Start Before You're Ready

CHAPTER 10Shoot for the stars, get mentored and make it happen

I’m a big believer in doing an excellent job in whatever you do. And if you see something being done in a terrible way, fixing it. Through delivering my first big order of 400 cycling jerseys I learned how the custom apparel industry would normally work. Most of OTG’s big competitors have teams of 20, 50 and even up to 100 people to handle every step of the process: sales, design, development of the product, quality control, production management, tracking of where the order is up to, quality control before dispatch and delivery.

It would happen like this. A salesperson would meet with a client who wanted a custom-designed product to find out what they were after. The salesperson would talk to the graphic designer, who would develop a mood board of designs. The salesperson would take this mood board back to the customer and try to sell it. If they closed the deal, the graphic designer would talk to preproduction to get all the files ready for the factory. Then they would send the files to the factory, and pay the factory. The factory would likely have a lot of questions about the details of the items, and they would go back and forth until it was all ironed out. At this point the factory would manufacture the garments, quality control would check them, and then the order would be dispatched. The whole process usually took three months. Alternatively, a customer could drive to a store and choose from a limited number ...