Origins.

​

Integrity Brands was founded in 1999 by John Pound. Back in prehistory, when he was 14, Pound’s father, an experimental physicist, said to him: “I wish I thought you were going to grow up to be an academic, but I think you’re going to be a buyer at Macy’s.”

​

Subsequent to this prediction, Pound earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard, a Ph.D in Finance from Yale; worked as an economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission; and served on the Harvard faculty for a decade, where he was an authority on corporate governance. (So there). During this time, however (ok, ok), he also became involved in a number of retail and consumer businesses.

​

He left academia in 1997, served in an executive capacity at retail/consumer conglomerate, and then founded Integrity. His idea was to leverage his operating and governance experience to collaborate with management teams to create value.

 

Observing this career arc, a family friend said to his father:  "The gene pool is deteriorating."

​

More about Pound is here.