Davis Smith founded Cotopaxi in 2014 because he loves the outdoors and wanted to build a brand that fuels both adventure and global change.
Davis Smith is an outdoor adventurer and mission-driven entrepreneur. That’s why he founded Cotopaxi in 2014. Best known for their bright colors, Cotopaxi doesn’t just make good gear, they make gear for good. The brand is committed to minimizing their impact on the planet, and maximizing the benefit for the people who live here. Davis spent a lot of his childhood in Latin America, and his parents were committed to serving others and getting outside, values that he still carries with him today. For him, Cotopaxi is a perfect way to honor his upbringing and the places that mean a lot to him.
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Shelby Stanger: I'm definitely one to geek out on good gear. I used to work for a shoe company and I've always loved interviewing people who make outdoor clothing and equipment. Recently, I walked into an REI store and there were these jackets and vests that just jumped out at me. They were brightly colored and they looked cool, festive, and fun. The clothes were made by Cotopaxi, an outdoor apparel company that started in 2014.
Davis Smith: The people that actually make our gear, they're incredible artisans, incredible craftsmen. These are the unsung heroes of the outdoor industry, but we thought, what if we gave them the choice to go design the bags? And so we gave them opportunity to do that. And we said, "We want to use all this remnant, and we want to challenge you with one thing to make no bag alike. Every single bag should be one of a kind."
Shelby Stanger: That's Davis Smith, the founder and CEO of Cotopaxi. He's an outdoor adventure and a mission driven entrepreneur. His story's pretty remarkable. Davis came up with a wild idea to start this apparel company while he was sleeping. And somehow, only a few years later, Cotopaxi has made a name for itself in an industry that is saturated with iconic outdoor brands. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. To fully appreciate Davis' story, it's important to know a little bit about his background and what inspires him. Davis spent a lot of his childhood in Latin America, and his parents were committed to serving others and to getting outside. He learned from their example, and these values eventually helped shape his vision for Cotopaxi. Davis Smith, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Davis Smith: Thanks, Shelby. I'm really excited about this.
Shelby Stanger: So I wanted to start with just growing up in Latin America. I mean, I spent a lot of time in Latin America in my last job. How did you know you were living so differently than other kids and you had a little bit more privilege? Because that's hard to recognize when you're young.
Davis Smith: It is. It's interesting. So my mom is Canadian and my father is American, but we moved to Latin America when I was four years old. So maybe in the first few weeks that we lived there, seeing a poverty, it was completely shocking to me. Even as a four year old, I knew something was wrong. And I didn't come from a family that had much wealth. When we moved to the United States, when I was a teenager, we were on like subsidized lunch program, like I did not come from money, but when we lived in Latin America, it felt like we had so much. And I remember seeing children my age, three, four years old completely naked on the sides of the street.
Davis Smith: So from a very early age, I really understood how lucky I was, and my parents did a good job of helping us understand we weren't better, we weren't smarter, we weren't harder working, we weren't more deserving, or more ambitious in some way. They all had dreams and hopes too. They were born in a place that would provide them very little opportunity, and we had just by chance happened to have been born in a place that would give us opportunity throughout our life. And so, yeah, it was a big part of my childhood.
Shelby Stanger: What country did you move to?
Davis Smith: We moved to the Dominican Republic. So we lived in San Domingo in the capital. Lived there for a few years, then we moved to Puerto Rico where we lived for five years, and then we moved to South America, and then I spent a lot of years in South America.
Shelby Stanger: That's so interesting. What brought your parents there?
Davis Smith: It's interesting, my dad was actually, he was a Mormon missionary when he was 19, 20, and 21 years old in Argentina.
Shelby Stanger: Wow.
Davis Smith: And so he learned Spanish. And so when he came back and finished university and started working, he was working as a builder and as an engineer and he heard of an opportunity to go work in Latin America and use a Spanish. And he thought it'd be a really unique opportunity for his kids and for his family. And so that's why we moved there.
