How a college student launched a social clothing venture with only $3K

Ryan Westberg is with me. Ryan is the founder of Serengetee, a social clothing venture that sells tee shirts with pockets on them.

The pockets are made from fabrics from countries around the world and a percentage go to the proceeds go to charities in those countries. I’ve got one very important question you’ll hear at the top if this interview.

Ryan Westberg

Ryan Westberg

Serengetee

Ryan Westberg is the Founder of Serengetee, a social clothing venture that sells T-shirts with pockets on them made of fabrics from countries around the world with a percentage of the proceeds going to charities in those countries.

roll-angle

Full Interview Transcript

Andrew: Hey there freedom fighters, my name is Andrew Warner, I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the Ambitious Upstart. And I don’t even know exactly where to start with this interview. Let me just do a quick intro. Ryan Westberg is with me, he is the founder of Serengetee, which is a social clothing venture that sells tee shirts with pockets on them. You want to show them your tee shirt? There it is, with pockets on them made from fabrics from countries around the world and a percentage go to the proceeds go to charities in those countries, I’ve got a very important question to ask you, but first I want to say that this interview is sponsored by HostGator, the hosting company and I will be opening up this box that I bought for my, there it is, you can actually see my address if you guys are ever in the area I hope you come visit us. Later on I’ll show you how this fits in with my sponsorship message, I have an idea. And in addition to HostGator, HostGator.com, this interview is also sponsored by Bench Accounting. If you don’t know how much revenue you made last month or the month before that or the month before that or maybe it’s too much trouble for you to keep your books organized, you should go to the bookkeepers and software company that work together at Bench. Bench Accounting is at Bench.co/mixergy and I’ll tell you more about them. I’ve got to welcome Ryan. Ryan, hey.

Ryan: How you doing?

Andrew: Hey before this interview started you said that we can get a little outrageous, so right from the start, can I see your butt?

Ryan: Oh my gosh.

Andrew: This will be the most memorable, people will either look away or they’ll look at it. Come on.

Ryan: Okay.

Andrew: Alright, I’ll tell you if we can see it on camera. That’s his butt right there! What is on your butt? Were your pants unzipped, that was pretty fast for you to be able to open them.

Ryan: That is the Serengetee logo.

Andrew: Yeah. And there’s a reason why I wanted to start off with that, not just because I wanted to see your butt. Not because, but that was a pretty fun way to start the interview. Why is that on there? What did you say that led you to get that on?

Ryan: Well so we started Serengetee when we were in college and started with just a few bucks, so we didn’t really know where it was going to go. So I made this bet with myself that I would get the Serengetee logo tattooed on my buttcheek if we hit a million dollars in revenue in one year.

Andrew: Okay.

Ryan: I did not think we would ever hit it, I thought this was just like a fun thing and then we hit it and I held up to the bet.

Andrew: Wow, a million bucks in revenue in one year selling tee shirts. When I talk about new technology it’s not like an app that could have been created before the iPhone. By the way, how are you feeling about showing your butt? You did it with like no hesitation, I was ready to negotiate for it, none of that.

Ryan: Well I got it over a year ago and I mean I posted it on social so my friends will ask me to see it, so.

Andrew: I’ve got to tell Sasha, hang on. We were talking, we had a bet about whether I could get you to show your butt, apparently that’s not that hard. He showed his butt.

Ryan: Bit hard to get.

Andrew: Tell the sponsors. There. Alright, let’s get into how you built this up because I want to understand what it takes to build a company that’s so big. But first let’s get into a little bit of your backstory. You’re a guy who went to, what is it, a semester at sea?

Ryan: Yeah, so that’s kind of where the whole company came together and like the ideas, it’s all built basically while we were on semester on sea, well at least the idea started.

Andrew: Okay.

