introducing: over & out

An inside look at building a brand, straight from my notes app to yours.

Welcome to over & out.

Candidly, it’s been a goal of mine for a while now to share a more behind-the-scenes look at entrepreneurship. And here we are, five years into building Halfdays... better late than never, right?

The past year (ish) has been pretty transformative for me, personally and professionally. I went through two cross-country moves, a long-term break up, bought a house, raised a big round of funding, built out our board of directors, and tripled our team size. All of this has forced me to get a lot more intentional with my time, my relationships, and myself.

This newsletter is partly a creative outlet, but mostly it’s a window into the insanity of building something from the ground up — something I’ve so deeply committed myself to the last 5+ years.

It’s a weird thing to build a company while you’re still growing up. Halfdays scaled into a multi-million dollar business before I even turned 25, which is wild to say out loud. It’s been exciting, isolating, overwhelming, and pretty surreal all at once. Only recently have I found people who really understand what it’s like to be a young founder and carry that kind of pressure (shoutout ypo!).

At Halfdays, I’ve raised institutional capital, built a team of nearly 30 full-time employees (who I get to work alongside in person most days), and gotten our brand into retailers all across North America. It still feels crazy to say, but it finally feels like we’re making a real dent in a pretty massive, outdated industry.

Every week, I get DMs, emails, and LinkedIn messages from people — brand fans and aspiring founders — curious about how we built Halfdays from a scrappy idea into what it is today. Whether it’s questions about getting started, building a team, or just wanting to be a part of it somehow, the support has been really humbling. It’s why I decided to start this newsletter.

Over the past two years, I’ve been lucky to share some of what I’ve learned so far — from guest lecturing at Stanford GSB and my alma mater, Michigan State University, to joining advisory boards for a few young brands, to hopping on a ton of 1:1 calls and coffee meetings with early-stage founders. It’s easily been one of the most rewarding parts of this whole thing.

I’m so grateful for the community that’s grown around Halfdays, and I’m excited to finally have a place to share more of the real behind-the-scenes — the good, the hard, the messy, and everything in between.

You’ll get over & out in your inbox weekly (most of the time) — starting with regular volumes that share a closer look at what I’m building, what I’m loving, and whatever else is on my mind. In a few weeks, I’ll also kick off an interview series called off the record, where I’ll be chatting with other founders, execs, and people doing cool sh*t.

I’m so glad you’re here!

xo ari