7. Matthew Swaggart - HoldFast Gear

Matthew Swaggart:

There's always that position in life where you have your passion and work ethic. When those two meet together and your work ethic is behind your passion and they're doing the same thing, I feel that's when mountains truly move for people. That's when your paths open up and things just happen and earth moves for you. I feel you've really lost when you quit at something. That's when you lose. If you make a mistake, you mess up or you trip and you fall down, that isn't the loss, you can learn from that. If you can take from any situation, if you can learn from something and then keep going, then you haven't lost yet.

Robert Wagner:

From HoganTaylor CPAs and advisors, I'm Robert Wagner. And this is How That Happened. A business and innovation success podcast. Each episode of the show, we sit down with the business and community leaders behind thriving organizations to learn how business and innovation success actually happens. Our guest today is Matt Swaggart, the founder and owner of HoldFast Gear. Matt, thanks for joining us on the How That Happened podcast.

Matthew Swaggart:

Oh man, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm glad you thought out of me.

Robert Wagner:

Matt, we've had the privilege of working together for five or so years now, and have really enjoyed watching you grow as an entrepreneur and watch your business grow really exponentially. It's been very exciting. For those listening on the podcast, who've never heard about HoldFast Gear. Tell us what you are and what markets you're serving.

Matthew Swaggart:

Primarily I started as a photographic gear company, so I make camera straps and camera bags, and lately I've been moving into more lifestyle products, travel bags and notebooks and stuff for carrying more than just cameras. I started this company back in 2011. I think I started working with you guys maybe 13 or 14 possibly. It was around there I think. It's been a real interesting company because I started as a professional photographer and I worked as a photographer for many years.

Matthew Swaggart:

Over the years of just shooting, I just realized that there was a hole in the market. I wanted to present myself certain way at weddings and at high end events that I shot. At the time everything was just black, nylon, near print. That's what opened the door for me to start making products for photographers.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. We want to talk mostly in the podcast about the innovative aspects of HoldFast and how you're changing that market. And you've already alluded to it a little bit. But before we get into that, tell us about early Matt. Tell us about growing up and how you got into the photography business.

Matthew Swaggart:

Yes. Even growing up I always enjoyed drawing and sketching and designing logos, even when I was young I'd do that. I've always been a little bit handy in the sense that, anything, I enjoy taking things apart and sometimes putting them back together. I enjoy working with my hands a little bit. Not that I'm very savvy with building things, but I do enjoy working with my hands. Leading into college, I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer and eventually settled on graphic design for video, which is totally different than the other two.

Matthew Swaggart:

But as I started studying graphic design for video, I just loved doing work on a computer and I loved that creative aspect of it. Photography for me was a natural step in that process, having a camera to enhance different designs or maybe take pictures to inspire designs and inspire drawing and graphic design for video stuff. I picked up a camera early on, but didn't have respect for the art or craft of photography. It was more so a tool that I could use for design work, not necessarily the art of taking pictures.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. You're a really young guy. Do you go back to when it was film or you've been digital your entire career?

Matthew Swaggart:

I started, I really picked up a camera and really got serious about it. Well, I had a camera a few years earlier, but I got serious in 2002. That was right when digital was really making a strong push. They had started producing two megapixel cameras and stuff like that, a few years earlier. And so by this time, this is when digital SLRs are really starting to make a place in the market, when I started shooting. I did shoot some film and I still shoot some film every now and again, but the bulk of my work has always been digital.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. You hit on it right there a little bit. What is the role of film today? How are people using film? Why would you use film in the world?

Matthew Swaggart:

Film is neat. It's one of those things I don't think will ever die out, because it always will have that nostalgic feel to it. All of us when we look at our, I'm 39, so all my childhood pictures that my mom took, those are all on film. And so as we look back at those, you see that look and you miss those days and you miss aspects about it. It draws people still to film, because of those things, because of that nostalgic feel. But also there's a look in film that's hard to replicate perfectly, digitally. You can do it and do a good job at it, but those that know film can see it and can see the difference. And so they appreciate film.

Matthew Swaggart:

I think, there's still some wedding photographers that only shoot film and they're hired because of it. If you can curve yourself out a little niche there, you can do really, really well. There's some timing aspects to it that you have to wait a little bit longer to get the images. And there's some good and bad to that. I think it might ever only have a small stranglehold of a professional market, but it'll always be there, because people like that feel.

Robert Wagner:

In the digital world, the incremental cost now of taking another picture is zero.

Matthew Swaggart:

Yes.

Robert Wagner:

And so in all of the world of innovation, this is one of the biggest innovations, was going to digital photography. I'm struck by the fact that everyone has a camera now, everyone over 12 years old just about in the world has a camera and we're snapping millions of pictures a year, or really even a day. And yet there's also demand for professional photographers to take pictures of life events. How do those two things both happen?

Matthew Swaggart:

Well, I think it's a beautiful thing. The fact that everyone now has high quality cameras in their phones, means they can take a picture and share it immediately. That part of it is just a beautiful thing, because I don't have any family that lives near me. I have family that lives all over the US, but not near me. That's great. Because we can take pictures and send them to our family of our kids doing things as they do them, in real time, videos and pictures. That way the people that live near us can stay completely in contact with us.

Matthew Swaggart:

They're not looking at images several months later, they can experience it as it happens, which is totally amazing. You talk about Twitter and Instagram, you have the ability to immediately share your life through photography, which is totally beautiful. Some people dislike that, because now, because everyone can have a camera and it's easy to get, there's always uncle John and aunt Tammy that have a camera that can go get shots of you. But if you look at it in a professional sense, I appreciate that aspect because what it does is, it forces those who want to make photography their living. It forces them to separate themselves from the uncle John and uncle Tom, aunt Tammy, or whoever there is.

Matthew Swaggart:

The professional now has to think about, well, all these people have a camera. How can I make sure my work is different? It forces them to think critically about their work and their craft, which I think again is a beautiful thing. For whatever reason, there's been a lot of backlash from professionals looking down on the fact that everyone can have Photoshop and have light room and take pictures. I appreciate it, because I feel that drives those that want to do this and have a passion for it, to get better and better. I think that's just great for the craft.