Shelby Stanger: It's really interesting. I want to talk to you about that background, because having grown up with missionary parents, and you have a mission based company, it's just kind of been in your blood since you're a kid. Also, I think what's really interesting is I think I heard you say this on another podcast, but if you are a missionary, you probably got a lot of nos and a lot of doors close in your face.
Davis Smith: Yes, I was a missionary as well. I moved to Bolivia when I was 19 and lived there till I was 21. I was a full-time missionary. I spent, it's pretty strict, 6:30 AM every morning and I'd go to bed at 10:30 every night, and there's no days off, no vacation. For two years, you work every single day helping others. And it is in some ways a beautiful experience, but in some ways painful. It's something that you feel very deeply, you're very passionate about, and you get rejected a lot. And you do learn to deal with rejection, you do learn how to listen and to adapt a message. I think it was a great training ground for me in being an entrepreneur, dealing with rejection and also learning how to pitch something, how to sell a vision and an idea that you really believe in that a lot of others maybe not see that same vision. And so there's definitely some parallels there that are fun.
Shelby Stanger: Seems like you have a pretty good capacity for empathy as well.
Davis Smith: I grew up in a home that we loved the outdoors. My dad was an absolute adventurer. I mean, it seemed like every weekend there was some adventure planned, whether it was climbing summiting some big volcano in the Andes, or we made our own raft and floated the Amazon and fish for piranha, or we'd go survive on uninhabited islands and make our own spears and spear fish.
Shelby Stanger: Wait, go back. You fished for piranha?
Davis Smith: Yeah. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger: Isn't that the deadliest thing you could ever do?
Davis Smith: It's interesting, you can swim with piranha. They don't really mess with people, but the fishing is interesting because for anyone that's like a fly fisherman, you understand like it's about stealth and quiet, you're kind of quiet and you kind of stock the fish and you don't want them to necessarily see you. With piranha, it's very different. You have a stick with like a fishing line on it and then you have a hook where you just put some meat or something, and then you take the stick and you just violently splash the water as much as you can. And within seconds, there's hundreds of piranha jumping all over the hook and the meat. But when you're swimming in the water, maybe if you were bleeding, it would be different, but yeah, there's no issues.
Davis Smith: Yeah. I mean, this was my childhood though. It was like these crazy. And I thought this was normal. I thought this was normal behavior. But I developed a deep love for the outdoors and for adventure, but I think more importantly, I developed a deep empathy for others. And while my dad was planning adventures, my mom was planning service. And we spent a lot of time visiting orphanages, giving back to our community. And again, we didn't have much, but it felt like we had so so much.
Shelby Stanger: Since he was a kid, Davis has been an adventure. He and his dad and brothers are intense backpackers. They go on trips where they intentionally don't bring anything to eat, where they have to fish and gather their food in the wild. Davis also loves getting out on the water. Just a couple years ago, he actually kayaked from Cuba to Florida. He knows firsthand that serious adventure requires great gear, but when Davis started Cotopaxi, he didn't just want to make more stuff. He wanted to make a difference.
Shelby Stanger: You always had this background in a little bit in the outdoors and in missions, like doing missions and being of service to other people, how did you know you wanted to start a mission-based company?
Davis Smith: Yeah. So when I was in college, I discovered a mentor, a man who I'd read about and his name's Steve Gibson. And he started a nonprofit in the Philippines that was pulling people out of poverty, through entrepreneurship. And he'd been a successful entrepreneur. He was about 60 years old, so kind of a retirement age, but had dedicated his life to fighting poverty in the Philippines. I tried to convince him to let me go work for him, and I wanted to expand his program from the Philippines to Latin America, where I'd grown up. And I gave him the whole spiel in his office, and the whole time, he's smiling and nodding. And in my head, I'm thinking, I'm nailing this, like I'm going to get to go work for my idol. And at the end, he told me, he's like, "Davis, I love and can feel the passion that you of around helping people, and I love that, but what I see in you is you shouldn't go work in a nonprofit. You should go find a way. You should be an entrepreneur. And if you can do that successfully, you'll find a way to make a difference in the world in a much bigger way than if you worked for me."
