How Two College Dropouts Built Nude Project, A Clothing Brand With Over $30 Million In Revenue

Bruno Alex thank you so much for being here with me today thank you we expressed earlier but you don't know how much of an honor this is when I was a kid I dreamed of this there was kids that dreamed about being a musician we didn't we like we like this we liked everything and it's an honor being interviewed by you we've seen a lot of your interviews thank you and you know talking about your childhood talking about being a kid take me back to the beginning tell me about what got you both interested in

in clothing and what made you so passionate about this line of work well as first it wasn't it wasn't obvious no it wasn't about clothing I I was born in in Burgos which is a very small City at the north of Spain probably the coldest city in Spain and and in my family everyone was um a pharmacist my my dad my uncle my grandpa my grandma everyone and they they literally told me you can be anything in this life as long as as you're a pharmacist so and in in real life in in reality they

they gave me plenty of freedom to think to to be curious and and being so curious I thought about making bikinis that was the original idea and then uh didn't work out I was super glad to meet Bruno because otherwise the bikini thing I I don't think it would have been something big and then then he told me to to go and and start a a fashion company o so how did you meet each other we met through social media I feel like get the Gen Z Energy but we met through social media I was

living in Bali from when I was 12 to 18 he was living in BOS which they both start with b but they're kilometers apart and back in the day me and my friends used to do YouTube videos about our life and we kind of just wanted to show everything we did there and we'd have like 200 300 views maximum but one of those 200 300 views was Alex cous huge f f huge fun so we connected we started following each other and as soon as I finished school then I got back to Spain we met

met and 2 weeks after meeting we started a new project wow now what was it about you two meeting and and really collaborating that made you want to take the dive into entrepreneurship and start your own company I think it was like when you're TW we started when we're 189 no you don't meet many kids that are super into entrepreneurship or like talking about Gary ve Casey neist we just had so many people uncoming which we're uncoming to have in Spain and that's when we instantly click and I was completely lost in life I always

felt like I was like I'm already 18 I can't believe I don't know what to do with my life this is so hard looking back is funny but and then I met Alex and he just had a drive I'd never seen in a person and I was like if I want to do anything successful with my life I better latch on to him and like be together cuz it's my best opportunity of being able to do it and that's when and when we started you say we started a clothing brand I think I like the

term that we have a clothing company and an attitude brand because what we try to transmit at least to the people of the world is that this is a lifestyle this is when we were kids we were daydreaming about our Dream lifestyle and I think we're trying to portray that we're trying to portray that people live from their passion like your passion is being a journalist and you told us our passion was entrepreneurship very cool and that's it so pretend I've never seen anything what you're wearing right now tell me and describe what nude project

is apart from being our life our passion like the thing that drives us forward every day like we really love what we do h n project be is a a a Lifestyle brand and an attitude brand that tries to inspire people to follow their passion find what they love and and try to make it a living no so since we we started uh selling T-shirts and hold these to our friends in University because we had literally nothing we started with €300 each uh we we started making videos telling stories I think uh storytelling was the

key component of of our success I think no it doesn't matter the budget that you spend on on a creative H piece of content the most important thing is the story so so we focused on telling great stories that hopefully inspire people so what types of clothes do you make we initiated as a street wear brand which is just casual clothing in a way but now we try to do almost everything uh like from the jeans I'm wearing to the sweater to the necklaces we at the end of the day when we said we want

to create a lifestyle I think when you dress it's the best way to express yourself like when I see you today you're like a four M Chic energy you know which is your responsibility of course and I think every day you choose you go in your wardrobe you choose who you want to be and with the attitude we're trying to convey I think it's essential for the the the client of nud project to be able to open the Wardrobe and be like okay I want to this is the energy I want to transmit today sometimes

you want to be off the grid and you wear all black and no one talked to me and sometimes it's it's this energy you know and you just want to go all in is there a certain type of consumer you're designing it for any particular gender or age as far like when we started we told you we started this brand cuz we wanted to portray the lifestyle we wanted and the best consumer example I could give you is I think literally us like we make clothes for the people we want to be or what we

want to live so is young people but young people I like saying young energy like because it's like I don't I don't want to just be for young people I think Young is is is a lifestyle and it's an energy and for example last year we saw when we saw W this was crazy we saw Madonna wearing her clothes in in in Barcelona she came to visit she was off on a visit and she wore a full nude project outfit and I loved a title we did or I saw in that magazine it was was

