PODCAST SERIES ‘THE PEOPLE BEHIND INNOVATION’ MAKES A RETURN

This past week I sat down with Rafael De La Vega, the CEO and Co-Founder of SALT Athletic to hear more about his entrepreneurial journey in developing a new type of technology for athletes and the many lessons he has learned along the way. ‘The People Behind Innovation’ Podcast dives into stories of impactful entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators surrounding the XI ecosystem to learn more about their stories and the lessons they have learned along their journeys. The podcast series is available now under Google, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify streaming services, or on Anchor with no account needed to stream.

Can you share your story as a soccer player and what inspired you to start SALT Athletic? 

I originally come from Bolivia where soccer is huge, but I didn't really play much soccer living out there. We moved to the United States and right as we moved here I noticed football and basketball were the big thing. I was a little bit of a contrarian, so I started playing soccer and I really developed a passion for it. I was playing 4 hours a day, every day. Since I came in late, I knew I had to make up a lot of lost time to be able to be competitive at the age group I was coming into. Throughout that course, traveling around making it to some of the teams that I wanted to play for, playing in some of the academies and the big professional teams here in the US, the need for this product arrived. I was in high school at the time. I was a sophomore in an entrepreneurship class where we dove deep into: “How do you build a product?” You have to look at a problem and I was like, “I know a problem. My cleats are stinking up my life!”. At that point, all I thought about the fullness of the vision was I'm going to create a cleat bag that is smell proof and that was it. 

Can you share more about some of the biggest challenges you faced during your entrepreneurial journey and how did you overcome them? 

I think the biggest challenge was jumping into this process with zero work experience. Right out of high school, I thought, you know, instead of going to college, I have this business idea. I could just become a millionaire instead right away. That was my thinking at that point. Then I jumped into this and I found out real quick that it's not that simple. I would say the first challenge was learning how to bring this idea to life and knocking on doors, talking to a lot of people and getting rejected early on but still following through and saying like, “No, no, no. I'm going to make this happen. This has to happen.” It took a while to even get the first product made or the first iterations of the technology developed to where they could be tested. At that point, once we had that, I thought, “That's it, we did it. We made it." Then we came to find out that no, it's actually very difficult to break into manufacturing in textiles, cut and sew, which is what we do. It took us about two years when the biggest challenge of the company was not “Can we sell this?” or “Are sales up?” or any of that. It was “Are we ever going to be able to manufacture this?”. That was the big question. The small factories wanted to charge us $100 a unit. As for the big factories, we were too tiny for them. This is an industry where if you don't know somebody or somebody that has believability in the industry and doesn't vouch for you, then nobody's going to take you seriously. So we spent a solid two years just reaching out to different factories, talking to different groups until finally through a family connection. We met somebody in Mexico that was able to connect us with the first factory and get that first production run started. That was a mess. We made every mistake you could possibly make. We shipped materials to my house before we sent them to the factory, and I thought, “Oh, how bad can it be?”. Turns out it was about a metric ton worth of fabric that we were shipping to my house. We had to move around so it was a whole process and we sent it down to Mexico. There were problems with the cartels and things like that. The most expensive material got stolen and never made it to the factory. We had to resend it. Those are some of the challenges that we had to go through to finally make our first batch of products, which ended up being about 40% of the amount that we had contracted out because of the stolen material and bringing it to market. We thought now we made it and then we realized marketing is a whole challenge in and of itself. 

So could you tell us a little bit more about your first product, the Aērcase Soccer Cleat Bag, and the technology behind it as well as your thought process? 

This is a product that was made originally for the psychological profile of a player like the player I was. You want it to be swagged out. You want to have the coolest gadgets and gear. Your cleats are your babies. That's the other thing, I was spending 200 bucks on a pair of cleats. I had two or three pairs of those for the different conditions. This was right around the time Beats by Dre dropped where it wasn't the player anymore, but it was how you listen to the music. And so I thought, “Man, that's an interesting philosophy around the product”. What if it's not just the cleats, but how you carry the cleats? Of course also dealing with some of the worst problems associated with cleats, which is a stink. That is how the product came about. We wanted to design a good-looking product with the right look and feel, and the magnetic closure. The product was designed to be very nice to look at and a very beautiful product. We launched it with the goal of having the best clean bag in the world and that's what we have at this point. 

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs or those just starting their entrepreneurial journey? Are there any key lessons or principles that you'd like to share with our audience? 

I've talked to quite a few people in the last few years that tell me, “Hey, I'd love to start my own company” and “I'm not there yet because of X, Y, and Z” and I always ask them this question. I said, “Are you afraid that you're going to go for it and you're actually going to get burned? It's going to hurt and you're going to fall in front of everybody. Are you afraid of that? Let me put your mind at ease. You're not just going to get burned, you're going to get roasted and it's not going to hurt. It's going to be excruciating. You are going to fall. More likely than not, fall on your face in front of the people you care to impress through your entrepreneurial success. But at the end of that, you're going to live, you're going to survive all of that.” That's just what it takes. A lot of people think that when they're going through that fire, there's something wrong with them, or perhaps, “Ah, it's for others, but it's not for me”. No, like, that's the most normal thing and you have to embrace it. Once you learn to embrace that adversity and all the challenges then you fall in love with the game, not just the trophies. That's the best place to be because then you can take it and say “Yeah, I've been hit with worse. Let's go!”.

Want to hear more? Listen to“The People Behind Innovation”on Apple,Amazon, andSpotifystreaming services, or onAnchorwith no account needed to stream.