Davis Smith: And it was really great advice, and I'd never honestly considered myself an entrepreneur. I hadn't really thought of that as a career option, but it triggered something inside of me. And I started exploring a few different ideas. Two of the ideas had a social mission attached to a business. I tried both of them. Neither of them really worked. They didn't go anywhere. But then I had another idea that did work. It was a small business, a very random business called PoolTables.com. And it's exactly what you think it is. But I started building that with my cousin, and we did $1 million in sales our first year. So it took off. And the internet was pretty new at this point. This is in 2004, and we just had a really wonderful experience together, but there was no social mission attached to the business, and all of our passwords were connected to social impact. That was like all I could think about. It was on my mind constantly, but I didn't know how to blend the two things, business and impact.
Davis Smith: Fast forward a few years, we sold the business, I went to business school. And when I was in business school, I was at the Wharton School. I had a few classmates that were very entrepreneurial as well. The founders of Warby Parker, the founder of Allbirds, there were classmates of mine, and they were building impact into their business. And it was amazing to me how they were tying these two things together. And it really inspired me. And so when I graduated from business school, I moved down to Brazil and I built a business there. And again, I hadn't figured out exactly how to have impact, but I was starting to watch TOMS shoes and Warby Parker and these other brands that were building impact into their businesses.
Davis Smith: And when I was living in Brazil, it clicked one night as I was laying in bed. I had made a new year's resolution that I wanted to find a way to change somebody's life. And it was May, I was feeling a little discouraged that honestly, I spent 10 years of my life building businesses and I hadn't figured it out. It was discouraging. I was frustrated that I wasn't doing something more meaningful. And as I laid in bed, I started having some ideas come to my mind around how I might be able to blend this passion for entrepreneurship with this passion for doing good. And over 36 hours, I got out of bed that night, I sat out on the couch all night, the next following day, and the next night. And over that 36 hours, the idea for Cotopaxi kind of came together.
Shelby Stanger: So just sort of downloaded, like I'm really curious how wild ideas come to be. And for some people, they see signs, and for other people, it's like a dream, and for others, it's like a slow build a and then a big waterfall. Take me through this process a little bit.
Davis Smith: Yeah. It's an interesting one because I'd had 10 years of experiences that I was leveraging without knowing, but I was leveraging those 10 years of experiences to go build something really interesting, but it all came together over a very short period. I was like half awake, half asleep. When that first idea started coming to my head, it was almost like part dream, but part awake. And that's when I rolled over and I started typing some of these ideas in my phone's, because I didn't want to forget them. And I thought I'd go back to sleep and come back to it in the morning, but the ideas just kept coming, and my mind was racing in a way that I couldn't stop.
Davis Smith: And so again, it was 10 years of buildup or maybe a whole lifetime. I think I was 34 at the time, maybe. So 34 years of experiences that all kind of culminated into this one moment. And I'm a religious person. I do feel it was an inspired moment, a spiritual moment for me, where it was something that I longed for and hoped for and prayed for, for much of my life. And to have it all come together the way it did, it really did feel inspired to me.
Shelby Stanger: So when it came to you, how clear was it? Was it coloring book outline or was it filled in with color?
Davis Smith: Oh, no. I mean, I took a very detailed journal those first few days, and I had incredible detail. And I read it actually often. I go back to those writings, and it's amazing how specific it was and how in line what we're doing today is with that original vision. I mean, I knew the name of the brand, I knew I wanted a llama in the logo. I had our slogan Gear for Good, was identified in those 36 hours. And then an outdoor brand, I identified that I wanted to focus on really packs and apparel was like the two big categories that I felt would work well. As an e-commerce business, fit is a big challenge. So there are certain products that seem to fit well packs, you don't have to return because they didn't fit you. Like they generally are made to fit any type of body. And then outerwear generally people know their size, small, medium, large, extra large, and it's just a lot easier to fit.