Ryan: It’s a study abroad program if you guys don’t know, where we were able to travel to 13 different countries all over Africa, Asia, Central America on like a floating campus. So it’s a pretty once in a lifetime experience. So we just started picking up fabrics in each of the countries we were going to just because starting in Ghana because they have these really amazing kente cloth fabrics which are bright and had no idea what we wanted to do with them, but we just thought they would be cool souvenirs and then just like country after country we were seeing really unique fabrics and again we weren’t really sure what we wanted to do with them or anything like that.

Andrew: Who’s we?

Ryan: So I met a kid named Jeff Stites who is my cofounder. I don’t know why I say a kid, but.

Andrew: I get it.

Ryan: Yeah.

Andrew: He was the one who was really into fabrics, whose eye was drawn to them, right?

Ryan: Yeah, yeah, he had the initial, he started pointing them out to me and I was like you know, you’re right. These are really, really cool. So we just started buying them in all the countries we went to.

Andrew: Why? Is he an artistic person who just likes to pick this stuff up?

Ryan: I mean I’m not really sure what exactly originally drew him to it, but he had one shirt that had like, I think his mom made it for him or something, and it was kind of similar to Serengetee, I guess that would technically be the first one, I’m not sure.

Andrew: I see, his mom took a little bit of fabric and added a pocket to one of his tee shirts.

Ryan: Yeah.

Andrew: Why?

Ryan: I have absolutely no idea.

Andrew: Okay. But it was just like this design. Did you get to see it?

Ryan: On his pocket, yeah.

Andrew: You did. And you liked the shirt, it just looked good.

Ryan: Yeah, I thought it was cool looking. But we hadn’t connected the two ideas of taking these fabrics and then cutting those and making those into pockets just yet. That came literally 111 days into the voyage, the last day.

Andrew: That’s when it came together.

Ryan: Yeah, that’s when everything came together.

Andrew: Can I tell you something? When I was in school I was really into heavy metal and I had my mom cut out the zipper from a pair of pants and tie in like pieces of leather and this is so goofy. And take a shoelace and tie it together because I thought that’s what the heavy metal guys have, they never wear zippers, zippers are for squares, dude, I need to have like heavy metal pants. I had long hair, I wanted to have metal pants, she did it. She left the needle in there, like right by where things could really cause damage. I wore it once thankfully my girlfriend at the time was very understanding, I think, I couldn’t have had a girlfriend like that, no way. But people weren’t understanding, I just realized how goofy it was.

Ryan: That’s funny.

Andrew: And I stopped wearing it. The reason I say that is how can, how does an idea like that come together? It’s such a clever design, such a new thing and at the same time so simple. How do you pick up on it and say hey, this fabric that we have could be this tee shirt that becomes this big idea?

Ryan: So we had two, we had just seen the world at the end of the semester at sea, we had just seen 13 different countries, kind of got a sampler platter of the world. And we saw all these issues in the countries, so we really were just kind of trying to think of a creative idea to get back on the road, to keep traveling, just somehow. So we were just staring at like this pile of fabrics and-

Andrew: Ahh, how can we find a way to keep on traveling, to get these good vibes going? You look around and you see we have these tee shirts, my friend’s mom made a tee shirt like this, maybe there’s a way for us to do this and sell it.

Ryan: Yeah, map in the room, like where in the world it kind of just all came together.

Andrew: I see.

Ryan: This idea we could travel, we could help people and we could just make it all come together through something as simple as a pocket on a tee shirt.

Andrew: And you’re entrepreneurial like me, right? Growing up I sold candy, you sold candy. How did you sell candy?

Ryan: Black Market operation in middle school. I was the guy to go to for selling candy.

Andrew: Where did you get your candy in middle school?

Ryan: My dad, he was actually a big help, he would bring me to Costco and I’d get the huge jumbo packs and my hot seller was the sour sprays and sour goos.

Andrew: And you’d just take them, buy them in bulk and sell them in pieces?

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. I was making like a good amount every day, especially for someone in like sixth grade, it was kind of scary because all the big 8th grade-I didn’t hit my growth spurt yet, I’m 6’7 now, but I was scared once the 8th graders found out and they would start hitting me up for candy, got me a little nervous.

