Kevin Keller: Co-Founder of Fulton & Roark

Episode 827

What does it take to build a modern luxury brand — without outside funding — and still grow at triple-digit rates?
On today’s episode, we welcome Kevin Keller, Co-Founder of Fulton & Roark — the American fine fragrance brand redefining how fragrance is designed, experienced, and sold. Launched in 2013 with just $11,000 and no outside investment, Kevin and his co-founder Allen Shafer set out to create products that felt more personal, practical, and modern — starting with their now-signature solid fragrance, a portable alternative to traditional sprays.
Since then, Fulton & Roark has grown into a nationally distributed brand carried in hundreds of retail locations, including Neiman Marcus and luxury hotel properties, while maintaining a strong direct-to-consumer business that drives the majority of its sales. With thoughtful product expansion into extrait de parfum, grooming, and body care, the company has built a loyal following by staying disciplined in its approach to design, storytelling, and customer experience.
In this episode, Kevin shares how he built Fulton & Roark from the ground up without outside capital, the importance of balancing DTC and wholesale in a competitive category, and how to scale profitably while staying true to your brand. We also discuss what “modern luxury” really means today, how consumer expectations around fragrance and grooming are evolving, and why intentional product development is critical to long-term success. Kevin also reflects on the lessons he’s learned as a founder, what he would do differently, and what’s next for the brand.
If you’re interested in building a capital-efficient business, redefining a legacy category, or creating products that truly resonate with modern consumers — this episode is for you. Tune in now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So youronly choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show today. I’m joined by Kevin Keller, who is the co founder of Fulton & Roark, an American fine fragrance brand that’s redefining what modern fragrance can and should look like. Kevin and his co founder Alan Schaeffer, launched the company back in 2013 with just $11,000 and no outside funding. Woo hoo, starting with a completely different take on fragrance, a solid, portable format designed for real life. So fast forward to today, and Fulton and Rourke has grown into a nationally distributed and recognized brand carried in hundreds of retail locations, including great luxury places like Neiman Marcus hotel properties, all while staying profitable and growing at triple digit rates. And what I love about Kevin’s story is how intentional the brand has been from the very beginning, and from product design to distribution to building a modern definition of luxury. Kevin, welcome to the Kara Goldin show. So excited to meet you and to have you here.

Kevin Keller 1:52
Yeah, glad to be here.

Kara Goldin 1:53
Super, super excited you have done such an incredible job, and I’m such a big fan. So I had seen your products before, and I had smelled your products before, but I didn’t know how vast it was. Like, you’re, I mean, you have, it’s a pretty big collection. Or I always say like, you know, when you feel like you’ve discovered something in a brand, then it’s probably older than it is, right? You’re probably not. It wasn’t just created six months ago. But anyway, for listeners who may not know Fulton and Rourke yet, how do you describe the brand and what makes it different?

Kevin Keller 2:33
Yeah, so we call it what we do, American fine fragrance. And the backstory there is not like a really American superiority kind of story, or anything like that. But rather we just saw this interesting arc when we were getting started with fragrance in a lot of other creative endeavors. We saw it with wine. We saw it with beer, coffee, chocolate, music. Where Americans, we have this little sense of insecurity. I think that comes from being a relatively new country, and so when creators get started, they often mimic the European status quo. So you think about wine, and you think about New York wines from the 1950s with the fake Italian or French label on the front, and it’s not very good. Or you think about Budweiser beer, just kind of this knockoff of a German beer and and we go along our way. But eventually, when Americans do their best creative work, I found, is when they stop with that they’ve they’ve learned all the rules, and then they choose to break them. And that’s when you go from the the New York fake Italian wine to the California cab that is distinctly American. That’s its own thing. That’s how you go from Budweiser to, you know, the Imperial IPA. That’s bourbon barrel aged and really eccentric. We’ve done it in so many things, but in the fragrance industry, we found, when we were getting started 13 years ago, that that that feeling still persisted that that even American fragrance companies were still really mimicking the French way of doing things. And we love the French maisons. We think it’s really cool what they’re doing, but we wanted to look to different formats, to different ingredients, and just kind of looking to do fragrance in a distinctly American way.

