In its sixth year, BRUNT Workwear now runs every major commerce channel on a single platform. BRUNT has sold direct-to-consumer on Shopify since launching in September 2020.
The company launched wholesale on Shopify B2B in February 2024 and is now carried by close to 100 retailers across roughly 2,000 stores, with plans to reach 3,000. BRUNT also uses Shop as a discovery channel.
On May 2, 2026, the company opened its first wholly owned flagship store in North Reading, Massachusetts, powered by Shopify POS and located half a mile from headquarters.
With Shopify, BRUNT Workwear has:
- Scaled to over $300 million in annual revenue in its sixth year of business, with the majority of sales flowing through Shopify across DTC, wholesale, Shop, and POS.
- Expanded their B2B customer base from 110 stores at launch to about 2,000 stores in two years, with a B2B portal that made operations about 5x more efficient and replaced paper and spreadsheet orders with a digital workflow.
- Opened their first physical retail store on Shopify POS, which is overperforming projections and ran out of inventory in week one.
- Drove 50% of DTC transactions through Shop Pay over the last 12 months.
Building a brand for the trades, with the trades
BRUNT exists because a group of childhood friends asked for it. Eric Girouard, founder and CEO, grew up in Bristol, Connecticut, in what he calls a blue-collar household. His father built airplane engines at night and roofed during the day.
Eric started roofing at 14, ran a landscaping business at 15, and expected to spend his career working in the trades until his parents pushed him to attend Babson College in Boston.
After graduating, he spent a decade in early ecommerce and apparel, working for a serial entrepreneur in the fashion space, while his childhood friends stayed home in Connecticut and went into the trades.
At his bachelor party in 2015, those friends pitched him an idea.
We wear our heritage boots and our heritage pants from the same brands our fathers and grandfathers wore. There hasn't been a modern brand that looks like we look, that talks like we talk, and shows up in the places we show up.
That sentence became the foundation for BRUNT. Newly married and with a five-month-old son at home, Eric left his job in 2018 to build BRUNT, raised capital, and launched the company on September 10, 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. One of his lead investors advised him to put the business on hold until the pandemic stabilized.
Eric checked with his friends before putting the business on pause. But the construction workers and tradespeople had been deemed essential during the pandemic and were back on job sites within a week. Their work boots and work clothes were non-discretionary. So he charged ahead.
Eric approached product development the same way he approached the business itself: by listening to tradespeople first. He worked directly with the eight or nine friends who had pitched the idea, asking what features they needed, what their favorite brands got right, and what they would change.
The Marin, one of four original boots that launched, was named after Matt Marin, a union drywaller Eric went to nursery school with. It remains the company's number one boot.
I knew if it excited them, there was a chance that it would work. If it excited me, it didn't really matter, because I sit behind a desk.
Choosing Shopify on day one
Eric learned ecommerce on what he calls "the old infrastructure," the big enterprise platforms of the late 2000s and early 2010s. He had watched companies spend millions building custom storefronts for businesses that never launched.
When his wife started a winter hats side business on Shopify two years before BRUNT, Eric helped her build it himself and realized the work he thought required an engineering team did not.
I had an understanding that it wasn't rocket science anymore like it used to be. It was ease of use and the fact that we could do it ourselves and change things on the fly and not count on someone externally.
He signed up for the Shopify free trial, watched YouTube videos, and figured the rest out himself. The same approach has held through every channel expansion since. BRUNT does not have a large in-house engineering team. The operating model is to figure out what the next channel needs, bring in the right partner, and ship.
Going to wholesale, betting on the roadmap
By 2023, BRUNT had close to a million customers and a triple-digit DTC growth curve. Customer research showed that more than half of those customers still wanted to try work boots on in a physical retail store before buying.
Eric set a goal that year: be the most dominant workwear brand in the United States by 2028. They couldn’t reach that goal by ignoring 5 or 6 out of every 10 buyers in the category.
The team evaluated various B2B platforms. The internal recommendation was to use the platform the team had run at previous workwear brands, the one the category had used for the prior two decades. Eric pushed back.
I said, that's where the market was the past 20 years. I don't want to go backwards. I know Shopify is going to be the future and I know they're going to figure it out, because just the size of the opportunity for them to be in servicing these B2B accounts is massive.
BRUNT launched their B2B portal on Shopify on February 15, 2024. Eric says the early version of the portal was still missing some functionality for the workwear category, but Shopify’s pace of development quickly changed that. Within 6 to 12 months, the platform had closed the gaps. BRUNT’s retail partners, many of them multi-generational workwear stores still managing orders through paper forms and spreadsheets, were skeptical at first.
We'd give them a demo and show them it was just like shopping on the website, except you're buying for your retail store and there's payment terms in there. At first it was a little bit like pulling teeth, and then as soon as they would just try it, they were like, wow, this is amazing, and they wished they could get all of their other vendor brands to actually go on this platform too.
The operational benefits ended up being even more significant. Paper orders created risk of error both at the retailer level and again when BRUNT employees manually entered those orders into the company’s systems. The portal eliminated that second layer of manual entry entirely.
It would have been a team that grew to 10-12 people that instead is now a team of two. It saved us time, energy, and a ton of human error in the middle.
