Notre Dame MBA graduate Max Martin is launching a new set of Notre Dame commemorative watches with his company, Legacy LLC. Courtesy of Max Martin.
Max Martin, Notre Dame MBA graduate ’22, is launching a university-inspired wrist watch design through his start-up company, Legacy LLC.
The company was founded by Martin in Sept. 2020, after completing his undergraduate studies in 2019 at St. John’s University in Minnesota. The original intention behind the company was to provide an alternative to “traditional class rings,” Martin said.
“I was looking for another more functional piece of memorabilia for graduation,” Martin said. “I wanted to make something that was really going to fulfill my vision of what I thought of when I thought of St. John’s University.”
In order to achieve his spirit-encompassing vision, Martin said he first evaluated what exactly “made” St. John’s the community he loved.
“[There is] a locally famous church called the Abbey Church, which is known for their hexagons across the church and it’s a really beautiful piece of architecture,” Martin said. “With that story, St. John’s always talked about transparency and work, as they are a Catholic institution. So, when the Abbey was made, they always talked about all the materials that were used and there were no secrets as to what was going on.”
From there, Martin constructed a design that incorporated these community symbols and values.
“On the face of the watch are a bunch of hexagons to resemble the Abbey Church. But also if you look on the back of the watch, you can see all the gears and movements moving in the background,” Martin said. “And that’s to show that transparency in work. You can see all the materials that are inside of the watch and so that’s kind of how its legacywas created through St. John’s.”
Martin noted that he incorporated his university’s values not only in the watch design, but also in Legacy’s business structure.
“I’ve taken a charitable aspect to the company. So, 10% of all of my profits from each watch sold goes directly back to the university or organization that I’m working with, to support their student scholarship fund or other cause they’re passionate about,” Martin said.
In this way, Legacy LLC, allows buyers to not only carry their alma mater with them, but only give back to the school in the process.
While Martin got his inspiration from his time at St. John’s, he was grateful to take advantage of the resources offered by Notre Dame during his graduate study. During his time on campus, Martin was a part of the IDEA Center, as well as the McCloskey Competition.With these resources, Martin set out to create a Notre Dame watch design.
“The licensing team at Notre Dame was incredibly helpful throughout the process… Licensing took quite a bit of time. But through that time, I was able to have some help with the graphic design and got to interview some students,” Martin said. “So I created the Notre Dame high-end male watch.”
Martin expresses gratitude for those that helped him along the way, as well as Notre Dame as a whole.
“The Notre Dame community just completely took me under its wing, even just for being there a year, so I was super thankful for that,” Martin said.
In terms of what the watch will look like, Martin said he quickly picked up on one prevalent aspect of the ND community: the alma mater.
“The design highlights a cover that is transparent, so you can see the gears moving directly on the face of the watch and then it has the alma mater laser engraved on the outside of the watch as well,” Martin said. “Each watch has your name and class year engraved on the back. And all of these watches are hand assembled and handmade and painted by my manufacturer.”
Martin says that the Notre Dame watch launch will hopefully be within the next two weeks — right in the heart of the holiday shopping season.
Martin concluded by reflecting on his journey with Legacy LLC and offering advice to any student entrepreneur about the value of “stick-to-it-tiveness.”
“Allocating enough time each day to your company and not giving up when you see the first roadblock is the biggest challenge,” Martin said. “It’s impossible to do alone. Notre Dame did a really, really good job of helping me, so I’m excited for their watch to launch.”
(Left to right) Peter Moeckel '20,, Brian Cho '19 and Erikc Perez-Perez '19 now work for Resonado full-time from Chicago. | Image courtesy of Erikc Perez-Perez.
A Chicago-based speaker startup has raised $7.5 million in funding — and it got its start at a Hesburgh Library whiteboard.
Now headquartered in Chicago, Resonado Labs was founded by Peter Moeckel ‘20, Brian Youngil Cho ‘19 and Erikc Perez-Perez ‘19 while they were studying in the Mendoza College of Business.
Since then, the company has raised millions from investors including Catapult Ventures, Queen City Angels and Lofty Ventures. A recent round in 2021 was led by Crush Ventures, the VC arm of Crush Music, a talent management firm that manages artists like Sia, Lorde and Fall Out Boy.
Resonado has secured one-time partnerships with big names like Hyundai and Notre Dame Athletics. It also developed RV and marine-focused segments of its speaker business that Lippert acquired earlier this year. Today, Resonado is working with Klipsch, a subsidiary of Audiovox (VOXX), and with the U.S. Air Force and Special Operations Command to craft tactical audio products using their patented sound technology.
Making (sound) waves
The technology that’s catching the attention of national defense experts is brand new to the industry. Co-founder and chief of marketing Perez said that as speakers have evolved to be slimmer and thinner, the sound technology inside them has often remained unchanged. Resonado strives to be different from the inside-out.
“We’ve built a speaker architecture from the core out that’s tailored for modern products,” Perez said. “The conventional speaker has literally been around for 100 years, and if you break apart any product, you’re still going to find that same architecture in it, but I think the entire landscape of the audio world has completely shifted.”
Dubbed Res-Core, Resonado’s patented Flat Core Speaker technology uses two parallel bar magnets, a planar voice coil and a flat, racetrack-like diaphram. Other speakers still use a traditional cone shape that is difficult to fit into thin and sleek designs.
