Design & The Air Force Academy

So that design contest worked out for me. I got to do what I wanted and didn’t really care what people thought because I thought it was cool.

But something happened when a lot of people bought the shirt.

Seeing them wear something that came from an idea of mine was like a drug. It was weird because just seeing someone else wearing the shirt was enough. I didn’t need any recognition. When I thought more about it, I think it was because they had to buy it with their own money, which proved that they wanted to wear it, and then they had to wear it instead of all of the other things they could be wearing.

Super cool feeling.

And the best part was that I didn’t need them to know about me. I had made something I wanted to make and it was just cool that it existed in other people’s frames. That made me interested in learning and doing more over time, and pushed my curiosity around the topics of marketing and sales. 

T-Shirts

What I later came to understand was that t-shirts can be one of the greatest forms of self-expression accessible to mankind. You’re basically wearing a human torso-sized billboard when you’re wearing a graphic tee. 

People won’t just wear any billboard. It has to represent them in some way.

Figuring out how to make designs that cross that chasm is an interesting challenge to me. You can’t always get it right, but sometimes you do… and when you do get it right it feels really good. 

It feels like winning.

So, in my latest attempt at selling t-shirts online, I tried outsourcing t-shirt production to a print on demand facility and, for me, the bad outweighed the good.

There was a lot good about it.

All of the products you can make, the quick turnaround, the customer service – all good stuff. So, why wasn’t I doing the work to make designs and promote the site?

That took me a while to figure out. Far longer than it should have if I’m being honest with myself about it…

But I finally did.

I realized that I couldn’t really pick the exact shirt that I wanted because the company I was working with didn’t offer that brand. It started there. Then I discovered that the designs also didn’t last through very many wash cycles.

It turns out that I care very deeply about t-shirt softness, how the design feels on the shirt, and how many wash cycles the design can survive to not want to control all of those details. It also turns out that I don’t really have the capacity or capability to control all of those details.

The key takeaway I learned was that I personally have no interest in putting the work in to try to build a brand with products that do not meet my minimum quality expectations.

So I figured out why I was self-sabotaging, aka not working on the project, and that was actually a pretty big step for me.

The problem then, was more like, ok… so now what?

For some reason I still had and still currently have the desire to create designs that people choose to exchange money for AND put on display.

Now that I knew that I cared deeply about the quality of the products I would be making, I would have to come up with something that let me control the quality part of the process.

And that’s how I landed on stickers.

Why Stickers?

If t-shirts are one of the greatest forms of self expression, stickers have got to be breaking into the top ten. They are tinier billboards than torso-sized, but they are billboards nonetheless. 

So we can start there.

And it happens that a while ago I had read a startup story about a guy and his girlfriend making stickers of their favorite childhood foods. Their goal was to make everyone around the world feel represented through stickers. 

That company is called Blank Tag Co.

What was interesting to me about the story was that A. it was a great story… but also B. the business side of it was pretty great too. Stickers are low cost items and the margins can be really good. 

It’s a volume business, for sure, but if you can find your audience, find a way to market to them, and have some winners, then it can be something. Especially if you are serving an underserved niche.

So what about quality?

Well, there are a lot of sticker making companies that produce stickers, but I had personal experience over the years with Sticker Mule, and they are one of the biggest.

I love Sticker Mule’s quality and their vibe, a lot. So I built a financial model in Google Sheets and even though Sticker Mule is a premium brand, the numbers looked good. 

Now I just needed to get it going…