Kara Goldin 4:21
So how did you know you could do this? Did you come from this world or, I mean, this is a big undertaking.

Kevin Keller 4:31
No. And speaking of feeling insecure about it, I’d been a reporter, and then I’d gone and first hard news, later worked in the music industry for a magazine called Paste Magazine. My partner had been a coffee importer and roaster, like really great high end coffee, and we were both totally fascinated by fragrance. We were interested in the category, and we really started with more of a focus on on men’s, because we. Thought it was just so little out there. We thought it was not very thoughtfully done. And so we thought, okay, you know, if we were going to create a men’s line, how would we do it? And eventually, we thought, you know, despite not having experience in this industry, we do feel like we’ve got something to offer here. And so for we were we were in business school, and we had our internships over the summer, and then it was such a weird time, because every night after my internship, I’d go hang out in Alan’s basement for hours, and we were pouring over every book we could get our hands on about fragrance. We were playing with essential and fragrance oils, trying to figure out how it all worked. And we were just voracious for a year and a half. And eventually thought, yeah, I think, I think we can do this.

Kara Goldin 5:50
That’s, that’s amazing. So did this start out as a business school project then?

Kevin Keller 5:56
No, it was funny. I mean, it was, we were in the middle of business school, and we started, we met each other or got to know each other well in in school, but it was really just kind of a fascination. We found we worked really well together and and we just took the opportunity while we were in school to, you know, poke all of our professors, to leverage every everything we had at our disposal at business school to do what felt like a very un business school thing, to make things in a time where everybody wanted to do subscriptions and services and tech. But yeah, it was, it was just really kind of a passion project.

Kara Goldin 6:34
Did the two of you it? You know, thinking back, I guess what, 1415, years, when you were sort of incubating this idea. Did you want to do a company together? Did you feel like, you know your co founders of foldin and Rourke, so did you look at like, skill sets and or did you just, did you have the idea and then say, Hey, you want to do it? Or like, how did that all work? Because I know often when co founders are coming together, there’s two different ways to do it. I mean, maybe you’re both kind of thinking about the same sort of thing, but then you have the exact same skill sets. And often that doesn’t work. But I know you two have very, very different skill sets, and that’s probably a big, big plus,

Kevin Keller 7:20
yeah, yeah. And it was funny. I mean, we, we really are one of those opposites attract kind of duos in business, but we had a lot of shared esthetic principles, I think just general character kinds of things, what we thought was important in a lot of ways we we really synced up. Had a lot of similar fascinations on the music side, on culturally, and so we had a lot of of common ground. It wasn’t just, hey, we’re we’re both complementary. We there was a lot that we shared too.

Kara Goldin 7:57
So you launched the company with just $11,000 can you take us back to those days? Because that number is, you know, still a lot of money, but, and certainly if you’re coming out of business school, but it’s probably kind of doable for a founder, like hearing that story that’s so inspiring for somebody listening, who’s thinking, Okay, I’ve got this idea. And and Kevin just went with $11,000 I’m sure there was a lot of add on money after that to get it going. But what was kind of the thinking, and maybe, what did you spend the money on initially, and how far did that get you?

