Handbag Designer 101: The Stories Behind Handbag Designers, Brands, and Industry Icons

How Salt Athletic Became the Cleat Bag Athletes Want (and Parents Trust) | Emily Blumenthal & Rafael de la Vega

• Emily Blumenthal • Season 1

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A single on-field embarrassment became the spark for Salt Athletic—Rafael de la Vega’s patented cleat bag designed for the athlete who uses it and the parent who buys it. In this episode, Rafael shares how early missteps with PR, broad targeting, and hype burned cash, and how a hard pivot—economics first, accelerator support, and factory access in Mexico and India—turned the company around. A near-dead runway led to a bold performance-ad strategy that paid for itself, and a key insight reshaped everything: the user is the player, but the buyer is the parent.

Rafael breaks down how Salt built a real brand system—from a clean, universal name to signature design cues like integrated handles and magnetic closures—and why D2C traction, league partnerships, and Nike shoebox activations beat vanity press. We dig into the realities of specialty retail vs. big-box marketplaces, drop-ship margins, and protecting price integrity while expanding into adjacent sports.

👤 Our Guest:
 Rafael de la Vega is the founder and CEO of Salt Athletic, the patented cleat-bag brand redefining how athletes carry their gear. With a focus on design language, manufacturing partnerships, and clear economics, he has turned a niche frustration into a fast-growing sports-accessory category.

✨ 3 Takeaways:
 • Solve for the user, sell to the buyer — Athletes want performance and style; parents want hygiene and durability.
 • Math beats hype — Unit economics, targeting, and calibrated ads drive growth, not PR.
 • Think in systems, not SKUs — Patents, naming, design cues, and channel strategy build lasting brands.

🔖 Hashtags:
 #HandbagDesigner101 #SaltAthletic #SportsInnovation #ConsumerGoods #BrandBuilding #PatentedDesign #D2CStrategy #AthleteGear #FoundersJourney #ProductMarketFit #SportsAccessories #Entrepreneurship #FashionPodcast

Host Emily Blumenthal is a handbag industry expert, author of Handbag Designer 101, and founder of The Handbag Awards. Known as the “Handbag Fairy Godmother,” Emily also teaches entrepreneurship at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is dedicated to celebrating creativity, craftsmanship, and the art of building iconic handbag brands.

Find Handbag Designer 101 Merch, HBD101 Masterclass, one-on-one sessions, and opportunities to book Emily Blumenthal as a

Youtube: / Handbagdesigner101-ihda | Instagram:/ Handbagdesigner

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SPEAKER_00:

I think it's it's the perspective from the consumer of a business. And then you see what the business is doing outward facing, oh, that's what I need to do without understanding why they're doing it, the the intentionality, all the other things on the other side of the curtain that's going on. And so, yes, that is precisely what happened. So I I thought I was the man at 18. By 19, I was like, man, I'm probably the worst person who ever tried entrepreneurship.

SPEAKER_01:

Were you depressed moving back?

SPEAKER_00:

I was. I was depressed, but I was also relieved. Because I was pretending to be somebody that I had not built yet.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep.

SPEAKER_00:

And so that pressure came down. And I was like, okay, I get to.

SPEAKER_01:

Hi, and welcome to Handbag Designer 101 the podcast with your host, Emily Blumenthal, handbag industry expert, and uh handbag fairy godmother. Each week we uncover the stories behind the handbags we love from the iconic brands and top designers, the creativity, craftsmanship, and culture that define the handbag world. Whether you're a designer, collector, or simply passionate about handbags, this is your front row seat to it all. Okay, welcome, Rafael de la Vega.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, thank you.

SPEAKER_01:

Of Salt Athletic, co-founder and CEO of Salt Athletic. Welcome to Handike Designer 101, the podcast. Very excited to have you.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you very much. Very excited to be here. And I'll throw in something. The full name is actually Rafael Antonio Enrique de la Vega Sanchez de losada. Because that's how we do things back home.

SPEAKER_01:

So I mean, if you're gonna have a last name, you might as well have a last name, right? Just keep going. Just keep going, right? Also, I think that primes you as a child to have a strong memory. Because you need to, that's like a lot of letters to know how to spell at a young age, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And a lot of names. And each name is one of the ancestors. And so you got told, oh, here's what great-grandpa did and what his dad did, and that's why you're named this.