Davis Smith: And so as any e-commerce, a digitally first brand, I felt those were products that would work. And so there was obviously a lot of detail that needed to get filled in over the years, but it's amazing how in a very short period of time, I really understood what this business needed to do.
Shelby Stanger: I love learning how people find their wild ideas. Sometimes they come full throttle in the middle of the night. That's why I always keep a pen and paper at my bedside table. When we come back, Davis tells us how he turned his wild idea into a reality. He also talks about Cotopaxi's impactful social programs in the amazing marketing campaign that he used to launch the brand, spoiler, alert and involved real live llamas.
Shelby Stanger: Davis saw financials success with his first attempts at entrepreneurship, but something was always missing. While he had a talent for business, he was also committed to making a positive change in the world. So when Davis dreamed of Cotopaxi, it felt like a way to honor both. And it ended up being a way to honor the places that meant a lot to him too.
Shelby Stanger: Why the name Cotopaxi? It's a place. Does it have resonance to you?
Davis Smith: Yeah, it's a very special name to me. I lived in Ecuador as a kid and as a teenager, and my dad and I used to go backpacking at the base of this volcano called Cotopaxi. And it's one of the few equatorial glaciers. It's one of the highest volcanoes, active volcanoes in the world. It's around 19,400 feet. And I spent a lot of time there. It was the first place I saw llamas in the wild. I remember we were camping at the base of Cotopaxi and we woke up in the morning and there was some llamas that were kind of running through our camp. And it was just a bizarre experience to see these animals, these majestic, beautiful animals that are very different than anything you normally see.
Davis Smith: So I've always just been kind of fascinated with that animal. They live up in such high altitudes. They always are in herds, they're never on their own. They love being in groups. And I just identified with that. I just felt like that is symbolic, and I think of this brand that I want to build, this brand that's about adventure and it's a little bit different and quirky, but it's about a herd, it's about sticking together to go make a difference in the world. So I really wanted that llama to be part of our brand identity.
Shelby Stanger: Okay. So this was all in your download. You knew that it was going to be called Cotopaxi, you knew there was going to be llamas, you knew it was going to be mission-based. So how do you take this wild idea that comes to you and actually turn it into a reality?
Davis Smith: Yeah. So this is where I didn't know exactly how to get started, right? So I'm running my other business in Brazil, and for a number of reasons, I'm at a point where I'm thinking I need a change. And in some ways, it was a dream come true. I was back in Latin America, living there with my wife and with our two girls. Our two girls are speaking Portuguese and going to an international school. And it was like they were living this childhood that I hoped they would live, because it was similar to what I had lived. And we had this jungle that surrounded a place where we lived, and every day they'd be out in the jungle playing and the trees. And it's like, yes, this is exactly what I dreamed for. And we were building this really interesting business. It was Brazil's startup of the year, and it grew from 4 employees to like 300 employees in like 18 months.
Davis Smith: So it was just this wild growth story. And at the same time, I knew I needed to leave. And I was very afraid to leave actually. And I was leaving behind everything I owned into that other business, and in some ways, it was my identity. This thought of leaving to go start something all over again, at first it was discouraging. It's like, I didn't want to have to start all over again. And starting a business is painful. There's so much risk involved. And I was worried about what if I didn't succeed? And this is going to be a hard business, and if I fail, what are people going to think of me? And all these, it may be irrational, but normal and very human fears that I had in starting something new. But I made the commitment and I went and told my board that I wanted to resign from my role as co-CEO, and my cousin was going to stay there and run the business.
Davis Smith: I moved back to the United States, and I went out to Silicon Valley and started pitching investors to see if they would back me. And I got a lot of rejection. I pitched over 100 different investors, angel investors, VCs, impact investors, and got rejected by many of them. But ultimately had a really fantastic investor, Kirsten Green, in San Francisco with Forerunner Ventures that backed us and led our first round. And so she believed in me and believed in this vision for the brand. And I started building a team, a really great early team that helped really kind of shape the brand. And then we launched in a very unique way, which I think helped in our local market, especially really helped put us on the map.
