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Originally Posted by Fishodeath
How did you start you buisness? Ie. Where'd the capital come from, who designed you apparel, how long before you showed a profit, etc.
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I talked about this a bit when it was starting up around this time last year.
But long story short, I technically didn't start the apparel wing. A good friend of mine and someone who'd worked at my dad's bar since around 2001 was already silk-screening his own
shirts and selling them on EBay. Eventually, he put up a site and was making
shirts for local bands and it was a second source of income and fun for him.
We worked together a lot of nights and become pretty close and he always talked about wanting to start a record label. I brought up that I wouldn't be a silent partner ponying up dough, but I'd like to be an active partner, but we'd have to expand on the apparel to pay for the record label.
We had a lot of relationships with a lot of bands signed on smaller labels from me playing for so long, him making merch for a lot of people, and of course, the bar. So, committing bands wasn't the problem. Ensuring capital for the long term was.
We put 100-150 of each
shirt into around 50+ boxes with a Kinko's catalogue into a shit van (that broke down a few times) that I bought and a trailer and drove to Detroit, Columbus, up to Portland (Maine) and hit every big East Coast city down to Miami in over a month to build up a clientele. We did so well that we were out of
shirts and I had to ask someone here in Chicago who owns a massive manufacturing and distro company (Mobtown) that I'd worked for and had a great relationship with my father to mass manufacture
shirts for us at a deal.
He accepted the deal and we distributed them once we got home, expanded the websites, put the bands in the studio, recorded them, and started putting them on the road with the cash flow from the t-shirts distributed to these shops. We weren't making a profit because everything was going back into the business.
I invested a such a substantial portion of my bankroll that someone who I asked to invest instead offered to take a piece of my action for 6 months. So I was only making money from poker playing mid-stakes limit online with my own money and mid-stakes whatever with someone else's at the casino. This forced me to play about 4 nights a week live because my backer wanted me in action a lot to make the investment worth it and kill the inevitable variance. With school and the business, this kept me extremely busy and never home.
Now, we're a legit corporation, so I make a salary. We've taken out small loans to secure a space, and pay a staff. What's coming in now is just paying the bank and we're not having problems with those payments, so again we're not making money, but we're not losing any either.
I guess the long story made short wasn't so short after all. Trust me. It could be a lot longer. i could write a 500 page book on the last 18 months of my life.
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