TECHSTYLE’S ADAM GOLDENBERG ON CELEBRITY, CURATION
THE CO-CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER REVEALS WHAT MAKES KATE HUDSON AND RIHANNA GOOD BUSINESS PARTNERS AND WHAT THE FUTURE OF RETAIL HOLDS.
By now, most people who watch television or surf the Internet are aware that Kate Hudson has an activewear brand called Fabletics. And many have also seen commercials for JustFab, where shoe-addicted women can fill their closets for just $39.95 a month.
What’s probably less known is the company behind those e-commerce brands — TechStyle Fashion Group, based in El Segundo, Calif., a rather unglamorous yet close-to-the-beach town just south of Los Angeles International Airport.
TechStyle is also the company behind Rihanna’s lingerie play, Savage x Fenty, which launched this summer to great fanfare. The company is raking in more than $750 million in sales across its portfolio of brands, which includes FabKids. To date, it’s raised $260 million in funding and many think that an initial public offering is imminent. With five million users, TechStyle brands operate on a membership model where customers are charged a monthly fee that allows them to buy a certain number of items per month, and are entitled to further discounts on additional items, which are rolled out as frequently as once a week.
The company’s two chief executive officers, Don Ressler and Adam Goldenberg, met in the Nineties, when Goldenberg was still in high school, a teenage tech wunderkind who ended up forgoing college when he sold his video- game website to a media company. The two would later found Intelligent Beauty, whose DermStore beauty e-comm would later sell to Target Corp., and in 2017, officially changed the name of their company to TechStyle Fashion Group.
Goldenberg, now 37, is a low-key presence, but he effectively presides over the 500 employees at the El Segundo campus, as well as another 2,500 worldwide (the company sells in more than 20 countries). He’s so down-toearth that it’s easy to forget that he’s an entrepreneurial visionary who bet early on e-commerce, membership models and celebrity partners.
Here, he sat down with WWD to discuss how he went from gamer to power player, and what he sees as the future of personalization and retail.
WWD: There aren’t many tech ceo’s who started their first company in high school. How did you get started in the tech business?
Adam Goldenberg: I wish I could say I had some master plan to build this huge business back in high school, but really I loved video games. I also loved computers. I had this idea that if I had a web site reviewing and writing about video games, I could get free games and hardware. A lot of people like me had web sites, but back then it was really expensive to host them, so I provided free web hosting to gamers in exchange for their advertising space. We started a network of video- game sites and had an agency selling the ad space and that became Gamers Alliance. The irony of it was that it did work, but all of a sudden it turned into a business where I didn’t have any time to play games and it was quickly about growing and scaling.
Then there was a bit of happenstance. My senior year of high school I’d leave school at 3, go straight to the office, sometimes get home at 2 in the morning, do like an hour of homework and three hours later, wake up and go to school again. I was like, “This is a lot and nobody wants to work for a 16-year- old kid.” Most of my employees were remote and didn’t know how old I was. So, when I had just turned 18 I sold the company to Intermix Media for stock right around the dot- com boom. As part of the deal, I agreed to move out to Connecticut for what was supposed to be six months to help with the integration and transition and then go to college. When I got out there, to me that was like college. I was learning so much every single day, interacting with such smart people, solving real challenges, that I said, “I can go to college later.” Now 20-plus years
later it hasn’t happened yet.
WWD: What was your trajectory at Intermix Media?
A.G.: It started with just running the gaming division, then I was promoted to vice president of strategic planning, where we were looking at acquisitions and new businesses to launch and create. From there I was promoted to chief operating officer, where it was about not just having the big ideas for new businesses, but helping to bring them to life. The gaming piece fell away pretty quickly and I actually spent a lot more time in entertainment content like greeting cards, and the early versions of ►
“One of the things we tell all our employees is to remember that there is a person behind every one of those numbers. When we say we will sell 10 million pairs of leggings, that’s a lot of people. And if a quarter of 1 percent didn’t have a good experience, that’s a lot of people who didn’t get the perfect product experience.”
— ADAM GOLDENBERG, TECHSTYLE FASHION GROUP