Welcome to my blog. A place where I will deliver you an opinion that will, at times, coincide perfectly with your own. Other times it will differ greatly from yours. I hope that you will appreciate it either way.
What is an opinion anyhow? Is it a method that I have discovered for giving you better abs ? Is it a recipe that is the “best” in its class? Is it a better way to raise your children that moms will adore? It is all of these things, however, my opinion comes with the above disclaimer. I think I have encountered some interesting situations in my life thus far that make me qualified to give my opinion. My goal isn’t to convince you that I am right. It’s to tell a story as I see it. The comments section at the bottom is where anyone that cares to share their opinion may. I encourage you to. Everyone on this planet is equally qualified to give opinions. I am just here for entertainment, occasional insight and to facilitate whatever conversation ensues as a result. Enjoy!
Let''s start with this opinion that is available in small - xxxl and youth sizes:
There is an interesting story about this t shirt that involves myself and some friends selling thousands of them. It was a unique business venture that could only be described as Mad Men but with more drinking, a lot less selling and no girls or glamour. It was a grand scheme with all kinds of potential that never got finished.
It started when my roommate, Steve, brought home a box of shirts and we needed to pay some bills. He created the shirt, single run, as a gag gift for a friend of ours. It got a lot of people talking whenever he wore it so in a moment of desperation one night, he decided to make a box of them. We figured the best place to sell offensive t shirts at 9pm on a weeknight was the bar. So off we went.
The drunk people loved it! Not the shirt itself but the fact that we were selling them in a bar to drunk people. You just give a shirt to each of the bartenders, they laugh at it and say thanks. Now you are down $20 in potential sales so you have to work. Usually the shirts that we gave to the bartenders would lead to a free beer for each of us. More importantly it would lead to a license to sell shirts in the bar. They’d also show the people sitting at the bar and often times, wallets would come out before we had a chance to sit down. After that, it was all about starting a conversation...with every person in the bar. One time a guy trying to watch the superbowl paid me $25 to leave the bar because I was blocking his view. Being a wise business man, I accepted. I was pretty good at this new sales job and I don’t like to gloat (that’s probably a lie, this whole blog is a gloat thus far). Bills were starting to get paid. Well, the important ones like the beer bill, taco bill and gas bill. The only problem was that we were wearing out our welcome.
So what do you do when you have sold shirts to every person at every bar in your town? Where can you go when you have run out of places to sell your product? Well, there are 2 options, a different city or the World Wide Web. We did both.
The website went up within a few months. Meanwhile, we decided to take trips to different cities and work the bars, like we had in Detroit. The trips were limited to how well the sales were going. We were literally paying for hotels 1 day at a time. I remember a particular trip to New York where we stayed 4 nights in a mid town Manhattan hotel, sold over 400 shirts and had 2 shops in the east village with our shirts on the racks. Things actually went so well that we had enough surplus money to buy Steve’s mom a Louis Vuitton wallet to thank her for loaning us money. I took a trip later that summer to NYC with a touring local band and paid my way by selling shirts from a backpack. New York was by far the easiest place to sell shit to people and the number of bars is endless.
We took regular road trips to Chicago and even drove to Michigan college towns like Lansing and Ann Arbor regularly to make sales. I personally visited cities like LA, San Diego, Denver and State College with one mission, sell shirts and you can eat. Well, we didn’t always have to pay for that either. A clever trade at a Subway in Mission Beach led to an entire roll of sub stamps. We ate a lot of free footlongs. We also had a white castle coupon that entitled us to 8 burgers, 2 fries and 2 drinks that we just kept making more copies of. It is probably STILL being copied and used by someone today. We were on a roll, full speed into a sales venture.
