Who owns tapout

You wanted to not be as distant from everyone else. Dan : No, I think it was very entrepreneurial. Even though the girls thing was part of it, it was about starting this business. I thought that was a good trade off. We had those woodgrain speakers and the turntables that were like four inches thick and had wood paneling around it.

It was horrible, but it worked and we got it done. I always built these small businesses. I started a snow cone shop, even though I was bouncing at this club. So, about 19 years old, I started bouncing at this underage club. It was a big two-story wood warehouse. Can we open a snow cone shop there? So, we opened up but then he got air conditioning and that kind of ruined that business. But what happened was when I was in high school, I took this law enforcement class.

I had lied about where I had lived so I could go to this more prestigious high school where all the kids with money went. I grew up in a really poor neighborhood and a really bad area. I wanted to go to that high school.

The reason being is because they had an entrepreneurial class and they also had a law enforcement class. I went over there for the entrepreneurial class.

I just end up having to take another elective as a senior. So, I saw this law enforcement class. All she did was tell stories. We were only graded on listening to her stories. I just thought it was the most interesting thing. She would talk about chasing people and car chases and murders.

She was a homicide detective and she would just talk about all these murders. So, being a cop kind of fit in that framework.

So, I decided to be an explorer scout where you kind of get to ride with the police officers so I could check it out and understand it more. I loved it. Andrew : Is that something I could do now, be a scout as an adult or is it just for students? I think we get to 19 you kind of time out. Andrew : That must have been fun, actually, fun but also scary. But maybe, then again, I read that you lived in a neighborhood where there drive-by shootings, muggings, that kind of thing.

So, was it less scary for you because of that? I was never scared, even though we were in shootouts in front of our house, my mom got mugged in front of our house, all of our cars got broken into.

We lived in that neighborhood. My friends had been jumped. We had been in fights in front of our front lawn. But I never was afraid. It was just kind of part of where you lived. I never was afraid to go outside. I was more afraid—I remember thinking about Freddy Krueger than somebody shooting at me.

I never thought like that when we were out there. Is there one that you can think of? So, probably the one thing that I usually tell when I talk to people is just how I got fired and how that kind of changed my life. Andrew : That was a bad day.

What happened that got you fired? For the first few years, the city was trying to save money on hiring law enforcement officers. So, they had hired me as a paid reserve. So, I was working full-time as a police officer. I was classified as this paid reserve. At some point, like two years into it, they decided they were going to hire me full-time.

So, I got hired full-time but I had to go through the training again because they had to go through the checklist and for legal reasons had to make sure that I had to go through all the regular training that a full-time peace officer goes through.

I was going through the training again. I had been a cop for two years. I was not a seasoned police officer, but I knew what I was doing. So, I got wrote up a few times because I cut corners. Dan : Just the way reports were filled out and how they were turned in.

I was used to being a police officer. I got comfortable and I was probably a little cocky. Andrew : What happened when you got fired? How did you react emotionally? I had actually just got into a shooting and I thought that I was being commended or going to be awarded some medal or something crazy because no one had really said anything.

I had done something that was somewhat heroic, not really. I was shooting into the car trying to stop that guy from running him over. It kind of starts with that. I just had high hopes for my career there. So, when I was walking back, kind of like my emotions overcame me and I was in the locker room kind of upset and physically upset and crying and just thinking my life was over. I was not going to get hired by another police department.

Andrew : And you had a baby? Dan : I did. I had a baby on the way. Really, I wanted to get my parents out of where they were. My mom, a little bit later, a lot later she got mugged. Andrew : You got in a shootout with a guy? Andrew : Someone at your neighborhood is shooting at you guys and you have to pull out a gun? Dan : Yeah, we ran in. I went in and grabbed all the guns, one for my dad and one for me and one for my brother.

They were shooting at us. Dan : In San Bernardino, California. Andrew : So, some guy is coming in. Why would he shoot out your house? Who was this guy? Dan : They were breaking into our car and he had shot through the window to break it. It was stupid. And they were going to just steal our battery. They were trying to pop the hood so that they could get inside the hood compartment and steal the battery. Andrew : How do you get a name like Punkass.

When someone is stealing the car and you have the guts to go get a gun, get your family, get them armed and go after this guy?

Someone stealing my car—how did you get the name Punkass? Dan : That came from in high school I was kind of a skater. So, I was skating with some of the bigger names in skateboarding at the time.

I was a horrible skateboarder. But I was around those guys. Those guys would come out. So, we were the only foot ramp. My best friend had the only foot ramp in the area, anywhere in the Inland Empire.

