Elevating Your Brand Through Social Purpose | Chad Dime | DIFF Charitable Eyewear

Chad Dime, Co-Founder of DIFF Charitable Eyewear, was raised in Los Angeles California. He was born into the eyewear industry thanks to his father who owned and operated an eyewear business for over 40 years. His dad passed down the knowledge of product design, import, manufacturing and wholesale to him throughout his entire life. 

On the manufacturing side, he was traveling to China by the time he was 15 years old to learn the ins and outs of what it takes to work with partners overseas. In wholesale he was attending major markets as a teenager to learn the ins and outs of what it takes to sell to major retailers both nationally and internationally. 

He was fortunate enough to know at that very young that he would be following in his family's footsteps. While attending college at San Diego State University he was the President of the nationally ranked SDSU Surf Team. His role there allowed him to work with many notable brands like Red Bull, Rip Curl and TOMS as he obtained sponsorship from each of these businesses. 

After years of building campus rep programs with these brands he learned the importance of both social media marketing along with social enterprise. The partnership with TOMS shoes was his motivation to build a business that gave back, and it became his dream to start a sunglasses brand that could help change the world. After graduating from SDSU he met his business partners. 

Together they began selling sunglasses at electronic music festivals across the country. It was here that they realized there was a massive void in the eyewear industry that they knew they could fill. Eager to disrupt the monopolized eyewear industry they founded DIFF with a mission to create affordable designer eyewear that gives back. 

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:00] Intro
• [00:50] Blending value and mission to drive impact
• [04:00] Partnering purpose with product
• [06:09] Leveraging past experiences for team balance
• [08:56] Nurturing partnerships for smarter growth
• [11:44] Stay updated with new episodes
• [11:55] Embedding responsibility into brand DNA
• [14:11] Sponsors
• [19:43] Influencer partnerships for early marketing strategy
• [22:54] Prioritizing finance to avoid early pitfalls
• [24:57] Understanding finances for loss prevention
• [26:06] Highlighting first products for brick and mortar
• [28:42] Following your why to create impact

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube www.youtube.com/c/HonestEcommerce?sub_confirmation=1
• Charitable designer sunglasses that give back www.diffeyewear.com/ 
• Follow Chad Dime www.linkedin.com/in/chad-dime-59550258 
• Schedule an intro call with one of our experts electriceye.io/connect
• Reach your best audience at the lowest cost! discover.taboola.com/honest/ 
• Easy, affordable coverage that grows with your business www.nextinsurance.com/honest/  
• Turn your domestic business into an international business www.freightright.com/honest 

If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

Transcript

Chad Dime

If you really want to make it happen and you're passionate about it, shut down the distraction,  go after it, but make it the focal point of everything you're doing. It makes your life easier because if you're trying to run a business and you're trying to also have that balance, right? The work life balance that everybody struggles to find as an entrepreneur, having good business partners allows you to do that.

Chase Clymer

Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today. 

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm bringing to the show Chad Dime, the co-founder and chairman of the board at Diff Charitable Eyewear where they create designer eyewear for a fair price, all while giving back. Chad, welcome to the show. 

Chad Dime

What's up, Chase? How's it going?

Chase Clymer

It's going great. I'm excited to chat with you. We're finally making this happen. You guys are doing so much cool stuff now, but I definitely want to go back to the beginning. So where did this idea come from? I'm guessing a little bit of family history. Maybe that was the impetus.

Chad Dime

Diff Charitable Eyewear was founded 10 years ago.  And when we founded the company, the whole idea was to create a fair market value for designer eyewear. And we wanted to give back.

So at the time when we were founded back in November 2014, it was really when we launched, there was not a lot going on in the price point range between let's call it a gas station,  

So we wanted to take the same quality, the same materials and create a pair of sunglasses that were gonna be equal to what you see in a department store for $200 and up and give it to people for under $100.

So the whole point was to really disrupt that whole giant, really what is almost like a monopoly in the eyewear industry with quality eyewear that was designer and affordable. And then tie in the give back. So what started with just reading glasses, yeah, we gave 5 million gifts of sight to date. What started with reading glasses transitioned into surgeries and medicines and different treatments and more. 

And then it became most recently, a whole program where we actually in Southern California have our own branded eyewear clinic. It's like a mobile eyewear clinic that has an optometrist inside and all the equipment that it needs. And it goes to schools and underserved communities where the student body is 50 % or above on a free and reduced lunch program. 

And we actually show up at the school. We screen every student at the school as long as mom and dad will give us a waiver. And if that student has a prescription or needs glasses, we will give them that prescription free of charge. That partnership today is done with Vision to Learn. They're an organization that was founded in 2012 and we're super proud about what we're doing there. 

