David Stoddard is a co-founder of Brixton, the Oceanside, California lifestyle apparel brand he started in 2004 with two friends and a single vintage-inspired hat. He built the company out of a garage after a decade working his way up from a $6-an-hour warehouse job at TransWorld Magazine, and grew it into a globally distributed brand known for heritage headwear and clothing. He now serves as a marketing and creative leader for the company, and speaks locally about entrepreneurship and betting on where you come from.
Josh Tabaj is the Chief Marketing Officer and one of four co-founders of Branded Bills, the Arizona headwear and apparel company that turned a hand-branded leather patch into a national custom-merchandise business. Branded Bills started around 2015 in a Mesa garage with a branding iron, a knife, and roughly $1,000 from each founder; its first patch hat went to a South Dakota brewery. The company grew from state-pride hats into a vertically integrated operation that sources and produces its own headwear, runs a custom and corporate-branding division, sells officially licensed collegiate gear, opened its first physical store inside the Phoenix Suns' Footprint Center in 2022, and moved into a 96,000-plus square foot Tempe headquarters in 2025. Tabaj handles the marketing side of that machine - the brand voice, the customer story, and the argument that a logo deserves better than a screen print.