Kevin Keller 8:36
Yeah, so, you know, it was, it was a difficult thing. I had been a reporter before, like I mentioned, reporters, as you know, are not pulling down huge amounts of money. So I had just taken out $100,000 to go to grad school in student loans. And so I was, I have, you know, my wife and I were, were doing our best, but we were pretty broke and but also because of, I think, my background and Alan’s too, we were scrappy, and we also had some great advice along the way. And so, you know, thinking about a company like ours, Kickstarter was pretty new, but, you know, I thought it was really important that we not launch our company as though it were some sort of experiment. You know, we really did want to have a perspective a finished product. We thought in fragrance, in the beauty industry in general, it’s, you know, it borders on art in a lot of ways. And so this idea that of it just being a concept. We just didn’t think that would do. And so the real problem for us is that we were making things. And so, you know, you need money to make things. Luckily, we had a friend of mine who was not a close friend, and something I think a lot about those, those loose connections, you know, of. Um, I knew Brandon, who became our packaging designer, just kind of tangentially, a friend of a friend, really. But I called him and I said, Hey, we’ve got this idea for a solid, wax based fragrance. Would you be up for designing that? I could pay you whatever. And we ended up, look, I’ll do it for free. It just sounds like a fun project. And helped get that going. And we made we made up for that with a small equity exchange later, mostly because we thought it was the right thing to do, and he seemed pleased by it. But our designers who helped us get all the branding and packaging right, Jose and Nicole Reyes of the metal leap creative agency. They were old friends of mine. I’d help them get a startup, or kind of a not for profit off the ground. And so I went to them and said, I can’t afford to pay you what you’re worth. But I thought maybe they had an intern or somebody who could help us with, you know, packaging design, business cards, website kind of stuff. And they said, You’re right. You absolutely can’t afford us. But what if we set up kind of a debt to equity agreement? So they just said, Here’s what it would cost for us to do this, and then over time, you can pay it back, or we can exchange that at a multiple that we agree on at a later date. And so we were able to move some of those costs, you know, to later. And so that $11,000 was what it cost us to get our first round of inventory made, to go to our first couple of trade shows. And luckily for us, you know, within the first few months, we were able to start making some some profits and turning that around. And we, we bootstrapped all the way to now by just, I think, being really focused and disciplined and conservative in a lot of ways. I suppose I

Kara Goldin 12:00
love it. So the brand is Fulton and Rourke. And can you share the story? I love the dog story behind the Fulton & Roark. So can you share that?

Kevin Keller 12:13
Yeah, sure. So it was funny. My My wife and I had kind of a funny story. We met in Atlanta. We were both reporters, and we got married and picked up the moving truck the next day to leave Atlanta and moved to Winston Salem for me to go to school here, and we were desperately homesick and got a dog almost immediately, the thing you do when you’re newly married, I think, right, and, and so we named him Fulton after Fulton County, where Atlanta is based, and and then my partner, his favorite place to ride his bike when he was at Suwannee University of the South was this road called Rorke’s Cove road, And it runs through the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, and it’s, I’ve been there, it’s beautiful too. And so it’s kind of funny. We didn’t really even think too much about it at the time, but both of our dogs got these names from places, and so when we were creating the brand, authenticity was really important to us. But we also wanted a name that sounded like it maybe had been around for 100 years, or maybe it was brand new. It was hard to tell. And so Keller and Schaeffer, we thought sounded both very German and very much like a law firm our last names. And so I joked like, well, our dogs have better names for this. We should. We should just name it that. And it became kind of just our placeholder name. And then eventually we had to put something on the packaging. We ran out of time, and we’re like, well, we never did think of anything better, and so it stuck. And so yeah, our dogs are the namesake of our brand.

Kara Goldin 13:53
I love it. So you started with solid fragrance, which was pretty unconventional at the time, versus like a traditional spray, for those who aren’t familiar with kind of those terms in your category. Can you talk about that and why you decided to make that decision?

