Herschel Co-Founder Lyndon Cormack Says Typical Towels Will Teach His Old Brand New Tricks

Lyndon Cormack was busy renovating his 1990s log cabin in Whistler when he decided to get some new towels for the place. But from where? His friends weren’t much help — they could tell him which stores they got their towels from, but they struggled to recall the brands. It surprised him that a category could be so enormous, and used daily, yet so few people could even name a company in it.

No one owned towels in the way Herschel Supply Co., the company he founded with his brother in 2009, owned backpacks.

That thought ran away with him, and with the help of friends Phoebe Glasfurd and Aren Fieldwalker, who run the creative studio Glasfurd & Walker, he got to work on Typical, a towel brand that uses 2% spandex, to give them a bit of stretch.

The brand launched in February this year and has already won a Red Dot Design Award and caught the attention of Oprah. Cormack says he thinks the idea is so obvious that stretch will become standard across the category eventually, not just at Typical. For now, the novelty works in the brand’s favor.

And he’s done all of this without stepping back from his role as managing director of Herschel, a global business with serious operational complexity. When asked how he has capacity for both, he seems unfazed. “Herschel’s big and we have lots of excellent talent,” he says. “My job is more like a conductor and not a full-on operator, which allows you to jump around.” Life has changed, too. The children who were young when Herschel began are now away at university. “Because of being an empty nester, I have more time that used to be devoted to other things.”

The same Herschel office is used to run both brands, creating what Cormack describes as a “healthy tension”.

Indeed, starting Typical seems to have rekindled Cormack's entrepreneurial spirit. “The challenges we had starting a business are much different than the challenges you run into continuing to grow one,” he says. The legacy systems that Herschel runs on, layered with new technologies to patch holes along the way, are a particular bugbear. “I would love to rip out almost every system and replace it with modern ones that exist today.”

Typical provides a clean slate in a world where anything and everything can be seemingly powered by AI. Herschel has been curious about AI for a while, but integrating new systems into an established operation comes with bigger risks, especially if things break. At Typical, Cormack says all decisions are made with the help of AI tools — they are big users of Claude, they're watching the model photography space, and they're holding off on an ERP system in place on the belief that an AI-native version will soon emerge.

Much of the enthusiasm remains ahead of implementation — still, Cormack is evangelical about what AI could do for business builders. “I remember Steve Van Doren [of the Vans family] showing me a blackberry for the very first time. It changed my life. And this is about 20 times as powerful,” he says. “It’s scary as hell, but it’s phenomenal.” He says the category Typical is operating in is itself future-proofed (“AI can’t disrupt how you dry yourself off in the morning”), but it can change how you build, market and run the business around it.

Back at Herschel, people are paying attention. "There's motivation among my colleagues to take the energy of a startup — seeing things like winning a Red Dot award, and how earth-moving these things can be for a small brand — and re-engage that energy," he says. "There's a healthy jealousy. And I get to apply that feeling to Herschel."

If he can pull it off, it’ll be a neat trick: using the new brand to teach the old one how to feel young again.

Read more in The Difficult Second Brand? series:

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• BYBI's Founders Are Building Their New Brand Rayro Around the Realities of Family Life