Four and a half years ago, Jack Zambakides came on the pod running LS Personal Shopper: designer clothes for footballers and about £1 million of PlayStations a month in lockdown. He said he'd never take investment and that he'd sell within two years.
Almost none of it went the way he predicted. Robberies helped end that business. He walked away, went all in on D.Louise, the jewellery brand he built with his wife, and moved to Dubai.
This is two founders comparing what they believed then with what actually happened: focus, hiring, investors, founder mode, retail vs DTC, AI, and the biggest lesson from scaling that nobody tells you.
Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/ltBAVubWL7I
Jack's first episode (March 2022): https://youtu.be/zS7hUIJP65Q
✅ All my links are here - https://www.midnight.co
00:00 Four and a half years later
02:39 Leaving LS Personal Shopper
05:21 Building D.Louise
17:29 The bootstrapped grind
21:54 Blagging into Gymshark's world
29:30 Founder mode and hiring
40:34 What's driving growth
43:58 Retail, ads and trends
52:25 Trust and the customer
57:45 UK vs US
59:34 Money, ambition and being CEO
1:06:29 Could you do it again, bigger?
1:14:56 Dubai and the modern team
1:21:16 Pay yourself more
1:23:39 Quickfire
1:27:46 Advice to his 18-year-old self
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