SPEAKER_01:

But doesn't that teach you a level of respect too? I think when you grow up knowing that, it's almost like dealing from people from the south in the US, because everything is ma'am, please. I think when you grow up having that many names, you treat things with a different level of respect, I believe, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And and I think also identity. Like the things that people did before help shape your identity and your sense of direction and purpose to a degree.

SPEAKER_01:

So I was told once, and if anybody's listened to my 100 plus episodes, they've heard me say this that I have been told that one way or another we end up replicating the life pattern of our parents andor ancestors. So, did you have anybody in your past who was entrepreneurial or someone who was very forthright in forging their own path, let alone within sports, or was very much like my beat of my own drum?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. So both of my grandparents.

SPEAKER_01:

There you go.

SPEAKER_00:

One of them started in resources and and built a company there. And the other one, the De La Vega grandfather, he was born and had to sell soap as a child to survive on the streets of La Paz and built a whole accounting practice and worked his way through in a in a very difficult society to do so. So though those were stories that I heard as a kid and stories that inspired me growing up to say, okay, this is what I'm made of, I guess, and uh ended up replicating it myself.

SPEAKER_01:

See, hustle is either in you or it isn't. I just think it's not something you can teach because that hunger or that inability to sit still is something that because you were telling me right before that you had gone to school on and off for entrepreneurship. Because as an entrepreneur, which it's like calling yourself a DJ, anybody could be an entrepreneur, you know what I mean? But are you a DJ too?

SPEAKER_00:

No, okay.

SPEAKER_01:

I just feel like I'd ask anybody can be. But it's really one of those things that anybody could do it. So to give yourself that name really in the bigger picture doesn't really mean anything because anybody could be an entrepreneur. But do you need school for it? Not necessarily, but are there things you can learn? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And I think the differences, because anybody could call themselves an entrepreneur. Yeah. Those who are entrepreneurs versus those who aren't are those who believe what they say about themselves ahead of what others say about themselves. Right. And so if your your self-designation of entrepreneur is bigger than the people that said, Oh, you're nobody, then you are an entrepreneur, and over time you're gonna prove it 100%.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Right. So we saw that on paper, you may or may not have graduated two years ago, which makes you very young in some capacity. We won't go there. It's fine. You have a full facial hair, so that means you're old enough to grow a beard. So you're obviously old in some capacity. How did because you were saying that you were trying to basically decrypt what kind of company Salt Athletic is. So did you play soccer? I assume you did.

SPEAKER_00:

I did, absolutely. So the company started out of my personal need for this product.

SPEAKER_01:

That's usually how those things happen.

SPEAKER_00:

And so, but I wasn't just the soccer player that wanted to be good. I was swagged out. I had the pink cleats, the mohawk, the different socks. It was it for me, form and function has always had to go together. And so when I first had this need, I went and made used duct tape baking soda fabric in my soccer bag and solved the problem for myself. And I was in a high school entrepreneurship class where they went through how to build a product or a business and the problem solution to product market fit process. And that problem identification alerted me to the fact that, hey, there's a lot of people that probably have this problem and it's scalable.

SPEAKER_01:

It's something that's the problem to be clear.

SPEAKER_00:

Is that you're my cleats were stinking up my life. And I'll tell you the exact day that that became apparent and something that I needed to solve for myself was the biggest game of my career. I was 16 playing against FC Dallas U-17s, and they were the team to beat. Stepped on the field, and I smelled my jersey. Everything was perfect, and I smelled my jersey, and it threw me off emotionally right before it kickoff. And so at that point, I was determined to fix that, fixed it for myself, went to this class, and then thought, okay, we can make a product out of this. And went through high school, got into, believe it or not, NYU, poly. That's where I was gonna go right out of high school.

SPEAKER_01:

And I thought too much money, you would have wasted your time. Go ahead. No disrespect to anybody who went there, but at this point, I'm sorry, it's a hundred grand a year at this point. Yes, it is a hundred grand a year. That's four hundred thousand. And unless you're guaranteed that ROI for your business in the first four years, I just I have lots of thoughts on college. Sorry, back to you.

SPEAKER_00:

It was it was 60 back then. So yeah, this this is back in 2014, by the way.

SPEAKER_01:

60 plus though.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, 60 plus. And I thought, okay, I could go to school or I could build this thing and be a millionaire at 18. Easy, easy decision, no-brainer.

