Back in 2017, I was doing a full-time construction management degree, working full-time as a construction manager, and living on campus. Which meant I had disposable income and nowhere better to put it than clothes and clubbing.
So, naturally, the idea for CLUTCH came to me where all good ideas come from… a nightclub called Chinese Laundry. For anyone that’s been you’ll know it’s a very iconic but disgusting and dingy club with 6ft tall ceilings. For anyone that hasn’t been: good for you.
That night, I was using fashion tape to try to hold myself into an ill-fitting jumpsuit. It took about twenty strips just to get the placement right, and every failed strip went straight in the bin… so much single-use waste, and the whole process was fiddly, annoying, and ripping up my skin. Within about a second of arriving at the club, I started to sweat, the tape gave up, and I flashed everyone in the vicinity. Including the DJ who was a very small artist at the time but now is huge.. His name is Dom Dolla.
In that exact moment of frustration and embarrassment, I thought: wouldn't it be so much easier if I could just glue myself into my clothes? And then, immediately: surely someone's already invented this, like surely I've never had an original idea in my life. So I went home and did a pile of market research, fully expecting to find the answer already existed. It didn't. There were wig glues, super glues, lash glues. I bought all of them but nothing that was sweat-resistant, seriously strong, water-soluble enough to wash out, hypoallergenic, vegan, palm-oil-free, non-toxic, and packaged in fully recyclable materials.
So I figured: we can get men to the moon, I can invent a glue. And that's what set off four years of inventing and globally patenting the CLUTCH formula, including moving to Hong Kong for two years, partly to bootstrap the whole thing on a bigger salary.
While I was zeroing in on the formula, my sister Lucy, ten years into a copywriting career in advertising started asking the obvious questions: what's the plan for branding? What's this going to be called? Do you even have an Instagram handle? I told her, quite literally, "you do that." Like a good older sister, she did.
Lucy's read on the category was sharp: fashion tape brands had always talked about "wardrobe malfunctions" through a lens of embarrassment and shame. Cover yourself up, don't get caught out like Britney Spears getting papped getting out of a car. She flipped that. Clothes simply aren't made with everybody in mind, and a product that helps you wear whatever you want, however you want, should be about self-expression and empowerment, not damage control. That positioning is baked into everything CLUTCH does.
We launched CLUTCH Glue on 1 December 2022. Day one sales: about ten tubes, largely to friends and my dad, who I made buy one while he sat across the kitchen table from me.
For the first two years, Lucy and I kept our full-time jobs in construction management and copywriting and ran CLUTCH around them, figuring the business out as we went and leaning hard into building a genuine, founder-led relationship with our audience.
Three months after launch, Lucy pushed us to build a backlog of TikTok videos showing different use cases, so we filmed what felt like hundreds of them in one day. One clip: ten seconds, a spaghetti strap slipping off my shoulder and me clutching it back into place, I posted on a Sunday night and went to bed. I woke up to a broken phone, because Shopify had gone berserk: the video had hit over 9 million views and 420,000 likes overnight. Americans were furious they had to pay for shipping and wait two weeks. "I'm having a wardrobe malfunction in the Uber right now, can you get this to me before the wedding tomorrow"... that kind of energy.
So we set up a US 3PL immediately. Then I decided this belonged on a retail shelf, you can't exactly plan ahead for a wardrobe malfunction and started cold-emailing buyers. I guessed and sent out over 300 emails to retailers in one day, including CVS and Priceline. Both replied almost immediately, saying they'd seen us on TikTok, and both agreed to ad hoc ranging rather than making us wait the usual six months to a year. Within a week of landing in Priceline, we were the number one bestselling product in store.
From there it snowballed: Boots and WH Smith in the UK, pharmacies across Spain, Lithuania and the Netherlands, CVS, Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie and Von Maur in the US, with Walgreens and another 3,500 CVS stores launching later this year. We're also live on our own site, on Amazon, and just launched on TikTok Shop in the US, with the UK following shortly after.
Partway through this, a Shark Tank producer messaged me on LinkedIn out of nowhere. My first reaction was "absolutely not, that sounds awful" but he talked me into it. I ended up doing what got called the best Shark Tank pitch ever aired, racking up over a billion views across social media. And then I turned down the panel's offer, because it came with a request for founders' shares, which wasn't a trade I was willing to make. They're not on our cap table, but we're still on good terms and can tap them for advice when it's useful.
Around the same time, a friend who mentored for the Start Mate accelerator program suggested we apply. We got in and then our lawyer pointed out it didn't really make commercial sense, since we already had a market and didn't need a go-to-market strategy, just capital. So we declined it and pitched Blackbird Ventures instead, which led to closing one of the largest pre-seed cap raises for a CPG company globally.
Today CLUTCH Glue sits across roughly 10,000 retail doors worldwide, with strong organic growth (about a quarter of last year's direct-to-consumer revenue came from organic content, at zero customer acquisition cost) alongside efficient paid marketing and guerrilla activations from a bathroom vending machine takeover at a major US arena to seeding the product with the bike-shorts and gymnastics community, which turned out to be one of our most devoted customer bases entirely by accident.
If there's one thing I want people to take from this, it's that you don't need permission or perfect conditions to start. The idea came from a bad night out and a genuine "why doesn't this exist yet" moment. The hard part was just deciding to actually go and build it, on evenings and weekends, around a full-time job, for years, before it ever looked like a real business from the outside.