Robert Wagner:

How are people doing that? Or maybe how did you do that or do you still do it?

Matthew Swaggart:

Well, the first thing I realized is, there's your over the counter cameras that you can go get at Best Buy or Walmart or anything, anyone has access to that. So you have those cameras. Or there's pictures on your phone. What you then have to look at, well, what cameras and what equipment do I need that can look different from what everyone else has? So then you start thinking about lenses and equipment. How do I make my picture look different? Well, one way to do it is with a shallow or depth of field.

Matthew Swaggart:

Most cameras, your basic cameras are going to be shooting, this is nerdy talk here, but like an F-stop six or five or whatever. So now what happens is your images, mostly everything's in focus. Well, if I go and spend a little bit more money and get an f/1.4 lens, well now I get a shallow depth of field. So then the subjects and focus and the background is really soft. Well, not everyone has access or will go out and buy that kind of lens. If I want to separate myself, I think about equipment. What equipment can I get that not everyone else has?

Matthew Swaggart:

And then I start thinking about, okay, this is all the images I'm seeing on Instagram. This is all the images I'm seeing on Facebook. Everyone's shooting from a fast point of view, which means they're not setting up the shot. They're just whipping out their phone and taking the pictures as quick as they can do it. Well, how can I rethink this and get maybe the same subject matter, but in a different way, from a different angle? I can position myself differently. So then if I can take a picture from a different angle, from a different viewpoint and then possibly some different equipment, well then it's going to look totally different than what you're seeing on Instagram and social medias.

Matthew Swaggart:

And that's what people will see and say, that looks different. I like that. That'll help draw people to your work and that'll help you differentiate yourself.

Robert Wagner:

Right. Okay. I see that certainly in composition of professional-

Matthew Swaggart:

Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Wagner:

... photos. It's very creative, very different now. I can see that aspect of it. One more question about just the digital photography industry, that I've just been wanting to ask someone like yourself. I see professional photographers talking about, if they're bidding on a wedding, they're going to take 1,000 pictures or 2000, is that good? Again, we're back to the incremental cost is zero. I can take as many as I can physically take. Is that a good idea? Has that been a good thing for the industry?

Matthew Swaggart:

Two ways of looking at it. I think as a learner, absolutely. If you're beginning at photography, well, what you want to do, is take as many pictures as you can, so you can learn, so you can hone your craft. You can learn what's good and what's bad. What works, what doesn't work. And you do that through time, through effort, through taking pictures. And so that's what's great about digital as opposed to film, is you can learn so much quickly, so much more quickly than shooting film. You get that immediate feedback. You can take a picture, look at it on the screen, think, okay, that didn't work, why didn't it work? And then you can dissect it.

Matthew Swaggart:

Or if you're shooting a sporting event and you're still learning the flow of the game, you're still learning where those impact moments are going to be and where the plays are going to be. And maybe you're not really in tune with the sport itself. Maybe you're shooting your son's football game. So now you're having to learn what plays are going to be called, where the plays are going to run, right side of the field, left side of the field. Digital is great, because you could just shoot a ton and then go back and look at it and learn from it to reposition yourself, to figure out how to get better shots. And that's the part I like.

Matthew Swaggart:

The downside of it is it can make you lazy. You can just fire away and think, okay, one of these shots will work. So I'll just take a thousand shots. If there's action happening, you can break away, instead of trying to predict it, you can just hold that shutter down and let it fire away and think, okay, at some point I'll get the shot. That part makes you lazy because then you're not challenging yourself to figure the situation out.

Matthew Swaggart:

I think when you're learning, shoot as much as you can. Once you've really started figuring out your camera and how things work, now, you want to take your time with the shot and figure out, let me think about the story a bit more.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. That's great. We'll get back to you now. So thinking about your career as a photographer, which is still ongoing, right? How have you positioned yourself? My sense is you're a high end photographer. You do high end events. High end weddings. Is that accurate? How'd you get there?

Matthew Swaggart:

Well, I've slowed down the photography side of things as HoldFast Gear grew. I started HoldFast Gear in 2011, I started shooting weddings in 2002. I continued shooting weddings pretty much full time all the way until 2014. I did weddings on the weekends. I did design work during the week and then the editing of the weddings during the week. And then as my kids would go to sleep, I'd put my family down. I would then pick up HoldFast Gear and do all that work through the night. I spent about three years of just sleepless nights, building HoldFast Gear and while still paying the bills with photography and design work back.

Matthew Swaggart:

In 2014, as HoldFast grew enough to support this family more, I pulled away from photography so I can focus more on HoldFast Gear. I still shoot quite a bit, but a lot of my work now is more just fun projects that I see and that I want to do as opposed to getting paid for them, which for me it's just a perfect place to be. But when I was shooting weddings full time, the way I would differentiate myself mainly was, I just looked at what was around. Looked what images looked like around me and made sure I didn't do that.

Matthew Swaggart:

There's a real strong pull, especially in the photography entry. It's always been so shocking to me, but when one photographer gets really good and they get some sort of influence, all of a sudden everyone wants to get their set of plugins, their set of presets and do what they do. I get it. When someone has success, it's easy to see that their success and then try to replicate it, to get your own success. I get that. That's easy to do. But man, I feel that will only take you so far and you're not going to get people hiring you for your look, you for you, they're hiring you for some look that you're copying. But as soon as that look is gone, well, then you don't have any identity anymore.

Matthew Swaggart:

I've always made sure that while I kept a pulse on what people were doing professionally, I didn't study it too deeply in the sense to let it get into my work. Sometimes when you're around something so much, you just become that thing or become similar. I would make sure I saw what people were doing, but only enough to where I didn't copy it and stayed away from it. If that makes any sense. I really dug in to find my own vision, to find my own voice, to figure out how I wanted to tell stories and stuck to that and drove on that as hard as I could.

Robert Wagner:

Sure. Okay. So you started HoldFast in 2011. Was that a dream? Has it always been in you to own a business or to start a business? Is that something that's just who you are?