Shelby Stanger: What year exactly did you guys launch?
Davis Smith: We launched in April of 2014.
Shelby Stanger: So 2014, there's Patagonia, there's the North Face, there's Columbia. There's lots of companies that make backpacks and puffy jackets. And you guys come along and you're like, no, we're going to be different.
Davis Smith: Yeah. And this is where a lot of investors really had an issue with investing in us. And frankly, I don't blame them. It wasn't an obvious business opportunity. I mean, I had many investors that said, "We don't believe that there's an opportunity for you in this space, Patagonia already exists, and while your brand is different and you have a just slightly different vision in terms of impact." Like Patagonia, they're trying to save the home planet. It's all environmental. And I love that. I'm very passionate about the environment, but for us, it's about saving humanity. It's a focus on humanitarian work and on, I believe we can eradicate poverty. That's my life goal, is I want to be part of this movement to eradicate extreme poverty. So that was my mission, but yeah, there's a lot of brands and really great brands in this space. So how do we do something really different?
Shelby Stanger: Wait, that's a giant, giant goal. Like eradicate poverty. That's hard. It's daunting. It's beautiful. But how can you do it with puffy coats and backpacks?
Davis Smith: Yeah. I'll tell you how I'm thinking about it. So first of all, say like we are living in an amazing time. 200 years ago, in 1820, and keep in mind, humans have existed at this point for thousands and thousands, thousands of years, but in 1820, 94% of the planet still lived in extreme poverty. This is under $1 or 90 a day in today's dollars. So almost everyone on the planet is living in extreme poverty, including here in the United States. And when I was born in 1978, I'm 43, only 40% of the world was living in extreme poverty. And when I graduated from high school, it was 18%. In the last few years, it's dip below 10%. It's like 9%. 9% of the world lives in extreme poverty.
Davis Smith: I mean, what an amazing to live in where we only have this remaining 9% where we can go tackle together as a global community and say, this needs to get fixed. This is not right. It's not right that people among us are dying because they're drinking dirty water, that they don't have access to basic education or basic healthcare, that women are dying giving birth to children in places where they shouldn't have to be doing that. And so I'm really inspired by this idea of finding ways that we can all contribute to that. And I believe business has a huge role to play and a huge responsibility. And we need to change capitalism. Capitalism has been an amazing tool to pull people out of poverty, but it leaves people behind and it destroys the planet. And we have to think differently about business and what our purpose is and how we do it. And that's what I'm hoping that we can be a part of.
Shelby Stanger: Davis has some big ambitions with his company. From the start, he was determined to make his idea work. He knew that Cotopaxi's target consumers were going to be young people, people that really care where their products come from and how they're made. So to catch the attention of a younger generation, Davis and his team came up with a pretty wild launch campaign.
Shelby Stanger: Okay, so let's talk about the early marketing. There's a lot of companies trying to market to kids. So the first thing you do is buy llamas on Craigslist, which is mind blowing.
Davis Smith: Exactly. Yeah, so this was kind of a unique idea, but I think one thing that was really important, we weren't going to be targeting a very young demographic. At the time, it was millennials, now it's Gen Z. But I understood, these consumers, they don't need to be pitched to buy another product. They want to be part of a movement. They want to be part of something. They want to go have experiences. And so I thought, if we're going to go build a brand that's built around this idea of having purpose and mission, let's not just go try to sell young people. Let's involve them in this mission. And so came up with this idea of a scavenger hunt that we called the Questival, this 24 hour adventure race, where we gave people hundreds of challenges to choose from but they were around spending time in the outdoors. They might be build your own shelter and sleep in it, or camp. And depending on the difficult, you got different points.
