a hot ticket item. Most men do not typically go out searching for a cool new wallet. Most of the time it’s a gift from someone else but if they do buy it themselves, chances are they are just gonna go to Walmart and pick out the closest thing to what they had previously. Therefore, a good marketing strategy is of the utmost importance and not only was The Ridge’s strategy good (as I’m sure you know), but it has been sort of a trailblazer for other e-commerce brands in the medium it decided to mainly advertise in, social media.

Marketing

It may seem a bit strange to think of advertising on social media as unconventional these days, especially for a DTC (Direct to Consumer) E-Commerce brand like Ridge. However, a few years ago it was not nearly as common to pour basically all your marketing efforts into social media sites but that is exactly what Sean did. Facebook and Google ads are the easiest to use since you just pay them, and they implement them popping up throughout their systems. Ridge utilized both of those systems the most, Sean stated that around 35% of their marketing budget was used on Facebook ads and another 35% on Google ads. However, one of the more effective marketing tools Ridge uses is sponsoring content creators, especially YouTubers. Ridge has worked with some big names in content creation, people like Theo Von, PewDiePie, Marques Brownlee and Joe Rogan but their bread and butter really comes from sponsoring smaller content creators. Sean shares in one podcast, “We say we want to be everybody’s first sponsor, so that’s kind of like the mantra of the influencer program over at Ridge. The core of the program was people you’ve never heard of making content you’ll never watch. It’s just a really, really wide breadth. So, we’re really trying to give content creators a really good first sponsored experience. They’ll get paid. We send them the product. We make it really hands-off. There’s no approvals. It makes it really, really easy, and that’s been the way we were able to scale that out.”. This method of marketing has proved to be insanely effective for The Ridge as their name has become almost synonymous with wallets at least in the younger generations. By sponsoring as many small YouTubers as possible, they have spread the name of their brand to practically all places simply because the breadth of content on YouTube is so wide. This has allowed them to penetrate market groups that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to and for a greater ROI (return on investment) compared to Facebook or normal Google ads because fans trust their favorite YouTubers and are more likely to buy the products they recommend. Ridge gets their name out more and gets a few sales and the content creator gets some money and experience dealing with their first sponsorship. It’s a really cool win-win.

Conclusion

It’s been a long journey for The Ridge from a small Kickstarter business to a multimillion-dollar company, it’s amazing the transformation that they’ve made in the past 10 years and Sean isn’t looking to slow down. His goal is for Ridge to reach 1 billion per year in revenue and begin manufacturing solely in the U.S. and based on his eye for marketing and their history of growth, I certainly think he can get them there.

Interesting Resources

If you’re interested in reading more about Sean and his journey with The Ridge, here are some resources that I found interesting:

Sean Frank has a Substack with a lot of interesting articles but this was one of my favorites:

What I Wish We Did Sooner

Here are a few podcasts featuring Sean that I found really interesting:

Key Takeaways

Social Media Marketing for DTC brands can be incredibly effective if you have a versatile product that just needs to be in front of as many eyes as possible and using smaller creators can provide really high ROI if you have the manpower to seek out good creators.
The importance of diversification. Staying strictly a wallet company would not have allowed The Ridge to reach the level it’s at today let alone grow further than that to reach a 1 billion dollars per year in revenue. It’s due to the fact that they diversified into rings, watches, key cases, and the like that they’ve been able to reach the level of success that they have. Sean shares in one of his Substack articles, “I have never regretted launching a product. I have only ever regretted saying NO to a product.”

Travis McCoy