Davie Fogarty: How Adelaide uni dropout turned $500 into $500m
It took plenty of failed businesses for the SA inventor of the Oodie to become an overnight success. Here’s how Davie Fogarty went from uni dropout to one of Australia’s most successful entrepreneurs.
SA Business
Don't miss out on the headlines from SA Business. Followed categories will be added to My News.
He’s amassed a fortune worth half a billion dollars and he hasn’t yet turned 30.
It’s safe to say Adelaide entrepreneur Davie Fogarty knows a thing or two about business.
And now, the founder of the hugely popular wearable blanket the “Oodie”, will be helping other success hungry Aussies realise their business dreams as an investor on the latest season of the Australian version of Shark Tank, coming to Channel 10 this year.
Fogarty, 28, will appear on the show alongside Canadian-Croation billionaire Robert Herjavec, who is also a star investor on the US version of the show, which airs on ABC in the US.
We take a look back at the young businessman’s extraordinary success story.
EARLY YEARS
Fogarty was born in Adelaide in 1994 to Kimberley and James Fogarty, successful entrepreneurs in their own right in the furniture business in South Australia.
He went to Adelaide’s prestigious Mercedes College, graduating in 2012.
According to a biography published by Ernst & Young for their EY Entrepreneur Of The Year awards in 2022, Fogarty got his first taste in business by baking and selling biscuits at school and by 16, was reselling products on eBay.
In an interview for the Ernst & Young awards, Kim Fogarty described her son as “loyal, driven and very curious” while dad James said he would describe him as having two distinct personas.
“There’s the business Davie, which I see as determined, resilient and focused,” Mr Fogarty said.
“Then I see the Davie outside of work. He’s good-natured, he’s got a great sense of humour and he’s quite a humble fella,” he said.
In a video on his own YouTube channel, in which he recounts his bumpy ride to the top Fogarty reveals that his phenomenal success was by no means assured.
He was, by his own admission, “slightly pudgy”, and a “very insecure kid”.
“I was the kid that just went to the beach and just wouldn’t take their shirt off, I would have to swim in my shirt,” he said.
STRUGGLES AT SCHOOL
Fogarty was also far from a star pupil and says that school was difficult “for a very long time”.
“I was told that I was stupid at a very young age, especially through primary school, and I believed it. It was probably exacerbated by my insecurities and I just never tried,” he explained in a video on his YouTube channel.
“Constantly arguing with teachers, constantly getting detentions and everything just felt like it was going downhill,” he said.
Fogarty explained the situation came to a head around Year 10 when, at a parent-teacher night, all five of his teachers conveyed how “incredibly difficult” he was to teach and warned that he was on a sure track to failure.
After the meeting, Fogarty said, his parents made it clear he needed to turn things around.
“I felt a deep feeling of shame at that point,” he said.
“I knew there was something deep within me. I knew that I wasn’t stupid and had a decent amount of intelligence, enough to make a good life for myself.”
THE TURNING POINT
Fogarty explained the turning point came one day when he was scrolling through YouTube and he stumped across several old Nike ads.
“These were so, so exhilarating in every single way,” he said in the YouTube video.
“You would watch them and you would just feel like you could run through a wall. I watched the (Michael) Jordan commercial where he talks about how many game-winning shots that he’s taken and he’s lost.
“After that I started to pick up that all greatness was, was just a willingness to work hard and fail.”
He set himself a plan; Get better grades, get a job, go to university.
He hired a tutor, enrolled in difficult subjects at school and got a job in a warehouse earning about $16 an hour.
Fogarty says he used the money to fuel a new obsession with working out.
“I started to get absolutely obsessed with the gym, which made me feel so much better and was kind of the first lesson that small bits of compounded effort can actually improve over time and just help your mental and physical health.”
“I knew it was working when one year after I decided to change I had a parent-teacher interview- I only had one teacher that was the same as previously.
“He said ‘in my career, I’ve never seen a child turn their life around as much as David has this year’, which really cemented that I was on the right track.”
GOODBYE, UNIVERSITY
Fogarty said he finished school with “pretty good grades” and got into mining engineering at university but soon realised a degree was not for him, and dropped out after the first semester.
“I hated university,” Fogarty explained.
“I only did it because I got told that I could get six figures out of it and it sounded cool and because there is no structure or forced way of turning up, (so) I didn’t rock up at all and ended up failing,” he said.
“I’d say one of the main reasons why I failed university was because I was just so passionate about business and I was constantly launching new things”.
His earliest ventures included selling hats and singlets but Fogarty also began realising his potential to turn social media marketing into money.
HELLO, INSTAGRAM
He started on the platform by taking photos of products in supplement stores, reviewing them, uploading them to Instagram and then selling ads around the content.
“It started off small, make $5 here, $10 here,” he said.
