Bobby Barzi is a businessman with a purpose: create a better world for our children by investing in communities and efforts that inspire positive change.
It starts with promoting the importance of being an active and engaged father, the initial basis for the creation of his successful clothing company, Fodada.
Barzi discusses these ideas as well as other programs he and his company have backed in the season finale of the Modern Dads Podcast.
Barzi started the clothing line in 2012 as a socially aware business. It focused initially on celebrating, promoting and supporting the idea of building great relationships between fathers and their children. (The company name, after all, comes from one of his son’s pronunciation of the words “for daddy.”) Fodada creates clothing for men, women and children with a hefty chunk of the profits being used to fund and host activities for families around the globe that promote fatherhood and family life.
Fodada sponsors many pro-fatherhood initiatives, such as Daddy & Me to promote interactivity between fathers and children. This program has been highly successful, especially in initiating and encouraging interaction between incarcerated fathers and their children.
Earlier this year, the company embarked on a campaign to promote mental fitness. It released a “Noggin” T-shirt that not only looks cool with its lightning bolts above a brain design (and feels super soft against your skin, too), but also carries a literal message on how to encourage a positive conversation on the importance of mental fitness.
“The instructions on how to do it are printed right on the inside of the shirt, under the laundry directions,” Barzi told City Dads Group as he showed off the shirt at the February Dad 2.0 Summit in San Antonio, Texas, where his company served as a sponsor.
Barzi and his family emigrated to the United States from Iran when he was a teenager, settling in southern California where he still resides with his wife and two boys.
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