About
Davie Fogarty (born 12 November 1994) is an Australian entrepreneur best known for dreaming up The Oodie—the oversized, hooded blanket that turned dressing like a walking doona into a global comfort trend. Launched from his Adelaide bedroom in 2018 with a few hundred dollars in Facebook ads, The Oodie has since cleared more than A$600 million in revenue and ships to customers in over 40 countries. Fogarty rolled that success into The Davie Group, which now houses product-led brands such as Calming Blankets, Pupnaps, and the education platform Daily Mentor. In 2023 Network Ten tapped him as the youngest investor on Shark Tank Australia, and the press quickly crowned him the nation’s “$600-million retail shark.” In 2025 he set a public goal of pushing The Oodie’s lifetime revenue past one billion dollars while incubating ten new Australian consumer brands by decade’s end. He also donates product overruns to homeless shelters through the Oodie Warmth Initiative and funds carbon-offset projects to neutralise the company’s shipping footprint—moves he calls “good ethics and good economics rolled into one.”
Before Fame
Fogarty’s fascination with commerce started early. Growing up in suburban Adelaide, he spent weekends helping his parents run a modest furniture store, absorbing lessons in margin, negotiation, and customer care. At seventeen he juggled a personal-training side gig and flipped sneakers online. He briefly studied marketing and mining engineering at university, but lecture halls moved slower than social-media dashboards; after one semester he dropped out and built a one-man digital-marketing agency. From 2013 to 2016 he managed social ads for wellness brand SkinnyMe Tea, running thousands of split tests that sharpened his eye for creative performance. He then poured his savings into a Vietnamese-roll café that collapsed within a year—an expensive lesson in overheads and foot traffic. Undeterred, he returned to e-commerce, where lower start-up costs and global reach better matched his appetite for rapid experimentation. A late-night product hunt in 2018 led him to an oversized hoodie blanket trending overseas; a few sample orders later, The Oodie was born. The SkinnyMe Tea stint proved pivotal: it taught him that tiny tweaks in copy or creative can swing results by double digits, insight he bakes into every launch. He even tested a weekend market stall selling weighted blankets—selling out by Sunday and confirming that physical products, not cafés, were his future.
Trivia
- YouTube classroom. Fogarty’s breakout video, “How I Went from $500 to Half a Billion in 5 Years,” has pulled in millions of views and turned his channel—now followed by more than 650 000 people—into a free crash course on landing-page psychology, creative hooks, and hiring.
- Asset-rich reality. Headlines peg his personal worth at up to A $500 million, yet he reminds viewers that most of that figure sits in inventory and brand equity, joking that he’s “cash-poor, asset-rich.”
- Numbers on the wall. A giant office whiteboard tracks daily KPIs such as deep-work hours, kilometres walked, and pages read because, he says, “what gets measured gets managed.”
- Open-source playbooks. Fed up with pricey masterminds, he released a free Shopify course in late 2024 to help cash-strapped founders validate products and launch ads without burning savings.
- Ad-creative quirks. The Oodie’s early campaigns used sloth GIFs and snack-stuffed pockets—imagery he A/B-tested until cost-per-acquisition fell below five dollars.
Family Life
While Fogarty keeps romantic matters private, he talks freely about his immediate family. In 2023 he filmed the tear-filled moment he handed his parents the keys to a new home, calling it “the best ROI I’ve ever had” and crediting them for decades of support. His golden retriever, Sherlock, stars in TikTok reels and occasionally sneaks into product photos wearing a dog-sized Oodie. Fogarty still calls Adelaide home to stay close to relatives and lifelong friends and has hinted at launching a scholarship fund for first-generation entrepreneurs—proof, he says, that success begins with somebody believing in you.
Associated With
Fogarty’s fast climb has connected him with a wide circle of modern business leaders. On Shark Tank Australia he invests alongside e-commerce pioneer Jane Lu, AI ethicist Dr Catriona Wallace, marketing guru Sabri Suby, and tech titan Robert Herjavec, and he returned in 2024 with newcomers Maxine Horne and Nick Bell. British entrepreneur Mark Tilbury dissected Fogarty’s playbook in a 2021 YouTube essay, praising his knack for turning scroll-stopping ads into loyal customers. Jane Lu’s Lazy CEO Podcast hosted him in 2023 to unpack how one product snowballed into a multi-brand empire, and a 2024 Shark Tank pitch for a retro digital-camera start-up saw Fogarty team up with Herjavec to fund the founders. Together these appearances have cemented his role as the go-to sounding board for a new generation of Australian retailers.