So yeah, and going back to your question about day one and kind of the founder story, Diff Eyewear was founded in the music festival industry. Of all places, we sort of started selling a no-name kind of unbranded eyewear. We had psychedelic eyewear, this is where I actually met my business partners. 

We had psychedelic eyewear where you put it on and the glasses would almost like take like a light point, know, like you see the lights behind me and where I was at a concert and it would do like prismatic, it almost like diffract the light and would make like prisms and things like that. 

And we sold other kinds of fun things. But that was where we met hundreds of thousands of people every summer where they were telling us, we were seeing that they weren't brand loyal to all these giant brands that we grew up with. And they're just looking for something affordable that would stand the test of time, and have quality. And of course, I again, I loved the charity piece. 

So what started in the music festival industry, then transpired into a transition and went on to become an Ecommerce brand. And we thought that was going to be just it for us. We never thought we were going to need wholesale and other omnichannel. But we slowly added in the different omnichannel aspects of things, whether it's Amazon and wholesale distribution and Nordstrom and Dillard's and boutiques around the country and things like that. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Now with  the first initial products, were they just... Was it just sunglasses and then you were giving back reading glasses? Or was it all reading glasses as well?

Chad Dime

No. So the initial give back started as reading glasses. So when I was in college, I was actually an ambassador for Tom shoes. I ran the surf team in college, really proud of that. And then we had this little sponsorship from Tom's where we were getting gear from them. But what stuck with me wasn't always so much the product as much as it was their program, their giving back. 

So it was a one for one model. Someone would buy a pair of shoes, they'd give a pair of shoes. Well, I thought that was interesting and could be done with eyewear. It started with one individual that I still talk to to this day, her name is Sherry Grigsby. And she had a charity called Eyes on Africa. She was a retired teacher. 

She would go and buy reading glasses and she would take them into 17 different countries around Africa. And I had contact with her from what I was doing previously before diff. And I told her, “Hey, I love what you're doing. I want to give reading glasses for every pair of sunglasses that someone purchases from Diff and you're going to be our partner.” 

We did that with her for a few years until we began to really scale. And so to answer your question, it was definitely just reading glasses in the beginning. A big reason why is because reading glasses are actually quite affordable. Not a lot of people know that, but it doesn't cost a ton of money to make readers. And they're actually, most, about 70 % of people that once they reach the age of 40 or above will need some sort of vision correction. 

A lot of times it can be fixed with just a generic reader. But the issue there was you don't get to help people of all ages. And as someone who's a new sort of a father, I think it's important to help children and adults alike. So that's why we sort of transitioned the charity over time from just being reading glasses to doing surgeries and medicine. 

And now we've got our own, that branded van that I was telling you about, it's a mobile, basically a mobile eye care clinic that we're able to go to schools and really help children where. I think that's where it all starts. Being able to get someone a resource that they need, like vision care at a young age so that they can learn and grow and become part of society and have all the chances they need to be successful. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. It's a beautiful thing. At the start of  the business, you were cutting your teeth in these music festivals. Did anyone on the team have any sort of... At that point in time, have any sort of experience building a business or were you guys just figuring it out and learning as you were going? 

Chad Dime

Yeah. My team, my two business partners and I definitely think we were a little bit of a tripod in a sense that we all had different experiences come in from different places, but together we rounded out what became an incredible team. Tiny bit of background on myself, my dad imported eyewear for like 50, 50 years. 

So he was one to teach me about when I was working with him, it was going to trade shows and selling. It was working with factories overseas and learning how to make eyewear and create and design and really work with partners overseas, which is not easy.

And he didn't really build brands, but he had lines of eyewear that we sold into different parts of the market, whether it women's or sport or men's and things like that. My other business partner, the one I met first was actually the one that really, started doing the glasses at music festivals, things. 

Things like that. So when I found him, he had a company called Rave Shades and he was going to electronic dance music festivals and selling psychedelic eyewear. And I was actually soliciting him to try to get him to buy glasses from the company I was working at, which is my dad's company. 

And he flipped it on me. He's like, “Hey, I need a partner like you that knows how to import and distribute and all this stuff that you're already doing. I think you'd have fun doing what I'm doing. How do you feel about partnering up?” And I took the bait and it was the best thing I ever did.  

And then my other business partner, Chad, so that was Zach, my other business partner, Chad, was actually doing the same thing  as what Zach was doing at music festivals, but on the other side of the country. Zach was from the East Coast. Chad was doing the Midwest and over to the West Coast. And they were competitors in that industry. 

