The Idea

Davie Fogarty was in primary school when he started jumping the fence at midday, going home to bake cookies, and coming back at the end of the day to sell them to his teachers. He has never been coy about the motive. He always wanted to be rich.

What followed was a decade of getting it wrong. A clothing brand in high school, then six or seven more: iPhone cases, headphones, gym wear, personalised nutrition plans, a seasoning business, a Vietnamese roll shop. He made six figures selling advertising on Instagram pages he'd built, then poured it into food and ended up broke again.

Roughly a dozen businesses. None of them worked.

What all that failure eventually taught him was not a product idea. It was a search process. Fogarty started trawling Facebook groups and forums looking for things people were already asking for out loud, and he found a mother describing the weighted blanket she was making for her autistic child. No supplier anywhere was selling them.

That was the pattern. Demand with no brand attached to it. In 2018, aged 23, he had $500 in savings and one idea. This was the beginning of The Oodie.

The Execution

• 2010 to 2016: Fogarty burned through a run of failures before he was out of his teens: a high school clothing brand, then iPhone cases, headphones and gym clothing. His first genuine win was selling an Instagram page for $30,000 straight out of school.
• 2016 to 2017: More wreckage. Personalised nutrition plans, coaching, a phone case marketplace, a weighted toy and a seasoning line all failed in quick succession. He'd built a real income selling ads on social accounts, sank it into food, and lost it. The café collapse is the one he still gets introduced by.
• 2017: The method that changed everything. Trawling Facebook groups for unmet demand, he found a mother making weighted blankets for her autistic child, and no supplier anywhere selling them. That business did $10 million in its first year.
• 2018: He ran the same play on loungewear, starting at 23 with just $500 in savings. No outside money: growth was funded entirely by direct response and positive cash flow.
• 2020 to 2021: Lockdown turned a comfort product into a household one. The Oodie alone booked $155 million in revenue that financial year, up 408% on 2020, on the back of a 300,000-strong Instagram following.
• 2021: Fogarty landed on the AFR Young Rich List with the Davie Group spanning 10 brands and more than $270 million in revenue, clearing over $20 million in some months. Four years earlier it had been making roughly $500 a month.
• 2021 to 2022: The expensive lessons. Running out of stock cost the group millions, and Fogarty came to describe $25 million as the "Death Zone" where trend-led e-commerce brands stall. His framing of the curve: it's harder to make your first million than your tenth.
• 2023: By September, The Oodie had sold 8.1 million units and passed $500 million in revenue, helped by Disney and Warner Bros deals that put Harry Potter and Star Wars into the range. That August he became the youngest-ever Shark on Shark Tank Australia.
• Today: The Oodie has passed $600 million in cumulative sales, Fogarty's net worth is estimated at around $150 million, and he's openly gunning for $1 billion. His coaching business Daily Mentor now works with 300 e-commerce brands turning over seven figures.

The lesson?

Fogarty failed about a dozen times because he kept doing what most founders do: inventing a product and then hunting for someone to want it. The weighted blanket flipped the order. He went looking for people already describing a problem in public, with nobody selling them the answer, and found one in a Facebook group written by a mum. He's since admitted the early wins gave him an almost invincible mindset, and that the mistakes which followed knocked it out of him. He didn't invent the wearable blanket. He just found the room where people were already asking for one.