Andrew: I’m surprised that you’d be so into continuing this travel considering some of the things that happened to you and one time you guys got fake train tickets.

Ryan: Yeah. So we’re driving in India and I mean, the trip had a lot of hiccups to begin with. But we were on an overnight train and it was kind of, something was already fishy because we were one ticket short, we were with a company that was leading us, a travel company, but we had to cram into these tiny bunks, no air conditioning, I don’t know why they wouldn’t give us better accommodation, but in the middle of the night we finally got to sleep, it was dripping sweat and then in the middle of the night we get woken up and there’s just a huge commotion and like four or five police officers in India, they had like huge AK-47s, they’re just screaming at us and we had absolutely no idea what they’re saying but then they’re just motioning that we need to get off the train right now, it’s the middle of the night, we have no idea where we are in India, just I still wonder where we could have possibly been. But then one of the girls was just absolutely freaking out and she just slips the guy maybe 100 bucks or something and then just silence, and then they leave. But it was insane.

Andrew: I got pulled over once in Mexico and the girl I was with offered the officers pizza at her place if they come in the next day. That did it, who knew? I would never have the guts to slip a guy 100 bucks but I guess in some places it works. So that didn’t scare you off? That didn’t make you say why am I traveling? Let’s just go home back to America where I have Amazon.com deliver everything.

Ryan: Those are the stories you live for, come on. That’s the adventure of traveling, that’s exactly what keeps me traveling.

Andrew: Wow. Alright so you finally hit on this idea, it’s time to actually turn it into something. How many shirts did you make with your first batch?

Ryan: I mean we had absolutely no money, we were coming off a semester at sea where we’d just seen the world and we just had no money for inventory, no money for marketing, no money for that, so we had like 3000 bucks to start, but a lot of that went into the legal fees and actually making this legit.

Andrew: Did you spend too much money? If we’re talking about $3000 going to legal fees and that’s more than you spent on anything else.

Ryan: No, no, no, $3000 total, that was for the first inventory also.

Andrew: I see.

Ryan: Which may have been like 10, 15 shirts or something, it was absolutely nothing.

Andrew: It still feels like then it was a lot on legal fees because what are your expenses on the shirts? You bought regular tee shirts, right? Good thick material I imagine.

Ryan: We knew nothing about like where to source shirts from or anything like that, so Jeff actually, Jeff he lives in Manhattan, or lived there, so he found like some sketchy guy in Chinatown and was trying to buy these shirts in bulk but was completely getting ripped off, those were where our first shirts came from.

Andrew: Alright, I see, so you overpay for tee shirts, you end up with 15 or so, or a dozen or so, you start sewing them, who sews them? Is it Jeff’s mom?

Ryan: No at the beginning it was whoever we could find, we went to some random tailors. We had to go back to school also, so I mean we launched in February, but we were back in school in January.

Andrew: Okay.

Ryan: So Jeff, Jeff went to Claremont McKenna College and I went to University of Arizona so I was handling all of marketing while he was housing inventory and stuff like that. And the first ones were sewn by him going to like a local swap meet, basically finding anyone that could sew anything.

Andrew: Okay.

Ryan: So he’d bring, he’d cut the pockets, then bring the shirt to whoever he could find at the swap meet and then just pray that when he came back they’d have the shirt ready and he’d give them like a few bucks. But we had an issue where this guy, he was great, but he kept just putting his own fabric on the shirts instead of, he just didn’t understand that this was customers ordering this specific fabric, so he’d take the shirt and put on some random fabric of his own.

Andrew: Did it work out okay like that? No you don’t want that because part of your mission from the start was to have this fabric that was sourced from exotic places with interesting stories and a good cause.

Ryan: Exactly. And the customer’s ordering a specific fabric, so they don’t want some random fabric on their clothes.

Andrew: Did you tie in the cause right from the start?

Ryan: Absolutely that was the core of everything really. We knew we wanted to give back to all these countries we had just visited and we wanted to help not only by buying fabrics, which we had this vision where we could both bolster local economies that way but also help tackle an issue within the country that the fabric was purchased.

