TUMI & ROAM: Charlie Clifford

Charlie Clifford grew up a self-described "scrappy Jersey guy" in a town of 5,000 people, and won his first entrepreneurial prize in sixth grade: a watch, for out-hustling a classmate whose dad rigged the contest by buying magazine subscriptions wholesale for his medical office. After business school at Indiana University, he joined one of the first Peace Corps pilot programs recruiting MBAs — sent to Peru to work with small businesses under a Stanford professor who'd later teach Nike's Phil Knight. He came home with $10,000, invested it in a scrappy import operation selling handcrafted South American leather goods, and in 1975 broke off to start his own company focused on travel bags. He named it TUMI, after a Peruvian ceremonial knife. The brand's real breakthrough came when Clifford shifted from leather to black ballistic nylon — a fabric built for flak jackets — manufactured through a partnership with a small shop in Vidalia, Georgia. Bloomingdale's 59th Street flagship picking up the line put TUMI on the map. A conversation with a longtime retail partner, who told Clifford he had "so much product" he should just open his own stores, led to the "side-by-side" concept and eventually freestanding TUMI locations. By the 2000s, TUMI was the brand road warriors carried through airports worldwide, and it went public in 2012. Clifford left the company in 2004, when the private equity partners who'd taken majority ownership after 9/11 decided to sell. He spent years distributing other people's luggage brands before realizing he wanted control over the product and the story again. In 2017, he and his former TUMI EVP Larry Lein founded ROAM — American-made, hand-assembled, and built around a philosophy that's the opposite of TUMI's black-on-black uniform: total color customization, so no two suitcases look the same. Make sure to check out ROAM at: https://www.roamluggage.com/ And TUMI at: https://www.tumi.com/   Check out my new book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4kRKGTX Watch our mini-doc - Starting Small: The Raw Truth Behind Entrepreneurship and the American Dream: https://youtu.be/eHuq93wIxs0?si=eDB-ycngvWNapRLO Visit Starting Small Media: https://startingsmallmedia.org/ Subscribe to exclusive Starting Small emails: https://startingsmallmedia.org/newsletter-signup   Follow Starting Small: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startingsmallpod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Startingsmallpod/?modal=admin_todo_tour LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/cameronnagle   This episode is brought to you by Panasonic. I just installed their WhisperGreen Select on a recent project, and I've gotta say — it's not what you picture when you think "bathroom fan." Panasonic's been in the ventilation game for decades, and this thing is proof. It's whisper quiet, ENERGY STAR certified, and you can customize it — airflow settings, LED lighting in five different color temperatures, even Wi-Fi and motion sensor add-ons if you want to get the best out of your new fan. It's a small detail in a home that makes a real difference. Make sure to check them out now at us.panasonic.com   Starting Small is powered by Riverside.fm, the AI-powered platform that lets you record, edit, repurpose,and distribute studio-quality content as easily as if you had a crew behind you. Check them out now at https://creators.riverside.com/CameronNagle