Episode 199 – Growing A Customization Business

Custom Apparel Startups

Episode 199 – Growing A Customization Business

This Episode



Marc Vila, Trent Walden, Trevor Walden



customapparelstartups.com



CAS Podcast



ColDesi

You Will Learn

• The importance of understanding your target market
• Getting the correct equipment to serve your target market
• When to add new equipment
• Tips for customer satisfaction

Resources & Links

• Colman and Company Blog
• ColDesi Learning Center
• Walden Bros Customized Apparel

Episode 199 – Growing A Customization Business

In this insightful episode, we sit down with Trevor and Trent Walden, the pioneering duo behind the Walden Bros., an Alaskan t-shirt shop specializing in Direct to Film (DTF) printing and embroidery. As they navigate the intricacies of the customization industry, the Walden brothers share their journey of transforming an idea to a successful family business.

Key Discussion Points:

• Taking ideas and going for it: The Walden Bros. recount their initial days, emphasizing the importance of good ideas, family and hard work.
• Taking Risks: Trevor and Trent delve into early wins and losses that helped make the business it is today.
• Building a Brand: The brothers explain their approach to creating a strong brand identity that resonates with their customers.
• Customer Engagement: They highlight strategies for engaging customers and personalizing experiences to foster loyalty and repeat business.
• Challenges and Triumphs: The conversation also covers hurdles they’ve faced, how they’ve overcome them, and the lessons learned along the way.

This episode not only provides a behind-the-scenes look at running a successful customization business but also serves as a guide for entrepreneurs eager to carve out their own niche in the competitive industry of bespoke products. Join us as Trevor and Trent Walden lay down the blueprint for aspiring customizers looking to expand their horizons.

Transcript

Marc Vila:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the CAS Podcast, and we have got a great episode today. Today, we’re going to be talking about steps towards growing a customization business, and we’re going to kind of follow through the path of some very special guests that we have on today, the Walden brothers from Walden Bros Custom Apparel.

And if you’re listening to this podcast, I would say a few folks should be listening to this. One is the very beginning. You haven’t started your business yet, or maybe you’re just crafting and you’re thinking about starting some sort of customization business, whether it’s T-shirts or whatever it might be. And more commonly, you are already in business, and you’re trying to figure out what your next steps are.

So that’s why we brought on the Walden brothers to kind of have that conversation a little bit, to talk about the steps that they’ve taken, and maybe the steps they plan on taking together in the future. So I’d like to pass the mic over to the two of you for a minute. Would you mind just introducing yourselves and tell us a little bit about what you do?

Trent Walden:
I’m Trent.

Trevor Walden:
I’m Trevor, and we own Walden Bros Customized Apparel. We make T-shirts, hoodies, anything clothing-oriented. We probably can customize it via DTF printing or embroidery. But yeah, we own Walden Bros Customized Apparel.

Marc Vila:
All right. Awesome. And where are you guys located?

Trevor Walden:
We’re located in a little town in Alaska called Soldotna. It’s about 180 miles south of Anchorage, if anybody knows where that is.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Well, I’m sure everyone’s heard of Anchorage. How many folks live in that town? Do you know?

Trevor Walden:
I don’t know.

Trent Walden:
I want to say, for the peninsula, it’s like 50,000 people. Soldotna is like 5,000 people.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Okay. And the reason why I ask that is because you’ve started and run a successful business, and folks all over the place are trying to figure out what to do, where to go, and they often think about serving everybody in America, which would be great. If you want to have a big, giant business, you serve everybody in America.

But most of the folks in our industry are semi-localized, and you don’t have to be in New York or Miami or Chicago or some big, giant, giant place to be able to run a business, sustain a family lifestyle, grow it, all that stuff. So that’s one thing that’s particularly inspiring, is that you live in a town just like tons of other people listening to this podcast, and that’s awesome.

Trevor Walden:
Absolutely.

Marc Vila:
So starting from the beginning, you’ve been in the business now about four years. You started in 2020, and why don’t you tell me a little bit about how you got started and what you started with? What was the first things you started to sell? How’d you make them? Et cetera.

Trevor Walden:
So in 2020, Trent came to me and was like, “Hey, we need to start selling T-shirts.” And so, I thought that he meant selling T-shirts in person to people. So we bought a printer, a DTG printer, and we didn’t really know how to use it that well, and didn’t have the environment set up properly. And we ended up wasting $20,000 on DTG printers, and then we found ColDesi and got a white toner printer, and it just kind of started to steamroll from there.

But when we started, we just sold masks. We made $10,000 on masks locally. Our mom was using a sewing machine and sewed fabric together, and then we put hair ties on for the ears. It all just kind of snowballed into what it is now.

Trent Walden:
And I was in high school still when we started this. So it was just kind of lucky that the school asked for 200 masks, one for each graduating kid in my class. And so then, we got to do that, which is pretty cool.

Marc Vila:
Really?

Trevor Walden:
But like you’re saying, just local, local stuff.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that’s one thing that’s… A couple cool things about that, for one, is when you see an opportunity, you jump on it if you can, which you did. You had an opportunity to make masks for folks, and the school wanted them, and you were able to do it, and you used the resources of your family to kind of pull together and turn it into a little business, which is super cool. And then the side on that is that you take advantage of luck and hard work, because I’m sure making those masks, I mean, how many times were you up super late nights, or whatever, taking care of those?

Trevor Walden:
Every single night. It was every night.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Every night.

Trevor Walden:
But the big part that you said that I want to highlight is the family part of it. We have so much help from our family, and that has been an integral part into us being successful, is how willing… Our grandma comes down from Anchorage. She’ll drive three hours one way to help us fix something that we didn’t know how to fix. We don’t know how to use a sewing machine. She comes down and brings her sewing machine. And, I mean, that’s the type of stuff that our family does. So it’s huge having family helping us.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Excellent. And when we talk to folks in this industry, and I think this is something that’s all too often inspirational and not considered, is how much… I would debatably say 100% of everyone I’ve talked to and being in this business for 15 years, almost 100% of them said it’s either friends or family that all help them gather around in one way or another, whether it’s helping them get sales, helping them work on machines, somebody doing art, just being an inspiration, lending them money.

I mean, there’s a million different ways. And almost always, it involves friends and family. So just hearing that again, every time I hear that and folks get kind of trapped in, “What am I going to do? How am I going to grow? How am I going to start?” It’s like, the people around you are the ones rooting for you.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Use them.