Andrew: Alright, so how did, I was going to ask you how you sold your first tee shirts, but I’m curious about how you even found a way to give back. It’s not that easy, right?

Ryan: As far as choosing charity partners, or…?

Andrew: Is it just as easy as choosing charity partners? The reason I don’t think it’s that easy is because you call up a charity and you say “I want to give you some money whenever we sell a tee shirt and tell people we’re doing it” and they say “Well if you’re going to use my name I want to know who you are, we want to know how many tee shirts you’re going to sell, if you’re using our name you’re essentially getting us to sponsor you, we want a certain amount of money.”

Ryan: Yeah, I mean we started with a lot of small causes and causes where we had, they were recommended by a friend, or we had like a close personal connection with them. And they were willing to help us out by-

Andrew: What’s the first one that you remember partnering up with?

Ryan: One of our first cause partners was Simply Smiles, they help malnourished people, or malnourished kids and educate them in Mexico.

Andrew: And who knew, who did you know who had that?

Ryan: Someone from our semester at sea voyage, but they’re also based out of Westport, Connecticut, or Southport, and I’m from Fairfield, so it was like the town over, so there’s a lot of mutual connections with that.

Andrew: I see. Alright, then how did you get your first customers?

Ryan: So this was kind of the fun part, we were on semester at sea, it was 500 plus kids that were all going back to school, they were spread out across the entire country, and they knew we were starting this and they were fully onboard, wanted to help out. So we offered anyone that would, this is 2012, by the way.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Ryan: So we offered anyone that would change their profile picture on Facebook to our logo, we’d give them a two for one code, so we wouldn’t really lose money but we’d get like great exposure because brands weren’t really taking advantage of social media yet, they didn’t really see the value in it.

Andrew: And to this day I don’t see companies that do what you’re just suggesting right now. Telling users change your profile photo to our logo and we’ll give you a discount.

Ryan: No, we had no money, we had to get creative.

Andrew: And you did it all by hand, right, you didn’t write any kind of software that would tell you if people were cheating or not.

Ryan: Oh absolutely. But the way we saw it was we wanted to get as many shirts out there as possible, we weren’t going to make any money on these two for ones, but these were now people who were willing to change their profile picture to our logo, those are the exact people we want wearing the clothes because they’re going to be the biggest advocates.

Andrew: Got it.

Ryan: So we just wanted to get as many out there as fast as possible.

Andrew: You mentioned this was 2012, I know you registered the website Serengetee, Serengetee, right, tee as in tee shirt.

Ryan: Yup.

Andrew: You registered I think the year before in 2011, about a year before you fully launched, right?

Ryan: No. We, I don’t know where you’re actually pulling that data.

Andrew: Alright maybe I got that wrong. I could have sworn that 2011-

Ryan: You know what? 2011 it was in December, because that’s when we came back from semester at sea.

Andrew: Okay.

Ryan: We launched February 17th, 2012 is when we launched the website, but we had registered before that.

Andrew: Okay maybe I’m misreading the registration date. Alright, so now you get all these people wearing your tee shirts, you’re making them by having random people sew the tee shirts for you, you still don’t have a business. What’s next? Was it the next semester at sea you did or was it now growing the business a little further?

Ryan: No, now there’s, I mean we still had no idea what we were doing. We kind of did think we were hot shit though because we’d be selling at least one a day. And we were like oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s getting big, it’s getting big, it’s getting big.

Andrew: This is all on your website?

Ryan: Yeah, all e-commerce.

Andrew: Who wrote your site?

Ryan: It was a friend, he was one of Jeff’s roommates and he was a very smart kid that taught himself how to make it, which was a huge help at the beginning because we had no money for something like that. So yeah, we just started growing it and then we caught our first big break the first summer. I went to school with this YouTube guy named Jimmy Tatro, he’s like the frat guy of YouTube and this was again before there were influencer marketing. Brands weren’t paying all these YouTube personalities and there weren’t that many YouTube personalities either, so.