Inside the Resonado Lab in Chicago, speaker driver prototypes are powered by patented Res-Core motors. | Image courtesy of Erikc Perez-Perez
“What a lot of these companies out there have done is they’ve taken that conventional speaker motor and just applied it to slimmer and thinner speaker types, so they’ve just retrofitted this super old motor on to new factors. That’s just inefficient,” Perez said. “We’ve completely redesigned the motor to be perfect for these form factors.”
Assembling the team
The idea for to re-engineer the speaker began with Cho and his father, Lee Hyun Cho, former head of research and development at LG.
After studying speaker innovation with his father in South Korea, Cho began to look for a team in South Bend. He met Moeckel at the Subway formerly in LaFortune Student Center, and the two finance majors hit it off. The pair joined forces to launch a startup and compete in the IDEA Center’s McCloskey New Venture Competition for a shot at a share of the $350,000 in prize money.
Despite high hopes, Moeckel and Cho didn’t see instant success. Their 2017 business-to-consumer speaker company debut fell flat on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Then, Moeckel and Cho met Perez, a junior living in Siegfried Hall with an affinity for marketing and design.
A former architecture major, Perez knew he wanted to be involved in the creative marketing process from the beginning stages of a company. He switched his major because of the “freedom that comes with business” and ended up working for a speaker industry disruptor.
“I knew that I didn’t want to do a conventional track within marketing pretty early on,” Perez said. “The startup world was something that was super enticing to me, having the ability to actually do everything at the groundwork from the marketing side.”
When Perez officially climbed aboard, the speaker startup was called Flato. Perez quickly got to work rebranding. His first move? Changing the company’s name from Flato to Resonado. The task was more difficult than Perez first thought.
“I was just like that seems like an easy thing,” he said. “And then it ended up being so much work to find something that you can Google, that’s going to be the top result and that you can get a trademark on.”
Perez next took the lead on product photography and content creation. Notre Dame and the co-founders’ friends became the backdrop for their product promotion. With the new name and photos, Resonado started selling speakers on Amazon.
In 2018, Resonado pitched a business-to-consumer speaker company in the McCloskey Competition. Placing sixth, the team was still hungry.
Soundproofing the pitch
The co-founders dreamed of making Resonado a full-time job after graduation, but that aspiration wasn’t tangible until the group leveraged Idea Center connections to make the trek to Silicon Valley that summer.
“Just working on something as a side thing, it’s hard to see what it could be, but I think especially after spending time in Silicon Valley and raising money and just getting that exposure to that world, we were definitely like, ‘Okay, this could be real,’” Perez recalled.
Just as they were embracing their status as the big fish in a little campus pond, Resonado was suddenly reduced to a little startup minnow in an ocean of Silicon Valley technology companies.
“It was a pretty huge culture shock. I remember we went out there, and we started doing pitch competitions and talking to investors, and maybe like the first 10, we would just get shredded, totally, completely shredded by investors,” Perez said. “It was super eye-opening. We were now just one of a million startups that were vying for these investors’ attention, but it ended up being super healthy. We ended up learning so much in such a short period of time.”
Despite the competitive nature of the trip, Perez said there was an energy of innovation about the place that inspired him and his co-founders.
“It’s awesome just being in an environment where you would go to a cafe and the person next to you is just like, an executive at Microsoft, and the person to the other side of you was talking about their next startup,” Perez said. “Just so much buzz and such a great atmosphere of building things that you just simply don’t have anywhere else.”
Perez said his favorite part of the startup process was when the tide turned in Silicon Valley, and Resonado started receiving positive feedback in the pitch room.
“That’s when we knew we had something … now comes the exciting thing. We have a direction, and all you have to do is execute, and I think that was kind of the most fun part,” he said.
One last encore
Back at Notre Dame for their final year together, Resonado had one more shot at the McCloskey Competition in 2019. Reorganizing into a business-to-business model, the team walked away tied for first and with a fresh $25,000 in their wallets.
Brian Cho (left) and Erikc Perez-Perez (right) stand on stage while pitching Resonado in the 2019 McCloskey Competition. Resonado split the first-place prize of $25,000. | Image courtesy of Erikc Perez-Perez
With Notre Dame as its first investor, Cho and Perez graduated that year. Diplomas in hand, the co-founders entered the post-college world as their own employees.
“We were able to give ourselves that first paycheck maybe like a month after we graduated,” Perez said.
Mitchell Kokko, an IDEA Center student analyst who helped Resonado build connections in its early stages, said the team’s ability to see beyond the college campus allowed them to turn their student startup into a full-time gig.
“They were what you hope Notre Dame students will be. They were all very passionate about the product,” Kokko said. “What was really exciting about Resonado was that they were looking so much bigger. That type of vision is really uncommon while still a student in college.”
Perez decided to attend Notre Dame for the architecture program. He left with a marketing job at a startup and the confidence to walk into a room full of multi-millionaire tech investors.
“I think my biggest [advice] would just be, if you’re able to get yourself into a room, you deserve to be there,” he said. “When we were starting out, we would be in rooms and in meetings with 45-year-old executives who we were trying to land as a client or hire for our law firm … and it’s super easy to get caught up in imposter syndrome.”
He says that would be his advice to current students who have a big idea.
“If you were able to get yourself in that position, and you’re going to school at Notre Dame, you have the intelligence, you clearly have the ambition to not only hold your ground in interactions like that but also get what you want out of it,” Perez said.
