Davie Fogarty was the kid at the beach who refused to take his shirt off, swimming in it instead, too self-conscious to do otherwise. Growing up in Adelaide, he sat through a grade 10 parent-teacher interview where all five of his teachers told his parents he was failing and nearly impossible to teach. What followed was not a straight line to success but a decade-long sequence of warehouse jobs, scams, a near-collapse in a bathroom, and a dad with a rock in a shoe, all of it leading to a weighted blanket, a startup launched on $500, and a brand that would eventually place him on the Australian financial rich list alongside Margot Robbie.
The $40,000 scam that wiped him out
Before the Oodie, before Calming Blankets, Davie built a small empire buying and selling Instagram accounts, running six burner phones on a bench while training personal training clients in the mornings and evenings, working 16-hour days. At one point he had $100,000 in the bank. Then he poured much of it into a Vietnamese roll shop that slowly bled money, and staked what was left on a $40,000 Instagram account purchase that turned out to be hacked. The original owner reclaimed the account through Instagram, the scammer kept the cash, and Davie was left with almost nothing. ‘I remember completely being disoriented in the bathroom, mentally just not even there with a lot of bad thoughts,’ he said. His father pulled him back with a deliberately unglamorous lesson: he put a rock in Davie’s shoe, made him walk down the driveway, then removed it. ‘These mistakes, if you carry them with you, they’re just going to hurt you,’ his dad told him. ‘Just learn from them and move on.’
He packed up, gave the shop away, moved to Melbourne, and went to work at a watch brand called the 5TH WATCHES, absorbing Facebook Ads, Google Ads, photography, videography, and influencer management. He still launched side projects: a seasoning business, six kilograms of parsley delivered to his parents’ house in Adelaide while he was still flying back from Melbourne. None of them worked. His savings ran to zero again. He moved back home with nothing except, as he put it, a mind full of knowledge that was invaluable.
A Facebook article and 400 very patient customers
The pivot came from a Facebook article about weighted blankets and their potential to help people with sensory disorders or insomnia. Davie piled every blanket in the house on top of himself on the couch to test the concept and, despite the heat, kept reading the glowing forum reviews. He ordered one sample from China. His girlfriend and his 11-year-old neighbor became the photo shoot models. He had $500 saved from weddings and videography work. He launched on a pre-sell model, taking orders before the stock had even entered the country, which meant that when Australian Federal Police held the shipment at the border for five weeks, his first 400 customers were waiting with no delivery date in sight. He spent weeks emailing border security, and when the clearance finally came through, the relief was overwhelming.
Sales hit $200 on day one, $1,000 in the first week, and $10,000 in the second month. Calming Blankets finished its first year at $1.5 million in profit. From there came the Oodie, the oversized wearable blanket brand that pushed the business from millions to tens of millions, and eventually to the half-billion dollar valuation that put his name on that rich list. The 60-person team, the Range Rover he drove off the lot grinning, the house, his girlfriend’s car: all of it traced back to that one pre-sold weighted blanket order and a customs hold that almost ended everything.
The rock still sitting in the driveway
A smooth stone, pulled from a shoe, left on a driveway in Adelaide.
Davie started with $500, a sample product, and a neighbor’s kid willing to pose for a photo shoot. The five weeks his first shipment spent in a customs hold could have been the end of it. He kept emailing.