But what Chad had that was unique that Zach and I both didn't really have under our belt yet was he was really good on the digital side. So he was building websites at the time and running e-commerce way before Zach and I had really figured that out and how to do it well. And he was good at ad buying and placing ads and things like that. So together, he had me with a wholesale background with production and manufacturing. 

Zach Moore, kind of this wild entrepreneur, very visionary, and what became our big brand marketing guy. He was able to get the glasses on celebrities and all these other things that kind of drove the brand in the beginning. And then Chad, on the digital side, who could take that kind of qualified pool of traffic that was coming in from what Zach was doing, getting the glasses through social media marketing and influencer marketing before it was ever called that. 

And he would take that and sort of apply it to the digital side, right? Bringing it in and advertising and CRM and retention and all that good stuff. So it was a tripod. 

Chase Clymer

Oh, no. That's amazing. And it also shows that you guys had unique skill sets that you were bringing to the table. There's probably some listeners out there that are in the early stages looking for partners. Thinking back to the founding of this business, what advice would you give to folks out there that are exploring, partnering with folks at the early stages of their business? 

Chad Dime

Yeah. Partnerships to me are, I can't do what we do without partners. So to me, having good business partners was everything. It started with my dad, right? He was a great mentor. He taught me everything he could about the eyewear industry that he knew. But I was looking at sort of the advent of what was going on with e-commerce and digital, but also really creating a brand that would stand the test of time. 

But then became my business partners that I have to this day. And what I believe is really powerful about business partnerships is that, if you're lucky enough to have good partners, it does sort of what I mentioned that we did, right? There are strengths that each of you are going to have. And as long as you can sort of stay in your lane and really feed off of each other, it creates a much stronger team. 

You're able to accomplish things much stronger, much better much easier I think. Together as a team if you all sort of have your own strengths and you play those strengths and you respect each other enough to say, “Yeah, you're really good at this. Let me let you run this and you do this and I'll do this. 

And we've kind of stayed in our lanes. But what I also find is that it's good to sort of have, in my case, I had someone that was very visionary who wanted to go from zero to a billion as fast as possible. And me more on the conservative side who was saying, Hey, let's grow slow and focus on excellence. then sort of another business partner that sits in the middle. So you kind of come together and are able to decide like, what's the right way to grow? And how do we get there together?

But without all of us, I don't think Diff would have ever become what it became. It was sort of like lighting in a bottle. And the last thing I'd say to anybody, and advice I would give you is really,  if you can trust each other, it makes your life easier. Because if you're trying to run a business, and you're trying to also have that balance, right? The work-life balance that everybody struggles to find as an entrepreneur, having good business partners allows you to do that.

Because if I need to take time or if I need to make sure that I'm doing something and need to step away, I have that support. And I was always doing that for them and they're always doing that for me. And I think that's unique. And you don't get that from not always just the team you can build beneath. It comes with great partnerships and people that have sweat in the game. 

Chase Clymer

That's absolutely true. Having a partner you can trust just does make things a lot easier. I'm lucky myself to have a fantastic business partner. Shout out, Sean.

Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week. So don't miss out. Now back to the interview. 

With launching  the business with these three partners back there, was it always called Diff Charitable Eyewear?  How did you guys land on that brand? And then what was the first year or two like?

Chad Dime

Yeah, Diff was, so we knew we wanted to be different, right? So we were going to have this sort of disruptive approach to  the e-commerce space, but also just to the eyewear industry. So Diff came from, we were selling diffraction glasses at music festivals. Diffraction glasses were the ones that I was telling you about where they sort of diffract the light. 

And we were driving back from a music festival in Colorado and my business partner, Chad Jernigan said, “What if we called it diff?” And I remember being like, that's a terrible name. We should not do that. But it checked some boxes. We wanted it to be four letters, one syllable, something that you could brand well, fit on the temple of a pair of sunglasses. And so it checked some of these boxes. 

And once I started realizing the sort of the play on the words there, what it meant to be different, and we truly wanted to be different. We wanted to do things. We wanted to bring a new life into the eyewear industry. [It] started to kind of sink in, and stuck with me a little bit. And I'm glad we kept it because Diff is to me a great name now. 

And we kept charitable eyewear in the logo itself and in sort of the brand name itself, because I never wanted that piece of it to get lost. So to me, it was important to kind of have that there because although it doesn't go on all of our branding, it does go kind of on the inside of the temple, that whole logo piece, Diff charitable eyewear. 