Andrew: This guy is huge. Let me see how many YouTube subscribers he has today.

Ryan: He’s got two million something.

Andrew: Does he have two million? He’s huge.

Ryan: Yeah he’s awesome.

Andrew: So you went to school with him, you guys were friends?

Ryan: We had mutual connections. I got his number, I reached out to him, I told him all about Serengetee, he had heard of it, he loved it, it was like okay, can I send you some shirts and will you wear them in the video? And he’s like “Oh yeah, absolutely” like no questions asked, wanted to help out however he could. But he didn’t tell us he was going to give us a shoutout in the video. The videos were getting hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views and he made this awesome joke about everyone matching the kind of clothes I wear and then he showed his shirt, which was obviously a black shirt with a pocket on it so everyone was staring at it from the beginning. Then we just started getting more and more orders than we’d ever seen. Our website crashed a bunch of times and that was a huge, huge moment for Serengetee.

Andrew: He got three quarters of a million views on it. 13,000 likes, almost 14,000. And only 200 negative down votes on there. He linked directly to the tee shirt that he was wearing, linked to your Facebook page, boy he was just really helping you out.

Ryan: Oh yeah, I mean that first year he helped out so much and that wasn’t even the only video he, that was like one of the only ones where he gave a shout out like that, but he was wearing them all the time. And it was absolutely huge.

Andrew: I did a search for the name Serengetee on his YouTube channel and it just comes up a lot, so he’s actually linking up to you guys at least two years ago a lot and wearing your tee shirts often.

Ryan: Yeah. And then we eventually got once we started getting bigger and I could start actually helping him out he came out with his own line of four patterns that would give back to a charity that he was passionate about and he would also make royalties, so he paid it forward at the beginning, but I didn’t forget that because we would not be where we are today if it wasn’t for his help at the beginning.

Andrew: How did your site do when he started doing videos about you? How about the first time?

Ryan: It was terrible.

Andrew: Why? What happened?

Ryan: We crashed like three times because we couldn’t handle the traffic, it was probably maybe a few hundred people a day, if that. And then that was just like thousands, thousands, thousands, so it was kind of like damage control, we were getting more orders than we had ever seen before and then as I said, we didn’t even have all the systems down for making the products. But-

Andrew: Were you still going and having random people that you meet as swap meets make them for you?

Ryan: By this time we had found this one woman named Robin who actually still works with us, she’s incredible, she’s like my mom.

Andrew: And she was sewing it for you?

Ryan: Yeah, she was doing it all out of her house, we were on the East Coast, I’m from Connecticut, Jeff’s from New York, so we were living there in the summer and then she was kind of handling everything from her house and we would just ship stuff to there and send her the order list every day.

Andrew: Let me do a quick sponsorship message. My sponsor is HostGator. Look, one of the problems that you’re going to have as a business owner is you’re going to get hopefully a lot of traffic the way that Ryan got a ton of traffic. If you’re with a hosting company that can’t handle it or suddenly starts ripping you off at that moment, you’re in trouble. You can’t capitalize on this work that you spent so much time on and you don’t want that. That’s why I recommend HostGator, they’re reasonable price right from the start and their bandwidth grows with you, they give you tons of space, tons of domains if you need them and they really are a rock steady hosting site. And that’s why I bought this. Now Sachet had asked me, Sachet Gupta who sells ads on Mixergy asked me to show him what this looks like before I wear it in a commercial that they paid for, but here’s the problem there’s lots of hosting companies, right Ryan? Do you remember the name of the hosting company I’m doing the sponsorship for?

Ryan: Gator something.

Andrew: Right, at least you remember the Gator part, most people remember Host, they email me back and they say “Andrew, which host is it? Is it Squirrel Gator, is it this, is it that?” so I went to Amazon and I bought one of these, I figured they’re sending me money I could afford to spend ad little bit on these commercials. Now, you tell me, you’ve got good style, you know how things work online, is this too much? Am I degrading my, no, who am I asking, you showed your butt. Here, now I’m a little too tall, let me lower my seat here.