SPEAKER_01:

Launching a brand overnight within two years, millionaire, obviously, go 100%.

SPEAKER_00:

And so I I went for it, developed, I took a gap year, developed the technology, patented it just through researching and reading patents and and a utility patent. Utility patent, yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

And right when we were filing that patent, the material science experts that were writing about this were saying, hey, the best combination to deal with this problem of stink and athletic stink was probably an adsorption agent and a biocidal agent, which is exactly what we were filing at that moment. And so that's the patent that has been the uh the technical underpinning to the brand.

SPEAKER_01:

And do you have a design patent to go with it so it's used within the scope of the bag?

SPEAKER_00:

So we have a utility patent for all bags for the combination of this for all bags. We don't have design patents at this point.

SPEAKER_01:

So that's something a lot of money. It's a lot of money, especially when your bags are probably not going to be the same today as they will be in two years.

SPEAKER_00:

And when you're really out in the world competing, because we've seen some people try to knock off what we're doing. You look into it, it's somebody drop shipping a Chinese product that you could send them a cease and desist, they'll stop that store, pop up the next one. And so the real advantage there is just having built the brand that we built. But digressing back to that part of the story, I had figured out how to do the product. It worked. And I thought, okay, this is gonna be easy. I'm gonna now move to New York. I moved to Brooklyn, met some of course, Brooklyn.

SPEAKER_01:

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SPEAKER_00:

It's and New York, of all the cities in the US, reminds me the most of home. It's because La Paz is so busy, hustle and bustle, all that stuff. The second I landed in New York, I was like, ah, yes, this is familiar. I was coming from Oklahoma, believe it or not, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Different pace of life.

SPEAKER_01:

So your family went from Bolivia to Oklahoma.

SPEAKER_00:

That's right.

SPEAKER_01:

That make were they doctors?

SPEAKER_00:

No, my dad was a minister. And so we moved here on a religious workers' visa.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep. Okay. That was my next guess. Okay. Praise Jesus. Okay. Hey, if Jesus can take you places, let's look, Jesus. I'm here for it.

SPEAKER_00:

Go. Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm here. Bring it.

SPEAKER_00:

So and that version of the company failed miserably. We did everything wrong, undercapitalized, uh, started wasting money on things that made us feel and look important that didn't drive business anymore.

SPEAKER_01:

So overhead, did you have over? Did you get you get not so overhead, overdeveloping, over-designing?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01:

That money on publicists and PR.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. Yep. And Twitter accounts to promote us before we even had a product.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep. It's the smoke in the mirrors. And it's it's one of the things I try to beat in to people that nothing should be outsourced. You need to do the grind yourself. You need to understand how to do every single thing within your company before you start having people do it for you. Because number one, that five grand minimum a month that it's going to charge you, you'll never know what you're spending that money on. Number two, you won't understand what they're doing. And number three, as a result of you not knowing, you can't even hold them accountable, let alone say you did nothing. I want my money back. You got no string on that. But it's one of the costs of doing business and might as well do that early than do that late. So you blew through 20 grand, I assume, at a minimum, and then said, Oh shit, I gotta go home.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, precisely. Absolutely. And it was, I think it's it's the perspective from the consumer of a business. And then you see what the business is doing outward facing, oh, that's what I need to do without understanding why they're doing it, the the intentionality, all the other things on the other side of the curtain that's going on. And so, yes, that is precisely what happened. So I I thought I was the man at 18. By 19, I was like, Man, I'm probably the worst person who ever tried entrepreneurship.

SPEAKER_01:

Were you depressed moving back?

SPEAKER_00:

I was. I was depressed, but I was also relieved because I was pretending to be somebody that I had not built yet.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep.

SPEAKER_00:

And so that pressure came down.

SPEAKER_01:

And I was like, okay, I get to but it's so good that you had that happen at that age, at that time. And the crazy thing is that I think what you went through was pretty standard. It's kind of like the cost of doing business learning curve of ego, and I have a business, I'm a hustler, I'm a pimp. Look at me, you guys all suck. You can't do what I do. I know, you don't. And then you're like, oh damn, I better leave before people don't know I'm not here. So, like, I'm getting on a plane, I'm not telling anybody, I'm just leaving, and I'll be back when I need to be, and when I know what I'm doing next. But that's good.

