The Making is the Product

Rarely

I'd love to hear your story.

Maddie

We have a grandfather who had a barbershop in Brooklyn. He passed away. We inherited all of his stuff — his straight razors, his strops, his barber chairs. And when he passed away, there was this aftershave. It was called Schulten’s Old Spices. Old spice stuff. Not like Procter & Gamble’s. Ceramic bottle and the ship on it. That stuff, to me, is the pinnacle of men’s grooming. Old school nostalgic men’s grooming.

My brother’s about to be back here in a minute, but he’s like a mad scientist. Always was. Always concocting and making things in the basement since he was a little kid. And he’s like, I’m gonna try to recreate this fragrance. It wasn’t just the actual fragrance. For us it was the nostalgia of being in our grandfather’s shop. The smell of that — we’d come home and our clothes just smelled like the shop. He bought lab equipment, essential oils, dupe fragrances, all sorts of things, and he was just mixing. At some point he came upstairs and he’s like, oh my god. This is it. He made one for me. He made one for himself. My brother, Stefan.

Then we started wearing it, and people started asking. Then he made an Etsy store. I used to own music studios, so I moved him into one of my recording rooms. He built a little lab. He got to the point where he was moving a lot of product. He’s more of a creative. He wants to make stuff. I’ve always been into business. I’m the pusher. That’s what I love.

Stefan

I just want to make shit. Matt just wants to make money. Every time I make something, he’s like, can you sell that? I’m like, I’m not really trying to sell. I’m just trying to make one-off.

Maddie

I love your whole mission (Rarely as anti-Amazon), because that’s what we stand for. Not only in business — in every aspect of my life. When it comes to my landscaping, I want to find the guy who doesn’t have twenty trucks. The guy who’s owner-operator, in there by hand.

I think there’s like a sweet spot in business. There’s this beginning where you’ve got a bunch of holes in your system and you’re trying to figure it out and you’re just getting off the ground. Maybe not the best you could potentially be. But then you come into once you kind of figure everything out — but you’re still operating everything, still going through your hands. You still have full control. I think that’s when you get the best product that you could possibly put out.

Rob

I think so too. From the beginning we said we’re never going to use VC funding. We’re never going to sell out to private equity. I don’t want to have anything to do with that.

Maddie

That’s how me and my brother — we always kind of steered away from that. So many people wanted to invest and get involved. But what we’re doing is built around a lifestyle that we actually live. We’re not really working. We never want that feeling of someone having full control of how we do and when we do what we say. The fact that we’ve been able to build it together, the two of us, and keep it what we want it to be, and get it to the point where we could kind of live off of it — we’re already successful. We’re good.

Rarely

Yeah, we're makers too and sometimes you create something cool — and then somebody’s like, hey, we could turn that into a thing. But as soon as I turn it into a thing, it's hard to stay interested any more.

Stefan

I think it’s when you start turning it into a thing, you have to make compromises. I’m not really willing to compromise. I always said no plastic bottles, no this, no that. When you start scaling, the compromise comes. That’s why we still do the limited edition stuff. For Halloween, we do the wooden box. I want to make the box from scratch. I want to age every single box. When he says heirloom quality goods — you can’t make money and scale that. So we have to make the making of it the product. Us making it is the product. It’s the video that comes out of it, and then showing people. It’s really the flex. It’s not about how much we make by actually selling these. It’s how much social currency can we make by showing our process of doing things the way that we want to actually do them.

Maddie

Neither one of us is following any sort of roadmap. Everything is built the way we think it should be done.

Maddie

If I show up anywhere, I refuse to have a vinyl sign and a table with a printed tablecloth. I won’t do it. Handmade. I’ve had another one next door that I built probably ten years ago. A lot of two-by-fours. I’ve been lugging it around the country. This whole thing has piano hinges so all of this folds down. Actually fits on a pallet. Everything is built out of squares that are the exact size for pallets. We’re hand painting all canvas banners — made out of drop cloth. We paint them and then we age them and put the grommets in. I’m able to pack it up and ship it out. I have an event in Texas in like two weeks. San Antonio.

