46 BCBusiness april 2014
A
s most entrepreneurs will attest, busi-
ness opportunities crystallize out of the
blue—while driving, in the shower or over
coffee. Joel Primus, the 27-year-old presi-
dent and
CEO of the underwear company Naked
Inc., is no exception. His million-dollar idea
came when he ran out of underwear in Peru.
"I'd been shooting a documentary in South
America and we got stuck in Lima due to
logistics," he recalls. "I happened to pick up
a pair of underwear that a vendor was selling
in a street market and it changed my life." The
key, he says, was a combination of Pima cotton
for which the Andean nation is renowned, and
the fact that Primus, an accomplished runner
and holder of 13 B.C. titles in high school and
the recipient of a track scholarship to a North
Carolina university, was never happy with the
underwear on the market. "Being a runner, I
wanted underwear that performed and didn't
feel like it was there," he says, articulating the
design ethos that led to his company's eventual
brand name. "Everything I was used to was ter-
rible—bulky, coarse and uncomfortable."
After returning from his documentary shoot
("I never did end up finishing it, but I want to
use the 1,000 minutes of footage for a project
soon") he sourced equally elegant cotton from
Italy, got a friend's grandmother to make the
first samples and launched Naked Inc., trying
to convince high-end retailers to buy into his
comfortable revolution.
Along the way he appeared on Dragons'
Den twice, in 2009 and 2012 (neither time did
the dragons buy in, but he learned some valu-
able lessons); worked two jobs while pitching
his company ("pumping septic and waiting
tables: a horrible combination"); launched a
charity called Project World Citizen that builds
computer labs in rural Ghana; and took Naked
to market. That's a hell of a way to spend your
mid-20s. –T.G.
Joel Primus
President and CEO, Naked Inc.
Age: 27
30
UNDER 30
p38-67_30Under30_april.indd 46 14-03-07 2:04 PM
