Max Brown and the business of taking a joke seriously

Max Brown went on national television wearing a shirt covered in bananas. Beside him stood Brian Brunsing, wearing the same pattern and holding the same improbable object. Between them was a proposal: $250,000 for ten percent of a company that sold a telephone shaped like fruit. The outfits were doing their share of the presentation. The arithmetic would have to do the rest.

The photograph from their Shark Tank appearance captures the arrangement nicely. Brown, on the left, holds the handset with both hands. Brunsing has his raised. They look ready to explain something, which is fortunate, because a banana with a charging cable does invite questions. It also offers an unusually short product demonstration. Put it beside your face. Someone will understand.

For Brown, the appearance brought two parts of his working life into the same room. He was a Banana Phone co-founder and its CEO. He was also president of Garrett Leather, a Buffalo business supplying upholstery leather. One enterprise asked people to laugh at an object. The other asked designers to choose materials they would live with. Both required somebody to place an order.

That combination is the useful starting point for his story. Brown had a family business to run, a product to sell with friends, and a television panel asking how much attention the second venture could command. A novelty looks pleasantly uncomplicated in somebody else's hand. Behind it sit the familiar obligations of manufacturing, selling and keeping customers interested.

The company upstairs

Garrett Leather began in 1988 with Brown's father, Cameron, working from the attic of the family house. The name preserved that beginning: a garret is an attic. Calling it Brown Leather would have suggested a rather restricted color selection. For a supplier whose customers make decisions with samples, that would have been an unfortunate introduction.

The family connection was there before Max had a title. His later route to the presidency included a decade working across departments. In October 2019, his promotion was reported in the design trade; he had previously been vice president of sales. The sequence matters. He reached the top of an existing operation after working inside it, with an established product and customers already expecting service.

Brown studied at the University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business from 2004 to 2008. By the time Banana Phone reached television, he was running Garrett alongside colleagues responsible for finance, operations, marketing and sales. A family surname may explain an introduction to the business. The departmental work explains what occupied the years that followed.

Leather offers plenty of opportunities for a purchase to become a conversation. A designer needs a color, a finish, a quantity and a delivery date. The material must suit the room or vehicle it is going into. Brown's working world includes furniture and interiors as well as transportation. These are products selected through a chain of practical decisions, often long before anyone sits down.

A joke gets a purchase order

Banana Phone arrived through crowdfunding in May 2017. The campaign raised about $45,000, reaching 145 percent of its goal. Pre-orders covered more than a thousand units from eighteen countries. Before there was a television pitch, there were people prepared to pay for the joke and wait for a package. That is a useful distinction when the product looks like lunch.

Brown's partners were Brunsing and Charlie Katrycz. Their creation was a Bluetooth handset that paired with a smartphone. The smartphone still did the connecting; the banana supplied the microphone, speaker and comic timing. Its shape gave an ordinary call a visible prop. The humor did not require the caller to compose anything clever.

There is a small social advantage in an object whose purpose can be understood at a glance. You can show a banana handset across a room. You can give it as a present without explaining a new operating system. The buyer may be purchasing the recipient's expression as much as the electronics. The product's own name has already done much of the explanatory work.

The founders attached a conservation commitment to the venture. Banana Phone contributes one percent of annual sales to gorilla conservation and describes itself as a member of 1% for the Planet. The distinction between sales and profit matters: the advertised contribution is tied to revenue. A silly object can still carry a plainly stated obligation.

The company's compact invitation was “Talk More, Smile More, Save Gorillas!” It joined the activity, the mood and the cause in one line. There was no need to pretend the handset would make a caller more efficient. Its appeal depended on a familiar human willingness to make an everyday act a little ridiculous, preferably in front of somebody else.

The shirts meet the spreadsheets

Brown and Brunsing appeared in the second episode of Shark Tank's fourteenth season, broadcast on September 30, 2022. Their request put an implied value of $2.5 million on the business. That was an asking valuation, a negotiating position. The banana print made a memorable entrance; the proposed ownership stake supplied the terms.

At the pitch, the founders reported more than $1.6 million in lifetime sales. That number belongs to that moment in the company's history. It describes purchases already made before the audience saw the episode, rather than a prediction about what television exposure might produce. For a handset built around a visual gag, it gave the conversation something solid to address.

The panel's objections concerned the investment as well as the invention. Robert Herjavec questioned whether the business could scale for an investor. Lori Greiner was reluctant about novelty products. Barbara Corcoran objected to the founders working on it part time. They left without a deal. The laugh and the investment decision proved capable of taking different directions.

Brown had walked into a setting where an existing career could become a difficult answer. His Garrett presidency showed experience and responsibility. It also meant that Banana Phone shared his working attention. For an outside investor, that division became part of the discussion. The same biography that makes a founder interesting can complicate the terms on which someone else wants to invest.

A week after the broadcast, Brown and Brunsing were discussing the experience in Buffalo's business press. Their appearance had delivered exposure and lessons about presenting the business, even without funding. Television gives an encounter an ending when the entrepreneurs leave the room. A company still has its next order, its next customer and its next decision waiting beyond that door.

A laugh is a promising beginning.
An order is a different kind of answer.

What an acquisition buys

Back at Garrett, growth took a more conventional form. In December 2021, the company announced the acquisition of Mohawk River Leather Works, a specialist in finishing leather. Its capabilities included embossing, hand-tipping and antiquing. These are specific things customers can ask for, with specific work required to deliver them.

The acquisition announcement paired those capabilities with a practical investment: more than 100,000 square feet of European dyed hides for custom requests. Garrett described smaller minimum orders and shorter lead times as benefits. For a designer, a finish is only useful if it can be supplied in the necessary quantity and on the necessary schedule. The inventory makes the promise more concrete.

In 2024, CTL Leather joined Garrett. The July announcement described a combined offering of more than 1,800 in-stock leather colors and an expanded ability to serve Canadian customers. Brown publicly credited his team's work on the transaction. The activity belonged to the longer project of expanding a supplier, with customers gaining access to a broader selection through its sales network.

His own announcement included a modest detail amid the acquisition language: he looked forward to working with and learning from CTL's Cristina and Richard. Deals arrive wrapped in declarations about growth. Learning the people and products that come with them is a more personal piece of the job, and one that Brown chose to mention.

There is a connection between these transactions and the more unusual product in his career. Each changes what a customer can buy. With Mohawk, the change involved custom finishes. With CTL, it involved a larger selection. With Banana Phone, it involved the pleasure of answering a call on something that looked as if it belonged in a fruit bowl.

The next call

By April 2025, reporting on Banana Phone described Brown as having stepped down from its CEO role and left the company. Garrett Leather continues to list him as president. His association with the banana belongs in his story as a founding chapter, alongside the continuing work of leading the family business.

Away from those titles, there is a quieter glimpse of Brown’s life. Brown has described completing the Cayuga Trails 50 Miler with support from his wife, children and their dog, Skipper. The detail is charmingly specific. A company biography usually supplies a school and a position; this one also has a dog waiting somewhere along a very long run.

What remains memorable about Brown is the coexistence of the respectable and the ridiculous. The same career contains a family supplier, acquisition announcements, leather samples and a matching banana shirt. There is no particular need to resolve that combination into a tidy personality theory. The photograph gives it a perfectly adequate form: a businessperson, smiling, holding a banana that can take a call.