Twenty Years of Ranger Up

Twenty years ago, a very young version of me, exasperated by the mundane nature of a corporate gig, started a hobby.  I wish I could pretend that I had some great vision of building the first military lifestyle brand, but it was a lot simpler than that: I was volunteering my time teaching combatives to the Duke ROTC and the kids there complained that there weren’t any good military t-shirts.  Everything was skulls and snakes and “Death From Above”.  So I made them some t-shirts with Microsoft Paint and iron-ons from Michaels and distributed my creations to them as gifts.  They loved the concepts but strongly recommended I hire an “actual artist” next time.

So I thought about that for a while.  At the time a website called Busted Tees was doing a lot of ironic funny t-shirts that I liked and I thought it might be fun to do something like that for the military.  That was it.  That was the grand vision.  I never expected it to be my job, my calling, and certainly not my life’s work.  But on June 16, 2006 I started the LLC that would become Ranger Up.  The site wouldn’t launch until September 8th, but with that incorporation I hired a designer, and started printing shirts.

As I approached launch day, my excitement level grew and grew.  I was sure I had created something awesome!  I had invested in 36 designs and I thought every one of them was absolute fire.  I was wrong.  When the smoke cleared, only two of the designs did okay.  It should have been soul-crushing, but for some reason it wasn’t. I wanted to get better at this.

At this time, there was no social media except MySpace.  There were no Facebook pages, ads, or any of the tools people use now.  It was just word of mouth.  So on the weekends, my friend Brad and I would table at Fort Bragg or Fort Benning.  By day I was working a high-profile Fortune 100 job, but on the weekends I was unfolding a plastic table and selling t-shirts.  And the latter is what made me feel alive.  At this point the company was running out of a spare bedroom.  I made shelves with my table saw and scrap wood that fit the boxes we had.  I had one part-time employee to fulfill orders while I was at work.  It was tiny, but I was interacting with the people I cared the most about  - the military community.

About six months in, I had the first email from a veteran under duress.  He had never bought anything from us, but had read our stories, and laughed at them.  He was back from Afghanistan and wasn’t doing well.  I called him and we spent two hours on the phone.  I realized that the silly shirts and sillier stories meant something to people.  I also realized they meant a lot to me.

This little hobby started to consume me.  I’d get home from my Fortune 100 gig at 6pm, eat dinner, and then work from 7pm to one or two in the morning, and do it all again the next day. Social media came on the scene.  We joined Facebook and YouTube.  The Ranger Up workout video was born. In 2009, a fantastic team of people asked me to help put on the first professional MMA fight in a war zone, and I took two weeks of vacation from my corporate gig to go to Mosul, Iraq.  We had 14 amateur fights and four pro fights, and the amateurs were largely made up volunteers to include an entire squad that had volunteered to fight, under the guidance of their squad leader, Patrick Miller.

On that Mosul night, I watched those guys give it everything they had.  Some won.  Some lost.  And then Pat got a call from his PL.  They needed to head back out on patrol.  I watched the squad that had just had a literal MMA fight, load up onto a Bradley and go outside the wire.  I had never felt more empty.  I wrestled with a lot of emotions.  Should I go back in?  Had I done enough?  The one thing I absolutely knew is that I felt more alive out in Mosul putting on this event and seeing that I played a small role in bringing joy to the men and women sitting in that desert than I had since I left the service.

When I came back to my job, I was greeted with interesting news: I was set to be promoted.  It was going to be a huge raise.  I resigned.  I needed to spend the best parts of my day focused on the Ranger Up community.  I was joined by two 75th Ranger Regiment owners in Tom Amenta and John Tackett, and two SF guys in Kelly Crigger and, of course, Tim.

Tom moved to NC and became my COO.  His pay was basically money for food and my spare bedroom.  And we got to work.  At my lowest point, I had $57k in credit card debt and $1300 to my name.  But I had you guys, and somehow that was enough.

Tom and I moved into a 1200sf warehouse, and then a 2500sf, then 5,000, then 15,000.  We employed tons of veterans.  We found the legend that is Jack Mandaville.  