“It started to grow really quickly. I created lots of different verticals of accounts, I created them in workouts, in nutrition, I was cooking recipes and putting those up.
“It probably got to the point where I was making the six figures I wanted from mining engineering just from Instagram, which felt huge compared to having minimum wage just previously”.
Eager to learn more about the fitness industry, Fogarty began working as a personal trainer while continuing to spruik products on Instagram using a network of “burner” phones to manage his many accounts.
“People thought I was a drug dealer,” Fogarty joked.
“I think dad thought I was a drug dealer for a very long time because they would all have different accounts on them.”
NO LONGER ON A ROLL
Fogarty remembers having about $100,000 in the bank when he made a decision that would prove to be his first serious misstep in business.
“It all kind of probably went to my head and things went very, very downhill,” he said.
He took much of the money he had made as a personal trainer and invested it in a Vietnamese roll shop with the goal of building “a huge food franchise”.
“I was really into Vietnamese rolls at that stage. I thought that there could be a big franchise of that, which there now is, it’s called Roll’d in Australia.”
Fogarty started work each day at 5am, picked up his supply of bread rolls and cooked the ingredients for the filling “and then I would just basically work non-stop”.
“I would still do my Instagrams during the day, wash dishes at 5pm and head home and just reset.
“I wasn’t seeing my friends at all. Food businesses are actually really difficult to make work, I was losing money.”
SCAMMED ON INSTAGRAM
While trying to keep his sandwich business afloat, Fogarty continued his work on social media, buying, growing and “flipping” Instagram accounts for a profit.
The strategy, he said, was working “really well” until he tried buying an account for the biggest sum he had ever paid, $40,000.
Things looked fine at first, until Fogarty discovered the account had been hacked and stolen from its original owner, who appealed to Instagram and had it reinstated. In the meantime, the scammer was gone “and I was left with nothing,” Fogarty said.
A ‘VERY DARK PLACE’
The scam cost Fogarty dearly, in more ways than one.
“My Vietnamese roll shop business was pretty much going down the drain and I got into a very, very dark place.”
“I was constantly drinking at that time as well so my family taught me a really good lesson.
“I remember dad put a rock in my shoe and he made me walk down the driveway with the rock in the shoe and it was poking me and hurting me and then he took the rock out of the shoe
“And he said, these mistakes, if you carry them with you they are just going to hurt you.
“Just learn from them and move on.”
A FRESH START
Fogarty heeded his father’s advice. He divested the shop, moved to Melbourne and got a job helping a watch company with their Instagram strategy.
At the same time, he started teaching himself all the skills required to make it in digital marketing and e-commerce; photography, videography, how social media algorithms work, how to set up Facebook and Google ads.
“It was an amazing time, I learned so much. I never gave up on launching my own business.”
After commuting between Melbourne and Adelaide, Fogarty eventually moved home.
“It felt like I was back at square one, I had zero dollars, I was back living with my parents but my mind and the knowledge that I had was just invaluable. All I needed now was a product that was just going to change my life.”
DAVIE’S BIG BUSINESS BREAK
Fogarty had his first big epiphany on YouTube. The next one happened on Facebook, when he came across an article for weighted blankets and read how they could help people “with sensory disorders or insomnia”. He spied a gap in the market “so I decided to commit to it”.
This time, Fogarty was positioned for success.
“I had so many skills from all of those past failures that I could launch the store from scratch, I could launch the Facebook ads, launch the Google ads, I could do everything from scratch.
“So I really didn’t need any money to get it started. I had about $500 at that stage that I saved up from doing wedding and other videography shoots.”
WEIGHTED BLANKETS
Fogarty funded his first shipment of weighted blankets, which he branded Calming Blankets, by taking pre-orders and then watched as sales took off; $200 on the first day, $1000 in the first week, $10,000 in the second month and a staggering $1.5m profit in the first year.
“Not to play favourites but Calming Blankets really was my main focus for a long time because it was so rewarding in more ways than just money,” Fogarty explained in another video on his YouTube channel.
“It was helping a lot of people sleep and improve their quality of life.
“I learned a lot about autism with launching this brand.
“I think one of the most rewarding things was donating a lot of our blankets to the disabled arts program (in Adelaide)”.
Fogarty had finally tasted the business success he had long craved.
And his most iconic product was yet to come.
THE OODIE IS BORN
Kim Fogarty remembers watching as her son sat at the kitchen table, designing the logo for his latest product.
“It was pink,” she said in an interview for Ernst & Young’s EY Entrepreneur Of The Year awards in 2022. “And he’d say ‘what do you think of this, mum? And this font?’”.
“And it’s a very fond memory and I’ve gone ‘Oodie, what’s that?’”
