I've always been interested in innovation that's why I tackle the problem of men's underwear. It hasn't changed for 50 years so I wanted to innovate and do something different. I'm Greg Taylor I started Step One. I often get asked about the name and it's pretty simple what's the first thing you put on in the morning? Your underwear. What is the hardest thing about making underwear? It would be the production part. Finding a factory and finding the right factory is incredibly difficult. I remember sitting at the table this waistband that pouch this leg this bit there and they just looked at us as though what are you doing? So when I was at the factory I actually had some bike pants with me and I had this idea what if we put ultraglide panels just between the legs? Because when you wear bike shorts they get really hot. I went back to the hotel and got these one pair of bike shorts I had and cut them up and asked them to put these panels between the legs. The sample comes out I put them on and I was like holy sh** these things work. So the chafing problem was solved. And I thought we need to fix this problem of sweaty balls and that's what led us to the pouch. Sweaty balls occur when the ball touches the leg. So what we need to do is place a layer of fabric between the ball and the leg. Problem is that every guy is a different size. So we had to think outside the box and come up with an idea where one size fits all. So I came up with this idea of putting a piece of elastic around the pouch and the reason we did it was that it'll stretch. So no matter the size of the guy we don't need different size underwear but because it stretches it means that it will fit any guy absolutely perfectly and most importantly keep that layer of fabric between the ball and the leg. Getting to that point a real milestone in creating something new different and most importantly innovative. Then we get to the fabric. Do you want cotton, model, this, that, the other? I have no idea. I run hot naturally so again I was like how can we make this breathe but also wick away sweat. So they made three different pairs with three different materials and I tried them. So we tried first of all cotton, then cotton, then fabric and then first of all cotton. That really got hot. Then we tried one called model which was good but it still got very very warm and then they suggested bamboo and that's where it got interesting. So bamboo being a natural fiber breathes. There's lots of benefits to it from an environmental standpoint. It doesn't need water, it doesn't need pesticides. You can harvest it three or four times a year and the fiber when worn on the body has much more drape ability. From a technical aspect the yarns longer and it's got this sort of concave shape. That is what's good. It absorbs the moisture and pushes it away from your body. Whereas cotton has what's called a yelp in the middle of it and that's where it traps the sweat. So one of the most unique things you see about Sep1 is it's one whole piece of fabric. There's no stitching down the sides so less seams means more comfort. So then the factory said to me okay do you want this bamboo or that bamboo? This one's cheap and this one's expensive. I said what's the difference? This one's organic, this one's got the certificates, this one's about 30% cheaper. If you know that you're buying something that is FSC certified, is organically grown and made in a closed-loop process, you know you're doing the right thing by the environment and that's really the ethos that we wanted to develop at Sep1 right from the beginning. And that's when we made the decision that we had to have an ethically accredited factory. There's a couple of different certifications. You can have BSCi, SA8000, Ecotec. So we make sure that everything we do from every supplier from the waistband to the packaging to the actual factory itself all have one of these accreditations and that for me personally is very important. They would have spent no less than two weeks full-time trying to find the right packaging. I've been looking at ways in which we can package the underwear that's not only hygienic but also good for the environment. Then we came across this. Compostable packaging. So the heart of what we do at Sep1 is innovation. Not only for the product but for the planet and as long as we keep doing that then we know we're doing the right thing. you