FOND: Alysa Seeland

Alysa Seeland grew up on her grandparents' dairy farm in northern Illinois, chased a Division I volleyball scholarship through high school, and pivoted to speech and debate when she realized the sport wasn't going to be her path — placing second in the state of Illinois for original oratory her senior year. She studied communications and English literature at Gordon College, then cut her teeth in marketing at a Boston fintech startup that went through Techstars, learning firsthand how founders build trust with customers from scratch.

Five months after her first son was born, a medical crisis nearly cost her life: emergency surgery, and a surgeon telling her to expect a second procedure within months. Instead of scheduling it, she found a decades-old book, "Nourishing Traditions," and went on a five-week bone broth diet. She never needed the second surgery — and went on to have five more sons.

That personal healing became FOND. She sold her first jar at a farmers market in New Braunfels, Texas in 2015, working out of a commercial kitchen with her husband dropping her off, hoping she wouldn't come home in tears. She sold out. From there, FOND won a People's Choice Award through H-E-B's Quest for Texas Best program, landed a Whole Foods and Sprouts partnership, and grew into a genuinely regenerative supply chain built on direct farmer relationships instead of concentrate.

In 2022, while raising a Series A, the co-manufacturer's facility burned down, wiping out over $4 million in product against a $150,000 insurance payout — all while she was pregnant with her sixth child. She walked away from the raise, put her own equity up as collateral for a $3 million rebuild loan, and launched an internal initiative called "Break It and Rebuild It" to get every channel profitable or cut it loose. Eighteen months later, FOND launched its tallow line and came back stronger. Today the company is profitable, debt-free of outside investment, growing 48% year over year, sold in H-E-B, Sprouts, Whole Foods, and now Albertsons — all while Alysa homeschools six boys.

Charlie Clifford grew up a self-described "scrappy Jersey guy" in a town of 5,000 people, and won his first entrepreneurial prize in sixth grade: a watch, for out-hustling a classmate whose dad rigged the contest by buying magazine subscriptions wholesale for his medical office.

After business school at Indiana University, he joined one of the first Peace Corps pilot programs recruiting MBAs — sent to Peru to work with small businesses under a Stanford professor who'd later teach Nike's Phil Knight. He came home with $10,000, invested it in a scrappy import operation selling handcrafted South American leather goods, and in 1975 broke off to start his own company focused on travel bags. He named it TUMI, after a Peruvian ceremonial knife.

The brand's real breakthrough came when Clifford shifted from leather to black ballistic nylon — a fabric built for flak jackets — manufactured through a partnership with a small shop in Vidalia, Georgia. Bloomingdale's 59th Street flagship picking up the line put TUMI on the map. A conversation with a longtime retail partner, who told Clifford he had "so much product" he should just open his own stores, led to the "side-by-side" concept and eventually freestanding TUMI locations. By the 2000s, TUMI was the brand road warriors carried through airports worldwide, and it went public in 2012.

Clifford left the company in 2004, when the private equity partners who'd taken majority ownership after 9/11 decided to sell. He spent years distributing other people's luggage brands before realizing he wanted control over the product and the story again. In 2017, he and his former TUMI EVP Larry Lein founded ROAM — American-made, hand-assembled, and built around a philosophy that's the opposite of TUMI's black-on-black uniform: total color customization, so no two suitcases look the same.

Make sure to check out FOND at: https://fondregenerative.com/

 

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