like this is Young energy you know Madonna looks younger than ever that was the title Madonna looks younger than ever and I was like w I love that you know like 6 to5 that was the my mom's been more more proud of did you know that she was going to be wearing your clothes we knew something that she'd be into the store and then she they grabbed a bunch of clothes but you hear and you can kind of believe it but seeing it you're like Jesus Christ this is it like how yeah how does it

feel when celebrities wear your clothes and have there been others besides Madonna I the coolest thing is just people that you look up to you know because I think like the term celebrity is quite wide but when we see people that we've been seeing on a screen or that we've been watching or that we've been to their concert and they're wearing her clothes it's like a recognition from a person you admire that you don't usually get that gives you the little I'd say especially artists like artists have been our main inspiration for the for the

brand H what do you like to say that you're yeah I'm a frustrated Artist Artist 1,00% 1,00% me too like I had no no chance in that space But but we were very very inspired by these people like these guys are the ones that uh they they are the influencers of the influencers they are artists are the the people that shape culture so we kind kind of felt like there had to be a brand that represented them and and that's our Dream you know when when I see stories from uh Michael Jordan uh being super

close a super close friend with Phil Knight the founder of Nike those stories about this this very successful Partnerships inspired me to be like hey I I hope that uh artists and entrepreneurs being more similar than than you may think I hope we can create this type of relationships in order to to inspire people that's a great answer so where can where can someone find your clothes today where can we buy them we can find them in seven stores across the world around Milan has been Madrid Barcelona Valencia bilbow the the the biggest challenge for

us last year was when we opened the Milano store because you know we are a Spanish based brand and it's one story when you have a little success in in your country but then going outside and especially to Milan which is like the the Mecha of the Mecha of fashion you know and and we came from marketing backgrounds we worked very hard on our designs so when we opened this in Milan we were scared as as hell you know and good shitless anything work and and we came up with a very very cool idea for

the marketing campaign of the Milano store which was that um this is part of the storytelling uh which was that we went to Burgos to my city and H we gave a surprise to my grandma because she's she's like 70 or something and she's taking care of of my grandpa which is now like a bit old and she hadn't traveled for the past four years so we went there and and we basically gave her a surprise that she was flying the next day to Milano to the opening of the store and then she flew to

Milano and we did the entire campaign about my grandma like we shootting pictures around the city then yeah we we we sneaked my grandma to a fashion show he was like she was paring like crazy party animal like out the time of her life and she came back to Burgos like feeling like 10 years younger and and then it was funny that when she was back in in my city like she went to the to the herir dresser and people started recognizing her and and taking picture with her she was like guys I'm famous now

I'm famous that's such a cute cute story C I love it so one of the things that I find is so interesting about the two of you is it's a totally bootstrap company nude project took on no outside Capital but yet you've managed to grow to such great Revenue can you tell me a little bit about that and and your Revenue growth journey I think bootstrapping what is a philosophy and a mentality when we started we had very we were lucky to have very amazing mentors because we were super naive when we started we had

no no idea about business no idea about how to run a business you know we literally typed in Google how do you create a company who should I hire first like we had no idea but we had amazing mentors and bootstrapping was a mentality being profitable from day one was also part of the the IDE idea we had and people it's very hard it's tough because when you're spending your own money you you watch very carefully how you spend it but I think it also kind of makes you and I don't know how to say

this but it kind of makes you smart in a way you know because it makes you be very valuable about what you're making about how you're spending it and we we grew quite quickly it's been 5 years since we started originally we're 19 when we started now we're 23 Yeah so basically uh in our first year we did like 600,000 in sales on the second year it was 2.6 million the third one was 11 million and last year we did 26 million in sales so yeah it's been a crazy ride the other part I think

is really cool about nude project is that you're not just a fashion brand you've kind of built this full community and and you're kind of looking to to not only do retail but also branching out into other things talk to me about your different revenue streams and the way you're holistically looking at your business I love that you bring that because the Whole Nude Universe is something we love to talk about and even though our clothing we're a clothing company and the clothing is H what brings the main Revenue source is the main main Revenue

Source we've got this thing H the podcast which became one of the top pod listen one of the most listen podcast in Spain and yeah we basically try to turn into journalist once a week we don't do it as good as as you do but but but it's been uh I think the best place to to try to share the vision and the mission of the brand because interviewing artists and entrepreneurs H we that's the best place to for them to express their messages yeah and it was also like it started very innocently in in

the way we we didn't say okay we have a clothing brand we're going to create the biggest podcast in Spain it wasn't there's never been like this huge business plan mentality it was like we have the brand I I think it's so cool what goes on in the office we'd love for people to get like a closer look you know we even did a podcast where we interviewed five of our different uh of of our employees and we're like yo so how is it working with new project am I like a shitty boss or am

