Josh Tabaj

A Knife, a Branding Iron, and the Unreasonable Patience of Four Friends

There is a particular kind of business origin story that has been polished so many times it no longer reflects light. The garage. The napkin. The moment of clarity somewhere around 2 a.m. Branded Bills has one of these, and it is genuinely a garage in Mesa, Arizona, but the props are unusual enough to be worth pausing over. The company's entire production capability, at the outset, consisted of a branding iron and a knife.

Not a machine. Not a licensing arrangement with a factory in Guangdong. A branding iron, which is a tool for burning marks into leather, and a knife, which is a tool for cutting it. Four friends heated one, applied it to the other, sewed the result onto a hat, and shipped that hat to a brewery in South Dakota. That was 2015. That was the company.

Josh Tabaj was one of the four. The others were Dave Dickert, Sam Coil and Tim Welch. Each put in roughly a thousand dollars, which means the total war chest for what would become a company of several hundred people was about four thousand dollars - less than most startups spend on a logo they later abandon. Tabaj is now Chief Marketing Officer, a title he arrived at by the same route everyone else did, which is to say nobody handed it out. The company's own description of the arrangement is that each founder "naturally fell into a role they felt strong in." This is either an admirably honest description of how small companies actually work or the most efficient org chart ever devised. Possibly both.

The Year They Titled "Until Our Fingers Bleed"

Corporate histories are usually written by people paid to make the past sound inevitable. Branded Bills did something stranger: it titled 2016, on its own public timeline, "until our fingers bleed."

The reason is that they decided to expand from one state-specific patch to all fifty. And they had not yet automated anything. Every scorching brand. Every precise cut. Fifty states, one hat at a time, by four people who at that point still had other jobs. The company claims to be the first to make leather patch hats for every state in the union, and having done the arithmetic on what that meant with the equipment available, one is inclined to believe nobody else was competing for the title.

The line that follows on that timeline is the giveaway: "Let us assure you, the four founders loved every minute of it." Marketing copy, obviously. But it is marketing copy that admits the work was miserable before it insists the work was fun, which is a rarer sequence than you would think.

Two Years Before Anybody Quit Their Job

Here is the detail that separates Branded Bills from most of the companies it now competes with. It was founded in 2015. All four founders became full-time employees in 2017.

Two years. Two years of burning patches on evenings and weekends, of expanding to fifty states while holding down other employment, of proving the thing worked before betting anything on it working. The contemporary founder gospel is to burn the boats. These four kept the boats moored, checked the weather, confirmed the island had fresh water, and only then let the boats drift. It is less cinematic. It is also why the company still exists.

2017 was also the year the custom division launched - the business of putting other companies' logos on Branded Bills' hats. This is Tabaj's territory, and it turned out to be the larger opportunity by some distance. The promotional merchandise industry had been running for decades on a quiet assumption that branded goods are things you accept politely and then discard. Company polo shirts. Trade show pens. The premise that a person might actually want to wear the item was, apparently, available.

Making the Thing Yourself

In 2018 Branded Bills began sourcing and producing its own headwear rather than buying blanks and decorating them. In an industry organised almost entirely around not doing that, this was a strange decision. Owning production is expensive, slow to set up, and hostile to the sort of asset-light margins that make spreadsheets pleasant.

It also means that when a customer wants a specific fabric weight, or a two-tone panel, or delivery in a timeframe the rest of the sector would consider a joke, the answer is yes. Tabaj's 2024 statement about the company names "industry leading delivery times" alongside quality and customization - three things that are all downstream of the same 2018 decision. Vertical integration is not a marketing story. It is the reason the marketing story is available.

By 2020 there was an apparel line. By 2022 the company had passed fifty million dollars in lifetime product sales, a number reported by the Phoenix Business Journal and, notably, the only revenue figure about Branded Bills that comes from anywhere credible. The data brokers who scrape company websites offer estimates ranging from five million to twenty-five million, which tells you rather more about data brokers than about Branded Bills.

The Arena, and the Seven Leases

In October 2022 the Phoenix Suns gave Branded Bills a storefront on the upper concourse of Footprint Center. It was the company's first physical retail location, roughly seven years after the branding iron. The Suns handle the staffing; the Suns-branded product is sold nowhere else.

An NBA franchise does not hand arena real estate to a hat company from Mesa as a favour. It does it because the hats sell. Credibility of that sort accumulates slowly and then becomes very difficult for a competitor to buy.

The property record tells the growth story better than any press release. Garage. Then 13,102 square feet on West Broadway Road in Mesa, with about forty employees. Then 37,076 square feet in the same commerce park, in 2023. Then, announced in September 2024 and occupied in early 2025, 96,407 square feet on 4.6 acres at 360 South Smith Road in Tempe. Dickert has said the company moved or expanded seven times since 2015. Every one of those moves was a signature on a lease that assumed the orders would keep arriving.

The Quietest CMO in Consumer Apparel

A note on the subject of this profile, which is also the difficulty of writing it.

Josh Tabaj is the chief marketing officer of a consumer brand with a substantial social following, a decade of press coverage and a store inside a professional sports arena. He has, in that entire decade, given approximately one on-record statement to the press. There is no team page with his photograph. No podcast circuit. No book. No founder newsletter explaining the seven habits of leather patch excellence. The company website's founder bio page profiles one co-founder and describes the other three, Tabaj included, as "three friends."

In an era where the standard operating procedure for a marketing executive is to become the product, this is either a strategic choice or a temperamental one. Either way it is consistent. The most visible thing Tabaj has done on camera appears to be an episode of a hunting series called Guided, filmed in Northern Arizona, in which he chases elk with a muzzleloader. Which is, for a man who sells performance outdoor headwear, arguably the most efficient piece of brand alignment in the entire story.

What the Hat Is Actually For

The company motto is "Where Premium Meets Purpose," which is the sort of phrase that survives a branding workshop rather than emerging from one. But the underlying idea holds up, and it is the closest thing to a thesis in Tabaj's public remarks.

Nobody buys a hat. People buy a place, or a team, or a company they are willing to be seen representing. Branded Bills started with states - the purest form of that impulse - and moved outward to colleges, to employers, to whatever else a person might want burned into leather and worn on their head. The product is the same. The belonging changes.

The stated ambition now is to become a daily wardrobe staple rather than an occasional purchase: more apparel, more licensing, more channels, everything still made in-house. It is a considerably harder problem than the one they solved with a knife. But the four of them have already demonstrated a tolerance for doing tedious things by hand for two years before anybody paid them for it, which is the closest thing to a competitive moat that exists.

Somewhere in South Dakota there is a brewery that placed an unremarkable order for one hat in 2015. It remains, to date, the single most consequential beer-adjacent purchasing decision in Arizona apparel history.