At some point, in business, you have to create a purpose. You have to identify yourself, especially when you have a shirt that points to a website. You can’t just have a shirt that says, “go to this website” and then simply sell them that shirt. I have a friend named Matt who would say “Why not?” to that last statement and he is probably right but what we decided, at the time, was that people wanted content. Since we spent a lot of time selling shirts at concert venues we got to know a lot of local bands. We actually ran deals with them where they would let us come to their show with a box of shirts and a guy dressed like a chicken and we would work their merchandise table for them. This consistently led to big sales numbers for the bands and us. We decided that we would link all of these bands to our site and have them link us back. That was it, we supported local music. It was a claim that we could make without spending any money that led us to more opportunities. So, where do you go when you support local music culture and you have a ridiculous t shirt to sell? The Vans Warped Tour of course.
Now I didn’t personally get on the RV and head out on the road so this portion of the story has little detail. I assisted in securing the funds, transportation, and t shirts to fill this tall order, 41 cities in 2 months. Again, we were paying our way one day at a time but there were hotels, meals and plenty of music lovers around to buy shirts. Sales were good but after paying the people in the van and covering travel expenses, it was a break even. This was supposed to be the big break, our chance to bring home the bacon, and it was turning out to be a killer with the RV breaking down and flying people back and forth. The bleeding eventually stopped when Steve got us kicked off the tour, 20 cities in, for selling fake backstage passes to make ends meet. Steve always handled the finances and it was a clear indicator to me that times were desperate. I felt it was appropriate that this venture ended the same way it began, in a moment of despair.
We did a few more festivals, including the Detroit Electronic Music Festival (It was called “Movement” at the time, before Paxahau started running the show). We worked a booth at the Polish festival in Hamtramck where we released a whole line of new offensive shirts like “I hate my life”, “I hate condoms” and the long awaited “I am sick and tired of white BOYS” t shirt. I was in a Pierogi eating contest at the festival and I took second place to a red headed polish kid who destroyed me by at least 6 pierogis. We also had a slight trickle of web orders coming in and even had a few vendors, nationwide, that were refilling orders with us but we didn’t have that same hype. The combination of losing our asses on the tour and being stuck in Detroit where the shirts charm was quickly wearing off was a big blow to morale.
Things slowed more, we started working less and hanging out more. Nobody wanted to take a 5 hour drive to Chicago to see if we could survive 3 days with just a bag of t shirts. The online orders started to become fewer and farther between. Steve had managed to put together a full screen printing shop in our garage over the course of our adventure so he started taking orders from local bands that we had worked with. He eventually gave the equipment to a friend who had lost a lot of money financing us. I moved out and got a 1 bedroom apartment and worked full time at Radioshack, applying everything I learned about shirt sales to cell phones and batteries and I was doing okay. Steve sold the site to some guys from New Jersey. These jokers who claimed the idea of the shirt was born out of spite for their ex wives. I checked the url for the site and they have since failed also. www.iamsickandtiredofwhitegirls.com is for sale. They tried to copy our failed business model and did it worse than us which I think technically makes us more savvy than them.
The Beginning
The above story is 100% true and I have left out so many details it hurts me to go on but I must. I wanted to let the world know that I failed. I started something and didn’t finish it because I was either too lazy or too proud to get back in the game. I have also started many other things that turned out much differently. I started training wheels when I was 3 years old. I had them off my bike before I was 4. I think this is where I developed my current love for the bicycle which I am sure will come up in later blogs as I discover more about it. I started a Pub Trivia business. A what? Oh yeah, there will definitely be a blog about Quizzo. I started a family. My wife and I have 2 good looking sons. But of all the things I have started in my life, I chose to tell you about one of my greatest failures first. That has to count for something.
Failure is the thing that DEMANDS we improve. It is the one principle in the universe that remains true to itself and can have no bias. It is important for me to embrace my failures because they have defined who I am today. My failures are the asshole friend who tells me what I need to hear, not what I want to hear. They make me stronger, wiser and most importantly, they guide me to what is truly right. Afterall, you learn a lot about doing things the right way when you do them all the wrong way first.
Today I started a blog because it’s something I have never done before. Perhaps I will fail at it. Congratulations to all of my readers who have experienced failure. May your misfortune guide you to a place that suits your ambitions and may you never take yourself too seriously.
