BYLT is Building a New Men’s Essentials Brand

BYLT Basics’ founder story starts like many other digitally native brands: Eric Mear had no fashion industry background but was disenchanted with the T-shirts available in the market, so he set out to find an alternative.

“He essentially lived in black T-shirts and just hated the fact that they fell apart after multiple washes,” said chief marketing officer Davide Mattucci. “Literally knowing nothing about the apparel industry, he went to a trade show and found a material that he thought was new and interesting for T-shirts, which all the vendors he spoke to cautioned him was too heavy. But he built it anyway, and lo and behold, we had our very first product, the Drop-Cut Lux.”

That was in 2016, and that shirt, which is still the brand’s hero product and features four-way stretch, wrinkle resistance, a slim fit and a drop-cut hem, became the launching point for the Irvine, Calif.-based brand.

He soon expanded into pants, followed by layering pieces and realized he was building a successful company.

“The business was on this pretty wild trajectory,” Mattucci said. “They did a deal with Mike Tyson for a fight sponsorship against Jake Paul, and that catapulted them to another level.”

Mear realized it was time to bring some apparel industry veterans on board to help capitalize on this growth opportunity. So he hired Jared Koenig, formerly with Oakley, to become chief operating officer and president; Joe Trachta, a veteran footwear and apparel product developer for Oakley and TravisMathew, who serves as senior vice president of product; Chris Taylor, formerly with Boardriders, as chief financial officer, and Mattucci, whose background included Adidas, Under Armour and Columbia Sportswear.

Together, the management team set out to realign BYLT, pronounced built, to be “less of a DTC company that sells product online to truly become a brand,” Mattucci explained.

So far, so good. Although he declined to provide a volume figure, he said that over the past four years the company has achieved strong year-over-year growth with a 27 percent compounded annual growth rate. It has expanded into a number of categories including polos and button-down shirts, outerwear, joggers, shorts, swimwear, underwear, footwear and accessories. It has also branched out into womenswear and kidswear.

Mattucci said that while BYLT does offer activewear, “we lean much more on the essentials side. We build active because it serves the needs of our consumers, not because we’re aspiring to be Nike or Under Armour or Alo. That’s an even more competitively crowded space than essentials. But our differentiator is taking really classic, simple silhouettes, and modernizing them through fabric and construction innovation. That’s been our recipe for success.”

He pointed to the T-shirt, a ubiquitous product, but by offering it in the proprietary Lux fabric with a scalloped bottom and small construction details around the collar, “all of a sudden, it’s a different, modern twist on a T-shirt. We like to call it: disrupting the classics.”

In addition to the Drop-Cut Lux T-shirt, which retails for $40, other popular items include the Everyday pant, a classic chino in a heavier weight stretch fabric that sells for $98 to $128.

Menswear still represents around 90 percent of the business but Mattucci believes womenswear, which was launched two years ago, has a lot of potential.

“We are predominantly a men’s brand today, but 40 percent of our average daily purchases are from women, and that number jumps all the way up to 75 or 80 percent come [fourth quarter] and holiday. So there’s clearly something she likes about what we’re doing for her guy. What can we do for her? I think we’re getting very, very close to cracking that code.”

BYLT will relaunch its women’s collection this fall with a reset of its basics collection and then next year will “take a bit more of a step forward in terms of the breadth and depth of that assortment.”

The brand is still heavily an online business, but it has begun moving aggressively into adding physical stores. “At the end of 2025, we had 13 doors,” Mattucci said. “As of last month, we had 15, and two more are opening over the next three weeks. By the end of this year, we’ll be at a store count of 22 with a road map to get to 60 in the next four years.”

There are locations in Irvine, San Jose, Newport Beach and other California cities, as well as Scottsdale, Denver, Boca Raton, Fla., Boston, Las Vegas, King of Prussia, Pa., Houston and Salt Lake City, Utah. The majority are in malls, but new locations will be opening in high-traffic urban areas such as New York City and Chicago, where a store on Walton Street will be added.

“We believe deeply in brick-and-mortar retail,” he said. “COVID created this massive e-commerce boom, which we attribute a lot of our early success to. But I would argue the digital backlash has begun, and people want to go back out into the world, and they want to touch and feel brands.”

So BYLT pores through its digital data to determine the markets where it expects to be most successful and sets up shop. But Mattucci said the strategy is to “test and learn. We crawl, walk, run with every major market that we break into. We don’t like going in, signing a 10-year deal and spending $2 million on opening a store. We want to make sure that the store can pay itself back.” Instead, they sign on for two to three years before doing a full-scale buildout.

“We’re completely bootstrapped — we don’t have any outside investment,” he explained. “So slow, scalable profitability makes much more sense to us than opening 100 doors without really being able to scale and test that model effectively.”

Although the business is almost exclusively in the U.S., the company does have distribution partners in Canada and Australia. Both here and internationally, the target customer is an “active achiever,” defined as a 35-year-old who is healthy and cares about how they look. “It’s not going to be the guy or gal who goes to the grocery store in pajamas,” he said. “They want to look polished and professional, and they also want to be comfortable.”

And while DTC continues to be the brand’s primary strategy, it has also been dipping its toe into the wholesale market.

“We don’t typically like to dive in headlong until we prove things out,” he said. “So we’re going very, very slow in the world of wholesale.”

For just over a year, BYLT has been sold in two Bloomingdale’s stores as it works to determine its path forward. This fall, he’s hoping to expand to around six or eight units. And beyond that, the brand is also exploring the golf market.

The golf category is among the most searched on its site, he said, so the company is working to line up some high-end green grass shops in which to sell its products.

To help get its name out, BYLT has partnered with former NFL star Rob Gronkowski, who connects with the company’s target customer. As the brand grows, it will look to partner with other like-minded celebrities in fields ranging from music and art to acting or the culinary arts. But that’s just part of the bigger picture.

“The first thing we have to start thinking about is not immediate conversion, but long-term brand value,” he said. “It’s about developing the funnel from the top to the bottom, and waiting for consumers, as they become more acquainted with us, to actually come to the site, learn about us and convert on their own without us having to effectively pay for every click, which we’ve historically been doing as a digital-first brand.”