Kevin Keller 14:09
Yeah, you know, when we started the company, we wanted to have a real focus on all of the little details about your life, thinking about the way you get ready, where you get ready, the size of your dopp kit, the, you know, all these different factors. And when we thought about all the things that we had to offer, we thought, let’s just pretend like no grooming or fragrance products exist. What? What would we make? And we just thought, you know, in an era where a lot of our customers are getting on a plane a couple of times a week, or they’re getting ready at the gym. A glass bottle of flammable liquid shouldn’t be your only option for fragrance. And so I’d had a bag explode or a bottle explode in my bag when I was traveling one time, so I knew that firsthand. And so we thought, well, I. I’ve actually got one here, if that’s helpful, it’s just we took this metal container and took all that we loved about fragrance and put it in a wax format. So you just swipe on top and apply to your pulse points, and you get, you know, the fragrance behaves in a lot of ways the same way it way it would with a fragrance. You have a colorless, odorless base, just like you would with a spray fragrance, but nothing to spill or leak or break, and it’s a little bit more subdued. We refer to it as kind of an introverts fragrance, so it doesn’t take over the room, but it’s easy to reapply without everyone in the room knowing that you’ve reapplied your fragrance and and so that was our first product. At the time, nobody was doing that really, and so it was definitely an uphill battle to, like, get get people to know this unheard of company with unheard of or, you know, unexperienced fragrances in a format no one was familiar with. It was we made things a little hard for ourselves to start, but it’s fun.

Kara Goldin 15:58
And how many SKUs Did you launch with?

Kevin Keller 16:01
We launched for three and we were just really intentional about, you know, going to every retailer that we admired and just staying in the store, asking questions until nobody ever actually kicked us out. We figured eventually someone would say, you got to go. But that was, that was the advice we got from retailers where we started was just, yeah, three seems like a magic number. And so that was, that was how we got started.

Kara Goldin 16:27
And then you moved over to traditional sprays, which you have today, and and how many SKUs do you have today?

Kevin Keller 16:36
Far too many. 100 maybe more skews in total, we have, we have 25 fragrances at this point. And part of the reason for that is one of the things that I love about Fulton & Roark is we have a really wide customer base. We we have a little a bit more women than men, but about 5050, men, women. We’re spread out throughout the US, a pretty wide age range, with a lot of different we’re in stores that sell, you know, suits to current and former US presidents and motorcycle shops and, you know, hip denim stores. And because of that, we have a lot of fragrances to fit a lot of different esthetics.

Kara Goldin 17:26
So you started out as a men’s fragrance company, and to your point, just now, your audience expanded beyond men. When did you really notice that that was happening? And when did you decide, because that’s a that’s a big strategic like shift, right that you saw coming and and you did it, and bold move, I love it. But how long before you decided it was time?

Kevin Keller 17:54
It was about, you know, it was fairly gradual for a long time, where I think, probably about three or four years, and we started getting a little bit of press referring to us as, like, Great tomboy perfume was kind of the initial way women’s magazines were talking about it. Because quietly, you know, we thought, I mean, it’s interesting too, like the the entire attitude around grooming has changed a lot with men and things like that. And so when we started in, 2013 men still needed a lot of permission, like, Hey, you can try it. It’s totally fine. This is for this is for men. Don’t worry about it. And they needed a little bit of hand holding. And in the last 13 years, that’s changed a lot. And so initially, we were using ingredients that we were a little bit worried would would be off putting to mend, like Geranium is one of my favorite fragrance ingredients. And so we had those things prominently featured, but had to be careful about how we talked about them and and we were just creating fragrances that we thought were interesting, that that, like, evoked something interesting for people. And so we just thought, you know, like, let’s just make fragrance that we think is cool. And so when we started getting that interest from women’s magazines, it was great. And we love that. And women would write us and say, hey, if this was for women, I’d wear it too. And we would write back and say, do it, you know, like, it’s, it’s just kind of, we’re focused on men, but it’s, it’s for people who like it. And then gradually, we just shifted focus. And then, and then eventually, I think, about six years ago, said this is enough’s enough. Like, let’s just, let’s just go all in. Let’s declare that this is for whomever wants to wear it. And the response has been great.

