Patrick Coddou believes he’s achieved the American Dream: having an idea, then scaling and selling it for millions of dollars.
Recently, Dallas-based Foundry Brands bought his company, Supply, a men’s grooming and shaving company.
The deal means Foundry Brands owns the entirety of the Fort Worth company and its IPs, Coddou said, CEO and brand manager of the company. Foundry Brands brought on board Supply’s existing 15 employees. Coddou wouldn’t tell the Fort Worth Report how much the company sold for because of a nondisclosure agreement, he said.
Foundry Brands, based in Dallas, specializes in pet, home and kitchen, beauty and personal care, fitness and sports and outdoor products. It’s funded by $100 million in equity the company raised in 2021, according to Crunchbase. In a tweet, CEO and brand manager Patrick Coddou said the sale represents a part of the American Dream: building a business and selling it for millions of dollars.
Supply started in the spare bedroom of the Coddous’ house in the Fairmount neighborhood of Fort Worth in 2015. The idea for the company started with a problem: irritation and ingrown hairs caused by multilayered razors. After Google searches, he found a huge community of people that shaved with single blade razors.
“I found an old kind of obscure version that I loved,” Coddou said. “I got like an old antique that I shaved with and fell in love with it. And decided more people needed to use it.”
He reinvented the razor and put it on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. They sold $80,000 worth of the razors and shipped them out of Coddou’s home garage.
Patrick Coddou worked as an engineer at Lockheed Martin, and cofounder Jennifer Coddou was working as a teacher. They didn’t hire an employee to help with shipping until 2018, she said. During the Kickstarter launch, they relied on friends to package and ship the products, Jennifer Coddou recalls. Running the company took up a lot of time – even during big life events.
“We had our first our first daughter on the day after Cyber Monday, and I was literally answering customer service emails in the hospital and Patrick was running home packing up orders and shipping them out and then coming back to the hospital,” Jennifer Coddou said. “So it was very much not the cute story you see online. There’s a lot of hard work.”
The couple appeared in 2019 on the TV show “Shark Tank,”where they pitched and were offered a deal by Robert Herjavec.
The couple didn’t end up signing a deal after the pitch session, Patrick Coddou said. There’s many working pieces to a deal on paper once the pitch session ends, he said, and they couldn’t find common ground to sign. According to one 2016 report by Forbes, 43% of companies surveyed actually reached a deal after the broadcasted pitch session
Despite not getting a deal, the show was a big milestone for the company. Patrick Coddou said Shark Tank elevated the brand for customers.
“We went from kind of a little tiny brand in Texas to a nationally recognized brand, almost overnight,” he said.
Coddou said the company is adding new products on Amazon this month and is speeding up the product development pipeline. He said he’s proud of the company they built in Fort Worth.
“(Fort Worth) isn’t necessarily the mecca of e-commerce brands,” Coddou said. “I’d love to see more. It’s a great industry to be in. And I would love to help any local Fort Worth entrepreneurs on e-commerce or anything related. Because I think the city has a lot to offer.”
Seth Bodine is a business and economic development reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at seth.bodine@fortworthreport.org and follow on Twitter at @sbodine120.
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