LSKD CEO Jason Daniel reveals game-changing moment that transformed his company
Jason Daniel was known as the loose kid. The kid who rode a bit wild, a bit crazy. Fast forward two decades and Daniel is CEO of the mega-successful sportswear brand LSKD
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On the BMX tracks of his childhood, Jason Daniel was known as the loose kid. The kid who rode a bit wild, a bit crazy, the kid who took on jumps even the older boys baulked at. The fearless kid who never gave up.
Fast forward two decades and Daniel, 36, is still that loose kid – in fact he ran with the nickname and made a multimillion-dollar business out of it.
As founder and chief executive of the mega-successful sportswear brand LSKD (shorthand for loose kid), Daniel has transformed the start-up he created as a schoolboy into an almost $80m global enterprise.
In the past four years, LSKD has seen staggering growth; its annual revenue has skyrocketed from $1.6m to $76m and, Daniel says, it is on track to hit $100m by mid-next year. They are blitzing their retail arm, having opened eight stores since February last year across Queensland, Sydney and Melbourne with plans to open three more in Queensland next year and potentially open in New Zealand.
In 2020, Daniel took the brand global and introduced it into the US before opening a US headquarters in San Diego in April this year. It’s since caught the attention of A-listers with Zac Efron, Hailey Bieber, Hilary Duff, Vanessa Hudgens and model Emily Ratajkowski among the line-up of celebrities wearing LSKD.
While the brand has undoubtedly experienced a boom in the past few years, for Daniel, it’s been two decades in the making.
It began as Loose Kid Industries, a side hustle Daniel created at the age of 12, from his family’s home in Logan, as a way to make extra cash to buy a dirt bike. It subsequently evolved into LKI in 2007, then transformed into LSKD in 2018.
Daniel’s rise is remarkable, though not without its trials: costly mistakes, debt, identity struggles, constant knock-backs and brutal decisions where he chose business over family and fractured relationships.
The Daisy Hill-based former motocross competitor and carpenter, husband to Ally, also 36, and father to their two kids, Hendrix, 5, and Freya, 2, is now one of Australia’s most successful entrepreneurs. As he recounts his journey, he still can’t quite believe it’s his to tell.
“I used to think, can a kid from Logan build something to be the best in the world?” he says.
“I truly didn’t believe in myself enough back then, as crazy as it sounds. I was wondering, could we do this? Is this possible?
“Because there’s not many brands that have done it from Australia, or Logan.
“Then I was like, well, what’s stopping anyone achieving anything? It’s a belief system where you’re constantly working and making mistakes. So then I was like, why not?”
The reminders of what he’s built are all over LSKD’s 4000sq m Loganholme headquarters, just off the M1 between Brisbane and the Gold Coast in a complex that combines a retail store, an office space, gym and rooftop event space.
Next door, boxes upon boxes are stacked sky high as stock is being delivered and packed in the gigantic warehouse.
While customers peruse the racks of trademarked sports and streetwear adorned with motivational quotes, enthusiastic staff brainstorm in the surrounding glass-walled meeting rooms, each named after the brand’s different eras, with the first T-shirts under Loose Kid Industries hanging on the walls.
It is a hive of activity, but that’s to be expected given LSKD is everywhere you look. If you haven’t noticed the reams of people decked in it, you will now.
LSKD’s success isn’t just down to its clothes, rather the community it is building. There are group workouts; events; charity campaigns; a sustainability push; LSKD.TV, which features inspirational videos documenting stories of athletes; and LSKD Library, where the team share the books that have, and continue to, shape them. It’s much more than a label.
Of all the dreams Daniel’s had, this was his boldest. But here he is.
Daniel grew up the oldest of three boys, with brothers, Ben and Nick, on a 2ha property in Cornubia. Before their parents split – their father left when Daniel was 17 – they owned a plant nursery. Daniel helped sell plants at markets on weekends for pocket money to buy his first dirt bike.
He’d watch his neighbour ride a motocross bike with an engine up and down the backyard and knew he wanted in. By nine, he got the bike.
“I always loved riding a BMX bike … I was always trying to do the craziest things on a bike,” he says.
“I’d ride at the local skate park at KP (Kimberly Park), which is not there anymore, and I was there every single day after school and that’s when I progressed into freestyle BMX.”
At 12, Daniel had 18-year-old mates taking him with them to the Gold Coast BMX tracks.
He mixed with some of the best athletes at the time, among them Corey Bohan, who went to school with Daniel at Chisholm Catholic College. Daniel wanted to keep up and that fearlessness birthed the origins of his nickname.
“I was trying to jump this really big jump, and I couldn’t make it,” Daniel says, as we sit in LSKD’s HQ.