BRUNT's wholesale business launched with about 110 retailers in early 2024. BRUNT will end 2026 in roughly 2,000 stores and is planning to add another 1,000 in 2027, including Blain's Farm & Fleet, Boot Barn's 550 stores, Tractor Supply in the fall, Scheels, and independents like Frank's in Pittsburgh, the kind of regional retailer that defines its category in its market.
Shop is a discovery channel BRUNT did not expect
Alongside wholesale, BRUNT also invested in Shop as its own discovery and commerce channel. One product manager was dedicated to building out the in-app brand experience.
When we tested the Shop app, we had no idea how that was going to work, because it was its own universe. We were surprised actually how many customers were coming through the Shop app. We've been in a bunch of different marketplace type things that just didn't work out at that level, and we were pleasantly surprised.
The team assigned a dedicated product manager to Shop in June 2024 to build an in-app experience that mirrored the storefront. Transactions in the app doubled month over month right after the launch.
Opening the first store on Shopify POS
The North Reading flagship opened on May 2, 2026, half a mile from headquarters. Eric is in the store most nights and weekends. By his account, getting the store POS up and running was relatively straightforward.
It was pretty much a flick of a switch. We had to order the hardware, because obviously we're going to need to accept credit cards. I think we just went on the actual Shopify website which has it all packaged up, got our iPads going, and had to get internet service. We actually set it up here to test it first and then relocated it to the store when the store was ready. We don't have our own in-house development team or a huge technology team. We have some smart product folks that were able to get it live in very short order.
The reason for opening a flagship store was not revenue. BRUNT products are sold through close to 100 retailers, often with only part of the assortment and varying merchandising setups. The flagship store gives the company a fully realized version of the brand experience that retailers and employees can experience firsthand.
I wanted to create the ultimate BRUNT brand experience to be able to show the retailers, hey, this is what BRUNT looks like when it's fully top to bottom, the best experience imaginable. For our employees to go see, this is what BRUNT really looks and feels like and smells like. And selfishly for me, to wrap my head around what we've built here in a physical world.
Eighteen days after opening, the store was outperforming projections and facing the good problem of running out of inventory. Because the store runs on Shopify POS connected to the same back end as BRUNT’s DTC and wholesale operations, Eric could view store performance alongside the rest of the business in the same daily reporting.
Now that the retail store is up, all of the performance and inventory data is flowing in and I can see it every day. The unified experience just makes operating the business a lot easier.
Three more BRUNT stores are planned to open in the Northeast in 2027.
Rebuilding the storefront on Horizon
In Q4 2025, BRUNT and Anatta, BRUNT's agency partner since early 2022, rebuilt the storefront on Shopify's Horizon architecture. Eric calls it an unsexy project that had to happen.
It's all behind the scenes and the website generally looks like it did, but it performs much faster and is easier to work with. It's a discipline project.
BRUNT used the quiet window between Black Friday Cyber Monday and the next year's launches to ship the rebuild. The benefit showed up in Google Lighthouse scoring on day one, with more gains landing in the weeks that followed.
Day one the speed was the number one thing. The score went up by 20 points.
Anatta has rebuilt other premium DTC brands on Horizon. Eric chose the agency for its experience instead of running a formal review process.
They've done this a few times with brands much bigger than us a couple years down the road. They've seen it, they probably learned where the pitfalls are, and we're going to get the benefit of their learnings.
Shipping a custom pre-order app in one week
AI is woven through how BRUNT runs the business. The team uses AI for inventory planning, financial planning, content writing, and merchandising. The most concrete example comes from a recent project run by Ian Sweeney, one of BRUNT's product managers, who is not an engineer.
We've relied on third-party applications to drive our website pre-order functionality for years. These solutions never got it quite right. One of our first employees, Ian Sweeney, who's one of our product managers, used AI to build a completely new custom app that helped smooth out the bumps with our pre-order experience. We were able to load that app into our Shopify experience to replace that third-party solution, which not only solved operational challenges but also saved operational expenses and provided a better customer experience, all using AI in one week.
The app handles pre-orders that BRUNT used to run through third-party tools that never quite fit. Ian built it inside the Shopify back end. It removed the operational headaches of the prior setup, lowered the cost, and made the customer experience smoother.
Eric is taking the same approach to agentic commerce that he used for the storefront rebuild: find experienced partners and move early.
It is the future. I pretty much don't use Google Search anymore. I go into Gemini. We are not going to be the smartest people in the room on figuring that out from scratch. Let's find the right agency partners that are the subject matter experts and leaders and cutting edge. Similar to how we did with Anatta from a Shopify perspective, let's do the exact same thing on the agentic search side.
BRUNT has already turned on agentic shopping through Shopify.
What comes next
DTC is still BRUNT's biggest channel and still growing. Wholesale will add about another 1,000 stores next year. Three more retail stores will open in the Northeast in 2027. Eric is explicit about what BRUNT is not going to do.
It's really easy to get shiny nickel syndrome, you know, start chasing new channels or categories, or going international, but all these things can also take your attention away from the core business. It's not the sexiest answer, but it's basically staying disciplined on the three channels we have and just continuing to scale them up.
Five years in, a BRUNT customer can buy direct, through a wholesale retailer, in the Shop app, or at the flagship store in North Reading. BRUNT can manage and view all four channels in one place.
Start with the end consumer that you're trying to serve, and take your ego, take your knowledge, take everything that you think you have, and park it. Just listen to the end customer. The customer is going to decide if your brand or your company is going to be successful or not.