ASR Blog

Business Tip of the Night

My Small Business Tip of the Day. . .actually, tip of the night:  Don't read Entrepreneur Magazine before bed. My head was spinning until four in the morning with my To do list! What do I do with the company I was crazy enough to start? How do I go about getting investors? How much do I want them to invest? How much of the company would I really want to give away? Do I want to give away any? Can I do it without support? Isn’t that why I left Corporate America anyway? No boss! No one telling me what to do! No one stifling me! But what if no one buys me either? What if no one wants my baby clothes? How do I set up my office? When do I hire employees? How do I hire employees? How do I protect the business? How much inventory do we stock? Should we produce overseas? How do we do that? Who do we trust? HOW HOW HOW?? From now on, I vow to only read business magazines on planes or on weekday mornings, days that I can do something about all the thoughts this magazine stirs up! My before bed reading is going right back to Better Homes and Gardens. Starting tonight.

Bottled Up Excitement!

I’m a trying!

Punkster is trying to do our part to help the universe in any way we can, instead of throwing more stuff out there into it, I’m trying at least to make our “stuff” better for the earth, or less wasteful. And it . . . ain’t . . . that . .. easy. . . .

First of all, our first task in the “make the world better” challenge was plastics. You see. . .our baby t-shirts and onesies come packaged in baby bottles. Yep, each shirt is stuffed in a baby bottle! It’s a hit at the baby showers, let me tell you! But the thing is, these baby bottles, that really put us on the map, that we can thank for our 200+ stores list that we have racked up in only a year, that set up apart from every other t-shirt line, these very same baby bottles are my demise. I think I will breast feed my children for the sheer fact that I never want to see another baby bottle again.

Wait, actually, now that I think about it, they will all be bottle fed. Considering I am the proud owner of over 10,000 baby bottles, I think I might have a few around the house when that time arrives for children. (yep, no kids, not even close, I’ll explain that some other time, but the gist of it is. . .I’m still young!)

Ok OK so first we bought the bottles at regular stores. I would make the Target, K-mart, Walmart circuit and literally buy every baby bottle in the store. Road trips lasted an extra hour or so, let no chain store go untapped! But this got crazy. Not only were we paying wholesale for the bottles, but buying three at a time wasn’t the most efficient way to handle business. The best was when the lady at the register said, “Yea, I don’t like doing dishes for my babies either.” I just smiled and agreed.

We finally were able to secure a small wholesale purchase from Evenflo, our baby bottle of choice. We could only use these ones because of their size as well as the fact that they weren’t curvy. You would never know how scientific baby bottle purchasing could be.

Evenflo let us buy 5,000 bottles. A purchase that seemed beyond huge at the time. But, being a thriving shirt business, we went through those much faster than we thought we would. So, here we are again, back to Target. No joke.

Ok, well the point of this is, we had to figure something out. We had to get bottles from a better source, a more efficient source, a cheaper source. But that was not easy to do. I researched baby bottles for months, looking for one that would fit the shirt, not be curved, not be ugly pink, just clear, no cartoons! They didn’t exist.

So here is where the environmental dilemma took place, we could make a mold for a bottle ($10,000 mold!), we could get a fake bottle anyway we want it, but it would not be FDA regulations and safe for babies to drink out of. So essentially, we would be just making thousands of little plastic bottles to throw into the landfill. I was not OK with that at all. I knew if we were going to continue our signature baby bottle packaging, that bottle better, and I mean better, be used to feed some baby milk, somewhere.

It’s amazing how easy it is as a corporation to take the cheaper and easier route, and I now see why it is done.

But no fear! We found a FDA approved bottle and we ordered 10.000 of them! Now we had to find out how to go organic. . . . it’s only just begun.

We are a bunch of bottled up excitement over here!

So far so good,

--Leanne

Get Out to Get In

I just transferred thousands of dollars to India last week. And I mean thousands. No, I'm not doing anything illegal. I promise! Punkster has officially, as of this transfer, taken our production overseas. Wild really, considering I started this company cooking the shirts in a dye bath on the stove and printing them one at a time on the family room floor. As I sign off on this business decision, I see this money floating all the way over across the ocean, one dollar at time, I am just hoping that as surely as it floats over there, it goes, picks up a couple dollar bill friends, and flies right back on home to me.

But then again, this could be goodbye.

So, here is the scoop on Punkster (www.niceshirtbaby.com) and really, on me. My name is Leanne Ford, I created Punkster at 22 years old, based on an idea I had on a walk, thinking about all the cool moms I knew. I noticed that moms seemed to be getting cooler and cooler, they were young, they were hip, they were rockin’ thrift store t-shirts. So, man oh man. . .if they like cool clothes, why wouldn’t they want their kids to be in cool clothes. At this time, mind you, there really were only pink and blue onesies for babies, and if you wanted design you had to settle on. . .well, let’s see, you had your choice between ducks, dolls and birds. Oh! Puppies were a popular sell too! Anyway, I thought if mom’s buy these really soft, washed out, old wrinkled shirts for themselves; they will for sure buy them for their babies! Punkster started out inspired by grandpa’s t-shirt (minus the pit stains) quirky sayings, washed too many times, as soft as “cottonly” possible . . .

Punkster was the nickname my dad gave me as a child, I guess I acted and looked like Punky Brewster, so Punkster seemed like a perfect name, considering 22 years later I still thought it was catchy.

Ok, now back to today, India. Right, .India.

I actually feel really thrilled and excited about what’s going on with the business. To be honest, I fought internally about producing overseas, you see, I am a total USA supporter when it comes to production of any kind. I like to support the country as much as possible. And for over a year, we tried to keep Punkster production in the USA, but it was becoming impossible. The profit margin was so sad that I actually felt like we were paying stores to put our shirts in. it was to the point when a store would order we would be bummed. You see, to make productions in the US is hard, not impossible, but hard to manage financially.

I will give you this, we were doing smaller orders at that time, we were making it all in LA, not the cheapest town, we were new and not very knowledgeable (ok, that last one’s still the case . . .but...)

But we hit the point with Punkster that it was make or break, we aren’t talking about producing overseas so we could buy Corvettes, we were talking about producing overseas so we could keep the company in business. We aren’t even dreaming of salaries yet, (that’s for a whole different blog!) we just wanted to keep this business that was just getting great sales alive!

Anyway, it was go time. It was make or break time, it was get in or get out. Literally!

So we got in and then got out, out of the country to be exact.

Its really a shame that we had to leave the US to survive as a company, and maybe down the road things will change, and maybe they have now and I just did not find the light here, but to be honest I feel really confident in the team we are using in India, we have really formed a great relationship with this husband and wife team that is helping us, they have, so far, proven to be a great match for Punkster, and a great family.

Course, that was before we transferred the cash money.

Just kidding.

I . . . hope.

Oh, and the best part of producing overseas? We went organic!

But hey,
So far, so good.

--Leanne