Trevor Walden:
Yup.

Marc Vila:
Well, awesome. Now, when you start first started selling with the white toner printer and doing T-shirts and stuff, how were you typically getting business at that point in time?

Trevor Walden:
So early on, whenever we got our own little… I mean, it wasn’t even a storefront. It was like a little office room. When we got the little office room and got set up in there, it was like, “Okay. Well, we need to market.” So here, being a small town, radio ads, and maybe in a bigger city, it seems crazy. But here, radio ads were a big part of marketing for us, because old people listen to the radio here, and the old people are the ones that have the money or the businesses or dah, dah, dah, dah, and then they hear that, call us, come in. And so, marketing on the radio was really our big push, I would say.

Trent Walden:
And another one at that current point in time was, we did a lot of printing on demand, and we didn’t charge anything for us to come show up. So we would just show up with no money beforehand and sit there and possibly make nothing all day, or we’d make like 500 bucks or so. But we did that for that entire first year, was a lot of printing on demand with nothing in return right away. It was just kind of sit there and hope.

Trevor Walden:
Hockey tournaments, wrestling tournaments, which made it to where people would see our face, and then they would talk to us about our business. I mean, you just had to get there. It was kind of… for us.

Marc Vila:
So that’s too funny, because… So most of the podcast episodes lately are just with myself, Marc Vila, but Mark Stephenson was the other host for probably the first 150 episodes with me of this podcast. And we would consistently have these running jokes where I would say, we would talk about advertising and marketing, and I would tell him advertise on the place mat in the diner or take out a radio ad or a park bunch, and he would just bust me all the time. He’s like, “What are you, in the 1980s?” And I said, “Yeah.”

But in America, when we’re talking about smaller towns, even medium-sized towns, the audiences for this type of stuff are actually reasonably small, and it’s not that expensive to do it. So if you’re in Tampa, where I am, and you want to advertise on the radio, that’s going out to tens of millions of people, and that’s incredibly expensive, and expecting much of a return on that.

But when you’re in a small, medium-sized town and you advertise on a radio or park bench or a sign-up at the school, or, I mean, a joke about like the diner menus, but the folks that see that will see your name and just be like, “Isn’t that so-and-so’s nephew?” Like, “Wait. That was my student in sixth grade.” Right? I’m sure that happened, right?

Trevor Walden:
Oh, yeah. We were out to dinner last night, and we saw one of our teachers that we had in middle school. And Trent brought it up, because it must be such a weird dynamic for him to be a teacher and know who we were as a kid and watch us grow, and then now he sees us out at dinner and is almost formal to us. It’s kind of weird in a way, because it’s like, “Okay. I know that you know who we are as people, but you look at us as businesspeople now,” which is, it’s cool, but it’s also a weird feeling at the same time.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It absolutely is. But there’s power behind that too, because if folks know who you are and they see your little ad or they run into in a restaurant, again, they’re going to root for you.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
And I think that’s like a real magic behind our industry and what we do, because it’s a product that essentially everybody needs. Unless you live in a nudist area, everybody needs shirts.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So everybody needs shirts. And if you’re in a reasonable-sized community, you can actually break into this market, especially if you’re offering unique things. Like, in the beginning, you offered masks and you did the on-site events. And commenting from the on-site events, how often would you go to an event… Or let me ask it different. Would it be often that you would make more money after the event from people you met versus the amount of money you made at the event? Am I asking that in a good way?

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think I get what you’re saying. We would make a good chunk at the events, but after the fact, we would get more customers, for sure, because people, they’d see us and they know who we are. And then once they realize, “Oh, you do this type of work,” then they talk to somebody that we actually have done work for, and then they start dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and it just culminates.

Trent Walden:
To build off of that, the type of event, too, played a very big role, because hockey tournaments for us here locally, hockey tournaments, kids love buying hoodies, whereas if you’re at a wrestling tournament, and those kids don’t really care about a hoodie or a T-shirt very much. They’re focused 100% on wrestling, whereas hockey kids, as soon as they walk in, it’s like a competition between who can get the hoodie first.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Okay. Right.

Trevor Walden:
It’s like this ocean.

Marc Vila:
Right. So knowing the right events. I’m sure that was a little bit scary at first doing those first events. So maybe tell me a story about one of the first events or the first one you went to, how it went. I don’t know. Anything interesting about it is fine.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. How about the hood one?

Trent Walden:
I remember that. Oh. Oh, no. I’ll tell mine.

Trevor Walden:
Okay.

Trent Walden:
I’ll go ahead and tell mine.

Marc Vila:
All right, go ahead.

Trent Walden:
There was a wrestling tournament. One of our local wrestling organizations asked us if we would come print on demand, because one of their coaches had cancer, I think. And so, we donated all of our profits from that event to the coach that had cancer. But it was very scary. You have to walk in and carry in your big tables for your toner printer, and then you-

Trevor Walden:
The heat presses.

Trent Walden:
… had to bring in your heat presses as everybody is staring at you. And then at that point in time, because we got smarter as we went on and just kept inventory at our business, but carrying in big blue tubs filled with T-shirts and hoodies, and trying to keep it all organized.

Trevor Walden:
Ice packs. Ice packs. We had to bring those in too, because we had the white toner printer, but it was a cold peel, and we’re trying to do it fast. So you go there. You’ve got all these ice packs lined up on one table. You’re setting your shirts out, and then the ice packs are sitting on the shirts, cooling them.

Trent Walden:
Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
I had never experienced anxiety, ever. I was always just like, “Whatever.”

Trent Walden:
“Whatever.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
But those tournaments definitely made me feel like, “Oh.” You feel like all of your energy is just sitting right under your chin.

Marc Vila:
Mm-hmm. Yup. I know exactly what you mean. So maybe it was 2018. I had the opportunity to volunteer at a children’s home here, people with displaced parents and stuff like that. So these kids are like eight to 16. And so, myself and another woman that worked here at ColDesi were like, “Let’s bring a bunch of transfers and a heat press, and we’ll just make shirts for these kids.” And it was all for free, of course.

And we get there, and the guy who’s running it is just like, “These kids don’t like anything. They are not from good places. So just do your best to have a good time with them.” And he’s like, “And just, every day is a work in progress with them.” Right? So we look at each other, and we’re like, “Oh, what is this going to be like?”