This is what we’re doing now. It’s what we did when we started. Nothing different.

Maddie

The most iconic thing that we do is probably unscalable — at least at the moment — we are so latched onto something called the Order of the Holy Black. That is our modern day social club.

Rarely

Tell me about that. I love that you guys are doing community stuff. You guys do a car show and everything. You branch out in the whole village.

Maddie

Yeah especially in your hometown. You could literally see my house from the back window. We do a school supplies drive here. We do hot rod toy drives throughout the whole community. But the Order of the Holy Black — this goes very deep. On its surface, especially where we’re in the day of AI, where everybody’s getting pulled further and further away from each other, and human interaction is becoming less and less — it’s one of the best things you could do for your mental health and your community.

It has been going on since 2016. We really started to organize it about four years ago. It was guys who were following us. Not like an Instagram club, but people were putting Holy Black Brotherhood in there, saluting each other on their posts. That’s one of the reasons we really push it — it was building itself. I’ve built a bunch of businesses, and nothing ever just built itself. This was just happening. I felt like it was contagious. People were just looking to be a part of something.

We had swag. Printed coins — little membership coins that shipped in orders. It was really like a customer loyalty program at the start. And these guys were like, yo, we will come down there.

Maddie

Now we just took over this building. This whole thing will be built like an old Victorian study. All black and bookshelves. We have like a hundred bookshelves. We meet monthly. We have committees and a president and a treasurer. Neither one of us is getting paid for it. You’re putting a tremendous amount of effort into it. Long-term vision — chapters all over the country.

Stefan

We’ve been doing this since we were little kids. We’ve always had a club. We’ve always had a clubhouse.

Maddie

The first iteration. It’s really developing into being something special. The people that are in this club have all come up to me individually and said, you have no idea how much I needed this in my life. I’m telling you, it is changing people. Just an update on the Knights of Columbus and the Masons.

Rarely

Men need this — what you guys are doing — so bad. Especially in the age of AI, where everything is automated, everything is slop — people want to see stuff that was made with hand, with care, by a person.

Maddie

The key is to have the human aspect on the front and be making things.

Stefan

I love technology. I use it to do stuff that I just don’t want to do. The nitty gritty. SEO and all that. But in the outward stuff that we’re putting out there, I want them to see us working with our hands and painting signs and coming up with new ideas. It also opens up our time to come up with new ideas.

Before, I want the website to have a countdown — that would take me six hours. I’d have to sit down and figure out how to write some HTML and CSS and JavaScript. Or hire somebody and it’s never going to be the way I want it. Now I feel so self-sufficient.

Maddie

Between the two of us, we don’t need anybody anymore.

Rarely

With better tech and tools, makers have never been more dangerous.

Stefan

We have to literally stop ourselves from starting more and more companies. Stop starting businesses. Just focus on the one that’s working.

Stefan

When we had the first place like this, people were like, why are you doing this? We had no money. We’re driving a freaking forty-year-old car. Literally a forty-year-old car. People who are running successful businesses, people in our family — what’s the point? This is just what we want to do. Doing what we want to do, and showing people us doing it. People latched onto it. Not everything has to make immediate money. If you just go by profit margins, you do another boring business that’s just like everybody else’s. Sometimes it’s worth it to go outside the box.

Maddie

We’re not really stuck into one genre. We’ve made products that have been synthwave ’80s to ancient Victorian. It never gets to a point where it’s stale to us. It’s always fresh and it’s always new and it’s always fun. We’re just having fun. And that’s the most important thing.

But of course media is king. If you don’t know how to reach people, and you’re doing the coolest work in the world, if no one knows about it, it’s not gonna ever go anywhere. You’ve got to be in it for longevity in order to find those people. And you’ve really got to be weirdos.