But to me, as brands grow, I know that sometimes, a lot of times brands lose their core values and their core DNA. And to me, leaving the words charitable and eyewear, but really that word charitable in the logo itself, in the brand name itself, was going to be a constant reminder to myself, my partners, and anybody that came onto this team. That it's not just something we do, but it's a responsibility that we have to run this business, grow this business. 

And as we grow it means that we can affect more lives positively. And it's actually been really rewarding. And I think it was one of the best moves we ever made. 

That's fantastic. 

Chase Clymer

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Chase Clymer

And yeah, so those first couple of years, obviously, I've actually met the other Chad on your team. Now with him helping  launch stuff digitally. What were the first couple years like? Were you guys still doing the music festivals to get your customers? How did you get the word out there about Diff?

Chad Dime

Yeah, I was going to mention this too. And going back. So the first couple years, if I had to sum it up and give you one word  on what it was, it was fun. And  I don't mean to say that it's not fun anymore. It's just changed a lot. And it's true. You become, you're bigger. There's more people here working with you. You truly are responsible for your team and trying to make sure that you're  doing right by them. 

And I'm not saying it's not fun again, it's just it takes, it becomes a lot more serious. In the first early part of  all this, it was three guys sitting around a table in an office or really a warehouse in Gardena, just trying to figure out how we were gonna get the glasses on as many faces as possible.  

And yeah, we stuck to the music festival thing for probably about a year. But the guys and I, my partners and I had started other  brands and other companies that were doing different things. We had a customizable eyewear piece where we were taking non-branded glasses and branding them for large festivals and large brands, and things like that. We still had the music festival, other brands that we had and  that my partners had started previous to Diff going in. The thing we had to do was shut it all down.

Because we knew the focus had to go to Diff. Like I said, it started with a product. We designed our first couple of SKUs, we brought them in, we bootstrapped this thing. So that was different. We never took any capital. And then it became Zach's job to really figure out, okay, how are we gonna get these glasses on as many people as possible? And that started with, I mentioned influencer marketing before they were called influencers. 

So we were just pinging people on Instagram that had their email and their bio saying, “We'd like to trade you a pair of glasses for a post. And this was pre-algorithm, so everything was chronological. We were getting some views. And one day a pair landed in the hands of a teen mom, one of the gals from the MTV show, Teen Mom. 

And it was our first $10,000 day. And we were like, oh, where did this come from? And we started kind of tracking back and seeing it came from this one woman. And that was when it really opened the floodgates. It's like, okay, how do we get from this kind of reality TV star to this reality TV star to the Kardashians and the Jenners and A-list celebrities and things like that, which Zach did.

I give him a lot of credit. He did it very successfully. He was able to get it in the hands of those people. We were working with the Jenner family and the Kardashians and that kind of  skyrocketed the brand. That's when Nordstrom started calling Dillard's and all the department stores. Then Chad Jernigan was doing a great job of handling what we were doing with the e-commerce piece. 

And of course I'm out there servicing the big department stores and going to trade shows and things like that. And that was all within the first, basically, the first two years. 2015 was our first real year of business then 2016. And all of that occurred within that timeframe. 

Chase Clymer 

That's amazing. Looking back now, is there... Obviously, we're talking about all the awesome things that Diff has been doing. Any mistakes along the way? Learning moments that you might want to point out for the audience? Like, hey, we did this so you don't have to. 

Chad Dime

Yeah. [I] mean, the one of the biggest mistakes and struggles I think is not looking at... We did things very ragtag and we didn't really have a  financial mindset when it first started. We were just thinking in terms of product marketing, how to keep things going that way. And I always tell people if I could go back to the very beginning, day one, what is one thing or one person you would bring into the fold right away, it would be someone that really understands the finance side of things. 

And understanding how to build a budget, how to really keep your eye on inventory. That's another thing that kills people in the early days very quickly. We've had a lot of issues with inventory way back when our inventory is really under control now, which is very grateful for that. And we've got a great CEO and some other great team members here that have helped us really make that happen. 

That and just a classic answer to that question also is the ops, right? I always had the privilege of running our warehouse for a couple of years. We had 25 people that were reporting to me at the warehouse level, trying to ship thousands of glasses every day.  And that becomes very cumbersome. So make sure that you've got your ops in place. 

Because my way of explaining it was that you can sell a million pairs of glasses today, but if they can't leave the warehouse, you're nothing, right? So just making sure that your ops and your finance and things like that are in place. But the engine, the marketing and the product, that to me was what was coming to us quite easily in the beginning. 