Matthew Swaggart:

No, I've always been a little bit, rebellious isn't the word, but I've always enjoyed doing my own thing. And so I've been a very good team member. Any job that I've had, I've done really well at, but there's always that thing where maybe I wish I was doing something more or wish I had a bit more impact with what I was doing. There's always been a little bit of entrepreneurial call in me a little bit, in my personality. But HoldFast Gear is not something that I sat around dreaming about for weeks and months and years, it really came out of nowhere. It's kind of a long story and I'll do my best to really make it short.

Matthew Swaggart:

But as creatives and a lot of people that are in the creative industry will be able to identify with this. You have your ebbs and flows, your ups and downs. There's periods of time where everything you're doing you just love, is exciting. You feel you're producing great work and you're really into it. But then there's times where it's slower. You're not enjoying anything you're doing. The jobs you're getting aren't fun. The work you're producing isn't great. You just don't love what you're doing. There's always the seasonality of the creative aspect of a workflow.

Matthew Swaggart:

Back in 2010, I was going on one of these down times where I just, I wasn't getting great weddings or I wasn't loving the weddings I was shooting. They weren't real fun. The work wasn't fun. It just felt like a grind. It was periods of life where it just felt like a grind. And then we had our second kid, our daughter Lola. We had Righter, he was two. Then we had Lola. When she was born, she was born with a cleft in her mouth. And we weren't ready for that at all. We didn't see any of that in the ultrasound, it was a total shock to us. She had pretty much a hole right in the middle of her face, into her nostril and her lip.

Matthew Swaggart:

That was surprising to us and we weren't ready for it. We did have some experience with that. Joan's older sister was born with a cleft and she had surgeries all throughout her childhood. Our immediate thought was, okay, we have this brand new baby daughter and is she going to be in surgeries all throughout her childhood? And that's a really tough thing to think about. Obviously you don't want a baby to be going through surgeries, to be going under and dealing with all that.

Matthew Swaggart:

And then you think about the aspects of your child growing up. Will she be looked at differently? Will kids see her, pick on her? That kind of thing. I felt powerless as a dad that this is not something I can fix. I can't just figure out the problem and fix it. It was a tough thing for me to go through, a tough period of time. It was a few months where it was really dark for me where I was already, I was 30. I wasn't happy where I was at professionally. I felt like my career could have been bigger or better. There was some peers that I was working around, they were really making marks in their career. I thought, man, I'm not there yet. What's going on? What am I doing wrong?

Matthew Swaggart:

You have all these thoughts. And then we had Lola, who was this beautiful baby girl, but I thought, man, is she going to be in surgeries? It's kind of this compounding thing. It really drew me back to just my faith and who God is for me and what God is. And so I really just got into the scripture and got into a lot of prayer. In February of 2011, I felt like I was showed an idea for a camera strap. That's all it was, was just an idea for a camera strap. At the time there was this one scripture in the Bible that says, "Hold fast your confession of faith for he who promised is faithful."

Matthew Swaggart:

That one scripture is what I lived on for several months with Lola, meeting with doctors, figuring out if she's going to have surgeries, what surgery procedures we're going to have to do, how many we're going to have to do. All this stuff. I'm just believing for, I just want my daughter to have a perfect face.

Robert Wagner:

Sure.

Matthew Swaggart:

That's one of those outward things that you see right away. That one little scripture is what I was just clinging to. It was like my lifeline. When I was showed this idea for a camera strap, I felt it had to be called HoldFast Gear. That word HoldFast really stood out to me. And it made a lot of sense for carrying cameras. That idea came in February of 2011, I have no background in textiles or sewing or working with leather or anything. But right away, I knew I wanted to build it of leather and canvas because I didn't see a lot of that in the photo industry. At the time it was just black, neoprene, nylon. Nothing looked great for professional photographers.

Matthew Swaggart:

And at the time this was so new. I really didn't know what it was. It was just a camera strap. I spent about three weeks talking with people and I recruited a few people to help. I got the first strap sewed up. It was terrible, but I thought there's potential in it. I went back at it. Over the course of chasing that idea, I felt I was supposed to chase this idea down, of a camera strap. Well, as I started doing that, more designs kept just flowing into my head and I was just sketching them out and trying to put them together. I picked up leather tools, started watching YouTube, get on Instagram, just teaching myself the leather craft.

Matthew Swaggart:

And so for the next few months, I was just building stuff, building stuff, building stuff, and trying it out and working with it. By November of 2011, I had a website up and started selling my first product. From idea to actually selling went pretty quickly. It didn't feel quick at the time, because it was just like, I was just so flooded with I got to get this off the ground. I have to put my hand to this. It was just no sleep for months and months on end, but I didn't need it. I was just riding on this wave of energy. It was interesting.

Robert Wagner:

Wow. That is a very powerful story. I appreciate you sharing that and just the transparency of that. I appreciate it. Had you ever had a time in your life where the creativity was just flowing like you're talking about? Because clearly you were really driving hard towards what you had had this vision for. Was that a first time thing in your life?

Matthew Swaggart:

No. Okay. To this level and to this volume, I'd say yes. This goes back to what I said. There's always these ebbs and flows of where, just whatever reason, some days you're just rolling and weeks you're just rolling. It's almost like your catch is on for a while and you're producing great work. Back when I started HoldFast Gear, even for the first couple years of HoldFast Gear, everything was so fresh and so new. There's always that position in life where you have your passion and work ethic. And when those two meet together and your work ethic is behind your passion and they're doing the same thing, I feel that's when mountains truly move for people, that's when your paths open up and things just happen and earth moves for you.

Matthew Swaggart:

It's a wild aspect because you can get passionate about something but never really work towards it or put your effort behind it. You're just passionate about it and you do it on the weekends, because you also have your other responsibilities you're doing. But when those two mix and combine, man, I'm telling you, that's just when it's like fire happens.

Robert Wagner:

Wow. I want to unpack a few things that you talked about there. One of the things that I feel I know about you is just a determination to learn about things and to get to the bottom of things. You already said, when you got started, you knew nothing about leather craft and you used YouTube and stuff. What is it in you that keeps you going? Because I'm assuming when you first started doing it, you weren't very good. Right? And you probably failed and-

Matthew Swaggart:

Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Wagner:

A lot of us just quit. It's like, I'm not this guy. I can't do this. What keeps you going?

