I worked with Billabong before.. you know the brand? Yes .. surf brand.
It’s alot. There used to be a factory here before and it was just the Wattman Manufacturing company. It was owned by this Jewish family and the father passed it on to his son so I ended up working with the son and he was making caps for my other brand which I was doing back in 2011. The brand was doing well, everything was going alright; then one day he asked me if I wanted to buy the factory. At that time I was only 19, so what I did was put together a kickstarter [Do you know what kickstarter is?] campaign and sold off the equity in my old company and bought the factory.

Yes, it was just through that and the help of our own money. From my old business, it took me awhile to sell my equity; I ended up selling it to my old partner but negotiation took a long time so it was this like huge stressful thing. In the meantime though, we were able to do the kickstarter campaign and that gave us the money long term to buy all the machinery, to put everything into the space – it was pretty crazy. The first year, we didn’t have money to do our own line so we did manufacturing, which was like Hill-side, Left Field (Denim), 3Sixteen(Denim) . We were making goods for all these guys and then we basically turned around, started our own line and it was doing really well. We still make stuff for other people but mostly manufacture our own goods.

No, all self taught but like you I also read a lot, you know, on textiles, selling techniques, everything.

Yea, so I started when I took a class back at my local college, it was pretty fun.

I started with one guy but now we have a total of 7 of us out there now. But in the beginning it was just one. His name is Felix and he was from the original factory but we kept him on. It just kind of slowly grown, at one point we had like 12 people but we cut back because we didn’t need so many. Now its good, because we are very focused, like we know the numbers we need to hit – we know where we are going. So this next year will be cool because I’ll actually be bringing in a couple more machines, like some really sweet machines, like some Union Specials. I’m really excited because this stuff is going to get really good. It will be a good year, It’s going to be another long year (laughs)

So now we are focusing on more wholesale internationally and online sales. And, yeah alot of businesses were beginning around our industry but only so many can really survive. Alot of people were writing orders that they ultimately couldn’t fulfill. So it was very difficult. We send orders to people, like our close friends and we have to wait a long time for the checks. I reached out for Fall, so you would have time to rearrange the buy if you needed to because if we were going to be late, you at least know way in advance. We didn’t want to put anyone in that position, or be that company because I always hear about that brands do that. We’re ready to ship in March, which is when we are supposed to ship but we had people who still hadn’t paid us – like currently, it’s crazy. We just have orders just sitting on the mini ramp, just waiting for awhile. We make it work but the main focus has to be [we don’t have any investor or anything like that] so we really have to be conscious of our output and being risk averse with our sales because otherwise – if we did another season like that, in the states, we would be screwed. We put ourselves out of business, basically by trusting people too much. It’s unfortunate to say because you want to be able to trust people

The first time we were at Liberty, did you see we brought all of our sewing machines? We all of our machines and doing everything there to show them. They just found me through mutual friends and since then it’s been like, since I’m young, I have a lot of people who like out for me. They always put me in the right places and then I have to make sure I deliver, make it good, you know? I mean, so far, so good, no complaints.