So, a lot of these guys like Tony Magnusson and Eddie Elguera and some of these pro skateboarders would come out and skate our ramp. It was just a nickname that stuck. They started calling me Punkass. Andrew : Was that your first one? Dan : Yeah, first tattoo. I think at this point the name should have switched. Once you get a gun, I feel like everything changes, once you go out and get one. But things did end up turning around.

Let me do a quick sponsorship message and then talk about what exactly happened because things got huge. The sponsorship message is for Bench Accounting. Every year, Patrick likes to do a blog post where he shows what his revenues and expenses are for the year so everyone can follow along. To put those numbers together, he was collaborating with a virtual assistant on bookkeeping and he says on his blog post that that just consumed an excessive amount of time.

You can imagine how much time it takes to track all the revenue that the guy was making with his website and all the different expenses. Enter Bench, he says. This is a direct quote from his blog from December, This is how I found out about Bench before they were a sponsor. When an actual honest to god human being bookkeeper manages your books for you using algorithms as a lever rather than a substitution for work and expertise.

If you want some organization for your bookkeeping, go to Bench. The reason you want to do that is that our sales department, which is one guy named Sachit, has been pushing every single sponsor to give some kind of discount for our audience.

They said if you go to Bench. You get to see where your money is going. You get to see where your money is coming in. Dan, what did you think of that, by the way? This is a new promotion. You have some kind of reaction to it. Dan : I wrote it down. Andrew : You did? Your brother is helping you at your company. I wish there was a better solution.

Andrew : Where did the idea for t-shirts come from? You were looking around and you saw what? We were good friends at the time. We both wanted to be police officers. This was before we wanted to be police officers. We saw the first UFC and this guy Royce Gracie comes in and he destroys like four dudes in one night. We started training with Royce Gracie. Andrew : Wow. And really, really nice guys too.

I always thought that I had to be like I was tough. I wanted to be tough. I was kind of like puffing myself up for my own personal reasons because of those insecurities that you have as a kid. It feels like no rules. The first time I saw it, Dan, I was scared.

I thought someone was going to die on stage. Dan : They were actually never there. They were only legal in like three states at that time. If it was early, early UFC, it would have been a Denver show. There were only like three states that it was even legal in. It never made it to Vegas until the Ferttitas bought it in Andrew : And then it came back on as like a real sport.

I thought it was huge. It just gave the appearance of size. How does that lead you to apparel? The place was like an hour and a half away.

Everybody was wearing these Gracie shirts. We had them. All they had were different colors. It was all one kind. It was all just a circle with a triangle and two stick figures in the middle looking like they were about to do a judo throw. You were supposed to wear their shirts. If you were in the Shark Tank, you had to wear a Shark Tank. It was more about like Nike. It was about the sport, about the overall sport. Andrew : How did you come up with the logo? Dan : Charles was more the logo graphics design guy.

So, we just got an artist. Neither of us were artists. Neither of us knew how to draw. We just found an artist and started coming up with something that was nice. We both liked Batman and Kiss, so it was these influences that we would talk out. Andrew : Is that why he had makeup on? Andrew : This is Charles Lewis Jr. Dan : Exactly. We wanted to create these characters.

Back then, FUBU was really big. They were their own people. So, if you looked at their hang tag, the owners were actually on the hang tag wearing their clothes.

So, we wanted to create that same thing, but maybe take it a step further and then combine the whole Kiss aspect. So, we each had these characters. We created these characters.

Mine, if you ever saw, I had like a bandanna and of course all tattooed up and always wore black. Charles would wear the makeup and he was more militant. Andrew : I saw the three of you. When I saw it, it just looked so cool because it felt like it was a thing, not a t-shirt company, but like a movement, just like WWE feels like something bigger than life, not like a bunch of guys in tights wrestling.

It feels something bigger because of the attitude, because of the costumes. So, I get why it works. But I know at the time when you started, did it feel a little bit weird? Did it feel goofy that you guys were getting dressed up and you were questioning yourselves? We probably would have stepped up to anybody who said anything to our face.

There were some keyboard haters that we would run up against on different message boards. We would get a little bit of hate. People would yell stuff every once in a while.

I remember we got into at the MGM. But eventually, we got our own TV show and people kind of understood who we were and what we were doing.

It really became a big movement. Hundreds and hundreds of tattoos people would send us. It was really crazy and exciting for us how far that went. They had a lot of smaller events that would feed the UFC. It was still illegal in California. So, I got arrested at an event before because it was totally illegal to have a mixed martial arts event or back then a no-holes-barred event out in California until maybe or something like that, where it got legal.