And immediately, we start feeling a little bit of anxiety, like, “Oh, gosh. I hope we represent them well.” So a couple little kids come up, and we make a shirt, and that was cool, and it was fun, and they were super happy, and they put the shirts on right away. Well, next thing you know, maybe 12 minutes tops, and the line was to the back.

Trevor Walden:
Yup.

Marc Vila:
So there’s a pizza station, and there was like a… I forget if it was ICEEs or ice cream or ice bar or something like that, and us. We all just sat around, and we were front to back lined. And there’s the pizza guy standing there, like, “What?”

Everyone chases me down. And here, these kids are lined up for the shirts, and they were super excited about it, and things were going fast. Yeah. I mean, we’re trying to cool them down, and the heat press is getting hot, because you’re working under it. I’m sweating. I wrap a T-shirt around my neck to catch the sweat.

Trevor Walden:
You look into the back of the line, like, “Where does it end?”

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Where does it end? And I gather you had line situations like that at the tournament.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. I’m going to throw one little quick tidbit in here that could help somebody, because it’s helped us-

Marc Vila:
Good. This is amazing. Yes.

Trevor Walden:
So when we started, we used the toner printer, and we’d bring it there and print it out and do the marrying process and do all that good jazz while we’re standing there trying to gab with the customer or the parent to try and make them like, “Okay. This isn’t going to take as long as it’s really going to take,” type thing.

And so, now, what we’ve done, because that moment, whenever you’re just sitting there feeling that anxiety, it sucked. So our shop is like, I don’t know, three miles away from our local hockey arena. And so, what we have done now, because we have the DTF printer, and it’s so quick to be able to get fulfillment done, is we’ll have ordering windows. So let’s say the tournament starts at 8:00 AM and it ends at 6:00. We’ll do our first ordering window from 8:00 to 10:30. And then if you order between 8:00 and 10:30, then you can pick up at 12:30 in the afternoon.

So then we get their number, text them whenever it’s ready to go. And then, usually, the parents, between hockey games, they’re either going to a different arena to play a different game, or they’re going to go to lunch and they don’t want to stand there and wait the entire time for the thing to get done. So what we did is, we made it easier on ourselves so that we didn’t have to sit there and be stressed out whenever they’re standing there, but also made it easy on them to be like, “Wait. I can just come pick it up in a bit?” And you’re like, “Yeah. I’ll shoot you a text message as soon as it’s ready.”

And then that for them is like, “Oh, okay. Yeah. Sold. Got it. Awesome. We’re going to go eat lunch. We’ll come back and pick it up later.” So it’s been extremely helpful for us. And we have three ordering windows, but then no one gets stressed out. They feel great about it, because they get to go and have lunch or go to their next game, and we make sales.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
So that’s a tidbit that we learned along the way.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s awesome. I know that the first time I did something in person, I did everything all together. And then the second time, I just pre-made what we were going to do, and I add to do a little bit of predicting and surveying to help. So reached out to people and asked them to vote on what design they would like best, what type of apparel they would like best, and that gave me a little bit of data, because I didn’t have previous data.

If it’s your 10th tournament, you probably know what’s popular by then. But in the first one, I didn’t know. So I just kind of surveyed out to try to get an idea, “Okay. This was a really popular design, so I printed twice as many of those.” And then when things ran out, I kept a sample behind, and I let people order where it could be delivered later on to them. But no, the window thing is really interesting, because you’re like… So essentially, you did a bunch of orders, fulfilled those. Now you’re taking a bunch of orders, fulfill those, and people are picking up while the second orders are being taken. Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
Yup. Yup. So from 8:00 to 10:30, and then 10:31 to 1:30 or whatever time it would be, if you’re in that window, then you pick up at 3:30 now. And so, we’re taking orders all day, but Trent clicks Print on the printer at 10:30. There’s no more. And at that point, we’re done. If you missed it, I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sure that we could figure out a way to sneak you in there. But for the most part, it’s just, hey, it makes it way easy on him and on the customer.

Marc Vila:
So, Trent, you were just queuing them up in the RIP software?

Trent Walden:
Yeah. So what will happen is, Trevor will be at the tournament, because I don’t like talking very much, as most people probably see from this podcast. So what happens is, I’ll stay at our office. Trevor is at the tournament, and we have an order for him where he’ll get the player’s name and number, because that’s another thing that we offer at these hockey tournaments that nobody else does.

And so, parents, it’s almost like, it just sells them before we even have to try and sell them anything, is you get the front, and then also, your kid’s name and number come on the back, and that’s included in the price of the hoodie, whereas whenever you go elsewhere for a tournament hoodie, it’s, you get the front, and then the name on the back is an additional $5. And if you want something on the sleeve, it’s an additional $5.

And so, Trevor will get their name and number put down in an order form, name and number, and he’ll already have a font and all that stuff designed for it. So it’s just easy for me to type in the name, type in the number, download. But then after that, it’s player name and number, size and color, and then time of order so that we make sure that we’re getting the ones that are in that order window done and ready.

And then as soon as 10:30 hits, I text him, say, “Hey, all orders done.” And he goes, “Yes.” And then the last one is uploaded. I’ll get that information put in. And as soon as that printer has loaded in the queue and ready to go, Print button is hit, and we’re starting to roll. So hopefully, we can get through that period with no errors.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s awesome, actually. And when you do speak, you say good things, so keep that going.

Trevor Walden:
Hey, Marc, you have to know, this is very evolved Trent. Trent would’ve sat in the back room and said that he was on the podcast before. So he’s made progress.

Marc Vila:
No. No. I’m glad that you’re here, because your input’s fantastic. How long would it take to go through one of those print runs, like for one of the orders? In the printer itself till they were ready to be put on shirts.

Trent Walden:
Okay. So whenever we’re getting the orders from Trevor, it usually takes, I would say… Or I’m trying to load them simultaneously. So the order window starts at 8:00. Trevor will have an order by 8:10, and what I’ll do is I’ll print out. He sends me a picture of all the order forms. So I print the order form out at the office, then get the designs loaded, and upload it as quick as I can, or if it’s like, sometimes he’ll have… 8:00, it opens, and by 8:10, he has five orders.

And so, I’ll print out all five orders, load all five orders. And then once those are loaded, I go back and check my phone again. And if there’s new orders, I will now repeat the process of print them out, load them in. And so, that usually is like 30 to 40 minutes, I would say, getting everything loaded in, bags, getting the bags loaded with the actual correct garments as well.

