Advice Line with Curt Richardson of OtterBox

Before we get into the episode, thanks to our presenting sponsor, Anthropic, they make Claude an AI built for the problems that take real thinking. Research, strategy, planning, and making sense of a lot of moving pieces. Give it a try for the next thing you can't quite stop turning over in your head. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at Claude.ai slash H I B T. And welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on the show, who will help me try to help you. And if you're building something and you need advice, give us a call, and you just might be the next guest on the show. Our number is 1-800-422-252-252-252. Leave us a one minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you like help with.

Alright, let's get to it. Joining me this week is Otterbox founder Kurt Richardson. Kurt was first on the show back in 2019, and if you missed that episode and you want to go back and listen, we will drop a link to it in our episode show notes. Kurt grew up in a tiny mountain town in southern Colorado, and when he was just 21, Kurt bought his own small plastics company, and for years he had a really rough time of it, until he came across a book called The EMyth. Which helped him understand what truly matters at the core. And this insight eventually led Kurt to build otter products, which started out as small, waterproof boxes for outdoor enthusiasts. And when the iPhone exploded in popularity, Otterbox was in place to become the dominant phone case brand in the US, growing the company from$5 to$575 million in just five years.

Fast forward to today, Kurt is no longer the CEO, but he's now the company's chief visionary officer, and we are so happy to have him back on the show. Kurt, welcome back to How I Built This. No, thank you for having me. I remember. When we met in Denver, it was a great time. We did. We did a live show together. It was super fun. Um when you were on that show back in twenty nineteen. What did you think? the next sort of five years would look like and of course What eventually actually happened. I was out or getting out of

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