Matt Kelly | The Midnight Pod

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