Ryan: I don’t think they’re paying you enough.

Andrew: Right? HostGator. Now they might be a little upset because this is not really their logo, it’s not their mascot, but can you imagine seeing this and forgetting that there’s a gator in the company name? Right, HostGator.com/mixergy, sign up for them and they’re going to give you a really low rate because you’re a fan of Mixergy. And we’ll find out if I’m allowed to keep wearing this. It’s kind of fun. I don’t have enough fun, Ryan, that’s the problem because I was starting to burn out and I said you know, I’m going to have more fun in the interviews and I’m going to have a little bit more fun outside of the interviews, so. Wait, let me end this sponsorship message. HostGator.com/Mixergy. Alright. So I was going to burn out and I decided I was going to have more fun in the interviews by asking people to show me their butts or whatever. And I’m also going to leave the city because I do believe since we moved to San Francisco the weather has actually been getting to me. I love the weather in DC, but there’s something about these overcast days that are nonstop that’s really driving me nuts. So I started renting a car and going to Napa Valley for the day with my laptop, I work hard and I get a lot done. And then I went to Stanford University campus in Polo Alto to hang out there, all these places are sunny and I work with a laptop and life is good. So that, that and some more time off are really going to be helpful for me. I saw you lifting up your shirt, was that a reminder to the audience that you’re-

Ryan: [Inaudible 00:25:37].

Andrew: I should have let you give a discount code back when you did the, when you showed me your butt, I feel like at that point it would have been good. You earned it at that point. What is the discount code? If somebody wants to buy you have one.

Ryan: Yeah, I have a discount code for all the listeners, if you use the code “Mixergy” at checkout you can have 20% off your entire purchase for your first purchase.

Andrew: I’m so curious about how effective that’s going to be for you. I know that Mixergy can move like software, can get people to use different hosting companies, but tee shirts? We’ll find out. Alright, let’s get back to business here. You’re starting to get some real sales come in the door. At this point do you start traveling again or are you saying I’m staying put?

Ryan: I’m a senior in college right now. So.

Andrew: Oh, you’re still in school?

Ryan: No, not right now.

Andrew: Oh, at this point in the story.

Ryan: That was going into senior year of college, so now I mean, now we’re starting to, this can actually be our job.

Andrew: I see.

Ryan: Just keep up and we get some more traction we’re actually making, we’re not taking any money out or anything but we’re making money finally at the business.

Andrew: Alright, the site crashed but you’re able to get it back up and running, you’re doing sales and at this point you’re starting to move off, you started to move to your own place at this point?

Ryan: Yeah so the beauty of e-commerce is we’re getting the money up front, so after that huge rush we realized we can no longer just operate out of Robin’s house. So we move into our first warehouse, we put down some money for that, which is not easy being 20 years old.

Andrew: It’s not. They don’t take you seriously, they don’t want to see you in the door, they don’t believe you’re going to be a credit risk.

Ryan: Yeah exactly.

Andrew: What’s one bad example? One bad experience that you had trying to rent?

Ryan: Oh, I mean. We were able to get it, there way more issues with age with banking stuff and things like that than, we just got kind of lucky on that first warehouse that we ended up staying there for about two years.

Andrew: Okay. So you get a warehouse and now it’s time to fill it with more sales. And is that around the time that you started the College Campus Program?

Ryan: Yeah, so that first fall, I had this idea from the beginning, because everyone is just wanting to know how they can get involved, how they can help out from the very beginning, but there wasn’t really like a platform or any kind of structure so I just had this idea from the beginning I wanted to create a program where people that wanted to get involved could get involved and they, everything would be incentivized. So that they’d be rewarded for helping me out and I created this campus rep program in fall of 2012. Again, before brands were really doing this and I was a college student, so it was like working with my friends. And like people around the country, so they trusted us more.

Andrew: What does it mean to have a college campus rep program?