Matthew Swaggart:

That's a good question. I think ultimately, I had an upbringing where I was surrounded by people that just didn't quit easily. They were just determined people. I think that rubbed off on me some. But I think at the end of the day, I just don't, the way I see life is, losing and making mistakes, I feel like you've really lost when you quit something. That's when you lose. If you make a mistake, you mess up or you trip and you fall down, that isn't the loss, you can learn from that. If you can take from any situation, if you can learn from something and then keep going, then you haven't lost yet. You haven't quit yet.

Matthew Swaggart:

For me, I look at things in terms of winning and losing, and if I don't quit, at some point I'm going to win. That's just how I see it. And so I just can't stand to lose and I don't want to lose at anything I do. So you know what, I'm just going to keep doing my best and keep learning until I feel I've got to win there.

Robert Wagner:

Let's unpack, we were talking about leather craft. Let's talk about the leather itself. And you've explained this to me before, but I would love for you to talk to our listeners about this, about basically what you've learned about the cow hide in this process and the different parts of the hide and where they fit into the products and those kinds of things.

Matthew Swaggart:

That goes back to, when I first started this company, I knew I wanted it to be, I wanted to make it locally as much as I possibly could. I wanted to source everything locally as much as I possibly could. And then I wanted it to last forever, period. There's leather products from Egyptian times that are still on display that people still can touch and feel. You talk about, if you treat leather right, it will last as long as you need it to last. You don't find that with manmade materials yet. At some point manmade materials break down and also as they break down they don't look as good as they wear down.

Matthew Swaggart:

Whereas leather, I feel as it wears in, it gets better looking. As it gets older it gets better looking, which is a beautiful thing to me. I knew I wanted to use leather, because I wanted to be able to make a product that lasted forever. Well then jumped, as I started playing with leather, I realized very quickly that a lot of leather doesn't last forever. Some do, some don't. Okay. What leather am I needing to look for? And so I quickly realized that most of the leather you see, well, I wouldn't say most, but a lot of leather you see is very low quality leather. It's not what's considered full grain.

Matthew Swaggart:

And so I learned as started out that full grain starts from the top of the hide outside of the fur, if there's fur on it, like a cow has hair, from the top all the way down and through, that's called full grain. Now, as you start to take away the surface of the leather, what you do is you get a cleaner looking leather, because there's no scars from the animals. As we humans just like animals do, they'll scrape up against something or get a scab that can turn into a scar. A lot of people see that as a defect on leather. What happens is they'll cut that top surface off to get a more perfect look.

Matthew Swaggart:

But what you're doing is, you're taking out strength of the leather and you're taking out the strongest portion of the leather. And then you get down to the part which they call suede, which is even deeper down and it gives it a really soft feeling leather, which is nice to feel, but it's not durable. It won't deal with stretching and pulling and tugging very well. If I'm going to make straps that carry cameras, these cameras can get heavy. They could be one, two pounds. They could be five, six, seven, eight pounds, even more than that in some cases. I didn't want to make a strap that would stretch out and lose its form. So much over time to where you've added three or four inches to the length of strap and now it doesn't fit right.

Matthew Swaggart:

As I started playing with leather, I realized that I wanted to use full grain, because it was the absolute strongest leather. Now, I then had to figure out where that leather came from. Most leather, a lot of times comes from cow, but on the body of the cow, a cow is a massive animal, starts from the back and wraps all the way around to the belly, then you got the hind and the front and the neck, all that is usable hide that people use within the business. But as you get more to the belly, you're getting to a softer, stretchier piece of leather, which is great for a lot of products, but not great for a camera strap.

Matthew Swaggart:

As you move up to the back, across the spine of the back, what they call the back of the leather, the back straps, that's the strongest portion of the leather. Primarily that's what I use. And so for all my camera straps, I'm using the back portion, the center back portion of the cow. And then as it gets down to the belly, I use those for little accessories that don't have anywhere and tear on it. That way they won't fall apart.

Robert Wagner:

Where do you buy it, the cow hides?

Matthew Swaggart:

Here in Tulsa, we have a store called Tandy Leather, which is local and that's really where I picked up a lot of skills. Tandy isn't great for a lot of high end stuff, but what they're really great is that education and getting started and the people there are wonderful. You walk in there and they're ready to answer all your questions. I would go in there and say, hey, I want to build this. What tools do I need? And how do I use the tools? And they would just sit there and tell me. It was wonderful. That's really how I got started. They're a great source of leather for crafts and projects.

Matthew Swaggart:

But as you want to get into, one of the things they had to learn the hard way, and we discussions about this early on, as HoldFast Gear growing and we were needing to really make volume, well, you can't go and buy local leather, because you're going to get killed on the price. You're just not going to be able to get it affordably to make any money on it. And also you're not going to get the best pick. I just started researching tanneries. First thing I did was start calling and emailing all the tanneries I could find on Google. And then I started asking them questions about where are they getting their cows from and where are they processing the leather.

Matthew Swaggart:

Over the course of the past decade, so much of our tanning processes have moved over to Mexico. Now most leather companies don't tan in the US anymore. There are some, but a lot of them do the volume in Mexico. I felt I wanted to do as much as I can within the US. As soon as a tannery said, well, we do this in Mexico. Well, that changed and dictated where I was going to work and who I was going to work with. Once I started finding the tanneries that I liked, that I felt were doing as much as they could in the US, that's who I started working with. And then I would just have long conversations with them about the types of leather I needed, the colors I wanted and how I needed to perform.

Matthew Swaggart:

The real interesting about this process was, no one was using the leather we were using it at the time. No one was. All of our straps were staining people's clothes. They weren't holding their form, because it was belt leather. Well, we had to learn the hard way was, any leather that's died no matter what, at some point it's going to stay in your clothes, if you really get it wet. And so I had to develop, I've now, I spent over a year developing my own leather with a tannery, to my exact specifications that won't stay in clothes, that won't lose form, but that breaks in nicely. It's an interesting balance to strike. Sure, you can go pick up leather and make a strap like mine, where it looks like it. But after a year it definitely won't look it anymore.

