LET'S START FROM THE BEGINNING

Being a self-employed professional is the only thing I have ever known. The lineage relays down from my Great Grandfather, to my Papa, and for the last 30 years my father. My Father, Big Rob, is easily my hero and greatest mentor. This man did not graduate from college, but has managed to successfully own, operate and grow his business exponentially over the last three decades.

Currently my Father's business is a full scale silkscreening & embroidery manufacturing facility just north of Boston, Ma in Everett (http://universalscreeningstudio.com/). He services a majority of the local high schools, colleges, sports organizations and businesses. He successfully has aligned himself with the top name brands in the industry including Under Armor, New Balance, Asics, Nike Golf, Adidas, Columbia, Majestic, New Era, Champion, Russell, Carhartt, Marmot, Lacoste, Brooks Brothers just to name a few. Growing up around custom apparel has always made me love the industry and I knew at a young age I would love to work in this realm as an adult.

MY FIRST VENTURE... YES we failed, I have failed a few times

Rack 'Em Tee's! This business did not last too long at all. I started it my sophomore of college while at the University of Rhode island with my best buddy from High School who was at Union College up in NY. The idea was to have college rep's at various schools around the country to promote the shirts and sell them. Little did we know being young and naive ourselves that dealing with college students was super unreliable and a horrible idea. The business had an e-commerce website that we eventually wanted to be the scalable aspect of the company. We would print and ship out 72 custom shirts to each rep at the school for them to sell to their peers.

That was detrimental fronting the product to the rep's because a majority of them eventually could not pay for their shirts, and we had no money! It was a great learning experience at a young age for me. There were a few key elements to my first company that allowed me to experience different facets of managing a business. One being hiring people as "sales reps" in a wide variety of areas that weren't under my direct control. This will be a key component to one of my future companies so thats why I want to intro it now. The next would be creating, building, designing and successfully launching and e-commerce online platform back in 2008 which at this point was 9 years ago! E-commerce has come such a long way since then, but knowing that having an online store was a major facet to scaling was knowledge at an early age that not many would foresee as a young age. These are experiences and failures I underwent early on in my career that paved the way for my future businesses.

MY FIRST TASTE OF SUCCESS!...but, i failed yet again...

(Gary Guyton at the time was a member of the New England Patriots)
http://indresano.blogspot.com/2010/09/custom-universe-teams-up-with-ne.html

Custom Universe was created basically as an extension of my Father's company, Universal Screening Studio. We realized from Rack 'Em Tees that there was no reason we should limit our market to a small niche. The capabilities of Universal allowed our market to expand drastically, and that is where we began to find success in the custom apparel industry. We immediately started landing business with sports teams, club teams, fraternities & sororities at our respective schools. Funneling the business right through Universal was the key to the whole operation since we could purchase and manufacture all of the orders in house.

Since we were dealing with a new market we started to receive requests to have certain other name brand products to be customized like Patagonia or North Face. At that time Patagonia just started to gain popularity so that is what was most sought after for us. After multiple emails and phone calls we eventually convinced Patagonia to sell us their product at wholesale, but we started at only 20% off retail (normal wholesale is always at minimum 40%; majority of suppliers are 50%). Eventually with Patagonia in our back pocket, Custom Universe instantly cornered a massive part of a new market. We eventually became a full wholesaler of Patagonia and were one of there largest team dealers and garment decorators in the country.

We eventually started to learn the college bookstore market, collegiate licensing and how to scale the custom Patagonia to schools across the country. Since our product was so unique and the first of its kind in the bookstore market, we got granted almost every collegiate license you could think of. We sold to Michigan, Georgetown, University of Virginia, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Holy Cross, Appalachian State just to name a few. We managed 4 road reps that all handled different territory throughout the country. Through networking we teamed up with a group of sales reps that were already aligned with all of the biggest schools in the country. These were seasoned reps that had years of selling and relationships with the buyers of the schools stores, and our custom Patagonia's were just another perfect add on to their sales trips and it caught like wild fire!

The college bookstore business scaled so quick we had to adapt quickly, the factory had never handled that kind of embroidery volume. Meanwhile this is all going on as we were both Juniors in college both student athletes. While we were in this phase I was playing college baseball at the University of Rhode Island. Unfortunately that season I came down with my second ACL surgery, and being a catcher my future in baseball was quite unclear. This is where I had to make a very tough life decision, but I knew exactly what I had to do. I left URI to pursue Custom Universe full-time.

(Catching for URI @ Mississippi State)

We continued to really scale the bookstore business, but 90% of our company revenue was coming from only one supplier in Patagonia. In a years time we grew the bookstore business so fast that Patagonia had to fly us out to their headquarters in Ventura, Ca multiple times for meetings and strategy on purchasing goods. We had to meet with the VP of Sales and team division to figure out territory management, how fast they wanted us to scale and then going over the product. It was also great getting to meet the founder Yvon Chouinard [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvon_Chouinard] and talk to him about our booming business. Another funny side note, these people had no clue we were only 20 years old and still in school but we pulled it off and never got questioned.

DON'T PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET

So yeah, about that booming Patagonia bookstore business. Logistically things got hot with local dealers in college towns that sold Patagonia in small retail settings. This created turmoil within Patagonia and things with them became very different and strict. The day after us landing Purchase Orders from Alabama, Notre Dame, Stanford, Ole Miss, and USC Patagonia revoked our vendor-ship and abruptly shutdown their collegiate bookstore products with Custom Universe. This was a total shocker especially with so much success, growth and popularity with our products.

At the end of the day learned a very valuable lesson to ALWAYS have a contract in place and have multiple streams of revenue don't rely on one supplier.

I'M NANTUCKET BOUND

(Great Point, Nantucket Ma)

(A view of our two stores on the island of Nantucket - Sail Loft & Her Sail Loft)

The bottom line here is THIS. BUSINESS. SUCKED! Talk about a really difficult business to be successful at, and we had no clue when we were getting ourselves into. Brick + Mortar retail was a completely different monster.

I'm going to tell you all about it in my next post! Hope you enjoyed the story of my journey so far...