people or myself for that matter as I was the only one playing it. Design was the canvas on which to create the art, story, passion, love and whatever it was. Design became the more important factor in my life. I continued growing up and playing with computers. I started building companies at 14. Out of necessity there wasn’t a computer lab at my high school. I found away to get a bundle of computers and then sold it in bulk to my school. I did that with other schools too. That was better than pocket money for my parents. I continued to build things so I started a digital agency in college. I then worked for a couple of really big ones and serviced some pretty cool clients. We worked on cool projects like creating a F1 Racing Team for Richard Branson. A lot of neat things and a great place to design at scale. You couldn’t afford to make a lot of mistakes. If your client is Nike, they expect projects to work globally and to be perfect at launch. You also have to think 360 when you’re designing. What does the website look like, social, apps and retail environments. That fluidity in thinking became innate to the way that I approach problems. I’m really not limited to a particular kind of channel or particular type of business. From there, I have gone onto build a number of companies in apparel, in software and now in skincare. AM: What perfect storm came together that brought yourself, Brian Lee and Kobe Brant together to create Art of Sport? MM: I had just finished up a business. Brian was stepping down from Honest Company and he has had an amazing career as he started Legal Zoom and went onto build Honest Company. We both found ourselves in LA at an opportune time where we were open to new ideas. I have a background as an athlete as I played sports growing up and I was a rower in college. I experienced first hand the problems with my skin (sunburns, dandruff, pain in my
joints, dry skin from showering a lot) and it never dawned on me as much as I felt the brands that I chose – the technical clothes that I chose to wear that was a pain point to me and I needed the best. I also needed the best when it came to nutrition and what I put into my body. There wasn’t a lot of innovation, questionable chemicals were used and there weren’t any exciting inclusions that you typically see in food and in beverage. We thought, hang on a second, how had no one touched application in the way that Nike has done for Apparel or that Gatorade has done for food. So he and I fell in love with that concept and it really spoke to both of us and he and I saw an interesting path to building awareness and community among athletes and really build an authentic player in the space. It started with the science piece and we wanted to educate ourselves on what is possible in the skincare space and what can we do that’s different out there. We brought on board the Chief Sci ence and Innovation Director from P&G. He had a ton of experience over the years. We also brought the Science Officer from Honest Co who is very focused on taking things out of things. So the combination of him and her looking at it from both lenses on how we can innovate and also how we can be clean and better for you, drove our early innovation. We then decided as a sports brand, that we should be bringing athletes into the business – deeply into the business and embedding them from day 1. That’s where we got to before door knocking and Kobe Bryant opened the door. AM: Not a bad person to start with. MM: We were just going from door to door and he was like the last door we knocked on ha! No, he was the first door that we knocked on and he has as an athlete, the ability to understand
