You open this bar thinking
it probably would be in the

but all of a sudden
you're the face of this.

How did you make that
transition personally?

And welcome to The Way
Up, presented by Square

with entrepreneurs
immersed in the day to day

and the communities
critical to their success.

Today I'm talking to
Jenny Nguyen, the founder

of The Sports Bra, a Portland,
Oregon establishment.

That's the first of its kind, a sports bar

Jenny, welcome. It's nice to be here, Guy

the story of The Sports
Bra really begins on

the women's NCAA basketball
Championship game.

You're watching that game.
Tell me about that night.

Oh my gosh. So a
group of friends of mine

and I, this is pretty common
for us, either before or

after we play basketball,
we'll get together,

watch some basketball, watch some sports.

That day we made it a point
to get together probably 12, 14

of us walk into our
neighborhood sports bar

and we think this is the
biggest game of the year.

So we're like, we ask the
server, she's like, absolutely,

we'll put some tables together,
you guys can sit here.

it seemed like it was gonna be a blowout.

And about the last five
minutes, Notre Dame just

I mean, I remember I was
wearing a baseball cap

and I threw it across the
bar in celebration.

And I remember watching my
hat like coast across the bar.

that no one else in the entire
bar was watching the game

- Your table's freaking out.
- We're losing our minds.

or a spark in your mind
already that night?

where we can gather and
feel like this is our place.

Did that, did that idea
already come to you that

and we finished our pitchers
of beer and our wings

and we're all hugging each
other saying our goodbyes.

and I was just like, that
literally is the best basketball

And she goes, yeah,
can you imagine if we'd

And right at that moment
I was like, I think

but mostly shocked that I hadn't noticed.

And what, what I realized
right at that moment was

that I had become so accustomed
to watching women's sports

as like a second class citizen
that I hadn't even noticed

And right at that moment,
out of just pure frustration,

I told her, I was just like,
the only way we're ever gonna

watch a women's sports game
in its full glory is if

When you've got an idea
and it's a gap between idea

And we dream about them
and they fade. Yeah.

