And, the same type of audience you would have had for a much bigger product in the 70s or 80s, you can have a giant audience for this product, and do a great job with your business. You know, not necessarily be known in the in the news or in any specific industry as a giant success story, but you can really maintain sort of a small business model.
Charlie: [] No no. I mean, bikers and bands and people have been wearing them forever. And maybe it gets more endearing to them over time. Charlie: [] It was pretty much just pins and patches from the start. Just random stuff like that. And then before any of the apparel…. Charlie: [] Yeah I had a friend who made these big woven blankets, and he told me that he used Walmart to make them and he would make one at a time and they cost a fortune to make, because Walmart up-charges.
Richie: [] And these were like tapestries you would either put on the floor or hang on a wall. Charlie: [] Yeah you could put them on the wall, put them on the floor. And I use the same model and kept them, and those have provided a really excellent extra revenue stream.
Richie: [] So like ten times more than what the pins were. And I have really just wanted, for a long time, to feel comfortable with wearing a piece of apparel that I would make. And so I just started making shirts and all this stuff with zero overhead, because my profit margins were lower, but there was no overhead because I was just making one-off dropship pieces, and then I would put them out and try to creatively market them to see what would happen.
Charlie: [] So talk a bit about the dropshipping piece. For the longest time people would buy inventory, they would take a risk, they would have to assess it in some way and then figure out after the fact whether this was actually worth doing.
I like to take things slow, I like to build the foundation. And so they had to fine-tune their process. When I first started doing it, a couple of people received blankets that had a random Christmas card on them. There was one of just a guy on a motorcycle that some guy got, and he sent me this photo and I was laughing my ass off because it was just like this guy ordered some….
So it could have been Walmart, could have been anything. And I think the coolest thing is that not every company that does dropshipping is some sort of behemoth that is mistreating their workers, is skimping profits, is trying to cut every corner they can, margin wise, to milk it as much as possible, including lowering the quality, objectively.
Richie: [] But for you it sounds like the on-demand piece has been integral to this thing growing. That you can just turn the nozzle any time you need to.
Charlie: [] Yeah. Richie: [] Talk about the marketing side of it a bit. It started on Instagram. Talk about that journey. Charlie: [] Yeah the marketing was a crucial part of the growth that I overlook when I talk about it, because it was so—I find it very boring. But when I first started, Morgan Watt from Inner Decay, who mentored me on everything, told me about this guy Patchgame, who is this cool dude who lives in New Zealand, who loves patches and pins, because he has a military background and he has just sort of this general love of countercultural stuff, and he just has a massive collection.
And he had this Instagram account that was huge. And my audience is a hundred and thirty five thousand on Instagram. And the way that I was able to sustain the company was from the sales that I got from his posts. And that just allows me to focus on the quality of product development and all that stuff. So I did that and just started pumping money into Facebook ads and kind of learning how to make them work for me.
And it worked really well to the degree that I was able to, without losing any money, effectively triple my audience very quickly. I take breaks in marketing. I do a certain push each quarter and then I chill out with it. So the budget fluctuates from zero to a lot, and that has proven to be a very effective strategy. Richie: [] I remember when the algorithm came out, you were freaking out. Charlie: [] Oh yeah. There was a time, the glory days, when everyone who was doing this, including Patchgame, which is how I was able to raise enough money through those first sales, to start the real company, it was all chronological, and he would post x amount of times a day.
So everyone would see everything that was posted in real time. There was no sorting, there was no filtering, there was no nothing, it was just au natural, like Twitter.
Everyone was really up-in-arms about that because it screwed with the platform and it screwed with the model that we had, and to be able to just have that linearity was very nice. So going back to the growth thing and also to your concerns about this whole thing evaporating out of thin air. Talk a bit about the pop up, because I think that was the first, maybe one of the first moments where I realized at least this thing had actual staying power, both on and off the Internet.
So talk about how the thing started and how it went. Charlie: [] Me too, my dude. Charlie: [] Oh this was in August of Not that long ago. And so everyone dropped it off. I set up the show, I had everyone advertise on Instagram. There was no one who was super famous or anything. I made an event on Facebook. A lot of people had RSVPed, but not a ton. I had a past in music and tons of people RSVP to events, they never show up. I had extremely low expectations. There were just all these people who, some of them had been pin collectors for years.
And so we just opened the doors and everyone crowded in, they had to let a few people in at a time because…. Richie: [] I know, I was working the door. Charlie: [] You were there! Oh my god you had the clicker! Richie: [] There were 4, people there, in 24 hours. Everyone was just crowding us. People were so excited just to have like their Internet niche in person, to have this sort of raw experience of being able to buy stuff in this sweaty room.
Richie: [] Yeah the cops were there before it opened too. Charlie: [] The cops were there before it opened, they were pissed but I think you being there and the galley people, they stopped being pissed at a certain point, they just let us do our thing, which was kind of a godsend.
It was just like, the pins were on the table, they were in plastic bags behind the thing, and we were selling them for cash. And we had a shoebox full of cash. Richie: [] What does that tell you though about taking something that has existed online for a year and a half at that point into the physical world?
I had seen it happen before, like I had been to Odd Future shows when I was in high school. I modeled the company very naively and very wide-eyedly, on Supreme, despite not having similar business models, I just admired people who were able to generate that sort of hype.
Charlie: [] I want to. I moved in order to both be with my girlfriend and have a large office. I plan to come back, hopefully in the summer, to do an event of some sort. But it takes a lot of hard work for everyone to bring what they have to the table and to not fight and to not get upset about money. You know, punks might not seem like it on the surface, but they are people acting on principles.
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