And then after that’s done, that 30 to 45 minutes, click Print, and that’s also about another 30 or 40 minutes. But what we do for our tournaments is, we have our employee. We have them work on that weekend. So as the prints are rolling out of the oven, they can be trimmed, and then we can take the bag with the prepped garment, and we’ll get the name and the number, take it over the heat press, and start fulfilling as they’re rolling out of the printer so that we can make our sale.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah, and start staging the bags.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s awesome. And a simple lesson to learn for that is, just develop your own system that works for you. For one, there’s tons of great, sophisticated systems out there for when you get big. Right? So if you’re going to an order and you’re taking 1,000 orders, that system probably doesn’t work for that, but you can pay for software that will help you do that.

But in the beginning, as you’re getting going, just figure out what works for you. And I’ve heard customers do everything. They email things in. They have a shared Google Doc with Excel, that they’re inputting the information into a shared Google Doc, so they’re both in it live, texting each other, literally just being on the phone, just calling each other on the phone.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So whatever works, do that and learn a lesson. Oh, here you go.

Trevor Walden:
So this is just our basic order form. If anybody comes in, in general, then I got to get all that information. And then on the back, if you ever need to use extra room on the back, like let’s say they have six different styles that they’re going to have in their order, then we can just slash in between, so like sizes, smalls. I can write smalls here, and then slash mediums, and then the quantities and everything just lines up with itself. But if you ever need extra room, you always have the back, too.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
So for those watching the video, you saw the order form. If you haven’t seen it, what you did was great, is it was big. You had plenty of room to write everything in, and you kind of boxed it out, like, “This is the area for information here. This is the area for notes. This is the customer’s information.” So make things big, easy to read. Give yourself plenty of space.

And like you said, you made room on the back too, so you can add more notes. Too often, I will see folks at live events where they’ve printed out an Excel sheet single line, or they have a notepad, that single line. By the end of it, that thing is a mess, and you’re going to make mistakes. So good call on having a nice, big order.

Trent Walden:
And you were talking about systems, but one of the reasons we’re coming up with even that order form was me and Trevor were talking, and the only way to get things through fastly is having the organized communication.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
And so, when we’re building it, it is like, what information do you need to get a sale, but what information that you need to get a sale actually needs to be passed back to the person doing the fulfillment? And that’s where whenever it was like, “Okay. Well, size, the color, garment styles, their quantities.” And then the customer name is all key information that we need to pass along. So as long as we hit all of these boxes on this order form-

Trevor Walden:
We should be good.

Trent Walden:
… we should be able to communicate in an organized fashion all the information that needs to pass through to everybody in the process.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right. That’s excellent. No, that’s really, really good. So moving on a little bit from… Those live event information is great. I’m sure some folks are going to take away some good stuff there. I wanted to talk about… You mentioned you do embroidery, too. So how did you make the leap from where you started to deciding to get into embroidery? How’d that go?

Trent Walden:
Do you want this one?

Trevor Walden:
You go for it.

Trent Walden:
Okay. On this one-

Trevor Walden:
I love hearing him talk.

Trent Walden:
Yeah, he does.

Marc Vila:
Excellent.

Trevor Walden:
I’ll drink my coffee.

Trent Walden:
On this one, it really was, at that point in time, we were printing T-shirts, and printing and all came around T-shirts, and it was like, “Well, why not do embroidery so we can have another thing to offer?”

Trevor Walden:
Because people would ask. They would ask for embroidery, but we were so small and starting out. It was like, embroidery machines cost X amount of dollars. We don’t even pay ourselves. We need to be able to have the funds to actually buy an embroidery machine.

Trent Walden:
Yeah. I mean, that’s really how it started. It was just like, we kind of want to expand our offerings. And so, we just decided to buy an embroidery machine. And then after that, we had a very large learning curve, because we had never used an embroidery machine in our lives.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Trevor Walden:
My gosh.

Marc Vila:
Right.

Trent Walden:
The embroidery really, I would say, last year and a half is when embroideries really started to kick in for us.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Good. Good.

And so, I’m glad that you said that, because all of the stuff in our industry has a learning curve to it, even the simple stuff. There’s little things that are hard to explain. And I’m the director of marketing here at ColDesi. So we make videos and content, and I have to explain sometimes to folks that every video can’t be 90 minutes long, where I tell you every single inch of every single step. Sometimes it’s just, folks want to see just how it’s done and the basics of things.

But, of course, I took into consideration how much negative space I put into the art or what colors I was printing with, because this printer does great with these colors or this does not, or in embroidery, I might sew it out on one hat and just be like, “It looks ugly on this hat,” whether it’s just the shape of the hat or the color of the hat. So then I go back and I get another hat, and I sew it again.

So there’s a lot of little work to this stuff, but once you get used to it… Folks will say to me all the time, sometimes in positive reviews, sometimes in negative reviews, “You make it look so easy.” And I’m like, “But it is easy for me.” Just like I’m sure running a printer now, or whatever, is relatively easy for you. You could do it half-awake, halfway through a cup of coffee, and you’re just not talking to anybody, clicking the buttons, printing it, getting things going, and it’s not hard, but there is a learning curve. You got to practice. Right?

Trevor Walden:
Yup. Absolutely.

Trent Walden:
Especially with the embroidery.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
I’ll show you some stuff that I made. This is all work-in-progress stuff, and this is about learning curve stuff too. Right? So this is one hat that I’m working on now. Hopefully, we can see it pretty well in the video. So it says, “Mannamong.” And our art director, her and her son have this comic that they write called Mannamong. And this is puff embroidery, sometimes hard to see on camera, but this is puff embroidery. And this is a work in progress, because the problem I’m running into now is the hat is puckering, which you might not see. Right? And I’m sure you’ve dealt with that before.

Well, this is a $2 cheap hat. Right? And I know that’s part of my problem for this design, because there’s a ton of stitches in here. We got puff. It’s three layers deep. A cheap hat is not going to handle this, and this is stuff that I try to explain to folks, is like, “Sometimes you just need a better hat.” Now, this is another one that I’ve been working on, too. This is a roofing company hat. And again, this is puff embroidery, but this one came out crisp and nice.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. I want to have one of that.

Marc Vila:
Right? Richardson hat. It’s on a Richardson 112. This is not a $2 hat.

