Having Fun, But Not Playing Around

Growing up in Southern California, Shaun Neff was a brand fanatic. By high school, he could size up other students’ musical preferences, and even what social circles they traveled in, by glancing at their sneakers.

Fast forward a decade and a half, and Neff himself is now one of the most broadly desired brand visionaries in today’s youth market. His 14-year-old company, Neff, now earns more than $100 million at retail annually, producing apparel and accessories that are sold in more than 40 countries.

Neff started working on his brand when he was a freshman at Brigham Young University. He designed t-shirts with his name on them and sold them out of his backpack, occasionally giving one away for free just to get it noticed. It was a small operation, but what he lacked in product he made up for by hustling. An avid snowboarder, he immersed himself in the that community. He attended key parties and frequented shops where other snowboarders worked or hung out, making friends who agreed to wear his shirts and spread the word about his product.

After college, Neff moved to Park City, Utah, widely viewed as the epicenter of professional snowboarding. When he found out that many snowboarding celebrities had endorsement contracts that did not cover headwear, he saw an opportunity. He jumped in first with headbands, then quickly moved on to beanies, the brimless woolly caps that were popular among snowboarders.

It was beanies that provided Neff with his calling card. It is thanks to his efforts — along with those of other early proponents of the beanie cultural explosion — that the now-omnipresent woolly caps went from being a cold-weather sport garment to a must-have fashion accessory worn by millennials year-round.

In the company’s early days, Neff enlisted help from his father, a lawyer with expertise in international trademarking. His assistance turned out to be critical, since by then Neff was juggling orders as large as $150,000 from Japan. His father remains a co-owner of the company.

Neff eventually moved his business from Utah to California, initially operating out of his grandparents’ guesthouse. By 2006, the company was shipping millions of dollars in back-to-school orders from a four-car garage.

As the company grew, its brand expanded from its origins in the snowboarding community to a broader range of active sports and sports venues. As Neff moved into skateboarding, he noticed that skaters often wore beanies, too. In response, the company came out with a “daily beanie” that could be worn year-round. The product was a huge hit; today it is the top-selling beanie among youth worldwide.

In 2009, Neff products hit the mainstream with “Neff x Snoop,” a collection designed in collaboration with rapper Snoop Dogg. That was the first of Neff’s lucrative and high-profile celebrity partnerships.

In the years since, Neff has forged other innovative celebrity partnerships to fuel his fashion sales, including one with actor Scarlett Johansson that produced a charitable beanie for cancer patients, and another with NBA star Kevin Durant that developed a line of co-branded underwear.

Neff is not taking his company’s success for granted. He constantly researches current trends, finding inspiration in almost everything he sees.

One of Neff’s most significant partnerships, with Disney, began in 2013. The two companies teamed up to re-imagine everyone’s favorite mouse. With a design based on, in Neff’s words, “a modern Mickey in an avant-garde style,” the collection included 12 co-branded men’s t-shirts, two beanies and two watches, all bearing the date ‘28, which was the year Mickey Mouse was first imagined by Walt Disney. “We’re raising the bar with this collection,” Neff said in a press release announcing the collaboration. “Disney holds a very special place in my heart as it does for so many other people, and to have my name sitting next to the most iconic brand and characters in the world puts a huge smile on my face.”

Neff is not taking his company’s success for granted. He constantly researches current trends, finding inspiration in almost everything he sees. He knows better than anyone how fickle teens and tweens, his company’s core constituencies, can be. He speaks both passionately and with amused fatigue about the challenges of being not just a trend-spotter but a trend-maker in a culture that changes, quite literally, day to day.

Although Neff now rubs elbows with high-profile athletes, rappers, movie stars and business elites, he remains a low-key guy. He is a Mormon who doesn’t drink and leads a relatively normal life. He spends what leisure time he has with his wife and two boys. But he clearly loves what he does. He counts among his favorite moments spending all night in Damian Marley’s studio, listening to him talk about his childhood with Bob Marley, and visiting Disney Studios, where he looked at original sketches of Mickey and some of his other favorite childhood characters.

During a recent interview at the annual Startup Grind Conference in Redwood City, California, Neff was relaxed and friendly, with boyish mannerisms and good-humored smiles. But when he settled in to talk seriously about what it means to stay on top of a $100MM-dollar-a-year international fashion conglomerate, his eyes took on the steely focus of a CEO determined to face down the myriad challenges in today’s market. Neff is having a lot of fun running his namesake company, but he’s clearly not playing around.