It was the other more fundamental thing you probably hear from a lot of founders that I will say again, if they've heard it 100 times, those are things you got to measure. Those are things you have to get under control and do it early because they can be killers if they get out of control. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Yeah. Knowing your numbers is absolutely critical. Especially on the marketing side of things. And know Chad, on the other side of the table, doing that stuff. Being able to scale with ads and all that jazz. If you don't know your contribution margins or what you can actually pay to acquire a customer... 

Chad Dime

That's right. 

Chase Clymer

Things can get scary very fast. 

Chad Dime

Yeah. And when you're making money, typically that sort of money and revenue can hide your sins for only so long, right? Until it catches up and you're like, wait, we're bleeding out. But you don't know where you're bleeding out because you don't have books and you're not really tracking all that. 

But we're very sophisticated now and we do that very well. But in the early days, we didn't. And if I could go back again, that would, me, would be someone who would make a great business partner.

Someone who has the chops and is analytical and does understand numbers and does understand operations and building a budget. Something I didn't learn until the fourth or fifth year in business. [I] was like, we don't need a budget. Yeah, you do. You want to know where you're tracking and what you're spending to get to your goals. 

Chase Clymer

Looking the other way,  what are you seeing going on with Diff in the next 5 to 10 years? 

Chad Dime

Yeah, critical things are coming for Diff, right? So we're 10 years old. And that to me was a huge milestone. And we focused on excellence in North America. So making sure that we could scale our D2C in North America, making sure that we could make our department store and our partners in the department store realm and the boutique realm really proud. 

But we've historically been a Sun brand. Diff Eyewear was founded mostly as a Sun brand. And we didn't really start introducing optical until a few years ago. What started as a small, very small, like 2% of the business has quickly grown to almost 15 % of the overall business right now.  

So to me, optical is exciting because when you look at the billion dollar behemoths out there, a lot of them are flipped, right?  Look at Warby Parker, for example, massive, massive, massive organization. And they're mostly optical. So we're trying to sort of, we don't want to totally flip it. I'm proud that we've done so well with sunglasses and we've been able to penetrate that market.

But to me, you go from just being sun and optical, you take it away from just being an accessory, you take it to being a medical device, something that people need and insurance covers and things like that. That's a huge growth avenue for us, not just through our own D2C, but another very exciting thing that's going to come down the pipeline is we're going to start opening our own stores. 

So we've actually recently just signed a lease and we're going to be open and the design for the store we've been working on for almost the last entire year. And the store design is very unique.  It brings a storytelling element into what I think will happen…  if you look at Iwear stores today, and I'm not bashing them, I love going into a Sunglass Hut or going into an Oakley store and seeing what's there. 

But what Diff does, we have 24 licenses that we're running next year, for example. That's really exciting. That's another really exciting thing. But being able to tell that story in store in a really creative way to me, is going to be what's going to set us apart. So all of those things are starting to come together. 

So the optical will be available in store. We're going to keep growing that online. We're also going to be doing a big push into wholesale with optical. And then you've got the licenses I mentioned, and you've got the store that we're opening. So those are just some things that are on the top of my head that I think are going to drive serious growth. 

But it's also something that is going to make our consumers very excited and some of the consumers we haven't met or touched yet out there in the world come into the Diff atmosphere. 

Chase Clymer

Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience? 

Chad Dime

I mean, no, we're touching on some very exciting things. I mean, to me, going back to some of the things that I think... You mentioned if someone's coming out and wanting to do something for the first time or just starting out, it's like... I always tell people that don't let something like being in a competitive industry be the thing that stops you.  

Or because a lot of people would have told me and did tell me in the beginning that Iware is really competitive. But I think following in, following your dream there and kind of pushing into something that you really believe in and that has a why. Something that will have that reason for us, it was the charity for someone else might be something different. 

But putting those things at the forefront, something you believe in that's going to make something special. Actually going after it. A big thing for me too was shutting down all the distractions, focusing on never letting what you really want to do and what you're passionate about be like a side gig. 

My big advice and something I always tell to anybody that's listening. It's like, if you really want to make it happen and you're passionate about it, shut down the distraction, go after it, but make it the focal point of everything you're doing.

And you'll hear time and time again, right? If someone really puts in the time, really puts in the effort,  win or fail, you always come out on top in a way. Lesson learned or something takes off.  So yeah, that's something I'm always telling people. It's like, go hard  and make sure you've got that thing that will differentiate you and  give people that why. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely, Chad. Now, obviously, go to diffeyewear.com if you want to support these amazing products. Pick up some amazing products, also help them give back. Chad, thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Chad Dime

Yeah. Thank you very much, Chase.