“He said ‘it’s a hoodie with a h’”
“And I was like ‘that is just gold Davie’, turn it to blue and I knew that it would work.”
Fogarty launched the Oodie in 2018 and by 2021 his company, The Davie Group, was reportedly turning over $200m a year.
As The Advertiser’s Cameron England wrote, the oversized hoodies came in a range of playful designs (pizza, garlic bread, avocados, animals) which often tap into the Zeitgeist of popular internet culture and which the company has been able to market successfully through social media platforms such as TikTok.
The company has also done licensing deals with the AFL, Disney and Warner Bros to produce Oodies featuring sporting clubs and popular characters from popular franchise such as Star Wars and Harry Potter.
As news.com.au reported, sales went through the roof during the pandemic, with tens of thousands of Victorians ordering Oodies during the state’s lengthy Covid-19 lockdowns.
However, in March, 2022, the company confirmed it had let an unspecified number of employees go as Covid lockdowns started coming to an end.
“Davie Group is one of the Australian companies that experienced exponential sales growth during the pandemic, as a consequence of the shift to home-based work.
“As a result, we hired dozens of new team members to service our customers and navigate the supply chain crisis.
“Now, with Covid lockdowns nearly over, our sales have normalised. Regrettably, as a result, we have had to reduce the size of our team, and optimise each role in the company.”
OTHER VENTURES
PUPNAPS
Around 2020, Fogarty and best mate Jye de Zylva launched Pupnaps, a business selling calming beds for dogs.
As news.com.au reported, Mr de Zylva was working as a carpenter when noticed his kelpie would be distressed, or even missing, when he got home from work each day.
He and Fogarty teamed up to created a line of dog beds designed to curb anxiety and stress.
“The first design we settled on was one that kind of emulates a dog curling up in their mother’s womb,” Mr de Zylva said.
“It’s a really common way for dogs to sleep and it gives them comfort.”
The company has seen enormous growth, in part fuelled by a boom in online sales during the pandemic.
Speaking on YouTube, Fogarty said the business hit $1m in revenue per month in the first six months “which is probably our fastest-growing launch”.
Mr de Zylva said the success of the brand was beyond anything he could have imagined.
“It was something that I didn’t really expect in my wildest dreams; coming from being a chippie only six or eight months before that.”
AUSTRALIAN FURNITURE WAREHOUSE
Fogarty has also started a furniture business with his parents called Australian Furniture Warehouse, which was set up to keep overheads, and prices, low.
Rather than operating from expensive shopfronts, the company sells from a showroom that is only open between 10am and 4pm Tuesday to Sunday.
As Fogarty explained on his YouTube channel, the model allows the business to charge “way less than our competitors”.
SECRETS TO SUCCESS
In the wake of his extraordinary success, Fogarty has made it part of his mission to help other budding entrepreneurs realise their business dreams, sharing helpful tips and valuable insights from his own sometimes-bumpy ride to the top.
Reflecting on how he went from “$500 to half a billion in five years”, in a video on his YouTube channel, Fogarty said a key turning point in his journey was when he decided to start investing in himself.
“My entire life changed after I dedicated myself to upskilling and learning,” he says.
He explains he effectively turned himself into a “single-person agency”, acquiring skills in photography, videography, website development and social media marketing.
“I just approached a tonne of businesses and shot content for them and then built their website and then just ran their ads. I did this all for free, just so I could learn those skills”.
He says the second key to his success was to “read a lot of books”.
“It really allowed me to understand why my businesses were failing and how I could make them succeed,” he says.
“It allowed me to learn how to test my business concepts properly before investing a lot of time and money in them.
“I also listen to a lot of podcasts about media buying.
“Podcasts are a great way to learn the most updated information on rapidly-changing topics like ad buying opposed to books which are probably better for the fundamentals which withstood the test of time.”
SHARK TANK
Fogarty will have the chance to share his hard-won wisdom in the business world to a national, and potentially international, audience, when he joins the Australian version of the hugely successful investment TV show Shark Tank, airing on Channel 10 in 2023.
Fogarty will appear alongside other heavyweights of Australian business as well as Herjavec Group CEO Robert Herjavec, who is also a star of the hugely popular US format.
Fogarty said he was excited to join the show and “give hungry entrepreneurs a chance to change their lives”.
“I am hoping to share my experience and knowledge so they don’t make the same mistakes I did, which could potentially ruin their business,” he said.
“I am looking for unique products that solve problems and improve the world.”
US tariffs could be a tailwind for ResMed
ResMed’s competitors might be hamstrung by potential tariffs imposed by the US, boss Mick Farrell says, but adds the company, which delivered a strong quarterly, doesn’t need the help.
How big tech is recalibrating around the DeepSeek threat
Silicon Valley owes its longevity to its ability to pivot and China’s new AI start-up could set it moving in a new direction.