Davis Smith: So some people are like, hey, I've never even been camping before. I'm not going to go build a shelter and sleep in it, but I might sleep in my tent in my backyard. And it's like, great. You get points for doing that, or giving service in the community. So all these challenges around serving and helping and cleaning up the community and volunteering. So the idea was, okay, we have this really fun thing, how are we going to get people to know about it? No one even knows we exist because we hadn't even turned on our website. So we went and bought llamas on online classified, and we started taking them around college campuses here in Utah, where we were based. And of course, people started gathering around these llamas and wondering why the llamas were on campus. And we never asked for permission, of course. We just showed up with the llamas. And I remember at BYU, and where I went to undergrad, I remember after a few hours, the campus police rolled up in the golf cart. And I was thinking, this is it, they're going to arrest the llamas.
Shelby Stanger: And did they want pictures?
Davis Smith: Yes, that's exactly it. The campus police officer walks out and he comes over and says, "Sir, can I take a selfie with your llama?" And it was like, are you kidding me? This is the craziest experience. But it was magical. That first Questival, we had several thousand people participate. We had 30,000 social media posts the day of our launch, those 24 hours.
Shelby Stanger: Do you still keep in touch with anybody who did those early races and won?
Davis Smith: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Actually a lot of people. Our community really rallied around this experience, and people started doing every year, but yeah, that first, there were a lot of those kids, some of them actually work for us now. But a lot of those young people that participated, they've stayed in touch over the years and some of them are working for other startups here in the area. But yeah, there's a few of them that I've actually stayed really close to.
Shelby Stanger: Cotopaxi's apparel is made with high quality materials, and it has a fun, funky aesthetic. They use leftover fabric and vibrant colors that mix and match to make some pretty wild combos. Behind the products themselves, you'll find a brand that really cares about the impact it's having. Many companies aim to do good, but it's often something extra, something nice to do after they've hit their revenue goals and quotas. Davis on the other hand has managed to make his personal values into central pillars of the business.
Shelby Stanger: So you're creating backpacks and coats and outerwear, and there already is Patagonia, but you're like, we're going to shift the way we do business and be in some ways shift how capitalism works by putting impact at the center of our business. How do you see this happening and how are you making this happening? And it's tricky because clothing as a whole industry isn't the cleanest most sustainable.
Davis Smith: Yeah, we thought about it very differently. In terms of how we make product, 94% of our product that we sold last year were made of remnant or recycled material or responsibly made material. These are leftover materials cuts and other fabrics that are used by other outdoor brands. All the outdoor brands that we've talked about or that you can think of in your head, they use the same factories as us. And there's so much waste that's created. And so we've found ways to go use those remnants to go make great product. But more than just using the remnants, we actually wanted to empower the people behind the product. These are the unsung heroes of the outdoor industry. The people that actually make our gear, they're incredible artisans, incredible craftsmen. And these sowers never get a choice in what to sew.
Davis Smith: They'll just sew the same thing over and over and over again for some outdoor brand, and we just felt there was a better way to do this. Again, being very people-centric and thinking about people and the impact that our brand has on people, we thought, what if we gave them the choice to go design the bags? And all of a sudden, it was like light in their eyes and passion because they were creating and you could see the personality of each sower in their bags. Some are choosing these darker colors, others choosing these really bright colors, and they're switching out the bobbin in the sewing machine to get just one little stitch, a different color than another one. And so it was a really powerful story. And of course, consumers love this idea of having a bag that's unique to them that no one else has, but has this really rich story behind it as well.
Shelby Stanger: This might be a little personal, Davis, but I'm just curious, are you also paying these sewers a little more than the other brands are?
Davis Smith: Yes. Yeah. So this is something we're really passionate about, is making sure that we're aligned with places where people are paid fairly. So a number of our factories are fair trade, meaning this is something we measure, we track and make sure that these sewers are paid better than normal. And actually at a fair trade factory, we actually pay 2% on top of the invoice price, and those dollars go into a pool of capital that the sewers, they have a committee that they get to choose where to use that money. And so one of factories, they have like computers where they bought with that money and kids come after school and they can learn computer skills. We have English classes that are taught. We have, at one of the factories, breakfast that's made every day from that money. So they can choose how they want to use those funds.