Matthew Swaggart:

And it won't maintain. Like I said, when I sell my products, I want to say, hey, this is guaranteed for life. And if it messes up, we're going to fix it and replace it. But you know what, I don't want to be fixing and replacing stuff all day. So I'm going to put everything I can into making that the right way the first time. It took a long time to find the leather and then develop the leather how I needed to our specifications to work.

Robert Wagner:

You've hit a lot of things there that I've always admired about you. And I think it's really important for younger listeners or anyone thinking about starting a business or being an entrepreneur is, you have no call fear. It seems you have no fear of saying, hey, I know nothing about this. Please tell me, please educate me. And just getting to the bottom of it, and just driving and driving and driving until you get to these really cool places where now you have your own leather. That's an awesome thing. I want our listeners to hear that, that's what it takes to really be successful and to go deep into an industry and into a product line.

Matthew Swaggart:

And to that point, I think for me, the fear lies in staying in the dark. That's where I get scared about. If you walk into a dark room, I've got kids, so there's Legos on the floor. There's toys everywhere. If I walk into my kitchen and don't flip on the lights, man, I'm going to step on something that's going to hurt. If I don't figure that out, I'm going to keep stepping on it. I'm going to keep getting hurt. So for me the fear is just remaining in the dark on something. I want to at least learn as much as I can about it. When I look at some of this stuff, I've got now people in my shop that real leather craftsmen, I mean old, world leather craftsmen.

Matthew Swaggart:

I'm not going to be that. I don't have a desire to be that. I did learn as much as I could up front to where I wasn't in the dark anymore, but then it helped me figure out, okay, what do I really need? I could find what I really needed once I could flip the lights. Once I can learn something about it. For me, I just don't want to sit there on the dark on something.

Robert Wagner:

You're the designer for all your products. Right? Tell us about that process. How does that happen?

Matthew Swaggart:

I'm a very inspirational designer. I'm not out there looking for the next great idea. Something has to hit me. For instance, the first product that really hit big for HoldFast Gear was called the Money Maker strap. And it's a camera strap that carries one, two or three cameras. I wanted to be able to carry three cameras at a wedding, so I could work fast. I didn't have to change the lenses. I could have what I needed on me and I could just work all day and not have any distractions. And that's what I wanted. At the time there wasn't anything on the market that could do that and do it and look really good doing it.

Matthew Swaggart:

I said, okay, I'm going to solve that problem. So that's what I did. And all of my products have just been born out of me running into an issue where I don't see anything like this out there. I've got this problem. I want to do a certain thing and I can't figure out how to do that thing. I would just make something to help me bridge the gap to doing that thing. It would always come on inspiration. As soon as I hit a wall of, okay, I've got these cameras, but there isn't a bag that fits these cameras. Or I want to carry this camera in a certain way, but other options are uncomfortable. What can I do to fix that? And then I would try to fix it.

Matthew Swaggart:

What would happen is I would just be thrown into the process for two or three or four days. And if I didn't get the solution in two or three or four days, I'd be sketching, I'd be building, I'd be trying things out. I wouldn't spend months on a product or an idea at all. One thing I don't like is getting caught in a rut and then nothing else gets done. And so then you're just at this dead stop because of this one thing. I'll spend two or three days, maybe a couple of weeks, really going hard on an idea, if it doesn't solve itself or if I don't find the solution, I'll keep all my notes on it, but I'll move on and just drop it and do something else and go back to whatever my focus is or find out what my focus needs to be.

Matthew Swaggart:

And then over time, I'll go back and readdress those notes and keep those fresh in my brain. And then one day at some point I'll meet that problem again, and then the answer will be there, as long as I've kept it fresh. For me, I'll dive into an idea to fix something, spend a few days, maybe a couple weeks on it. And if I don't nail it, I just don't stick with it. I keep it, and I'll come back to it over time. Every few days I might go over the notes just to keep it fresh in the brain. That's the great thing about, you can wake up one night from sleep and all of a sudden have an idea. If you keep those ideas fresh or keep the problems fresh, at some point that idea will happen.

Robert Wagner:

You've talked about for the Money Maker functionality and the visual, the looks of it. Why do people buy it? Is it both those things? Is it one? Why do professional photographers buy it?

Matthew Swaggart:

There's probably a few different reasons. I'll tell what happened when I first made one, and this is what's really rang true for a lot of people. The very first one I made, it was very terrible looking, but it served it purpose. Actually I was shooting a concert. I had the idea that I needed to solve carrying multiple cameras and look good. I was shooting a concert when finally all the puzzle pieces came together. I went home. I was out of town. I flew out the next day. As soon as I got home, I ran right to my closet and got two belts and started making what I had in my mind. It didn't work. So I went to the left store and figured about what I needed to do and built it and then wore it at my next wedding.

Matthew Swaggart:

That particular wedding, all the bridesmaids in the wedding, the bridesmaids were all models. I hadn't met any of them, I had just met the bride. When I showed up the wedding, I went to to the brides room to get some pre stuff of them getting ready and that kind of thing. And as I walked in the room got quiet. There's always been this idea where the photographer needs to be a fly on the wall. And I get that. And there's a lot of value in that. But when you're shooting events, at some point, people are seeing you work. No matter what, they're watching you work. They may not ever see the pictures you take, but they're seeing you take those pictures.

Matthew Swaggart:

And so what happened was, when I walked into that room to take pictures, I'm being quiet. I'm staying out of the way, but all the girls got quiet and they started talking. You could hear them saying things like, he knows what he's doing. They would say things like, wow, he looks professional. You'd hear them say these things. I thought that was interesting, because I had never heard that before. Prior to making that I was using all the top products in the market that wedding photographers were using. And then I made this. Then I had a totally different reaction.

Matthew Swaggart:

Well then within a few minutes, all those girls started coming up to me and asking about what I had on, what I was using, which I thought that was interesting. And then after that, for the rest of the day, I never had to work on getting their trust. They just did whatever I said to do. They'd do any pose. They'd go anywhere. They did whatever I said to do to get the shots I wanted to get. Now, typically before that, when I'd work a wedding, you might know the groom and the bride and maybe the parents, but no one else, you usually don't, you don't know anyone else there.

