Eric Girouard: Building BRUNT Workwear Into a $300M+ Challenger Brand

Eric Girouard, Founder & CEO of BRUNT Workwear, joins LegendsNLeaders to share how he built one of the fastest-growing brands in workwear by focusing on a customer he believed legacy companies had overlooked: America’s tradespeople.Growing up in a blue-collar household, Eric started roofing at 14 and running a landscaping business at 15 before eventually building a career in e-commerce and footwear. Years later, conversations with his childhood friends in the trades sparked the idea for BRUNT—a modern workwear company built around direct feedback from the people actually wearing its products.In this conversation, Eric breaks down the journey from leaving his job and launching BRUNT in 2020 to scaling the company across work boots, apparel, direct-to-consumer, wholesale, and physical retail. We discuss product development, community-driven branding, customer obsession, competing against heritage companies, and why listening to workers instead of industry insiders became one of BRUNT’s biggest advantages.Eric also shares the lessons behind building a brand that has, since recording this episode, grown to hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, the mistakes and failures along the way, and what it takes to turn an underserved customer base into a powerful community and category-defining business.