But sometimes we take those
ideas and realize them

You open this bar thinking
it probably would be in the background a little bit, but all of a sudden
you're the face of this. How did you make that
transition personally? Therapy. I'm Guy Raz. And welcome to The Way
Up, presented by Square a new series where I sit down with entrepreneurs
immersed in the day to day of building a business. We'll talk about the ups and downs that define their journeys and the communities
critical to their success. Today I'm talking to
Jenny Nguyen, the founder of The Sports Bra, a Portland,
Oregon establishment. That's the first of its kind, a sports bar that only plays women's sports. Jenny, welcome. It's nice to be here, Guy Jenny, the story of The Sports
Bra really begins on April 1st, 2018, the women's NCAA basketball
Championship game. Notre Dame versus Mississippi State. You're watching that game.
Tell me about that night. Oh my gosh. So a
group of friends of mine and I, this is pretty common
for us, either before or after we play basketball,
we'll get together, have a couple beers, watch some, watch some basketball, watch some sports. That day we made it a point
to get together probably 12, 14 of us walk into our
neighborhood sports bar and we think this is the
biggest game of the year. Yeah We roll in there, there's 30 plus TVs. The game's not on any TV, and the place is kind of, not super full the time we get there. So we're like, we ask the
server, she's like, absolutely, we'll put some tables together,
you guys can sit here. And they changed one channel for us. As the game progressed, it seemed like it was gonna be a blowout. And about the last five
minutes, Notre Dame just starts this incredible comeback. Three seconds on the clock. Yeah 58 points. Tie game. Tie game and out of bounds play. I mean, I remember I was
wearing a baseball cap and I stood up and I took my cap off and I threw it across the
bar in celebration. And I remember watching my
hat like coast across the bar. And that's when I noticed that no one else in the entire
bar was watching the game that our table was watching. - Your table's freaking out.
- We're losing our minds. Yeah. And the rest of the
bar is just.. Dead silent. Was there an inkling or a spark in your mind
already that night? That something, there must be something where we can gather and
feel like this is our place. Did that, did that idea
already come to you that night? The idea came to me that night, but it wasn't right at that moment. You know, we celebrated, we cheered and we finished our pitchers
of beer and our wings and we like, I feel like
we stayed a lot longer after the game. 'Cause we were just high on the victory, right? On just this amazing game. And we came out to the parking lot and we're all hugging each
other saying our goodbyes. And I remember I hugged my friend and I was just like, that
literally is the best basketball game I have ever seen. And she goes, yeah,
can you imagine if we'd watched it with the sound on? And right at that moment
I was like, I think that there was like this level of shock, but mostly shocked that I hadn't noticed. And what, what I realized
right at that moment was that I had become so accustomed
to watching women's sports as like a second class citizen
that I hadn't even noticed that a game as huge as a championship there was something else on. And right at that moment,
out of just pure frustration, I told her, I was just like,
the only way we're ever gonna watch a women's sports game
in its full glory is if we had our own place. There's that moment, right? When you've got an idea
and it's a gap between idea and then actually taking the leap and saying, I am going to do this. And most people don't get there. Sure. Most of us have ideas. Yeah. And we dream about them
and they fade. Yeah. But sometimes we take those
ideas and realize them and turn them into something real. What was the catalyst, what
got you from this idea in your head to saying, you
know what, I'm gonna do this? So that game was in 2018,
that was when it kind of sparked the idea, or you
know, The Sports Bra in my mind. Shortly after that, you
know, I told my friends, I was just like, ah, you
know, it's The Sports Bra. It was this fantasy place that
we all referred to as a joke. But of course, you know, I started to turn it over in my head. And so I, I grew up seeing that Portland showed
up for women's sports. So I thought to myself, man, you know, maybe it could work in Portland, maybe this could be something cool. And I did a lot of research
and I started to look it up and I thought, I wonder how other women's sports bars have done, 'cause at the time I had no idea. Yeah. And the more I looked it up, the more I realized it hadn't been done. - It hadn't been done.
- It had not been done. So all of a sudden you
realize, wait a minute, there's a huge opportunity,
there's a business opportunity to do something here. And, and you had an intuition
that this might work. Was there any pushback
when you, when you started to talk about this with anybody? Did anybody say, I, I don't know Jenny. I don't
know if this is gonna work. I mean, I think maybe I was
saying that the most. Hmm. I honestly didn't know if it would work. I started to think, you know, why, why hasn't it been done? And when I got really serious about it, you know, I didn't tell anybody. When I got really serious
about the very first kind of major call I made
was to a mentor of mine. So I text him, I'm like, Hey,
wanna meet up for a beer? I have this idea, I wanna
run by you. He is like, sure. So we meet up for a beer and we, you know, catch up a little bit. And he's like, so gimme your idea. And I give him like the three minute elevator pitch, you know? And literally the first
thing that came out of his mouth was, what's your timeline? And I was just like, oh. And I told him the Women's
World Cup, which is 2023. So at the time it was 2021. And he was just like,
oh no, that's too late. He goes, you need to start this right now. - You need to start this right now.
- That's what he said. He goes, don't one, don't tell anybody. He goes, I think it, I think
this is a million dollar idea. You didn't have a
huge war chest of cash. What were you gonna do
to actually get the money to put down a deposit on a space and to get a lease and
to start this thing? All the things. All the things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean honestly I