Trevor Walden:
No.

Marc Vila:
But it’s super smooth. And I thought I had them, but I have two other versions. I was trying to get it done on a cheap hat. But again, there’s so many stitches in this design. It doesn’t work. So those are just little things you learn, and quality in, quality out, practice, learning curves. I mean, it’s all part of it.

But when I sent a picture to the gentleman who owns this company, I said, “Hey, can I use your logo for work?” And he’s like, “Yeah, sure. What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I saw your hat. I can make it better.” And he was like, “Yes. Okay. Sure, sure.” So I made it better. I sent him pictures, and he’s like, “Oh, can you send me a bunch of them?” And I said, “Well, I’ll send you the design and your embroiderer can make a bunch of them for you, but I’ll make you a couple.”

Trevor Walden:
And those look good. It looks really good.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It looks good. I have another one that I don’t have around here that I like even better, but we’re working on a bunch of little projects. All right. Back to the embroidery question then. By the way, anyone who’s listening to this, I’m sorry, that was very visual part of it, but you can go back and check 40-something minutes into it on YouTube or on our customapparelstartups.com website. But now you have multiple embroidery machines. How many machines did you start with? Did you just start with one?

Trent Walden:
Yeah. We just started with one.

Marc Vila:
Okay. How quick did you get multiple, and what was that journey like?

Trent Walden:
So we bought our first one, I want to say, in May of 2021. And we only had that one until May of 2023.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
I think May of 2023, we had enough cash just sitting in our business bank account to pay off that Avancé that we currently had. And then after we paid that one off, we got another Avancé. And we ended up actually receiving it, I think, in June of 2023.

Marc Vila:
Okay. Okay.

Trent Walden:
And then two months later, our embroidery was really starting to ramp up. And so, August, we bought another Avancé one. We just bought that one so we didn’t have to get into a loan. And so, at that point in time, by August of 2023… Well, I mean, if you went April, we had one, and then by August, we had three Avancés total.

Trevor Walden:
Summer really hit us hard. Summer was like, there was people coming in left and right asking for embroidery, and we were like, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” And then it was just like, embroidery is time. You can’t make the machine move any faster than the way that it moves.

Marc Vila:
Right. Right.

Trevor Walden:
So we quickly realized, we were like, “We need more heads,” whatever.

Trent Walden:
So we actually need-

Marc Vila:
Yeah. And how many total heads do you have now?

Trevor Walden:
Five?

Trent Walden:
We have, yeah, five heads.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Five heads. So that’s one of the things I really like about embroidery. So one of the things I don’t like about embroidery is, embroidery is just time. Right? It’s slow. It’s not fast.

Trevor Walden:
You can’t outwork. You can’t outwork.

Marc Vila:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And depending what you’re putting on, I mean, it can be done pretty quick. If you’re just doing initials or something on the sleeve of a shirt, I mean, you’re going to hit Start and walk away, and before you fill up your coffee, it’s done. But if you’re doing a logo like this, the Mannamong one that I’m showing here, this logo is 13 inches wide, and I want to say it’s like 30,000 stitches or something. This takes 40 minutes to sew out on the hat.

And so, depending what you’re doing, but the cool thing is, is I just do my job while that stuff’s sewing out. So I hit Start. I listen for the hum. If it stops humming, I think maybe I’m out of bobbin or my threads, they’re broke, and I wait for a pause point and I get up. But the cool thing about embroidery is, it’s doing the work for you, which is different than when you’re running a heat press, because everything you’re heat-pressing is on there for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds. There’s no time to do anything else.

So an embroidery machine is an awesome add-on, because depending on your design and what you’re sewing it out, you just hit Go. And it’s like having a baby. You got to go and change it. You got to feed it. You got to burp it every once in a while. But otherwise, it’s just chilling there on its own, depending what you’re… And once you really dial in your hooping and your digitizing and all that stuff, then it’s easy.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
Yeah. For us, whenever we were starting, I mean, it was amazing and awful at the same time, because it was amazing that we got to add the embroidery, but the learning, the tensioning, and trial and error of making sure tensions are correct and not was such a pain for me. Finally, I now know how to do it, but learning how to tension all those things correctly makes a massive difference.

Trevor Walden:
I think Avancé is responsible for a few gray hairs on Trent.

Marc Vila:
Oh. Yeah. All the things do. I think that patience is part of the key to success. A common denominator, which is terribly interesting, is when I talk to a lot of folks who are doing well in their business, and they talk about growing it and getting customers. All of them have a degree of patience in their personality, where when we talk to folks who get frustrated really easily or leave bad reviews, or get really upset at our technicians, typically, they don’t have the patience to get over the hump to learn something that’s a little challenging.

So I would just encourage anybody, if you are the type of person who punches a wall or yells at things when they get… all that stuff, we’re all different personalities. Fine. But if you are, do your best to exercise patience and learning, because once you break that line of like, “Wow, I got it,” then… I don’t want to say it’s easy riding from there, because you still own a business. Owning a business is always a little bit of a challenge.

But for me, it’s no longer an issue whenever I’m going to make a video digitized or get something digitized, sew it out, make a T-shirt. That part of it is the easy part for me. Coming up with the idea, all the other things is the hard part.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. Yeah. No. We’ve had our arguments and battles, because I don’t understand embroidery the way that Trent understands embroidery. So there’s times where we butt heads on like, “Why is this not possible? Explain to me why this isn’t possible,” or “What are you unaware of that is making it impossible for you right now based on the knowledge you have?”

And so, Trent will inform me, and I’m like, “Okay, but I’ve seen this somewhere. I know somebody has done this. So why can’t we do it?” And then that’s where… But like you said, patience. I have to be open enough to understanding that I don’t know everything about embroidery. And so, I need to be able to learn and understand from Trent, who knows way more, and he’s way more educated on… He could tell you stuff about embroidery that I don’t even… He’ll speak a different language to me.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. I’m sure even me too. You’ll probably outspeak me out, because I don’t do production all day. I mean, I talk about it a lot. I make machines. I mean, I talk about machines a lot. I talk about digitizing. I definitely do it a lot, but I’m not doing production, which is, it’s another skill set.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. It really is.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. So congratulations to you for learning that and getting through that. And then you see, I mean, it’s like, when those machines are humming, I mean, it’s a joke we’d say, but it’s like the sound of money.