So, you were going there to fight. Dan : No, we were going there to sell. Andrew : To sell t-shirts. Dan : We would setup our table. Andrew : How did you get permission to sell? What was your deal there? It was just for him to bring in more money. I remember an event in like—there was an event in Huntington Beach where it was totally underground.

You had to give a password to get in. One time, actually, they had set it up. They got smart. It was the one in Compton, I believe. So, we were like all extras and they had this whole movie set and these big cameras. The police left and they continued the fight. Andrew : How much money could you make at one of those events selling t-shirts? Dan : It depends on the event, how big it is. You wanted to be both online and events, no stores, no nothing. But really, I just followed the instructions to get connected to you.

As a non-technical guy who was the business side of the partnership, how did you setup a website? How did you get yourselves online? How did you sell? Andrew : Around , late We were just pushing. We were kind of a dotcom company in away because we were providing this service. When we first jumped on, we had an internet site.

We just had a phone number and you would have an number. I would forward that number—it rang my house and then I forward that number to my cell phone and I had to keep ordering forms in my back pocket. So, when I was at work or wherever I was, I would take an order on the spot.

Andrew : And you would write it down? Dan : That was before we had commerce. We just wanted to create this 24 hour ordering, you could call any time of the day and then I had an answering service too. So, if I got tired and I knew—I was working two jobs at the time. I would just forward the phone number. It was forwarded from the house to my cell phone. I would forward my cell phone to the answering service. They would go online. They were really just doing what the customer would be doing, but they would just go on our website and take the order over the phone from the customer and—.

Andrew : And type it in. Dan : But we had hour ordering back in It was good for us. It worked well. Andrew : How did people find you online at the time? Dan : So, starting in , we started sponsoring fighters in the UFC. We kind of considered ourselves the first people to do these huge logos on t-shirts.

So, before, back when we were creating t-shirts, most t-shirts just had a simple small logo here on the pocket. And we knew that we were paying all this money to sponsor fighters in the UFC and they were going to be walking in. Well, nobody is going to see this little tiny logo here.

So, we started printing these huge logos on the front of the shirt. Before that, no one had done that. No one was printing big logos on t-shirts. Andrew : Well, Everlast was doing it for boxing? Dan : No, not on the front. Nobody would do it on the front. They did it on the back, but they would do a little tiny logo up here. So, you had a big back logo and a small front logo.

So, over that next seven years or something, they stopped doing back logos all together and everything became on the front.

We felt like we contributed to that a little bit. This was before we actually had TapouT. So, we put InYaFace. Hopefully people saw it when they were watching the UFC and they would write it down or something. And we had a little tiny ad in Blackbelt Magazine. So, those were the two ways that they could find us.

Andrew : You told our producer that you would start getting calls from all over the world. People from Japan would start dialing in to get the shirts. It was so crazy. You must have got the wrong number.

But I would take the order at night. Andrew : Was it InYourFace. Andrew : InYaFace. Dan : InYaFace. If you can see flash animation—great, I can. Mixed martial arts is a sport that combines elements of boxing, wrestling, jiu jitsu and other martial arts.

Ultimate Fighting Championship draws fans to live venues and television sets around the globe and has spawned television reality series, a new set of celebrity athletes and even its own fantasy leagues.

Favorito said TapouT created a cachet for its brand early on, not only among practitioners and fans, but consumers outside the sport, particularly men in the demographic. Favorito, who previously worked in mixed martial arts, credited TapouT with finding the right places to grow their business, and for their personal involvement with the fighters and trainers with whom they work. WWE has formed a joint venture with Authentic Brands Group, in which the companies will partner to relaunch the Tapout clothing brand that was formerly closely associated with UFC and mixed martial arts fighting.

Tapout will now be repositioned as a broader lifestyle fitness brand, with the company also set to serve as the official fitness and training partner of WWE. WWE also will create new content featuring its roster of male and female wrestlers who will wear Tapout apparel outside of the ring. Additional branding will be featured at the WWE Performance Center in Orlando, Florida, where all performers, trainers and staff will be outfitted in Tapout workout apparel.

WWE believes it can provide Tapout with over 1 billion impressions across its various platforms a month. Much of that business has been dependent upon toys, videogames and apparel. But WWE sees Tapout as a new way to expand into the lifestyle fitness arena — a market that others like Under Armour have been especially successful in doing lately.

WWE sparked to the idea of a joint venture, given that the company had been looking to expand into the lifestyle fitness ring with its own products.

WWE previously had a deal with Under Armour. ABG saw an opportunity to make Tapout appeal to a larger group of athletic consumers, however, and will relaunch the company with a new logo, apparel and accessories in the spring, with other products debuting later this year and early New products will also include beverages, supplements and fitness centers. Home Biz News.