Episode 47: $100 Million. No Playbook: Brendan Cawley on Building Righteous Felon, His Way

What happens when a middle-school jerky hustle, a Kmart dehydrator, a few hundred bucks from friends and family, and a suspicious-looking baggie turn into a brand crossing $100 million in retail sales?
You get Righteous Felon.
In this episode of SHeCOMMERCE, Cristina and Jacqui sit down with Brendan Cawley, Founder & CEO of Righteous Felon, for a founder story that is equal parts accidental, audacious, scrappy—and refreshingly devoid of the usual startup theater.
There was no giant funding round.
No polished 50-page business plan.
No army of employees.
And definitely no traditional playbook.
Instead, Brendan and a tight crew of childhood friends and family figured it out as they went—selling at farmers markets and beer festivals, hunting down manufacturers willing to take a chance on them, obsessing over flavor and storytelling, and turning a middle-school inside joke into one of the most distinctive brands in meat snacks.
And then things got big.
Really big.
Today, Righteous Felon has crossed the $100 million retail sales mark while staying lean, founder-led, deeply personal and unapologetically weird.
But this conversation isn't just about the number.
It's about what happens after the scrappy brand starts winning.
How do you evolve from founder to CEO without losing your edge?
How do you bring new leaders into a company built by brothers and childhood friends?
How do you professionalize the business without becoming painfully corporate?
And how do you scale what consumers love without killing what made them love it?
Brendan gets candid about all of it.
About Brendan Cawley:
Brendan Cawley is the Founder and CEO of Righteous Felon.
His fascination with jerky started as a kid after watching his uncle turn raw ingredients into a product he could sell to coworkers at a Pittsburgh steel mill. That curiosity eventually became a childhood jerky operation of his own—and one memorable misunderstanding involving a teacher, a school bathroom and a hand-to-hand transaction.
Years later, Brendan built his business chops working in aerospace, gaining exposure to finance, manufacturing, operations and supply chain. At the same time, he watched the craft beer movement explode—independent brands using better ingredients, bolder flavors, sharper branding and a hell of a lot more personality.
That collision of craft, business and rebellious brand building ultimately became Righteous Felon.
Today, Brendan is navigating the next evolution of the business as CEO, while also navigating an even bigger new title: Dad.
About Righteous Felon:
Righteous Felon is a founder-led, family- and employee-owned meat snack brand built around bold flavor, irreverent storytelling and an outlaw-with-a-code mentality.
What began as a handful of friends making jerky has grown into a nationally scaled business that has surpassed $100 million in retail sales.
The brand has never been interested in blending into the sea of functional protein claims.
High protein? Great.
Clean ingredients? Absolutely.
But Righteous Felon believes healthy eating doesn't have to taste like punishment.
Its next chapter is increasingly about rebelling against boring, bland and basic wellness culture—combining better-for-you credentials with flavor, humor, characters, storytelling and zero apology.
Because sometimes the rule worth breaking is the one that says healthy food has to be miserable.
What We Get Into
🔥 The felony that started it all.
Yes, Brendan really was caught exchanging a baggie for cash in a middle-school bathroom. No, it wasn't drugs. It was jerky. And yes, that misunderstanding eventually helped inspire one of the best brand names in CPG.
🔥 The $100 million milestone nobody planned for.
Righteous Felon didn't begin with a roadmap to $1 million, let alone $100 million. Brendan talks about reaching the milestone one stubborn step at a time—and why the celebration was meaningful but short-lived.
🔥 Bootstrapping before they knew it was called bootstrapping.
There was no stra...