Tyler Howells spent his 11th birthday driving around town with his mom, feeling every set of sheets they could find. None of them were soft enough. Years later, after discovering bamboo fabric while trying to solve his wife’s night sweats, he turned that search into Cozy Earth—a $100 million bedding and apparel brand he initially ran alone and grew across 16 years, without taking a dollar of venture capital. His path runs counter to a lot of founder advice: Go niche before broad, know what it really costs to underask, and treat patience as a competitive advantage. Here’s how Tyler funded an inventory-heavy business, why he stayed off the VC “conveyor belt,” and what he’d tell a founder running out of cash.
On going niche with interior designers before going broad:
Starting when I did, I don’t know that it was the perfect time to launch a D2C [direct to consumer] company. But it created some disciplines in me. It was necessity, really—there were no VC companies funding my type of company at that time.
So I thought, let’s find a customer who’d have a very high standard, who could help me make the product better and give me their honest opinion. Interior designers were perfect for that. High-end designers have very exacting specifications for what they want to see, and the feedback was immediate.
They became a microcosm for the actual customer who’d end up using our product. I’d attend trade shows and work hand-in-hand with them, and it kept us disciplined—refining the product, refining the business model, staying focused on making a profit. They still put our products in houses all over the world today.
On what landing on Oprah’s Favorite Things actually demands of you:
The interior designers got us to our first real core of customers, which was very wealthy people. One of them was Oprah. She used the product and loved it, and a lot of people who could afford to hire designers found us online, organically. That was really fun to watch.
Oprah’s one of the biggest influencers ever—before social media even came around. I’ll admit I was skeptical before we got on her list the first time. I thought maybe you had to pay someone, or find a certain PR person. No. She uses the products. If she likes them, she puts them on her list, and she doesn’t ask for anything in return. I thought that was really cool.
But getting picked is only part of it. Your product has to stand out. Your customer service has to be there. And you need more good ideas, because you can’t just have one product—it’ll flame out. It’s great validation, and it helps people feel comfortable trying you. But you still have to execute the next steps, the same as you would with any celebrity or influencer.
On the $60K check he wishes had been bigger:
We had a family member who really enjoyed the product—he and his wife had used a similar comforter—and he said, “We’d like to give it as a gift. Do you think there’s a business here?” I did some research and told him I thought so.
Then he asked how much I’d need to get it started, and he started naming off numbers: “Is it $100,000? Is it $500,000? A million?” And honestly, I should have said a million. I should have said more. But I wanted to impress him and show him I had the fortitude to really work it. So I just looked at what the inventory cost on the first buy, and I said that number—60 grand.
I took the 60 grand check and went to work. It was very hand-to-hand—going to trade shows, grinding it out—and then I sold out of everything.
On why growth sucks cash:
A lot of entrepreneurs in consumer products know what this is like. If you’re successful, that’s great—but now you have to buy more the next time. And getting that flywheel going takes a very significant amount of capital. I had to learn that the hard way.
So I’d be thinking, could I get a little bit more money to buy this next order? A little more for the one after that. Doing it that way took many years—six years by myself, order by order.
Then I took a bit bigger check, about $700,000 from friends and family, and we were off to the races. The company started doubling every year.
On building a brand instead of riding the VC “conveyor belt”:
Not taking VC let me build a true brand, and that’s really what I’m working on. A lot of companies funded by VC are on a timetable. You get on this conveyor belt really quickly where you have to make decisions, and it totally changes your decision-making—everything becomes about urgency, getting something done fast.
For me, I was always trying to make the decision that was best for the brand and the products we were making. I wasn’t sweating about returning capital to a bunch of investors all the time.
Eventually I did recap out my friends and family with a small family office in Utah. A recap is a recapitalization of the cap table—a new group comes in and takes out the existing shareholders. I wanted to get a nice return for that friends-and-family money as a thank you for what they’d done. And this group has been super patient and supportive. They basically said, “Simplify things for us,” and we hit the ground running. It’s very different from raising institutional capital, where you’ve got a bunch of LPs and money that needs to be returned very quickly. That wasn’t this case.
On the advice he’d give a founder running out of cash:
It really depends on your personal energy, your ambition, and your patience. I truly believe the tortoise always wins the race. I probably have too much patience, honestly. But if you have patience and you enjoy what you’re doing, you can build something really great. This lifetime’s longer than you think.
Some people say, “No, I want to get in and get out.” That’s totally fine—that’s for a certain type of person, and there’s real wisdom in it, because the environment can change around you.
In my case, we’re building a brand with a lot of different product categories, which has helped us diversify. Building a brand is arguably more valuable long-term. You’re building brand equity with customers, you have a name, and you’re producing products people can actually rely on.
On the “echo chamber” approach to marketing that compounds over time:
If you asked me at the very beginning, I’d have said SEO. If you could rank high on Google back in the day, that was the way to go—you’d capture a certain amount of the addressable market and grow from there. But every six months this stuff changes, and so does the pricing. Back in 2014 or 2015, the cost per click was much cheaper than it is today. CAC was a lot lower.
What I tell everybody is to look at it like an echo chamber. Even if you’re only doing a small echo right now—a little PR, an affiliate, Instagram, a small podcast, a bit of content you produce yourself—the more angles you can get, the better. It really starts to magnify, and as you grow you keep investing in it.
Our business needs digital ads to foster that engine. But starting with digital ads? I wouldn’t recommend it today. There are so many ways to get free exposure on platforms that reward engaging content—TikTok and YouTube are two big ones. There’s a pay-to-play element either way: these platforms need eyeballs, so you either buy them with ads or earn them with your own content. There’s a lot of wisdom in making your own content today. It can get expensive, but it doesn’t have to be, especially when you’re first starting out and telling the customer your story.
On knowing when to get out of your own way:
Starting something, scaling something, and optimizing something are really different skill sets, and I’ve been through all of it. I’m a student of other companies—not just D2C ones. I look at Berkshire Hathaway, American Express, these huge companies, and I study how they iterate, how they grow, who stayed with them over time.
If a founder is hyper-focused on the company, has a ton of passion for it, and has enough humility to get the right team members around them, then the business is in no better hands than the founder’s. But if the founder is using it for self-aggrandizement—trying to build a business while also becoming an influencer or a star, or just chasing a certain lifestyle with the business on the side—the business always suffers. The people who work there suffer. It usually doesn’t end well.
For me, I’m all in on Cozy Earth. So the big thing now that everything’s going is to get out of the way and focus on the brand, the product, and the vision. Our team is insane—they’re amazing, they’re elite. If I can get the right people in the right spots, I can just trust them to do their job, and we all go together.
Hear Tyler’s full conversation on Shopify Masters to learn how the Bedrot Challenge racked up 85 million organic views, why he’s mining 11 million customer records with AI to decide where to focus, and what a touch-and-feel brand learned from opening its first physical stores.
