Thursday afternoon we filled a matcha bar in Cologne for erlich's 10th birthday. Friends of the brand, family members, the old team and a surprising number of actual customers who just wanted to be there.

We started to run small micro-community events this year. Nothing fancy, just getting people in a room together to do something fun, meaningful or both. This one happened to land on the 10-year birthday mark, which felt about right.

And just the best feeling was that people actually showed up. A few of the women from our community were also at our very first event, a riso print workshop, and they came back again. One was riding her bike for close to two hours in the middle of another heatwave in germany (glad she’s alright!). For an underwear brand's birthday party. That still does something to me when I think about it.

The brand is now 10 years old. Blows my mind. I've owned my piece of it for about two and a half years. So for most of its life, I wasn't even in the building.

Founders get to tell the good story. The garage, the first order from a stranger, the “almost didn’t make it” moment they can tell in various variations like i do when i talk about a good adventure story from my backpacking years. I didn't get any of that and that’s cool. I bought into something that was already seven or eight years old and inherited the whole thing, history and all.

That's a weird feeling. You're suddenly responsible for something whose best parts were built by other people, before you had any say. And you can't really take credit for the stuff that made you want it in the first place.

So the job was never really about putting my stamp on it. Most of it was figuring out what I absolutely should not touch, and being honest that the best of erlich had nothing to do with me.

Top of that list: the relationship erlich has with its community. It sits on this very real openness, about feminism, sustainability and actually caring about other people and our society. All of it was here before me. My job was mostly to not screw it up. Ha, hard enough!

And I found out fast how fragile that kind of thing is, because early on I had to fight for it.

Just before we bought the brand back, it got political and nasty. A typical sideeffect of high commercial pressure. I remember sitting alone in a hotel room in Cologne, phone going off, taking these angry, worked-up calls. At some point it went past explaining a direction and descicion. I was standing in front of this brand and the people behind it, arms out, saying you don't get to touch this. At least not the heart and soul of it.

Anyone who thinks something like that is easy to copy, or that you never have to defend it, has just never been in that room. It's a fragile, precious thing, especially in the beginning. And it can be destroyed super easily.

When a corporate swallows a small love brand like erlich textil, it's not enough to just wave your values around. You've got to actually hold the line on them, and take some real punches doing it. And stay clear-headed about the business at the same time, about what's actually working and what has to go. Both things at once. Always, it never stops and it can turn you into a shizophrenic person at times.

It's also why I started cutting things. I went through every channel we ran and killed a few of them. Affiliate setups that looked nice in a report but did nothing for the brand or the P&L. Money we were burning on sponsored magazine sale events, fees which never got renegotiated, creator partnerships which didn’t move the needle on any number. And a pile of smaller stuff that mostly just kept everyone busy.

That's an uncomfortable thing to do when the brand isn't yours by birth, sitting across from people who've been here way longer than you, explaining why you're pulling the plug on their thing. You really can't tell in the moment if you're fixing it or wrecking it. Turns out it can be both. You get used to it.

One line I won't cross, whatever the spreadsheet says: we show real humans and real bodies. There are tons of people who want to sell you their AI solutions for UGC or production. Don't want it. I looove AI for Business Intelligence, marketing operations and pretty much everything else but the day we show artificial people in ads is the day I've lost the plot. The brand is called “erlich” for a reason.

Which brings me back to that room in Cologne. People don't drive two hours for the birthday of a brand they just occasionally buy from. They came back because of something built long before me, and something we're finally putting real weight behind.

And that night pretty much made up my mind about where this goes. The real, in-person side is going to matter more and more for us. So we're doing a lot more of it. The energy in that room told me there's way more in this brand than we've tapped so far.

I still can't give you a clean label for what I am here. "Custodian" sounds way too passive for someone who sat in that hotel room. "Founder" would be a lie. Most days I'm somewhere in the middle and not sure I'm getting the balance right. Maybe I hold the inherited stuff too tightly. Maybe I should be breaking more of it. Still figuring it out.

If you've ever taken over something you didn't start, a team, a company, a role that had a whole life before you walked in, I'd really like to hear how you dealt with it. Did you cling on too hard? Change too much, too fast? Ever had to defend the thing to people who were quietly hoping it would fail?

Hit reply, tell me, trying to read it all between my kids throwing their organic muesli at me.

Alright everyone, have a great day, don’t let them grind you down,

Philipp

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