SPEAKER_00:

All my best suits in the apartment in Brooklyn, and by the time I came back, it was all gone. I'll like all my stuff was gone. So I was like, okay.

SPEAKER_01:

You didn't need them anyway, just stuff.

SPEAKER_00:

Just stuff. True that.

SPEAKER_01:

Just stuff, just stuff. Wow. So, okay, and then you decided to go back to school. Like, okay, maybe I should go.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And I come from a family that's very academically inclined. And so when I told my family, I'm gonna start a business, I'm not gonna go to school because I'm smarter than you, and your opinion is antiquated. I'm here with the with the modern times. There was so much pressure on me. So much pressure. You're so you're ruining your life, blah, blah, blah. Yep. And so that pressure, I I cave, I caved, and I'm glad I did. First, I'm glad I took it on and said, No, no, no, you're not gonna define me. I'm gonna define me. And then, oh, you were right. I should probably go learn some stuff. I went to school and tried to relaunch again via Kickstarter with barely any money because I said, Hey, we have a product, there's a need for this product. We started it for soccer players. Now we're just gonna do a shoebag for active people, so we have this enormous market, right? And that went nowhere, but I did get to go on NBC and go on and talk and in a segment called Your Business, uh, there at 30 Rock, and went in, did the whole thing, talked. I was like, ha ha ha, yes, I'm here now. Again, that went nowhere. A lot of things that looked and felt like you were important, or looked and felt like you were going somewhere, but you weren't actually going anywhere. And so then I really just went back to school to study economics.

SPEAKER_01:

But you know, everything you're doing right now is a case study. It is 100% entrepreneurship 101, defining your customer and overextending who your customer is, trying to be everything to everyone, which it's impossible if you want to make money, right? You have to be laser focused on who this customer is, what their needs are from an ethnographic perspective. What do they eat? What do they sleep? What do they drive? How, what are their needs? And being very clear, is it he, she, it, they? Where do you stand? What do like how often do they shop? And I think, like, you know, we'll get to it. But what you said right now, that you have the pleasure of interviewing 11-year-old boys who play soccer, like all the way going full circle. Again, this is the life of running a small business, let alone running a handbag brand, that anybody who starts seems to think that they're splitting the atom and that they're creating a product that's for everyone all the time. And what I tell people is that there's no such thing as a day-to-night bag. It does not exist. Nobody wants their day bag tonight, no matter how many ways you want to slice it. What you wear at night is not what you want to look at during the day, and vice versa. So to say that we're creating anti-stink technology for everyone, not everyone needs it, or not everyone is willing to pay a premium for it to compensate for the money you spent on the patent. So it's like you gotta go through all these steps to get to, okay. And it's funny because I bet you were probably at a moment after being on NBC that you're like, yeah, I'm here. And then you realize, okay, press doesn't really warrant any ROI number one, even though I went there and got my suit and made sure and I did it wasn't shiny and everything. But also to think that have I been dragging this out for so long? What if nobody wants this anymore? What if everybody's heard it? I can't go back to the same person over and over and over. And you know, there's this level of shame slash, should I keep this going? And I might as well just go be a student. Maybe I'll go back and look at that again. Like, are all these correct to assume?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Let's look at what openings are at JP Morgan right now.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. Like, oh, wouldn't it be nice to get a massive paycheck and some health insurance just so I could like day job? It's funny how day jobbing looks sexy after going through all this.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, absolutely. And I started to go down that path again, and I will say my academic passion is economics because ultimately everything I'm building, I'm building towards the development of my country back home. Like right now, we're in this industry learning entrepreneurship, learning consumer, consumer psychology, all of these things, but these this is all going towards that direction. And so I went to study economics. I looked at what I really wanted to accomplish and said, hey, the reason this didn't work out in the past wasn't because there wasn't a market or we didn't have a product or solution that was compelling. It's because we were terrible at business. And uh that's something we can fix. That's something we could we and so back at school the second time, and I go to apply to an accelerator program called Mass Challenge. And at that time, I think they were like the third most prestigious accelerator. It was YC, then 500 startups, then Mass Challenge. And uh I got into the next round, which was the first time I ever had to do a pitch. And so I researched. I now I had some sense of if I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna build a knowledge base with the resources at hand so I could do it well, or at least at a baseline level. Researched how to pitch, what the structure of a pitch was. I go in there, I give the best pitch I could. 750 companies applied, 250 got to actually go and present. I was one of those 250, and I give my pitch. I was I was going in, I was very nervous, and I asked the person that was bringing me in to give the pitch, are they nice? And she goes, They're really nice, don't worry about it. Okay, awesome. Give my pitch as soon as I'm done. One of the guys goes like this here's why what you just said on your market slide is stupid. Just goes in, lays into me why I had no idea what I was talking about, and so I left that, got on the Uber back to the hotel. It's like I flew out here for nothing. Yep. And turns out I got in, and I was one of the 69 companies that actually made it into the program, and that's where I learned so much about what's been successful at SALT. Connected with all the mentors, people that have built companies, people that could speak directly to where I was at at that point, why things. Hadn't worked out in the past. Connections with factories, which in in the handbag world and all the cut and sew world, it's getting the factory is maybe 60% of the difficulty of getting going.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep. And is the factory in Bolivia?