I a good one you know and then and it's been very cool cuz I think it brought people closer to what's the meaning behind the brand and I think every day now more personal brands are becoming a huge thing because people don't want to look up to like a huge corporate brand but they want to see and know who's the person behind what are values and what does he stand for or she that's a really good point and that brings me to my next question which is would you ever consider selling your brand to one

of those big conglomerates or is is that your end goal at all I don't want to say never because you never know you know we're so young and we have out life Transitions and things happen but right now it's not our end goal and it's it has never started being our end goal because we're so even what we're telling you know we have a podcast is called the nud project podcast and we're the image or even the personal brand we're the image too so I think we're we're quite tied up to new project for a

while now and I'm super happy for it because if we sell tomorrow I literally don't know what I'd do with my life like I'd be I'd be lost I'd wake up and be like oh yeah we're fortunate of having said in as one of our goals to create a profitable company since they W so hopefully we can live of our Dream as long as possible and as long as we love what we do why would you sell no so that's our I think our our path from now on there are so many fashion and clothing

brands out there today what do you think it is that sets yourself apart from all the thousands of others it's an amazing question and it and it's very hard and when we started I think that was the big question for everyone like what are you going to do why are you you're making hoodies and t-shirts everyone makes hoodies and t-shirts and the idea was always like in the beginning we didn't quite know yet cuz I think no one quite knows in the beginning but now when you look back and you connect the dots a a

that has a podcast that does clothing that does events that we have like this thing called a new tour where we do an event in different places around the world monthly and at the same time we've almost tried to create like a creative agency in in house in our office you know and I think having that DNA being able to be very liquid and change all the time and do things that feel true to ourselves is hopefully what keeps differentiating us it makes us have our own DNA you know maybe the clothing can be similar

to the others maybe the podcast can be similar to others but if you put the whole compound as a such I think that's that's maybe what what is special no I'd also say that I think we we went through a big big transformation into the marketing and Communications World basically a few years ago you you could spend €200,000 on a production on a piece of content and you would just run this one piece of content through television and now suddenly you need to make five pieces of content every day for every single platform and I

think this came natural to us but we with this massive change we had to adapt budgets changed so you had to think of content in a different way and I think this was one of the main differentiators for sure that makes sense so now can you tell me what is coming up in 2024 that's really exciting you with nude project anything you can share I feel like 2024 is a year of of us growing up a little bit and growing into her own skin you know it's like when a little when a kid grows the

fits don't even fit the clothes don't even fit him anymore everything's going so fast I feel like new project has felt like a little bit like that for us you know it's been so fast everything's been so quick then now this year it's like all right we have to mature we have to create a a great sea level team we have to make this a real company it's not a game any it was never a game but it's not things are serious now you know every decision we make has an impact and I think that's

been our biggest goal this year we want to create a very solid brand identity and a very solid company to to to bring that forward because last year we were everywhere trying to do everything and it was amazing and I think it's been part of the growth but this year we want to Sol solidify everything we've done so you both started the company so young what was it like trying to to lead a company at such a young age and was it hard then to hire people and be in charge of people who may have

had way more experience than the two of you as you may see I'm just growing a beard now so it was it was not 19 was hard and I remember there's a funny story about the first employee we hired um it been Alex and me for like two years all by ourselves trying to build something initially and the first employee was a kid in my university class he was very disciplined he'd go to the gym at 6 every morning I'm like that's the guy I need you know I need someone I need someone that's serious

about this and but I remember we we sat down in my grandma's living room which is where we worked at the time and we're like all right this guy's going to be here for four hours a day how do we like even gather tasks to give him 4 hours is a lot of time like we don't even know how how what do we tell him to do what should he do we started Googling okay like what should your first employee be like as a clothing brand it was it was horrible but then he started it

was hor it was a learning experience a learning curve and then you start getting Confident by yourself of like you need a team to to be a bus like a business business is not an individual sport it's a team sport we can't do this all by ourselves it's even if we thought we were the greatest people on Earth it'd be physically impossible so we need a great team we have The A Team mentality and especially as we grew having to hire older people than us people that were senior people that had experience it was a