Matthew Swaggart:

There's always this element of you have to ingratiate yourself with them. You have to get their trust. You have to earn their trust. And so you could spend 30 minutes, you could spend 10 minutes, you could spend a couple hours sometimes at a wedding, to get their trust to the point where you can pull off the shots that you want to pull off. And it can be in this easy workflow. After wearing that strap at that wedding and then every other wedding since, I realized that the way I looked really influenced the trust they had in me. They may have known that I was a successful photographer or maybe they didn't, but if I looked the part, it didn't matter.

Matthew Swaggart:

I realize that really, to them they may have not seen my pictures, so it didn't matter what I was taking. But if I looked like I knew what I was doing, man, they would just do it. They would just roll with it. It made my weddings so much easier when I could come in looking a certain way. And so then I realized that my branding was more important than my business card and the pictures I took. It extended past my website. It actually was also who I was and how I looked and how I showed up to shoot events. If I looked a certain part, it's just easy to trust.

Robert Wagner:

That's fascinating. I encourage our listeners to go to the HoldFast Gear website and take a look at these products to really understand what Matt's talking about, where you have a strap and you can have two or three cameras hanging off of it. And the way he's designed it, you can grab that camera and just pull it to you without taking it off the strap. Really increases the utility of the strap and having these multiple cameras. But then the aspect that I had never thought of is this image, right? It credentialized you with the strap, just with the quality of strap, which is just fascinating. Is the Money Maker and really all your products, do you consider them luxury products?

Matthew Swaggart:

Yeah, they are. I never set out to build a luxury brand with quotes around it or anything. With that initial idea that I had, I knew that I wanted to make products that, where form and function were completely equal. At the time everybody was so concerned on function, that form really wasn't considered when it came to professional photographers. And after that experience I had at that wedding, I knew that form and function had to always be equal and one could not outweigh the other. From then on, everything was about, I'm going to make products that solve a problem for me, but then after they solve the problem for me, they have to look really, really good.

Matthew Swaggart:

If it looked really good and it wasn't comfortable, I didn't want that. But if it was really comfortable and it looked terrible, I didn't want that. In doing that, I have really hit on a few materials that I like using, that I know will last forever, that I know will age properly and look better as you use them and they won't look worn out when you use them. But they also work in becoming very comfortable. When you add all those things together, and then you also throw in a lifetime guarantee on everything we make, you can't produce a cheap item. There's just no way to shortcut that.

Matthew Swaggart:

It turned into a luxury brand in terms of a price point and in terms of the materials I liked, but that wasn't what I set out to. I don't look at myself and think, boy, I'm Louis Vuitton out here making a luxury brand. I don't see it that way. But at the end of the day, if you want to make a product to hit certain check marks, there's going to be costs to that. I just determined that, for me, quality, longevity and style were very important. I didn't really care about making something cheap. For me, it was quality over quantity all day long.

Robert Wagner:

You're answering this question, but did you have to get comfortable with the price point?

Matthew Swaggart:

Yeah. That was actually the hardest thing. That's probably came, worked itself out through a lot of conversations between you and Tammy who works for you guys and handles my account. You guys helped me out a lot in that area in actually determining what a price point should be. Because I don't consider myself a business guy, to this day I still don't. I don't like the bean counting. I don't like the numbers. I don't the formulas. I just want to design great products and we'll see where the ships fall, how the dust settles. When I first started making products, I felt like, okay, this strap should be priced at $100, because that feels comfortable to me.

Matthew Swaggart:

You guys would say okay, well, okay, let's look at this now. Let's break it down. What do the D-rings cost you? What does the leather cost you? How long did it take you to produce? And after we started looking at the numbers, we could actually put a price on. I thought, wow, that just seems really high. No one will be able to buy it. And here was the really cool thing, is right when I started this company and we started determining these prices, and then I started trying to get the products to the stores. No store would take it. Not a single store would buy onto it. Even someone would say, the idea is okay, but no one's going to spend that money for a strap. No one would.

Matthew Swaggart:

I thought, okay, you don't think so, but there's still something me inside me that says I need to chase down this idea. I just didn't stop. We just put on the website and started selling them. Well, they sold. And people paid for it. And so now what happened is, I was able to build a company not through the wholesale channel. I was able to build it direct through my site, which means I get to keep all the profits and put that right back into the business and not let someone else take it. And so I could keep reinvesting right into the business. And so after, through a lot of conversations with you guys and just looking at the market, you begin to get used to prices, but man, it's hard up front.

Matthew Swaggart:

I think that's the challenge with professionals photographers in general, they always have a hard time pricing their work and pricing their value. They want to do everything for as little as possible to be competitive, but really what that's doing is you're going to burn yourself out, because you're never going to make what you need to be making to survive on it. What you're always going to be doing that photography job, getting paid for way less than you think, because you deserve that or whatever. And then you're also going to have to do extra jobs just to make ends meet. Well, at some point you're going to burn out and you're not going to be able to do it all.

Matthew Swaggart:

Just looking at the parts that make up a Money Maker, you guys help me determine what the value should be and what cost should be. I think photographers need to step back and look at their life, look at the work they want to produce and the style of photography they want to take. And look if you want to do 30 minute photo sessions and charge $10 and that's where you feel great at. That's great. That's awesome. You're only going to be able to do so much with that and your passion, your work ethic is only going be able to get so deep into that.

Matthew Swaggart:

But if you step back and say, man, I really want to produce top notch work. Okay. So I need top notch equipment. There's certain things you need to go along with producing the best work available. So you sit back and look at that and start adding the costs and that'll help you to determine how to price it. And then you can get comfortable with that.

Robert Wagner:

That is all great stuff. I think so many people in professional services in particular, really struggle with charging for the value they're delivering. You have been just relentless in building quality into your products, obviously quality into your work as a professional photographer too. Quality into your products, and that mandates a price point. But it's really, really hard I think for a lot of folks to get to that point.

Matthew Swaggart:

I want to say something else to that too. It is hard, it's almost like a big pill they have to swallow and they feel they can't swallow it. But what happens is, your work will find its people. If that makes sense. Your creativity, your passion, your heart, it will eventually spark and ignite with someone else within someone else. And that's the thing. People want to make work that appeases everybody. That's where you fail. If you're making cheap work that a lot of people can get into, well, a lot of people may get into it, but no one's going to get passionate about it. And you won't get successful if other people aren't passionate about what you're doing, and if you haven't lit that fire for them.