SPEAKER_00:

The first factory was in Mexico. And then and now we're in India and in Mexico.

SPEAKER_01:

So no Bolivia.

SPEAKER_00:

No Bolivia. The factory in Bolivia that did all the cut and sew and all the fashion stuff for Ralph Lauren was a good friend of my family's, and he got kicked out of the country right around the time my family was getting kicked out of the country. And he's the person I reached out to when it took us. I'd been spending about two years trying to find a factory. 2018, 2019. Yeah. Everybody was booked. Fully booked. And so I reached out to him. I asked him if he could help us find somebody. And he was good friends with my grandfather, and he connected me with a gentleman down in Guadalajara in Mexico who has all the connections.

SPEAKER_01:

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SPEAKER_00:

So we found an advisor in Guadalajara.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Who, by the way, connected us with somebody at FIT. Do you know Margaret Bishop?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh, yes.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. Yes. We met with her recently. And so he connected us with her. And he's got all the connections with factories because he did all of the engineering for a lot of these. And he got us in with a pant factory at the end of COVID to get our first production run done. We got that in, had no idea how to sell it. We were like, we're gonna partner with professional soccer teams for easy money. Couldn't sell that. So we were running out of money. And we didn't have enough to pay the next month. This is December of 2021. And I bring in a marketing agency that specialized on ads.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00:

And I told them on Facebook ads. And so we had an arrangement where I'd pay them at the end of the month. They'd work for a month and I'd pay them at the end of the month. But what they didn't know is I was betting on them selling enough product during the month for us to be able to pay them. And we had I had a big discussion with I've had two co-founders that I I worked with throughout all of this. And one of them, when he realized what what we were doing, he said, What did you do? We're not gonna bleed to death slowly. We're either gonna succeed or we're gonna go out with a bang. Those are our options right now.

SPEAKER_01:

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_00:

And it worked out, it was a success. We stole enough to be able to cover our expenses and continue the path at that point, compete for a grant here in Colorado at the University of Colorado, where I'd been a student, win that grant. So you had to go through an accelerator program, and you got 50,000 if you won. And so we competed for it, won that grant, took that 50,000, took all the learnings we had until that point, which was we don't actually sell to swagged out soccer players, we sell to their moms, but we need them to think it's cool. So we need to communicate with both of them.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow, and your co-founders have been the same the whole time?

SPEAKER_00:

They have been the same the whole time.

SPEAKER_01:

So and did they go to school with you when you were going through that, or you're like, hey guys, I'll just enroll and you just come with me.

SPEAKER_00:

So one of them, Jackson, was in that high school entrepreneurship class with me at the very beginning.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

And then he went on and did an engineering degree, worked in in defense for a while, after that jump came back. The other one I've known since I was born, he's my cousin. And so Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Is he on the Del Vega side?

SPEAKER_00:

He's on the other side, on the Sanchez Hill side side.

SPEAKER_01:

So Okay. So he can't even roll with the same last name at this point.

SPEAKER_00:

Not at this point, but you never know.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh my god. So where and where did the name Salt Athletic come from?