Kara Goldin 19:43
That’s awesome. Do people ask you to kind of make that decision for them? Is this really for women, or is this because, you know, it’s obviously, it’s a scent, right? So it’s probably if they haven’t smelled it, or maybe they’re trying to figure out they like it. But is it acceptable? I don’t know if that’s the right time. Did you ever get that? Yeah, yeah,

Kevin Keller 20:04
yeah, no. It’s really funny, where even friends will be like, Okay, but seriously, is this one like, serious promise? You know, if you like the way you feel in it, then then you should wear it. One of my favorite fragrances we make is called 1000 palms, and the primary notes of that are green bell pepper and tuberose. And tuberose Is this, like, plush white floral. And it, you know, if you were just reading about it, you’d say, Oh, for sure, that’s a femme fragrance. But it doesn’t feel femme on me. And I, you know, I really like it, and so I’m really happy that our customers seem to totally fall in in with that too.

Kara Goldin 20:46
So being self funded obviously has allowed you to make these shifts and pivots along the way that maybe if you had private equity, or, you know, had lost control in some way of the company, that those kind of decisions would be a lot more complicated, not that they wouldn’t be doable. But what would you say to that around like growth and discipline, because you guys have been able to really grow this business in the right way, I think, and I mean, it’s incredibly impressive.

Kevin Keller 21:20
Well, thanks. I mean, I’ll say before anything else, that I don’t think that our way is the superior way, or anything like that. You know, had we found a partner early on that that had a lot of brains in addition to money, you know, and strategic, you know, a lot of strategic value to offer us. I think we would have been really excited about investment. It was just one of those that we never felt like we were in the right moment with the right partners to take that investment. And we, we have guarded our autonomy very closely, and, you know, but I’m not saying that that was always the right move, necessarily, but it’s worked for us, and so I do think you’re absolutely right that having to bootstrap it and and do it with only the the money that we were able to create has forced us to be really disciplined and and to not get on wild tangents, to not spend superfluously, you know, in paying ourselves and having super plush offices or whatever, and, and really, more than anything, I think the the best benefit is that We have had to be really focused on listening to our customers, because we couldn’t get that wrong, and we needed them to stick with us, and we needed them to believe in us, and we just didn’t have the money to do things the wrong way. And so in that way, I’m really thankful for the discipline that we’ve kind of forced upon ourselves with, with self financing.

Kara Goldin 23:05
So I read that a large percentage of your business is direct to consumer and I mean, you’ve definitely grown and are very visible and other retail locations, luxury hotels, all, all of those incredible places where people can see you and smell you, but you’ve continued to build this direct to consumer, which is kind of ironic when you think you know you can’t smell yet through the machine, it eventually probably will happen, but not quite yet, but But with that, I would imagine that storytelling and around you know whether it’s why you guys decided why, as founders, you decided to start the company, but also around the fragrances and you actually came from journalism and storytelling background, but I’m so curious, like, how important do you think that is to Being able to get the consumer to connect and also share. I think because people, once you start sharing, then they’re starting to share, right?

Kevin Keller 24:09
Yeah, I think it’s a great point. And you know, all of our fragrance names come from places throughout the US, and that decision was in part because, to your point, we’ve done really well through that storytelling. But part of that isn’t is because talking about fragrance is really hard, even for people who know fragrance really well, if I tell you, Oh well, this is Javanese vetiver, not Haitian vetiver. That doesn’t mean anything to you. And like, I can get excited about that, because we’ve spent a lot of time on that, going through ingredients and whatever. But even people who are really involved, that doesn’t mean much. And you know, until you’ve smelled it, it’s way better to tell you, hey, this fragrance kind of it sort of feels like driving through Death Valley like that. It’s got this, you know, really. Really intense vibe and and like a lot of confidence and that kind of thing, where this feels really subdued, and it feels like being on a hike in the rain or whatever. And so I think that goes a lot longer way for people. I think it’s actually more helpful. And so I also love doing it. It’s been really fun to find places or communities that really inspire us, and then think, how would we communicate that olfactively? And so it’s not just a marketing gimmick. It’s been a really fun creative exercise for us.

