How did you begin to produce the product?
Before Dirtbag, I was working for a mountain bike manufacturer, and part of my
job was selling T-shirts for the company. I had developed a pretty good
relationship with Accent Art (www.accent-art.com),
the screen printer they used. Accent Art already had relationships with
suppliers and the setup we needed. So they agreed to do everything for us.
They ordered the T-shirts from the distributor, printed them, folded them,
bagged them—everything.
THE SALES
Who did you sell to in the beginning?
We sold most of our product locally in skate and surf shops. We got a list of
buyers when we had a booth at the ASR Trade Expo (www.asrbiz.com).
The organizers gave each booth an Excel spreadsheet after the show with the
names and contact information of all the buyers who attended. From the
sheet, we took our local shops, and that’s who we went to first.
How did you approach them?
We’d walk in with twenty shirts. The buyers are very loyal to the brands they
already carry. At that point, all we had were two T-shirts and two hats,
which wasn’t enough for a buyer to make a financial commitment. But they
liked the concept, so they’d let us leave some to sell on consignment.
Did they start placing orders after that?
Over time, they would order more and pay up front. We kept turning that money
into new products and expanding into new stores. In the beginning, we paid
about $800 for 144 T-shirts. We sold them wholesale for around $10 each and
retail on our website for around $20 each.
Was inventory a problem for you?
As a small company, the toughest problem is maintaining inventory. If you sell
$100,000 worth of product, you need to have $50,000 to get it into
production. With MGR Entertainment, they already work with the same vendors
we do, and they have sixty-day terms. A couple of months after we signed
that deal, we had someone start approaching licensing companies on our
behalf. We got a few offers, and soon after we picked the one we thought had
the best deal for cost and payouts.
How do you process orders?