Trevor Walden:
It is. It’s euphoric almost. It’s so great when that, what we call… So when the DTF printer is printing, and we know that we have the perfect feed coming through, and the time on the roller is going perfect, it almost sounds like horses galloping whenever the kicker is on and it’s hitting the excess powder off. So it sounds like that, and I’m like, “You know what that sound is, Trent, right?” And he goes, “Well, like the sound of money,” because it’s basically printing money. It is.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That’s the coolest thing about everything that we do, and embroidery machines, too. Also, you mentioned sound, which is another kind of funny thing to talk about. I’ll be in the showroom and we’ll be sewing out a design, and I’m on the computer in the RIP software messing with something that I’m going to print, and the embroidery machine’s in the background, and I’ll say, “It’s about to thread-break.” And they’re like, “What are you talking about?” And they’re like, “How do you know?” And it’s just like, when you sit in that room, you know what the galloping horse should sound like, and you can hear when that horse is about to trip.

Trevor Walden:
Yup.

Trent Walden:
Yup. I can hear it. With the Avancés, you can tell whenever there’s a thread break that happened, because you hear that… If that noise happens, it’s like, “Yup, there’s something that’s about to have a red light on it.”

Trevor Walden:
Yup. Pause. Pause.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yup. Yup. Well, that’s awesome, and that’s so true. So maybe we could probably do a few more minutes, if that’s fine by you all. I wanted to talk about growing and keeping and getting customers, because that’s one last thing to discuss when it talks… If we talk about the topic towards growing a customization business, getting customers is one thing, and then keeping customers is another thing.

So how do you deal with… I have a few questions on this, but for one to start with is customer service issues, when you have unhappy customers or somebody didn’t like what you did, or you made a mistake. How do you handle those problems typically? I know they’re all individual cases, but maybe you could talk to that a bit.

Trevor Walden:
So I’m sure that there’s a bunch of people out there that had their parent… Their mom growing up was the mom that when you go through the McDonald’s drive-through and you say ketchup only on there, and then they put pickles, onions, and mustard on there, your mom goes in and reads them the riot act. That was my mom.

Marc Vila:
Okay.

Trevor Walden:
Okay. So we had that fear every time. It’s like, I’ll just eat the pickles. I don’t even want to say anything. So for me, I’m the sales guy that talks to the customer, and I always think in my head, “What would my mom want? What would be the expectation from my mom?” And so, for us, it’s always, one, if the customer is flat-out wrong and they just didn’t do their due diligence, as a customer, you have a responsibility to do the customer things that are asked of you from us. But at the same time, if we mess up, and it’s going to cost us money, it’s business. It’s the way that it is. So you got to handle that.

Trent Walden:
We prefer to have the good name or good reputation over the $130 that it could be saved by just saying, “No, that was your error. We’re not going to fix it.”

Trevor Walden:
And in a small town, if we mess up Sally’s shirt, and Sally’s shirt was extremely important to her and her event, then Sally is going to tell all 100 people that come to her event about, “Well, the shirts are messed up because dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” Was that bad word of mouth worth the $400 on shirts, or was it just, “You know what? Our name is more valuable than the $400 that we lost. Let’s just get it right”?

Trent Walden:
I will play devil’s advocate in that he is more often on that side, and I am more often on the side of, “We have things in place that say once you approve this part of your order, you are taking responsibility that everything is correct. And so, if we were beyond this order that you approved, I’m sorry, but it’s not my fault, and I don’t need to replace it for you.”

Trevor Walden:
Well, like you said, everything is variable. So there’s situations that are like, “Okay. Trevor’s point of view definitely is the way that we should go on this one,” or there’s situations where it’s like, “This customer really just didn’t pay attention to what their order was.”

Marc Vila:
Yup. We have to be flexible.

Trevor Walden:
And it helps then remedy… Yeah.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. You have to be flexible.

Trevor Walden:
So I would say, as far as getting customers, it sounds weird, but we have an extremely chilled-out vibe to our business. You come in, you’re like talking to a cousin. That’s how I always try and think of it, like, “Hey, how you doing? How can we help you?” When you come in, I’m never disgruntled. Even if I’m disgruntled with Trent and I’m irritated beyond belief, when you walk through the door, you’re my customer now, and I have to be exactly what we want the Walden Bros experience to be like, because when you come in the door, we want you to have a good time, and we want to be able to help you.

Trent Walden:
And an additional thing for the getting customers is, whenever we first started advertising, and we’ve sort of just kept with it, because it’s worked for us, was, whenever we started advertising, I don’t remember what book we were reading exactly, but it had the effect of, “Whenever you hear potato chips, what do you think of?” And for us, it was like, “Well, there’s Lay’s.” And so, our way to go at marketing was, whenever people hear custom T-shirts or custom hoodies or custom prints or anything, we just want it to immediately correlate back to Walden Bros.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
And so, for all of our advertisements, it was, in the beginning, we kind of did more annoying things. We had a radio ad that’s 30 seconds.

Trevor Walden:
Obnoxious. Obnoxious. Don’t say annoying. Obnoxious.

Trent Walden:
It could be both.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
30-second radio ad where we said “bro” 45 times in 30 seconds, and it was just to get people to realize that bros and T-shirts. So then anytime we got in public, “Bro, I need a T-shirt. Bro, I need a T-shirt.”

Trevor Walden:
We’ll have these random 55-year-old women that’ll be like, “Bro,” in our face, and we’re like, “Hey, how you doing?” But that’s what they see us as, is they see that.

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Trent Walden:
And I guess just not being selly.

Trevor Walden:
Keeping them, keeping them. Yeah, not being selly, but keeping the customer happy, too. So if somebody comes in and they place their initial order and we make it, like, “It’s so easy. They did a great job. We love the product, dah, dah, dah,” you have to keep track of everything that you did for them during that order. So we have a software that we use that keeps their order, but also the print dimensions that we used on that order. If they just want to duplicate that order, how do we do that? Well, we need to know the print dimensions that we had or the embroidered area, or whatever, in their customer folder. So we keep Google Drive folders for all of our customers, and it has artwork, print dimensions, et cetera, in there.

Trent Walden:
Embroidery.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. Embroidery, files. Everything is in their customer folder, so that even if I’ve talked to 1,000 people between the last time I’d seen them, when they come in, I can pull up their customer folder and go, “Okay. I totally remember exactly what we were talking about a long time ago, and here’s all of your artwork files. So which one was it that you were talking about?” or I can go and look back at your old order and know exactly what you were having before.