 

We did weird things like enter and win the team Bataan Death March and break the record…while drinking. We sponsored 104 MMA fighters, and multiple veteran wrestlers, and endurance athletes.  We hosted charity events.  We threw parties.  We created a veteran entrepreneur program before any of the great charities that do this work now even existed.  We were doing things that I had never dreamed of doing.  At Fight for the Troops 3, when Tim knocked out Nadal, and the whole crowd started cheering “Ranger Up” I cannot explain to you what that meant for all of us.

We were just regular guys.  None of us were heroes.  But you all believed in us and in that moment we felt we had made you proud.  I didn’t think it could get any better.

Then this young JTAC named Jarred Taylor called me up.  He had recently started my second favorite military apparel brand, Article 15, with his friends Mat Best and Vincent Vargas.  Jarred wanted to make a movie, and thus began a three year effort to film and release the first veteran made Hollywood movie - Range 15.  

I’ve done a lot of hard things, but perhaps nothing in business as hard as making that movie happen.  And it was all worth it to watch you all in theaters.  To see it hit number one on the charts, knowing that…perhaps…and I do mean perhaps…the movie wasn’t quite Oscar-worthy, but that rather it’s success was entirely due to you.  And I don’t just mean the fact that you raised the funds, saw it in the theaters, and bought it on DVD, but you also showed up for filming, fixed HMMWvs, got props, solved problems, and supported us in every way.

We wanted to be able to do more for you, and we had watched three other big players in the military space take on private equity money.  We did the same.  In 2019, I sold the controlling shares of Ranger Up so that we could grow bigger, do more for the community, and begin opening physical locations.  Within months, I knew that was a mistake.

The piece that I missed in my naivety, which I did not adequately protect, is that in a business like ours, heart matters a lot more than numbers.  And as soon as there were larger shareholders, the decisions were different.  Not because anyone was bad.  In fact, the business they ran was superior to the business I ran.  More money was made.  Non-returning investments were stopped.  Budgets were tightened.

And I hated it.  Because sometimes you need to do the events that are meaningful even though there is no return.  You have to spend the hour on the phone with a soldier in crisis, even though it’s not your job.  You have to make decisions that financially don’t make sense, because we knew that Ranger Up only existed because you believed in us and we have to look out for you.

So I left.  

Ranger Up had been my baby, but it was no longer mine.  I never thought I’d see it again, and I found peace in that.

When I left, my employees were given a choice: relocate to another state or be laid off.  Again, no judgment.  I understood where they were coming from.  Why keep two locations?  It was the right business decision.  From my perspective, though, these people had fought side by side with me to build Ranger Up.  So I hired them all into a new company I created called Diesel Jack Media.  Simultaneously, and very much unplanned, I started a charity organization that did international refugee work that took me to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Ukraine, Poland, and supported hurricane efforts in NC.

And for five years prior to September, that’s where we’ve all been working.  In the process, I made great friends with people like Austin von Letkemann (AKA Mandatory FunDay), Johnny Vargas, Kagan Dunlap, Ashley Gutermuth, and a whole lot more incredible people.  Austin and I in particular were looking for some projects to work on together, but hadn't found anything quite right.

And then I got a call.  Ranger Up had been acquired alongside the business that originally bought it.  The new owners wanted to know if I wanted it back.

And after five years of knowing I’d never own Ranger Up again, I realized I did want it back. So I bought it, bringing Austin on as my new CMO, and Eric Tansey as our "HR Rep".

 

And now we’re once again hiring veterans, planning fun things to do with this community, making videos that we hope will make you chuckle, and dreaming up the next great impossible task.

I know that we don’t deserve the love you have given us over the years.  Again, I assure you - we all know we are regular people.  But I can also promise you that we work very hard to be worthy of it.

There’s a lot I can say about the last twenty years.  It was incredibly hard.  It required superhuman effort by so many people.  It almost broke me many, many times.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

The best years of my life have been devoted to making you guys smile, and I hope you understand how much you all mean to the Ranger Up team.

Here’s hoping that in twenty years, we still have some meaning for you all.  I can promise you that I know how lucky I am to get a second shot at this, and I’m going to give you everything I’ve got, for as long as it’s still within me, to represent this incredible community.

We’ll be doing a lot more as we approach the anniversary of our business launch date in September, but I couldn’t allow the quiet birth of the company to go unacknowledged.

Thank you so very much for twenty incredible years.  

The best is yet to come.

Nick Palmisciano

President, Ranger Up