Davis Smith: But one thing that I think is really important is that we don't have a cookie-cutter answer for every factory. We go in and we ask them what they need, and we listen and we try to find out ways that we can have an impact. And so one of our factories, we have a community garden that we help fund, where they have about an acre of land, where they have fruits and vegetables that grow and they can take these back home.
Shelby Stanger: So what's Cotopaxi's big mission now? I mean, it's still the same company, but you've had couple years in business now, what do you most excited about? Where do you see the brand and kind of moving?
Davis Smith: Yeah. Yeah. So the brand has definitely grown and evolved in some ways, but the one thing that we'd say true to from the very beginning is our social mission of eradicating poverty. And last year, we helped 1.2 million people living in poverty through our business. And it's the thing I'm most proud of. We use our profits to go fund these amazing nonprofits that focus on poverty. We focus on healthcare, education, and livelihood training. Those are the three pillars that we believe are inextricably linked to poverty alleviation. And then we can go use our supply chain, and we employ refugees here in our local community in Utah. If you order something from us, you'll get a handwritten thank you card written by a refugee in their native language. They join a job club where we help them create a resume and build job skills and practice doing job interviews. And so we have all these ways of having impact.
Shelby Stanger: I'm inspired by Davis's multifaceted approach to eradicate poverty. The company provides fair wages to sewers, they use recycled materials, and they provide opportunities for refugees. In addition, all of Cotopaxi's venture capital investors have been women. This is a big deal because women make up less than 5% of venture capitalists. For Cotopaxi, these efforts are part of a larger mission to make the world a better, more equitable place. I love that Davis and his team are thoughtful about how to grow and sustain a mission-based business. So advice to other entrepreneurs, because I know there's a lot of people listening who want to start their own business, and starting a business is really terrifying. What's the best advice you give now to entrepreneurs?
Davis Smith: Yeah. So maybe a few things, and I'm still learning as well. I'm on this journey along with you and everyone else that started something, and I will say, it is so fulfilling and so satisfying to go create. One of my favorite quotes is by a man named Dieter Uchtdorf, and he says, "The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul." And I believe that's true. It's all embedded inside of our DNA to go create and to build. And I just love that thought. And for some people, it might be music or art, or for people like me, it might be building a brand or a business, but for those that are feeling this desire to go build something of their own and go create, there's a few things that I would think about. Number one, build mission and purpose into what you do. It makes it so much more fulfilling, even that much more fulfilling when you go build something that really truly matters.
Davis Smith: And I think, Shelby, it's interesting what you do, it's such an inspiring thing because you can go shape minds, you can tell stories that impact the world and how we think. And so you have this really loud megaphone that you can communicate messages that matter. And I'm sure you can identify with this idea of like when you have something that really has purpose, it just makes it so much better. And people want to be part of that. They want to work for that type of organization. They want to rally to support you, maybe as an investor or as a coworker. But I think that really matters. Number two, I'd say surround yourself with good people. It doesn't matter how smart someone is or how good they are their job, if they're not a good human, it's just not fun. And so surround yourself with good, kind people.
Davis Smith: I think one of the most underutilized tools in business and frankly in life is love. And so don't be afraid to love people. And I think it really matters when you are working at a place where people care about each other. And you can have big ambitions, and you can want to win, and you can have high expectations of each other, but when you love each other, it makes a big, big difference.
Shelby Stanger: So much of Davis's business is driven by love, love for the planet and love for the people who inhabit it. Davis, thank you so much for coming on Wild Ideas. I loved talking with you, and it was fascinating to hear about your practical approach to making the world better for everyone. If you'd like to learn more about Davis and Cotopaxi, go to cotopaxi.com or Cotopaxi on social media, that's C-O-T-O-P-A-X-I. Wild Ideas Worth living is part of the REI podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by Annie Fassler and Sylvia Thomas of Puddle Creative, and our senior producer is Chelsea Davis, our executive producers are Palo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we appreciate when you follow this show, rate it, and review it wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.