Stories of the entrepreneurial journey with Brandon Snower

Brandon Snower left a cushy job on Wall Street and decided to reinvent men’s fashion. In this podcast, we discuss his early journey, and watch as Brandon just gets started.

TAMAR:
Hey, everybody, I am super excited. I have Brandon Snow here. He is a jet setter. Came, flew in just for this podcast. Right? Thanks so much for joining.

Brandon Snower:
Only for you. Only for you.

TAMAR:
Yeah. So you’re in New York City, right?

Brandon Snower:
I am.

TAMAR:
OK, so we’re we’re local, but we’re not really local. But he did take a red eye to kind of get here on time and was on time in a different time zone. So. Yeah, yeah. So so tell me a little bit; first of all, where in the city are you?

Brandon Snower:
I live in Chelsea. I have been out here for two years.

TAMAR:
Nice. Nice.

Brandon Snower:
What about you?

TAMAR:
I’m actually in Westchester County. I was in Morningside Heights and the Upper West Side for a while and then I made my way slowly up as I moved. I guess it’s it actually coincides with the different milestones in life, the marriage and then the having kids. And it was Riverdale first and then it was Westchester. So.

Brandon Snower:
Awesome.

TAMAR:
Yeah. Cool. So Brandon’s here and he has an entrepreneurial journey that I definitely wanted to share because he did I guess the unlikely and he did something especially like that is extremely gutsy and pretty fab. So I, I don’t even know how to introduce it. I’m going to let you do that all. Go ahead. Tell me a little bit about your story.

Brandon Snower:
Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. It’s always great to speak with other entrepreneurs and just discuss kind of the facets, the obstacles and kind of the journey, you know, just to help others. And so essentially, starting out, I’m twenty four right now. I graduated from Northwestern University a few years ago in twenty nineteen. And like every person in college, you know, you don’t really know what you want to do.

Brandon Snower:
You know, very rarely, like people are like set as, like if you’re an engineer, you’re a doctor. You know, you’re those are kind of like set courses that you take, then you know where you want to be. But like most I didn’t know, I studied learning and learning and organizational change, which, you know, it’s very like a broad not very niche kind of path in terms of you can go to X if you study organizational change. Right. It’s like understanding human behavior. And I didn’t want to be a psychologist, but I liked understanding people and leading and seeing what what works and what doesn’t in terms of like the human psyche within organizations and just interactions with people. And but with that I’ve always had this like business mind and kind of business acumen. My dad always had small businesses here and there. He’d start one, quit, and then started back up again and and then just move all over the place. But from there, I, I knew I wanted to either build something at some point or I knew I had a business savviness from just watching him work hard and get up at 5:00 and do all these things that you don’t really get to see growing up that much. And from there that kind of just took me to the spot where, OK, what’s the what is it going to lead me to a path that will give me a lot of opportunity down the road. And I thought, well, you know, finance, banking, they make a lot of money. It is a challenging environment. They’re smart people and they work super hard. But that’s the trajectory I want to go to. So I went for it. And I didn’t have any finance background. I didn’t know what an income statement was. Yeah, I was really underqualified. But that kind of shaped me to, like, really grind and really learn about, OK, I have to learn all of this, all this information in order to get a career that I want. And so ultimately, I ended up with a job. Someone took a shot at shot on me on working on Wall Street, a pretty large bank. And from there, I started working as an investment banking analyst. You know, I was the happiest person in the world. And I had my career that I wanted. But there is a massive learning curve, right, like I started learning organizational change and and everyone else was studying finance, math, accounting, but that just meant that I had to wake up at 5:00 a.m., go to the office, study, you know, learn as much as possible, be a sponge and literally be the last one and tur