had been like living off of my savings for five years. So I really didn't have a lot of money to tell you the truth. I, I applied for SBA loans,
traditional lenders, all of the things and got
denied by every single one. But what is fascinating is that with every denial came a phone call, which I don't think happens very often. And usually the phone
call was like, listen, these are the reasons that
we can't loan you the money. And it was basically the big three. One, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Two, you've never owned a business before. Three, this is a concept that literally has never been done before. Pretty risky. But all of
them saw the business plan and they were all like, but listen, we really
think this is a great idea. We really hope that it comes to fruition. I had read that it would take
about three to six months to find a location. And so I figured in three to six months maybe
I'd figure out funding. So I'll just start looking for a location now, put my feelers out. And I basically walked into the space that is now The Sports Bra,
about three weeks into looking. And I like hated myself right away. I opened the door and I
was like, why am I here? Like, 'cause I just knew
that I didn't have the money. Yeah. But I opened the door and I could see where
the TVs were gonna go. I could see where the
trophy shelf was gonna be. I could see where the
flags were gonna hang. So I went home, slept on
it, woke up the next day and was like, let's do
it. We'll figure it out. February 2022, you launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to get this thing off the ground. Yeah. You have a goal and
you blow right through it. Yeah. The community just
comes out in support of this. What, how much did you raise? Well, we were seeking about 49,000 and we met the goal in nine days and we closed at just over 105,000. It was unbelievable. And literally that was the first time we
really put it out in public. And to get that kind of response, I mean, I'll never forget the day
I was working at the Bra and I get this text from
mom and I look at it and she goes, have you looked at your crowdfunding campaign today yet? I go, no, why? And she goes, look at it. And I open it up and it was
like the graph went from this to this and what had happened was a
local magazine had printed like a Coming Soon to Portland article and it has been like that since then. Just two months after that Kickstarter on April
1st, April Fools' Day, which was four years to the day of that NCAA championship
game. You open the bar. Yeah, I'd picked April
1st to open a while ago. One because it's a huge weekend, but two, it's meaningful
because of that game. But three, I'm always
like that kind of person that has like a plan B and a plan C. I felt like if there was for
some reason we couldn't open, we could be like, April
Fools we're not opening this week, we're gonna open next week. So I had like a backup
plan, our grand opening, we saw about 3000 people
come through the door. Wow. For a 40 seat restaurant. 
That's insane. Overwhelming. Totally overwhelming. It was a four hour wait
when we opened the door and we closed to a four hour
wait and people weren't mad. They were like, see you in the morning. So we opened Friday, Saturday, Sunday. By Monday morning I
started to get phone calls and what had happened was
the community credit union believed that we were a small business, which I also believed. And so they gave us a
small business platform and we crashed it day one. So we ended up upgrading to Square. We basically took a poll of my team and was just like, what
do you guys love hate? And everyone recommended Square. There's a lot of tools
in there that we use that have made everything a lot easier. We have a pretty robust
merchandise program and so we actually
added retail for Square, which has a lot more tracking,
sales tracking, SKUs, all kinds of stuff that we've added. And so that has been
super helpful for reports. And when we're reordering
and we're re-upping and also developing next products and then figuring out what we
wanna send out to franchises. And you, you've done events
outdoors, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. And so you can sort of efficiently do everything you need to do. Absolutely, yeah. We've taken, we've taken our entire
workstations out of doors. Not just handhelds but entire workstations and you know, run 'em
off of our phone hotspots and it works like a dream. Describe what you see when
you walk in to The Sports Bra. Yeah, I mean I think the, at this point The Bra is larger than life. It has taken on like a
whole life of its own. Televisions on every wall. There are five TVs. The space is like a small pub. It's 40 seats, 50 people
standing room only. Only women's sports
playing on those TVs. Only women's sports and memorabilia flags, autograph stuff, everything is female athletes. It's a full restaurant, amazing
menu, which I've looked at And from what I understand, all of the beer on tap comes
from women-owned breweries. Yeah. I mean more or
less we have 21 taps. Everything is either owned, operated by, or has a woman in the brew house. Wow. But we have gluten-free ciders, kombucha is also on there. I think in the first eight
months you brought in like a million dollars in revenue, which sounds like completely
exceeded your projections and your expectations. I mean the community really turned up for this. Like it wasn't just that
people were coming out because it was, you know,
the right thing to do. This was a real business opportunity. There was a a demand for
this big time. Big time. And there was this gap that you filled even unbeknownst to
you, you yourself doubted yourself for some time. Yeah, I had no idea. I mean, what I thought I
was building was a space for people like me who
are huge women's sports fans to just come and share in community. But the reality is that
The Bra has become more of a community space for all folks. We are super geared towards inclusivity and there's this idea about how women's sports has
been under invested in underrepresented. Those stories aren't being
told. Now more than ever, they're finally getting the light of day that they've deserved for decades. I think pretty soon after you opened up, investors
started to contact you and say, hey, would you be
interested in franchising? And one of those investors was