So that is a big part for us, because initially, we didn’t have customer folders. It was like, “We made money. That’s awesome. We sold you something.” And then they’d come back, and they’d be like, “I want to do exactly what I did before.” And you’re like, “Okay.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah. “Do you happen to have one of those shirts you could bring me?”

Trevor Walden:
Exactly. “Can you send me a picture of the ones that we did?”

Marc Vila:
Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
Those were the ones that we got.

Marc Vila:
No, that’s great. You’ve said so many awesome things in there. So I’m going to try to work backwards a little bit in some comments. So one is, keeping folders and information on everything you do is a key to this. Most of the software that’s available that comes with printers or embroidery machines has some ability to do that. You can also use CRMs. You can use Google Drive.

One tip that I’ll add on to that is, whatever you’re using, have a backup. Right? So have backups that you do every so often, whether it’s once a week, once a month, every so often, but make sure you’re downloading that stuff, backing it up, putting it somewhere else, just so it’s always in two places, because that information is so key to growing and keeping your business going, that it’s a part of the money, too. So keep it safe.

Trevor Walden:
Yup.

Marc Vila:
And it does make it really easy. You mentioned your mom and McDonald’s, right? Part of the reason why she would drive through to McDonald’s is because, “I’m going to go there. I know what both of them want. We’re going to get out of there, and we’re going to go to the next thing we were going to do. I don’t have to think about it,” where maybe there’s a new taco place that opened up. “I have no clue what they’re going to like. We’re going to have to figure out through the menu. Are they both going to hate it? Now they’re going to be hungry while we’re on an hour drive to so-and-so. They’re both going to be complaining. I’m just going to do McDonald’s.” Right?

So part of what you said is, somebody can call up and just say, “Hey, can you do the exact same thing again? Do the exact same thing, but do it on a white shirt instead of a black shirt.” Then, they can just call you, and you could say, “Sure. Hang up. The money is done.” They don’t have to worry about it, where if they were to maybe say, “Oh, let me try this online store,” they got to start all the way over again. They don’t know what it’s going to be like. So having that recipe is going to make folks want to come back just because it’s easy and stress-free, especially if you make it, like you said, a chill environment.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. 100%.

Marc Vila:
Yup. And then in regards to getting business and advertising, I think it’s great that you thought of… Being obnoxious can be… Do stuff that fits the personality. So the two of you, you’re younger. You’ve got a chill vibe to you. So make that about your business. I just think make your business who you are. So if somebody is a very business professional, they only wear shirts with ties, they speak very formally, match that to everything.

If you’re chill, wear T-shirts and hats to your business. If you are super bubbly, make all your stuff bubbly and pink and glittery. Do stuff to match what you like for your business or whatever you want your brand to be, because, for one, it’s natural. So now, when you’re trying to think of an advertisement or an ad or whatever it is, our brand is us and our style, so we just make it that way, versus some folks will try to come up with a brand or a style that is too professional or too chill, or they try to be funny when they’re not.

And then not funny is the cringiest thing. When you try to be funny and it’s not funny, that’s super cringe. So don’t try to be funny if you’re not a funny person. And all that’s really interesting, but it’s a great way of doing it. Well, we’ve been on about an hour, so it’s probably time to wrap up. But is there any final thoughts you want to leave before we head out?

Trevor Walden:
One thing I was just thinking whenever you were saying… You just said something and I lost it, but there was… Gosh dang, I lost it. I wish I was sort of-

Marc Vila:
Okay. So I have a final thought, and then maybe it’ll come back to you while I’m talking for a minute here. So we titled this podcast Step Towards Growing a Customization Business. And I think one of the things that’s a takeaway here, there are some concrete things and there are some fluid things, but for one was, you worked hard in the beginning when you had to work hard. So like you said, you were up late doing the mask stuff. You went to an event not knowing if you were going to make money, and that’s obviously scary.

So all of that is part of the journey. Right? You got to endure a little bit of pain. I think it’s just like working out or just like dieting. If you want to have big muscles, you have to go to the gym, and you’re going to be sore for many days. If you’re trying to reduce weight, you’re going to have to feel hungry throughout the day, or eat things you don’t like to eat because you’re changing your formula in your diet.

And the same thing goes with business. You got to get through that. And then there’s a perseverance side of things. When you’re really frustrated with a printer or with an embroidery machine, or anything like that, you’ve got to get past that stuff, which you did time and time again, clearly, which is why you’re able to be successful.

And then the third piece is, this is one of the ones that some people just won’t get it, but I hope everybody listening does. You got to be customer service-friendly. You said, “If I’m in a bad mood, my customers, they don’t have to know that. I want to give everybody the experience of buying shirts with us.” And that is huge.

I was calling some folks the other day trying to buy a service, trying to hire somebody to take some pictures. And this one guy answered. He’s just like, “Hello?” And I’m like, “Did I call a business?” I said, “Oh, is this so-and-so?” “How can I help you?”

Trevor Walden:
Yup.

Marc Vila:
Well, “Is this so-and-so?”

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. Exactly.

Marc Vila:
And he’s like, “Yeah. How can I help you?” And I was like, “Well, I was calling about getting some pictures done.” “Oh, okay. When do you need them?” Wait a minute. We’re not even there yet.

Trevor Walden:
We just bypassed so much dialogue.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. We went through so much, and I’m like, “Wait a minute. You haven’t even said hello to me. You haven’t even wished me a nice day.” I don’t need you to worship me, but I mean, gosh, just be nice.

Trevor Walden:
There’s a customer portal. We call it the pipeline. You have to work them through the pipeline. And Trent always says, he’s like, “You’re so good at working them through the pipeline.” It’s just, once you get reps at doing it, you talk to them. You know what your intros are. Basically, most of the time, they’re just going to respond with one of four ways, and then you need to know how to route from those four ways.

Marc Vila:
Yup.

Trevor Walden:
Just get them down the pipeline.

Marc Vila:
Yup. And those were all little keys to success. And then the last thing that you had mentioned is just kind of knowing when it’s time to take some of that money that you put in the bank and reinvest it in the business. That’s a really scary part, is because all of a sudden, you see your bank account’s got some digits in it, and you’re like, “Wow, this is actually like a business.” And then you’re like, “Wait a minute. We’re going to take all of that money and buy something? I hope it’s going to make us money.”

