Kyle Hency started Chubbies in 2011 with three Stanford friends as a fun, weekend‑and‑beer‑vibe shorts brand.
The irreverent direct-to-consumer clothing brand—one popular item was a tear-away pair of shorts with a speedo-style bathing suit underneath—”was objectively maybe a bad idea,” Hency says, half joking. Nevertheless, the company caught fire—revenue went from $1 million to $8 million. And when Chubbies was acquired by Solo Stove in 2021, it marked a rare retail exit just as the direct-to-consumer boom began to collapse.
After spending a few years on the sidelines, Hency is back: He cofounded Good Day in 2024 with former Chubbies CFO Dave Wardell, and the startup just raised its seed round to solve one of retail’s biggest problems: managing inventory.
It’s an area in which Hency has hard-earned, first-hand experience. Despite its ultimate success (Hency says Chubbies now does $100 million or more in sales under its new owner), Chubbies almost ran out of cash three times, and at one point managed with negative $2 million cash for 18 months. Managing inventory became critical, and Hency says he struggled with the software tools available at the time.
And in today’s market, clothing brands are under even more pressure to run a tight ship and obsess about everything below the revenue line, Hency says.
“Every single brand now has to manage revenue all the way down to profits, because those profits are the only way they can fund their business,” he says. “The lenders have gone out of business. The VCs aren’t backing brands as much as they were before. If you look up how much VC investments into consumer deals have gone down since before that period, some numbers show over 90% reduction.”
Good Day has raised $7 million in seed funding from current investors like Ridge Ventures, FirstMark Capital, and Flex Capital, the company exclusively told Fortune. New investors include Long Journey Ventures, Adverb Ventures, and Seguin Ventures. This brings the Good Day’s total capital raised to $13.5 million and current customers include Hill House Home, The Normal Brand, Margaux NY, and Kenny Flowers.
Amish Jani, cofounder and partner at FirstMark, described Good Day as “AI-native, ERP-lite”—an enterprise resource planning system that stands apart from traditional options. He sees an opportunity for startups to capitalize on the AI boom as retailers redesign their systems of record for this new era.
“If agentic solutions are driving real utility and replacing labor costs directly, I expect e-commerce brands to be amongst the first adopters of these tools,” Jani said via email. “GoodDay is a good example of this in the ERP space, but you can also see this emerging very quickly in every major vertical SaaS category both in consumer and beyond.”
While Hency’s latest startup may seem more staid than the loud Chubbies shorts he once flogged, the entrepreneur has not completely left the attitude behind. An important part of Good Day’s brand marketing is taunting established ERP competitors like Netsuite.
“Do you think NetSuite, created 20 years ago by a bunch of suits, is helping anybody during Black Friday, Cyber Monday?,” said Hency.
Hency’s rhetoric isn’t an accident, it’s strategy. In the ERP jungle, he’s aware he’s new—but he thinks he can get customers to switch from established competitor NetSuite. There’s some evidence this could perhaps happen. Take Jimmy Sansone, co-owner of The Normal Brand and Good Day customer, who said via email: “From an operational perspective, we did not have accurate visibility into our inventory balances, and our ops teams had to rely on offline spreadsheets and manual tools to move, fulfill, buy and receive inventory.”
Hency’s directness is part of his philosophy about business.
“I think it’s so important when you’re building a brand to be different,” he said. “It’s way more important than it is to be cool.”