“I kept falling short on this jump and because I was the kid, they’re like, ‘you’re riding loose kid’. I think it meant, you’re always riding a bit crazy on a bike.
“I was the youngest in the group so I would be the one who was trying all these things that these older top athletes were doing because I wanted to be a really good rider.”
Loose kid caught on. When it started to take on a life of its own, a friend suggested he turn it into a brand. At first, he didn’t see the appeal.
“I was like, why would I do that? How do you even have a job by selling T-shirts? I didn’t understand at the time,” he says.
But his early entrepreneur mind kicked in.
Motocross events attracted up to 600 competitors and even more fans so Daniel told his mum about the idea. She ran with it and helped with the trademark papers.
In 2002, Loose Kid Industries was born.
“We thought it might pay for racing back then; we’d have a little pop-up tent on the track and sell hats and T-shirts,” says Daniel, who went on to race motocross competitively from age 14.
“My mum was a big help, she would set up at the track and sell shirts.”
Daniel paid their first graphic designer in plants from his parent’s nursery and bought cheap blank hats from a tourist shop in Surfers Paradise and printed his logo on them, before going on to make men’s and women’s clothing, backpacks, stickers, caps and more.
Over the next years, Loose Kid Industries ticked along but was never a focus for the teen who wanted to be a successful pro-motocross athlete.
And at his peak, he was looking like he might make it, reaching the top three in expert level in the state and making it to pro.
But the reality of how difficult it was to be at the top of the sport kicked in and, as Daniel says: “I was never going to make it.”
He dabbled as an electrician and took on work in a bricklaying yard before landing a carpentry apprenticeship, starting on $7 an hour.
Meanwhile, the business was heating up and it prompted a shift in direction to be taken more seriously and rebranded to LKI in 2007.
Daniel finished his apprenticeship in 2010 and in the same year gave carpentry up, as well as motocross racing when he broke his wrist. He made LKI his full-time job.
“My career path went from that (being a pro-athlete) to going, hang on, maybe this is my calling, to have a sportswear brand,” he says.
“I thought, I actually can do something with this – it just snapped in me.”
He was all in and bought 1000 blank T-shirts on his mum’s credit card, found someone to print their logo and turned the family home into a warehouse. They stored stock in his mum’s bedroom and he made sales calls from the living room. As business grew, they set up three 20ft shipping containers in the back yard.
The products they made expanded to include life jackets for water sports, gloves for motocross and mountain biking, socks, accessories, footwear, various sportswear and clothing and the list goes on.
While LKI was stocked in major retailers and sales were decent, Daniel says it was a business in trouble.
“The brand wasn’t doing well,” he says.
“We were stagnant on the same revenue … sitting on about $3m (annual revenue) for five years.”
Daniel has spent many years reflecting on the 11 years of LKI – it’s helped him build what he has now. He’s candid about its failures and the moments he’s not proud of – like the times he yelled at a staff member for being 10 minutes late, his direction was scattered, and he ignored his staff.
It led to a string of costly mistakes, the biggest being a loss of $100,000 when Daniel went against the advice of his team and hired the wrong person to develop their eCommerce business.
“They didn’t do the greatest job and it failed,” he says, of trying to set up using online platform Magento, before switching to Shopify.
“One of our teammates there at the time said to me, ‘I don’t know if that person is the right person to build your website’.
“That’s where it really started to teach me that I needed to listen to the team, because I wasn’t listening to them enough.”
Daniel is brutally honest about why the company failed in the early days.
“I realised, firstly, it was me,” he says. “I was trying to do too many things and secondly, I wasn’t clear on what our ‘why’ was and what we wanted to do.”
But for all his faults, he recognised his strengths.
“When LKI was failing, I didn’t go, ‘oh cool, I’m not going to do it anymore’, I thought, ‘what am I doing wrong?’”
What followed was a mammoth journey of self-discovery, reflection, growth and learning, and the evolution of not just a brand, but a man.
Daniel met with other founders, including Ben Mackay, who started Penny Skateboards, listened to their stories, learned from their mistakes and absorbed their advice.
A particular turning point, he says, was attending personal development course Landmark Forum in 2015, where his eyes were opened to the story of the wildly successful yoga brand Lululemon. It prompted a deep-dive into their founder, Chip Wilson, who became an inspiration.
“I loved his story and resonated with it, I read every book he shared and started asking ‘why’,” says Daniel.
He read some more, including the story of Nike, and couldn’t get enough of authors James Collins and Simon Sinek. Everything started to click.
In September 2018, he rebranded once again but this time it would stick. LSKD was now a business with a purpose.