SPEAKER_00:

So another person that was in that high school entrepreneurship class, believe it or not, that's who we contacted the first two times that we tried was under the name Evo. So Evo Athletics was my I'm not good at coming up with names for stuff. That's not my thing. And right when we were about to do the third iteration of this business, which is the one we're on right now, we reached out to him because he was working at a company that just started a branding studio called a small studio.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Out in Seattle. And he said, We're just getting started. We could do a deal for you, get a brand done for developed for you guys. And so when we went there, my request to them was I love what Apple has done. Taken something that everybody has a relationship to and rebranded it. Ten out of ten, A plus for you guys would be if you could do the same for us.

SPEAKER_01:

So make us like Apple.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, that tracks. Good for you. That was the aspiration. If you're gonna shoot, shoot big, I am here for that. I totally, totally respect that. So they're the ones who, in conclusion, who came up with the name.

SPEAKER_00:

They came up with the name. Salt has all these connotations. It's clean, it's a preserving agent, it's something that everybody has a relationship to. And so that's where that that name came from.

SPEAKER_01:

And where is salt at right now in terms of D2C? Are you in retail? What are the hopes, wishes, and dreams for Salt Athletic?

SPEAKER_00:

So right now we are we're the number one cleat bag in the US, number one golf shoe bag as well. Okay. So we're our D2C channels are moving and grooving. We've been growing consistently, and we're at a point where we've got partnerships with the biggest leagues. Our product is sold at the Nike shoe box at ECNL events. It's the only branded item that is sold at the Nike pop-up. And now we're looking at expanding into other markets that are like soccer in the sense that the form and function really matters. How you look while you're doing it is a big a big concern. And we're looking at the volleyball, running, gym, and the idea was you've expanded to anywhere uh shoe stink. Exactly. And beyond that, building a brand that's at the intersection of technology, style, and sport. And right now, the technological innovation is really around the hygienic innovations. Stink, bacteria, there's plenty to do there. The design element of it is one of the things that we're focusing on very heavily in this next year and in this next season. Because I took forever to design this bag, super intentional in everything, the magnetic closure, the handle, the integrated handle, the angles. It's all one, it's all integrated. And so this year we've codified the design language. What is salt? What isn't salt?

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

This is how we're going to present ourselves to the world. And now it's it's about finding the next group of talent that can come in and carry that vision forward. So we we've raised some investment, we've expanded into retail in various soccer specialty stores, and now we're we're looking at we're deciding whether it makes sense to focus on retail and and exporting goods. Or we've had Walmart and Target come after come come up to us and say, Hey, we we're interested, we can carry your stuff on our sites and then see where we could go from there.

SPEAKER_01:

That's drop ship, though.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's a whole other conversation with the return on investment for how that works. Because for some brands it's great, and other brands it's an inventory suck. So it could go either way, depending on where you're at. This is all really exciting stuff though, Rafael.

SPEAKER_00:

So now we're we're at a point where we even had a movie come up to us. They're working with some A-list soccer talent, and they wanted to get some product placement in the movie and some brand and for us to outfit some of the athletes that are going to be in the movie. And so we're we're at a point where everything that I had originally wanted to accomplish is pretty much done. The original thing was let's make the coolest cleat bag in soccer and let's take over the sport. Let's make sure that this is a highly desirable item. And we've accomplished that at this point. We always hear, and this is it's not great for the people that it happens to because it these bags often get stolen in locker rooms, but it speaks to the desirability within the sport and and what the bag symbolizes. And that was one thing to this day. I don't have very clear how you manage to make a product cool or assign a level of social value or psychological value beyond the functional.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

And it's something that we've managed to pull off with with this one. That was one of the things I I really wanted to do from the start.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

And now we're we've raised money and we have a board of directors and and we have staff, oh boy, this this was not in the that was not in the bingo card for how quickly that, yep, the evolution.

SPEAKER_01:

This is really cool. I'm so excited we were able to get you on here and for you to speak about the journey of Salt Athletic in terms of inception to essentially foot. You know? How can we find you, follow you, get our hands on salt athletic bags and gear and so for it?

SPEAKER_00:

So you can find us at saltathletic.com. That's our website. That's where we have all of our all of our products, everything that is salt, you can find there. And you can follow us at salt.athletic on Instagram and on TikTok. And on TikTok, you might see me go out there, interview kids, do challenges, dance. You might see me dance. You never know. So those are the three places where where you could connect with us that that will be that you'll find us.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh my goodness. Raphael, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to rate and review and follow us on every single platform at handbagdesigner. Thanks so much. See you next time.

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Emily Blumenthal

Host