a pretty well-known founder, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of reddit
and he sent you a note and said, hey, would you be
interested in, from what I read, at first you kind of
said, oh I'm so flattered, but I'm just not even ready
to have this conversation yet. Yeah, no, Alexis reached out via Twitter and this was before our second anniversary,
so we'd just gotten like maybe a year and eight months in. I was still trying to figure
out like which way was up, you know what I mean? Like things were insane. And so yeah, people had come to me about opening other locations, franchising this, that
and the other thing. I was like, I need somebody
to run the bar tonight. Like come on now. Like we're trying to
run a restaurant here. Whatever was happening
was bigger than anything I had imagined. We were prioritizing that,
you know, I'm really driven by the mission of the Bra, and at the time I wanted
that box to succeed. I couldn't see outside of that. And that was when Alexis reached out along with a handful of other folks. And what's cool is that he was just like, let me know when you're ready to go big. And he was just like, let
me know what your plans are. And I just wrote him back. I was like, I don't have any plans. I have no idea. I don't even
know if I want more than one. So you, I think about a year
later he becomes your first outside investor and you agree, but you come to the realization
that you're kind of destined to turn this thing into
something much, much bigger. Before I ask you about that,
I'm curious, you spent most of your career in the
background in kitchens, not as a public facing person for sure. You open this bar thinking
it's gonna be a community bar. And again, you probably would
be in the background a little bit, but all of a sudden
you, you, you come to the forefront, you're the face of this, you're getting a lot of attention. How did you make that transition
personally to becoming the representative of this thing? Therapy? No, it was really
hard, honestly, outside of just starting a business. Yeah. That part of my personal growth
was very, very difficult. I have always been a
back of the house person. I mean in fact, I remember
people being like, Jenny, don't ever cross that line 'cause you are not made
for customer interaction. But you rose to it. You found that charisma. - I mean I had to.
- Yeah I had to. Well one, sometimes you just
have to do what you have to do. You know, you fake it till you make it. But another thing that
I try to remember is that The Bra is bigger than just me. And so for whatever insecurities or whatever I have, it has
to take a backseat to what the mission is and the impact and all of that is super
powerful and bigger than me. So if I have to be the face of this thing, I'll do it. Jenny, it's, it's been a, a
mixed bag for small business. It's a tough time. The cost
of goods are going up, cost of labor's going up,
inflation, there's a lot of pressure on small businesses. How have you sort of managed through that and how have some of the
tools that you're working with helped you figure out the most efficient
way to move forward? Absolutely. I mean a
lot of it has to do with talking to people. You know, we have leads, we
have a bar lead, a chef, front of the house lead and then my manager. And so talking to them
about efficiencies in labor, figuring out when slow periods are, I mean that's one really great thing
about Square is like really easily we can see guest counts during which hours are
our peak hours, low hours. It tracks people clocking in and out. If we have six people on staff during happy hour at 3PM
which is the slowest time, why is that happening? As far as cogs, honestly, it's
really about tracking sales. Yeah. And seeing what are popular items, what are unpopular, what
are their food costs? Can we get rid of 'em? So we do a menu refresh twice a year. Fall-winter, spring-summer. And you can track all of that. We can track all of it. Even so we have 21 taps. We can track every tap and we can say, oh, clearly number 13, which is a pilsner, outsells everything. Alright. So as this vision
for franchising The Sports Bra, for this to become something in cities, in communities all over the
United States, maybe the world, how do you imagine some of the tools, the Square tools you use, how do you imagine those
helping you realize that vision? So one thing is that
Square is very popular. And so when we put that in
our restaurants, a majority of servers, bartenders will
have experience with it. And that makes ease of transition and training like almost seamless, right? Another thing too is that
the ability for our POS and all the menus and stuff
like that to transfer over, since our menus will be
relatively unchanged in the different cities, we're
gonna leave some wiggle room for chef creativity and regional flare. So, but a lot of that stuff
will be plug and play. Another really great thing
is the connection to merch again. The merchandise is
gonna be a whole revenue stream as we franchise out. Right now, all of our logos say The Sports
Bra, Portland, Oregon. I mean imagine a world where
it says some other city and we start to do like
local collabs with artists and things like that. And the ability for those
stores to sell their own merch. And we can track them, run reports, figure out SKUs, all kinds of stuff. Tell me the vision
5, 10 years from now, what does The Sports Bra look like? I mean, I half jokingly say
this, but world domination. I mean, I imagine that when
you have a baby, you know, you have dreams and hopes and visions of what that
baby's gonna grow up to be. But the reality is that
baby's gonna grow up to be whatever it's gonna be. I no longer control what The
Sports Bra is growing up to be. I just want to foster it. At the end of the day, my
biggest driver is impact. It's not money, which I know
investors hate hearing that, but to me it's like what will
create the biggest impact? Let's do that. Maintaining
all of the culture, mission and values. So world domination with
all of that. Count me in. Great, thank you. Of course. That's Jenny Nguyen. I'm Guy Raz and you've been
watching The Way Up, a series presented in partnership with Square. On our next episode, I sit
down with Alex Samuels, the founder and CEO of
Nashville's Rustler Hat Co. in her first interview.

Guy Raz x Square | The Way Up: The Sports Bra

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