challenge because when you're like a 19y old kid and you're like oh we're going to be the best biggest clothing brand in the world they want to believe you but it's kind of hard I'm telling you from my Grandma's living room how are you going to how are you going to truly believe it and um I learned this from a mentor of us which is if you can't be older if you can't show that you have more experience than them because it's the truth try to be excellent in your own world and for me being

excellent was arriving to the office the earliest leaving the latest showing that even if I didn't know I was down to learn showing that I wasn't the most intelligent guy in the room and I didn't try to be that was what I think we tried to describe excellent as and I think the people around us respected us for that I think we were also very people oriented since the beginning our company culture has been different from from other companies I feel like and I think we we Tred to create many many spaces for people to

to be comfortable working with us to to feel that they can innovate to feel that they can create with freedom and in that sense I feel like when you care a lot for people good things happen for example my my our our Ral manager he's called Mickey and he he basically was the first store manager of our first store in Madrid and when he was I don't know like 13 H he was his dad gifted him with a cash register Mach machine so basically he was telling me this story and now being him the the

retail manager he's like I'm living literally of my dream I'm opening stores around the world you know so that's what makes us move forward you know so living in a way that not only ourselves live from our passion but also our team can do what they love every single day because if you don't do what you love it's impossible to be the best at it yeah and to add one more thing because I think this question is is great is what we learned is that and we like to throw a message to the world that

entrepreneurship is not for everyone and the end all be all you know I think there's people that are born to be entrepreneurs and that is amazing and there there the team is as important if not more important and what we learn as as entrepreneurs our job was to align the company's mission and vision with these people's dreams and to try to keep that the the furthest clo the closest could possibly be because if people can d off live off their dream like for example Mickey in this case inner company that's like it blows my mind

is like is the coolest thing could possibly exist so as two people who are very it seems friendly with each other how does it work balancing both the the business side of things but also your your friendship N I hate him completely no h I would like to say it's hard because there's definitely a challenge like we're both kids that we're growing up into our own skin and we're learning who we are individually and as a whole with the company but at the same time meeting Alex I I call him like a wizard you know

I think like meeting Alex was the the one of the best things that could have happened to me in my life he such a complimentary person to my personality I'm like this crazy creative director and I just run around the office going crazy and he's like the more solid serious person in the business so me being able to meet a person that adds so much to your life and that you add your own thing to theirs and it working out I think is the best thing you can do when starting a business because entrepreneurship is

quite tough and being alone in certain moments it can get a bit dark so being able to have some a person at least this next to you and you're like you're at least laughing at life you know you're like life is a bit crazy but hey we love it you know I think we were fully obsessed since the beginning working in this project but um I I've been super glad to have a great business partner I think we' have never had a crazy fight or anything like that and if he calls me a wizard I

think he's the true special guy he's the creative director and I'm now more focusing into the into being the best CEO I can possibly be so this has been probably the one of the most challenging things this year as we separated inside the company and he started focusing on all the brand and communication uh details and I was more focused onto onto the company makes sense now I have a big question for each of you I'll start with you Alex what would you like your legacy to be I think I was I was very inspired

by Great American entrepreneurs with with guys like Gary ve also there's this British guy called Ben Francis who started Jim cir H these were massive Inspirations for me and I feel like in in Spain entrepreneurs were more closed off and having seen these people talk publicly about how entrepreneurship can be a way of living the this opened my mind to it and I realized holy [ __ ] I'm an entrepreneur like I was born I was born to do this so hopefully uh I hopefully we create one of the biggest clothing companies in the world

we're going to work like maniacs for it but hopefully we can leave a a deeper message of uh both artistic and also and Entrepreneurship inspired so so kids can can follow their their dreams amazing for you Bruno my legacy it's very aligned with Alex's because if not it'd be a problem but uh for me it's always been um a thing where I I think what drives me in life is self-improvement and creation H it's like I realized when I was younger that if you start having end goals when you reach the end goals it's very

frustrating because you're like okay I want to reach 1 million followers you reach 1 million followers you're like okay I'm going to be super successful and cool and nothing changes you're still in the same clothes you're in the same house nothing really evolves so I've I've try to change that from having a self-improvement concept and knowing that self-improvement is cool because it's never going to end there's never going to be a day where i'm like I'm the best person I possibly could be you know there's always room for improvement so it's it might be very

simple but I think it's a message that people should ingrain in their life and also try not to compare yourself as much to other people and what they're doing but just be as long as your self-improving and you're in a race against yourself be happy and progress that is some great advice thank you both so much for taking the time to be here with [Music] me