Before The Oodie: How Davie Fogarty’s Food Business Fell Apart

Shivangi

Aug 29, 2026 4:48 PM IST

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Synopsis

Before the wearable blankets and the Shark Tank seat, Davie Fogarty ran a Vietnamese roll shop in Adelaide that nearly convinced him he wasn’t cut out for business. He put in long hours behind the counter, spent two years trying to turn it into a franchise, and still walked away with nothing to show for it.

Before the wearable blankets, the Shark Tank seat, and the hundreds of millions in sales, Davie Fogarty ran a Vietnamese roll shop in Adelaide that almost convinced him he wasn’t cut out for business at all. It wasn’t his first failed venture, and it wouldn’t be his last, but it was the one that hurt the most. He put in long hours behind the counter, spent two years trying to turn it into a franchise, and still walked away with nothing to show for it.

The story matters because it strips away the polish that usually surrounds successful founders. There was no clever pivot or lucky break here, just a young entrepreneur learning, at real financial cost, how unforgiving a physical food business can be. This is what that failure looked like, and how it fit into the string of setbacks that came before Fogarty finally found something that worked.

About the Founder

Davie Fogarty grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, and started chasing business ideas well before he was old enough to drive. He has spoken about jumping the school fence at lunchtime, baking a batch of cookies, and coming back at the end of the day to sell them to his own teachers. It wasn’t a one-off stunt. By his own account, he had been “doing business since primary school,” constantly trying to launch something new.

That restlessness followed him into his teenage years. By the time he reached high school, Fogarty had already tried and failed at a clothing line. It didn’t stop there. Over the next few years, he moved through iPhone cases, headphones, gym wear, and a homemade seasoning business he mixed in his shed. None of them took off. By his own count, close to six or seven ventures had already failed before he found anything that worked.

What makes this period interesting isn’t the number of failures. It’s that Fogarty kept going back for more, each time convinced the next idea would be the one. Somewhere in that stretch, he decided to step away from small online experiments and try something with a physical storefront, staff, and a menu. That decision led him to a Vietnamese roll shop in his local suburb.

The Business Model

Vietnamese rolls, or banh mi, had become a familiar lunchtime staple in Adelaide, sold out of small suburban shopfronts and food courts across the city. Fogarty saw an opening in that everyday habit and opened his own bricks-and-mortar shop selling them. On paper, the pitch was simple: people already lined up for banh mi across the city, so a well-run shop selling the same thing should be able to find its share of customers.

Running a food shop, though, is nothing like running an online store. No warehouse partner is handling the physical side of things. Someone has to be behind the counter every single day the shop is open, and someone has to deal with suppliers, food costs, and the people working the till. Fogarty took that on directly rather than hiring it out from day one.

He has since called it “the funniest failure” of his early years, a line that hints at how far the shop sat from anything he’d tried before. Coming from a background of Instagram pages and dropshipping products, the shift into a labour-heavy food business would have tested skills he simply hadn’t needed yet, rostering staff, managing stock that spoils, and keeping a physical space running on a tight margin.

Day-to-Day Operations

Once the shop was open, the daily grind set in. Fogarty has described putting in long hours at the business, the kind of stretch that comes with owning a food shop rather than clocking in and out of one. Despite that effort, the business kept losing money rather than turning a profit.

That gap between hard work and financial results is what makes food retail such an unforgiving category for a first-time operator. A shop can serve a steady stream of customers throughout the day and still not clear enough after rent, ingredients, and wages to call itself profitable. Fogarty was learning that lesson from the inside, at an age when most of his previous business attempts had cost him little more than time and a small amount of savings.

This one was different. A physical shop carries fixed costs whether customers show up or not, and those costs don’t pause while the owner works out what’s going wrong. The longer the shop stayed open without turning a real profit, the more it ate into the money and energy Fogarty had put into it.

The Franchise Expansion Plan

Rather than treating the shop as a single location to stabilise first, Fogarty had bigger plans in mind. He has said he spent around two years trying to turn the Vietnamese roll concept into a franchise, hoping to replicate the format in other locations.

That ambition sat awkwardly against the reality on the ground. Franchising works when the original outlet is already proven, with strong repeat customers, systems that don’t depend entirely on the founder, and a comfortable profit margin. Fogarty was chasing that expansion while the single shop he already had was still losing money.

Two years is a long stretch to keep pouring effort into an idea that isn’t yet standing on its own. Instead of buying him time to fix the fundamentals, the franchise push added another layer of complexity to a business that was already struggling to break even at one location.

Root Causes of the Failure

Looking at how the shop unfolded, the failure wasn’t the result of one bad decision but a stack of them arriving at the same time. Fogarty was running a capital-intensive, labour-heavy business for the first time, having built his earlier ventures entirely online, where the cost of a misstep was low and the workload was flexible. A food shop offered neither of those cushions.

The economics of the shop itself were also working against him from the start. Banh mi is a low-margin product in a competitive category, sold in a city that already had established players, which left little room for a first-time operator to absorb mistakes in pricing, staffing, or food costs while still learning the trade.

On top of that sat the franchise plan, which pulled attention and resources toward expansion at the exact moment the core shop needed to be fixed. Trying to scale an unprofitable format rarely solves the underlying problem, it usually just repeats it in more places, and here it kept Fogarty focused on growth instead of on why the original shop wasn’t clearing a profit.

Financial and Personal Fallout

The result was a business that had consumed two years of Fogarty’s time without ever becoming the multi-location brand he had pictured. Around the same period, he also lost roughly $40,000 after buying an Instagram account that turned out to be hacked, the platform later returned it to its original owner, wiping out the money he’d spent.

Coming so close together, the two setbacks hit hard. He has described this stretch as one of the lowest points of his early career, a period where the roll shop’s failure combined with the Instagram loss to leave him questioning whether he had anything to show for years of trying.

Eventually, rather than continuing to prop up a shop that wasn’t earning its keep, Fogarty gave the business away. It wasn’t a dramatic public collapse, just a quiet exit from a venture that had taken far more out of him than it had given back.

Part of a Wider Pattern

The roll shop wasn’t an isolated misstep in Fogarty’s early career., it sat inside a much longer run of failed attempts that stretched from his school years into his early twenties. The clothing line, the iPhone cases, the headphones, the gym wear, and the shed-mixed seasonings had all come and gone before the roll shop ever opened its doors.

What set the roll shop apart from those earlier attempts was the scale of exposure. A failed online product listing could be shut down in a day with little more than wasted stock to show for it. A physical shop, tied to a lease, staff, and daily running costs, couldn’t be closed as quickly or as cheaply, which is part of why this particular failure left a deeper mark than the ones before it.

By the time the shop closed, Fogarty had racked up close to seven failed ventures across two very different business formats, digital and physical. That pattern of repeated failure, rather than any single success, was the actual track record he carried into whatever came next.

The Aftermath

The roll shop didn’t mark the end of Fogarty’s attempts at business, only the end of that particular one. He shifted his attention back toward the digital skills he had picked up from his earlier Instagram and e-commerce experiments, using what he already knew about online marketing to look for the next opportunity.

That pivot eventually led him toward a wearable blanket idea that would become The Oodie, launched in 2018 with just $500 of starting capital. To learn more about it, read here.