“I was known for always giving everything a go, but I had grown up, turned 30 and went on this learning book journey, finding mentors and got to think about why we’re doing this for the future,” he says.
“That’s where we found our mission which was to inspire people to chase the vibe, but it’s now move, transition and (to be) 1 per cent better every day.”
Those phrases formed the core of LSKD as a movement and are now printed on shirts, hats and merch and are part of Daniel’s everyday vocabulary.
As for the clothes, it’s allowed Daniel to listen to what the people wanted.
“They (women) loved wearing their boyfriend’s hoodie or their partner’s hoodie,” he says. “So I was like, why don’t we just make this product unisex, let’s make it for everyone, it’s essentially genderless.”
LSKD launched with a pair of leggings called the “Rep tight” and sold out immediately. He describes their style as “functional fitness with a street aesthetic” and that style has led LSKD to be among the power players of the lucrative and expanding activewear market.
“We almost created this edgy look about us where we weren’t the typical pretty activewear brand,” he says of what sets them apart.
“We eventually created our own fabric, which is a buttery soft fabric. We’re obsessed with what’s in the fabric, to give the performance elements for the fitness community.”
While the business is certainly enjoying its moment, the burdens he overcame to get there will always stay with him.
There was a period in 2018, when Daniel was a new dad with Hendrix just five months old, when he owed a supplier almost $100,000.
“There were weeks I couldn’t pay myself, we were waiting to be paid by wholesalers so it was a really tough time.”
In 2019, he was knocked back by cult Australian surf shop, City Beach, to stock LSKD. (He notes they called him a year later wanting to stock LSKD but Daniel politely declined.)
But the most severe of all was when he made his brother, Ben, who worked in sales, and his mum, who worked in accounts and payroll, redundant in 2018 and 2019.
That was a choice he made knowing it might have ramifications but one he says was necessary to move the company in a new direction.
“A lot of different family members had thought what I was doing wasn’t right; I was chopping and changing a lot,” he says.
“They thought I had gone a bit wild and they were struggling to change. This had been going on for a while, this was the final straw and I got very clear that it had to happen.”
The decision did damage those family relationships, but Daniel maintains it was the right decision for the broader LSKD team and he praises his mum for her early support.
Other family members were keen to be part of it, however, with his brother, Nick, joining the business in 2021, where he now works as an assistant accountant.
Daniel lives and breathes his business, which now has 100-plus full-time staff and a further 100 casuals.
And he’s learnt to balance his passion for work alongside raising his two children with Ally (who works at LSKD in the finance team looking after payroll) in their Daisy Hill home, surrounded by beautiful bushland.
The couple met when Daniel was in his late teens, through mutual friends and become best mates. They’ve been together for 18 years and married for 10 and Daniel beams talking about how much they’ve experienced together.
The smile widens even further chatting about his kids.
“Fatherhood has made me a better person,” he says. “It’s given me a really strong ‘why’.”
With Hendrix just as keen as his dad was on the bike and both kids absorbing his work, Daniel is a proud dad.
“The kids are involved in it too, they’re starting to learn about the brand more and it’s really cool,” he says.
“They always talk about LSKD and my son’s books at school have the LSKD logo all over them.”
Family has allowed him some downtime outside of business, he says. Although his “downtime” might differ to some.
“I get up at 4am each morning, before the kids are awake. I usually get up, put on an (audio) book, and make a coffee.
“The first thing I plan around is when am I working out?
“This morning I was cycling at 5.15am and listening to a book called Looking Backward (by Edward Bellamy).”
It’s telling of how his mind works when he comments he’s listening to the book at 2.3 times the normal speed.
“I used to be at 1.5 speed for a very long time, so an eight-hour book you can do in four,” he smiles. “I have a limited amount of time. I might miss things but I’ll go back to it.”
His is a busy life. During this interview, he’s continually declining incoming calls.
“You don’t become the Michael Jordans of your level … by sitting still,” says Daniel, smiling wryly.
He lives life in the fast lane – you have to, he says, when you’ve thrown every fibre of your being into something.
So, what keeps him going?
“I ask the same question,” he says, then pauses to think.
“Our family business, our dad chopped and changed and I saw that and it made me think I want this to work. I’ll make it work, I’ll commit and I’ll see it through.
“If you’re going to do it, you have to go all in, put it all on the line, risk everything and give it your best shot.”
There’s still much to be done, he says … he has a legacy to leave.
“I’m very thankful to be in this position because it took a long time before it started to really grow,” he says.
“We still have a long way to go here and we’re always looking forward.”
He may not be the young boy on a BMX bike anymore, but he’s still the fearless “loose kid” from Logan.
Only now, he’s not the kid trying to keep up – he’s the man who is influencing the game.
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