Boston Entrepreneur Curates the Ultimate Retail Store for Men, with Wares Proudly Made in the USA

Mark Bollman is a twenty-something entrepreneur with sights on bringing his American heritage inspired brand to the masses.

The rugged side of prep has caught on, and today Bollman oversees an e-Commerce site, and two brick and mortar retail locations – a  350-square-foot North End store that opened in 2010 and a newly-opened, 2,000-square-foot space that resembles a well-curated hunting lodge.

“Modeled after an old American hunting lodge, Ball and Buck is the ultimate place to be a man,” says Bollman. “We have a huge leather couch, music on vinyl, and vintage industrial lights putting off dim, comfortable light. We’ve built a place to hangout … While Starbucks up the street has pictures of coffee vines, we have vintage taxidermy, and art sourced from firearms dealers.”

Learn how Mark Bollman built his preppy, classic and rugged Made in the USA brand and why to win big, you must be willing to lose big.

How I Got Started:

While a student at Babson College I felt that I wanted to start a company that would embody all of the best things I saw in other brands and match them with an iconic logo.

The brand would offer the quality of Loro Piana, the class of Brooks Brothers, the appeal of Ralph Lauren, and the warranty of LL Bean. Unlike the others, I thought it was extremely important to focus on making all of our products in the USA to bolster American Jobs and create products that would be sustainable in a way that people usually overlooked.

We would focus the brand on creating products that emphasized conscious consumerism meaning people would consume less products overall by purchasing only high quality items that would last the test of time.