Matthew Swaggart:

That's where I've really learned in this process of having a business and coming to the prices that I needed to get to, to survive with the vision that I had. You're going to get a lot of people saying right away, that's too expensive. That's way overpriced. I can go to Walmart and buy a bag that is the same thing. Hey, sure, you can do all those things, but it won't last forever. It won't look like my bag. It won't perform like bag, but yeah, you'll have a bag.

Matthew Swaggart:

Or yeah, you can get a photographer for cheap and he can shoot your wedding. No problem. You can definitely get that, but you won't get me for that price. I think once you've really settled in with who you are and what you want to do and you go after that, you will find the people that that speaks to, and that's the people that you want to work with. And that'll happen.

Robert Wagner:

Right. A minute ago you talked about initially taking the product to retail and then got turned down basically and went to the website. Tell us some more about how you marketed the product, how you got started with that. You eventually worked your way into the premier catalog website in the industry. Talk about that.

Matthew Swaggart:

That's one of those things that I can't take any credit for because I was building a product for photographers and there's a strong element of my product that's very aesthetic. It's easy to put on and take a picture of yourself in. If that makes any sense. It was at one of those products where it became part of your outfit. And so you would put it on, you'd go to work and you'd take a picture of yourself as a selfie or whatever. Well, then someone else was like, well, what do you have on there? That's the camera strap from HoldFast Gear.

Matthew Swaggart:

And so when we got started, I really didn't have to put much effort into marketing. I was really fortunate in the era that we're in, right now. This was in 2011 and it really took fire, in 2013 is when it really had a big growth, was in 2013, right when Instagram was getting off and Twitter, all that stuff. People were really getting into those things. These are photographers, so they're taking pictures, and they took pictures of themselves and they'd post it. And a lot of people would talk about it.

Matthew Swaggart:

And so this big grassroots movement just blew up and I didn't have to really think about it. I'm fortunate in that way that we came in with that digital market, and it just took off that way. And so now you have to step back and think, okay, now everyone's doing that. So what I do, that's a little bit different or how can I stay on top of that game? Now that's the new challenge is, at first I didn't have to think about it, but now I have to really start digging in and figuring it out.

Robert Wagner:

Do you feel you have changed the professional photography industry?

Matthew Swaggart:

I like to think so. For me, the way I measure success was never about money and it was never about sales. For me, success was always about influence and reach. How many people can I reach? How many people can I influence? How can I raise that bar up in their lives and also in the industry at whole? I know before HoldFast Gear started, form and function weren't really a thing that a lot of products considered. There was this idea that the photographer should be the fly on the wall. And again, I think there's a lot of value and merit to that. But I think shooting weddings is a little bit different.

Matthew Swaggart:

And now when you look at the wedding industry as a whole, everybody, all the high end wedding photographers are very concerned with how they present themselves, how they look, down to the shoes, the pants, the shirt. They really get into to their look, not just wearing all black and being unseen, they're really considering their branding as a whole. I felt like when I started this company, it was about extending your branding into yourself, into your person and how you carried yourself and presented yourself while you worked. As I look at the industry now, people are really consider considering that.

Matthew Swaggart:

And then when you step back and look at a lot of other brands use the phrasing form and function. When we did that, no one else was doing that. That was one of our pillars of the business and that was all of our website form and function being equal. And now a lot of people talk like that. I hope there's some influence and credit I can take there, although I try not to get lost in that and think about that. But when I step back and look at the industry, I feel the industry has moved more in the direction of that path that HoldFast Gear cut.

Matthew Swaggart:

Because that really wasn't an option when I started the company. That wasn't there when I started the company. Whether that was just everything as a whole moving that direction or HoldFast Gear maybe led the way a little bit, I don't know.

Robert Wagner:

Matt, we're nearing the end of our time and we're going to get to our five questions we ask everyone here in a minute. But before we do, tell us about the other things that you're doing with HoldFast, the other product lines that you're developing.

Matthew Swaggart:

Well, that goes back to that question you asked me about my design process. I said, I'm very inspirational. If a problem strikes me with way I'm using something, now I want to fix that. We had a dog named Fancy, we had it for 14 years and she got sick and we had her put her down, and she was a family dog. And so we had the dog before we had children. My children have always been around a dog. I have three kids. My wife always had a dog growing up. I always had a dog growing up. When Fancy passed, it was hard on the whole family.

Matthew Swaggart:

What's really interesting is I didn't have much sympathy for people that had pets where they'd lose them. And now I do, because for whatever reason, when Fancy, I just had never really lost a pet before like that. When we lost our family dog, Fancy, boy, it hit us all so hard. It just broke our hearts. And so pretty soon we thought, okay, a couple weeks we started thinking, we need another dog. We have to have another dog in this family. Our family didn't feel complete. It was like we always had a dog with us. I went out and found a Panda German shepherd. They're a rare type of German shepherd that I had seen a few years earlier. My whole family fell in love with this one little puppy that we saw.

Matthew Swaggart:

We're here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I drove to Auburn to pick it up. My son and I drove 12 hours through the night, bought this dog and drove back the next day. He's a German shepherd, so they have lots of energy and he's a puppy. The cool thing about German shepherds are they're very loyal and they're very trainable. You can really train those dogs to do anything you want to do. They're brilliant dogs, but they also are active dogs. They need that engagement. They need to be trained in a sense or else they're just really hyper. As I started meeting with trainers and trying to work with the dog, I'd look at videos on how to train German shepherds. I started training our dog, Ranger. I realized I couldn't find the tools that I liked to train him.

Matthew Swaggart:

There wasn't a leash on the market that I liked or thought worked for me, for how I wanted to work. I didn't like the design of the collars that I could find online, anywhere I looked at, for whatever reason, I didn't connect with any collars I could find and any leashes I could find. I started building collars and leashes for Ranger. And then I started expanding that into our attachments, to our camera straps. So you have a camera strap that can carry a camera on one side and then be attached to a dog leash on the other. So you can go on a walk with your family, have access to your camera and your dog.