But that’s kind of part of the risk and reward that you take. So we’ve told folks in the podcast before, you need to have a place where you’re putting profits and you’re putting that money, and then this way, you actually have something to pull from. You need to decide when it’s a good time to finance versus maybe just pay cash or pay something off.

And then everyone’s got a different formula for that. You’ve done both. So you’ve kind of seen what works for you. So I encourage everybody out there to figure out that for you. And the biggest thing that I’ve realized in this conversation is, I didn’t get any rules that were hard and fast for you all.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah.

Marc Vila:
You financed some. You paid cash for some. You have rules for customer service. Sometimes you have to break them. You tried one thing on live events, and then you changed it the next time. That adaptability is a key to success. So hopefully, folks out there listening have kind of learned some steps to growing the business. I think what I just outlined there are some of them. But I want to wrap up the podcast with a little bit of a commercial type of a thing, because I know something about both of us. Both of us, or all three of us are fans of the ColDesi Graphics service.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah. Yup.

Marc Vila:
So I’ve seen you guys place a lot of orders. And all the stuff that I showed here, I mean, I digitized through there. And it’s funny because folks ask me, like, “Oh, well, it looks so good because you have an insight into it, or it’s because it’s you guys.” And I’m like, “I order it like you.” I literally go on the internet, and I order it through the portal. The only difference is, is I create the coupon codes, and it’s ColDesi doing it. So I don’t pay for it.

But I order it online. I make a coupon code real quick. I drop it, and it goes through the system. For one, I want the true experience every time to make sure if things are not going right, I can message a manager and say, “Hey, by the way, did you know this happens?” But two, it also works. And every once in a while, there’s a mistake. I respond back. So what’s your experience been like using the ColDesi Graphics?

Trevor Walden:
Awesome. Awesome. We actually have our own artwork creation prices set up, where we make money off of the ColDesi Graphics, using that service, and it completely eliminates the stress of us having to digitize. I mean, we do artwork, but… Yeah.

Trent Walden:
For him in the sales process, it makes it much easier, because it immediately eliminates one of those questions, where whenever the customer comes in, the way we have it set up, and then he talks to them as, “If you just have nothing, well then, you-“

Trevor Walden:
Oh, yeah. Let me do this. Let me do this. I like this part.

Marc Vila:
Okay. All right.

Trevor Walden:
This is one of my favorite things. I have a click funnel in my head on this.

Marc Vila:
All right.

Trent Walden:
Well, and it’s ColDesi Graphics.

Trevor Walden:
Yeah, based on what ColDesi has. So there’s three types of people that come in for artwork. The first person has their artwork all ready, but it’s in a crappy, low-quality format. So we need to upgrade that in order to make it a printable file, so it doesn’t look bad. Yeah. So the second person that comes in is the person that has a chicken scratch. They have an idea of what they want. They have a screenshot of some style that they like, but they want it to be theirs. So that’s the second phase.

And then the third one is the person… This is my favorite person, Marc, is when they come in, they’re like, “Hey, I’m so-and-so with X sports team, and I’m the parent of John, and I have no idea how to do any artwork or anything. We just want something cool.” And I’m like, “I love you.”

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah.

Trevor Walden:
So all three of those people have… Their problem is solved if you use the ColDesi Graphics service.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Yeah. No, because that’s how we kind of tiered it. So I’ve used graphic services for so many years working in marketing, then we started using a service ourselves outside, and I was like, “Gosh, I hate ordering this.” And I would hate ordering graphics, and to the point where I start… Then I trained somebody else on our marketing team how to order graphics, because I was the boss, so I could pass it down, and then they were like, “I hate doing this.”

And then I was like, “We need to do it better, and maybe that’ll help people.” Right? So from the ground up, we started it up, and we were thinking from the decorator’s perspective of, “All right. We know that we have folks who have no clue what they want. We have folks who just want to mess with stuff, and we have folks who just want to clean up an old logo or something, that they lost the art, but they just have an old JPEG or something that they saved from somewhere.”

And we tried to put it there, and then also price it in a way where it’s like it can be marked up to a retail. And then for the people that it works for, it’s gold, especially if you’re not a super awesome… If you’re a super awesome graphic artist and digitizer, part of the desire is doing the art. They may actually hate the production side of it, but they love the art.

But depending where you are, I love the service. It’s great, and I really appreciate that you all do, too. And then for embroidery, I just like it, because when you order an embroidery file, you get a picture of what it’s going to look like. So I know right out of the gate if there’s a problem sometimes, like, “Oh, I didn’t explain this right to them, or they read this wrong,” or whatever it is, and I can hit a reply and say, “Hey, this is actually supposed to be this, not that,” whatever.

And then when I sew it out, I pretty much know that an expert digitizer has done this, where when I would digitize stuff myself, I would digitize it and then I have to fix it, digitize it and I have to fix it. Now, I get it digitized, do it. If there’s a problem, I just basically send an email, go in there and hit an alert, and send a message, and then I’d just go and do my job again, and come back in a little later and it’s fixed, which I think is huge, because my strength is, I’m not an artist. I do all these other things, so I’m going to do the things I’m better at.

Trevor Walden:
Yup. The time value that you gain back simply by just passing it off to ColDesi is… Yeah. It’s one less thing that I have to think about. Look at my list today. I’m sure you have a list similar to mine, but I don’t want to try and deal with graphics for every single one of those people on the list today.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s a lot of work.

Trevor Walden:
I know that ColDesi has got that. Yeah. And then I’ll just get an email when it’s ready to go.

Marc Vila:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast. We had a little bit of a long episode today, but I think it was an entertaining episode. There was a lot of great information. Hopefully, we look forward to having you both on here again. So yeah, for those folks listening out there, if you go on to the various socials, you can search for the Walden Bros if you guys want to see more about their story and check them out, or if you need to send them some business or something.

And so, you can follow them. Definitely go to coldesi.com. If this is the first time you’ve kind of heard from us, go to coldesi.com. You can live chat with any of our folks there and learn about that, and you can see links to the graphic services, if that’s something that you’re interested. But we appreciate having you on there. And everyone out there who’s been listening, I’m sure you appreciate the Walden brothers just as much as I do, and have a good business.

The post Episode 199 – Growing A Customization Business appeared first on Custom Apparel Startups.