Kara Goldin 25:37
Yeah, definitely. So when you look back, I I guess I’ll start this by saying, You’ve done so many things right in building, in building, Goldin Roark, but there has to be something where you look back and say, If I definitely do that differently, if I was starting again. Is there anything that you that you look back on and you think I wouldn’t launch this fragrance, or I would have, I, you know, wouldn’t have used that packaging or any good stories along the way where you just really learned your lesson.

Kevin Keller 26:13
Yeah, I think maybe the biggest one was, it’s kind of ironic, because I just told you how important it is that we listen to our customers, but really early on, we we started launching other products, and I do believe in this idea we’ve got we’ve got products that you can layer so we have bar soap and deodorant and a hair and body oil, kind of a multi purpose hair oil that you can use, that all match to your favorite fragrance. And that was something that we thought was kind of differentiating. But we also used to have products like shave cream and aftershave, and we had a daily moisturizer with SPF, and they were really good products, and we were really proud of them. And when we would launch them, we’d get a pretty good reception and but our customers would say, Oh, cool. Like, when are you gonna launch another fragrance? And it took us far too long, from our retail partners, from our customers, from press, telling us over and over again, you guys are a fragrance company. You’re that’s what we love. That’s what’s really interesting to us. And we just, we were way too slow to listen to that. And year one, people were saying, Hey, I love the solid fragrance. Could you do a spray fragrance? And we were getting so much press attention at the time, you know, for the solids, we just thought, well, maybe we should just stay in our lane. But again, everyone was telling us we were a fragrance company. We should have launched the spray fragrances 10 years before we did, because as soon as we did, it was, you know, a huge inflection point in the company, because some people just absolutely do not want a solid fragrance and and we just missed those people for for a decade because we didn’t listen. So that that would probably be the biggest

Kara Goldin 28:03
and what are you most excited about? I know you launched something new as today, actually, right? And you’re just getting getting started on on something. So can you share that for everyone?

Kevin Keller 28:19
Yeah, we just launched a new fragrance for the spring, summer months called Flower District. It’s inspired by New York City’s Flower District, and like I mentioned, all of our fragrances are meant to speak to a place and how it feels. And there’s something that’s so interesting to me about while while the city of New York is sleeping at 3am the Flower District is coming alive, and shipments from all over the world are pouring in, and then all of the people who are in charge of making every wedding or office lobby or magazine meeting room or Whatever throughout the city are all converging at 6am picking out their flowers for the day and that sort of thing, all while the rest of us are sound asleep. I think there’s something really beautiful about that. So we created a fragrance that was meant to kind of capture that creative energy, and it’s it’s fresh, and it’s light and it’s fun, and so I’m really excited about that. I think in general, I’m, I’m just really excited. We’ve got a great team. We’ve We’ve grown quite a bit these last couple of years, and we have hired up in the last six months or so. And so we’ve got people that that we’ve wanted for years, of an old friend who we wanted for years. We finally got him in charge of operations. We were finally able to afford him, and that is just so exciting to have a team of people that we really believe in, both in terms of their ability to do the job and being good people and being the company i. Just really excited for us to continue to create as a team and see what we do next.

Kara Goldin 30:05
I love it Well, Kevin, thank you so much for joining me today, and Fulton and Rourke is such a powerful example of how thoughtful innovation and scrappiness and brand storytelling can truly reshape a category. And for everyone listening, be sure to check out Fulton and Rourke, especially the new fragrance that was just launched, and explore all of their products. And they’re all over social, amazing, amazing. You have not tried Fulton and Rourke, you definitely need to try all of their products. And thank you, Kevin, thank you everyone for listening until next time on the Kara Goldin show. Kevin Keller, co founder of Fulton and Rourke. Thank you, thanks, Kara. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit, and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast, just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now.

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