DTC company Brunt gets to work with $20 million in funding

Brunt is ready to lace up and get to work. The Boston-based DTC workwear brand closed a $20 million Series B this week, which will be used to bolster inventory, bring on new employees, and ramp up marketing efforts.

The capital comes on the (durable) heels of Brunt’s first full year in business (it debuted in September 2020), which saw sales surge 80% higher than it expected, founder and CEO Eric Girouard told Retail Brew. While he declined to share specific figures, Girouard said Brunt sold out of its first 5,000 pairs of boots (price point: $200–$250) in just nine days.

Raising the bar: That momentum carried over into 2021—Brunt even introduced apparel—but the trouble was keeping boots on the ground in supply.

• Despite selling four different types of work boots, Brunt was only fully stocked (across all styles and sizes) for 11 days (or 3%) of the year, according to the founder.
• Funding should help get that figure up, Girouard said, ballparking 75% as an inventory threshold for core styles in 2022.

“We didn’t realize how voracious this customer would be,” he said. “If we’re not in stock, they need work boots like next week. So they’re going somewhere else if we don’t have it.”

Looking ahead…Brunt wants to roughly triple the size of its team, from 11 to 30, by the end of the year. It also hopes to boost sales by 200% from 2021.

• Key to that goal? Focusing on blue-collar workers, the company’s main demographic, as they warmed up online shopping even more due to Covid-era realities. Brunt’s TikTok page, for example, has 27.8k followers.

“All of these customers who are in the trades, like construction, might not have been online shoppers before, [but] during this Covid period, [people] were now forced to learn how to order groceries online, or clothes online,” Girouard said. “All of a sudden, they became really digitally savvy.”