Matthew Swaggart:

That's one thing that, an avenue of the business that we just went into is his pet products. I never would've dreamed building pet products. But we got a new dog. I saw a hole in the market. Couldn't find what I wanted, and now we have a pet line. That's where, I'm not a five year and 10 year plan kind of guy, and that might be a weakness of mine that maybe I should fix, but I've never been that. I don't like to get locked into a thing and not be free enough to break away from it or free enough to chase down an idea.

Matthew Swaggart:

Before Ranger, I never thought we'd have a pet line, but now we have a pet line that's really starting to grow and do some things. That's probably the future of HoldFast, is wherever I can find problems that makes sense to me, that's what I'll chase down.

Robert Wagner:

Great. Thank you so much. Matt, let's talk about these five questions that we ask everyone. Here we go. Number one, what was the first way you made money?

Matthew Swaggart:

That's a good question. The first way I made money. Okay. Yup. I started drawing mazes in second grade, and I can remember there's me and another guy, I can't remember his name, but we would take the sheets of paper and we would start taping them together to make these big sheets of paper. And then we would draw these mazes out on them and we'd sell the maze for a quarter. It's the first way I made money.

Robert Wagner:

So you were an entrepreneur from the get go?

Matthew Swaggart:

Maybe. I don't know the mazes were very harder. I think we actually made the mazes where it couldn't be solved. Maybe we were just cheating.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. If you were not the owner of HoldFast Gear, what would you be doing?

Matthew Swaggart:

I love photography. I still love photography for this day. I picked up a two megapixel, digital camera called a Kodak DC290, when it first came out years ago, it was the very first camera I had. And I instantly fell in love with the camera in my hand. At that point I felt that's what I wanted to do, was take pictures. I didn't know if I wanted to be a photographer per se, but I just wanted to take pictures all the time. If it wasn't for HoldFast Gear, I'd still be taking pictures. I think there's an element of me that likes to, I've been involved in missions work on and off through church, and even through when I was in high school and in college, and that's an area that I love doing. I'd probably doing something like that as well if it wasn't photography.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. Earlier in the podcast you let it out of the bag. You're 39 years old.

Matthew Swaggart:

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Robert Wagner:

What would 39 year old Matt tell his 20 year old self?

Matthew Swaggart:

Oh man. I'd tell 20 year old Matt to not be so self-conscious. I think, especially at that age, going up through high school and going to college, maybe not everybody, but I know I did. You care a lot about what people think. What that does is, when you care so much about what people think and your outward appearance and how you talk and how you act and how you do things, what happens is that starts to dictate your future as opposed to you chasing your calling and you being in your calling. You start allowing what other people think you're calling is to affect you.

Matthew Swaggart:

And even if that's slight, it's still affecting you some. I think what that can do is that it can, if it doesn't, it may not alter your course overall, but what it will do is it'll stunt it, I think. If you can get past it, you won't alter your course, but it does slow you down. It does take momentum off your move movement. It does take, it adds like, the way I look at it is, it's like you can go through a muddy path or you can go through a clean road. I think when you start listening to everyone else's opinion, you start getting into the mud.

Robert Wagner:

Matt, you're a creative guy and I have this theory that everyone is writing the book in their head about their experiences, their philosophies, what they believe. What's the title of your book?

Matthew Swaggart:

For me, and this is a really long story, I don't think you have time now, but for me, it's forgiveness. I had a pretty interesting background as a child. I saw some really interesting things growing up with my family. My family was always in ministry, and so we had a church, we had a school and we had a Bible college. We had a lot of things going on. And so I faced some interesting challenges growing up. And what would happen is, I'm really condensing this down as fast as I can. But what would happen is, I sort of had this mental black book that if you made fun of me and my family, mainly sitting around my family, but if you made fun of my family, then I'd write you off.

Matthew Swaggart:

I'd first try to punch you. And I'm not a big guy. So they never ended well for me. I would first try to fight you. And then I would just write you off and never think about you again. And essentially that's a form of hate, I would just cut you out of my life. I did that my entire life all the way through college. Through a long story, I learned what forgiveness truly was. I learned that through forgiveness you can live a completely free, totally free life. And so my book would be forgiveness.

Robert Wagner:

Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Last question. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Matthew Swaggart:

Oh man, I wish I could have known this question before we came in here. The best piece of advice I've ever been given. I remember this is really small. It seems insignificant. But when I was in college, I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I had tore up my knee in high school and had surgery on my knee, and I thought that was so fascinating what the doctor did. I asked him a lot of questions about just the body. I've always had an interest in it. I thought what he did was so cool. He had a mark on me. And so I thought I wanted to be a doctor. And then when I got to school, I didn't want to be that.

Matthew Swaggart:

So I went, started the process of doing law school. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. After a semester, they're like, man, I'm not having fun. My dad asked me, well, what do you want to do? That's what he said, what do you want to do? I was like, well, I like doing graphics. I like drawing. He goes, well, do that. Why don't you do that? I don't know if that's advice or not, but he said, why don't you do that? I think that's really what unleashed this idea in me of I can do what sounds right or what people think sounds right.

Matthew Swaggart:

Because graphic design doesn't sound like a grad major in college. It's a lot different now. The digitals that we're in is different now than it was maybe in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was a little bit different back then. But when he said that, I was like, okay. Yeah, I guess I can do that. Just do it. He's just like, what do you want to do? Well, do that.

Robert Wagner:

Okay. That's awesome. Well, Matt, I appreciate your time. Before we quit, I want to revisit just real quickly something you said that I thought was a fantastic takeaway for our listeners. I think I remember this right from earlier in our time together, you said, I haven't failed until I quit. And that is a fantastic golden nugget from you today. I appreciate that very much. Thanks for your time.

Matthew Swaggart:

All right. Thank you.

Robert Wagner:

That's all for this episode of How That Happened. Thank you for listening. Be sure to visit howthathappened.com for show notes and additional episodes. You can also subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher. Thanks for listening. This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Copyright 2019, HoganTaylor LLP. All rights reserved. To view the HoganTaylor general terms and conditions, visit www.hogantaylor.com.