Taylor Llewellyn ’04 has found success in a line of functional hoodies — including the topical Quarantine Hoodie.
This past spring, Taylor Llewellyn ’04 was self-isolating with his wife and kids — and juggling a small business with homeschooling — when the idea hit him: Wouldn’t people appreciate a comfortable clothing item in which they could store everything they needed for a pandemic?
“You could shove in your mask, plastic gloves, hand sanitizer, and a kid’s homework assignment you needed to pull out between Zoom meetings,” Llewellyn says. The Quarantine Hoodie was born.
The cheeky shelter-in-place accessory isn’t a one-off for the long-time entrepreneur. It joins a line of luxe but practical hoodies Llewellyn has been creating through his company The_Hoodie since the late fall of 2018. “The original product was the Dad Hoodie,” he says. “I have young children, and some buddies of mine and I were joking about how we’re lugging around these diaper bags with enough supplies to last for weeks.” He started designing a soft, hooded sweatshirt with a mesh lining full of pockets of different sizes to enable fathers to carry everything from diapers to sippy cups — without suffering the sartorial indignity of a diaper bag.
After the product took off, on the strength of Father’s Day and baby shower sales, he started adding hoodies pitched to different consumers: the Mom Hoodie, the Dog Walker Hoodie, the Traveler Hoodie. While each hoodie follows the same design, they are branded and packaged differently to appeal to a variety of different customers.
Growing up outside San Francisco, Llewellyn watched his mom succeed with a catering business and his dad struggle with a newspaper and golf equipment stores. “I saw what entrepreneurial success and entrepreneurial failure looked like,” he says. An education major, he says the liberal arts education prepared him for life as an entrepreneur. “Being in small classes where the focus is on reading, writing, and articulating your thoughts was a great training ground.”
After college, Llewellyn spent a summer on Martha’s Vineyard, where he came up with the idea to launch his first company — an online store called Tucker Blair, which sold preppy needlepoint belts —while earning an MBA at Duke. After that business took off, he tried to go bigger with a kids’ popsicle company called Squeaky Pops, but the business plan melted down. “I realized what I really like is creating these niche single-product businesses that are e-commerce driven, sell direct-to-consumer, and are lean and bootstrapped,” he says.
The_Hoodie is just Llewellyn, operating out of a one-room office near his home outside D.C. and creating his products through a network of contractors and suppliers. Llewellyn invested in a premium product, with high-quality tri-blend fabric and double stitching on the pockets. At the same time, he strove to keep the price below $100 to make it accessible to people looking for a unique gift. In his first year, he sold more than 3,000 hoodies — and Llewellyn hopes to more than triple it this year to exceed 10,000.
Of course, he says, the best outcome would be for his latest product to outlive its usefulness, while Llewellyn works on new ideas such as a Dad Vest he’s releasing this fall and a wearable beach towel for next summer. In the meantime, however, he’s hoping he can at least make social distancing a little more comfortable.
“These are serious times, but sometimes you have to take a deep breath and just laugh,” he says. “If we can deliver a little bit of fun, and also make some people’s lives easier as they’re trying to carry around all of this stuff, then that’s the cherry on top.”