Ryan: They’re pretty common now. But it’s just having brand ambassadors around the country they’re kind of like the grassroots marketers, the guys on the ground that are going to class, wearing the shirts and talking about it, getting a buzz going on their campus.

Andrew: Do you do anything to monitor how they’re buzzing about it?

Ryan: Now it’s a lot more monitored. Back then I was running it myself and I mean it was all through Facebook, they’d send pictures. It wasn’t a perfect program back then, but it grew into what it is today.

Andrew: So you gave them all a tee shirt and all they had to do was just talk about it?

Ryan: Yeah and spread the word, they had a discount code they could give to their friends and family and then they would receive some kind of credit every time that code was used.

Andrew: Financial credit?

Ryan: We messed around a little bit with actually paying people but now we just reward people with free gear and free things no one else can get except if you’re a rep and things like that.

Andrew: What do you do to monitor it now?

Ryan: We have a whole point system so everything is incentivized by points and it’s like, you know, like an arcade or something where you get all the tickets and you redeem them at the end of the semester. So you can redeem them for really whatever you want at the end of the semester.

Andrew: I see, so if I take a photo of someone else while I’m wearing my shirt then I get a point? Is that the kind of thing?

Ryan: Not exactly.

Andrew: Come on, be open, I saw you smile as I said that, it was like what the hell Andrew are you thinking? Your creativity sucks. What gives me a point? If I was going to be on college campus right now?

Ryan: If you go skydiving in the Serengetee and get a picture and send that to us or post that on your Instagram and we see it then you’re going to get some major points.

Andrew: Oh I see, it’s that kind of stuff.

Ryan: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew: I have to do something public with my shirt.

Ryan: Yeah, or there’s a bunch of different ways also, if you sell shirts to your friends you’ll get points that way, there’s a bunch of different ways.

Andrew: I see. Are colleges now saturated with this? Or does this still go on?

Ryan: Yeah, we have a bunch of campus reps across the country now, it’s a really great community that we’ve built because they’re people that have been working with Serengetee for two years, two years plus even, from the beginning. So it’s kind of like a little Serengetee family we’ve got going.

Andrew: I interviewed a woman named Leah Bell who teaches this stuff, actually I didn’t interview her, we did a course for Mixergy for how to do it, that’s all that her company does, just set people up with these college programs. But when you did it by yourself and you didn’t have a company like hers to set you up, how did you find college students outside of your friendship group?

Ryan: I mean it just started really with friends and friends of friends. There’s no more than two degrees of separation from anyone in that first wave. But then once more people were hearing about it through, really through social media, that was really the biggest thing, and you can reach tremendous amounts of people.

Andrew: What did you do? You started to do some searches for people on Facebook and message them, that kind of thing?

Ryan: These reps and stuff would be posting on Facebook and then we were really pushing to build our Facebook page and get some new fans that way.

Andrew: But if you wanted to, I went to New York University, if you wanted to get somebody from my university to be a rep, how would you contact us, how would you find the right person?

Ryan: It was all inbound. We weren’t really like going out trying to get reps, people were always coming to us wanting to be reps and get involved.

Andrew: I see.

Ryan: So we started scaling the program and getting it bigger and bigger that way.

Andrew: Okay, alright. And let me see here, I’m looking at my notes. You started at 50, you grew to 2500 student reps.

Ryan: Yeah, so it’s an absolutely massive program now.

Andrew: Is this something you’d recommend that somebody do today?

Ryan: There are pros and cons to having a bigger program. So I just switched the program, I gave it a full makeover this summer and I chiseled it down a little bit. But I mean power in numbers is a huge, huge thing. But it’s also very, very difficult to manage 2000 plus people. And but even when we had smaller amounts you’re not going to have 100% participation no matter what. And the percentages stay about the same no matter how many are in the program.

Andrew: What do you mean? What percentages?

Ryan: Like the top tier reps and then there’s the people that are really active for a month and a half and then they fall off and keeping engagement high.

Andrew: How do you keep track of them all?

Ryan: So they’re all divided up into regions around the US so that they can meet up and stuff and then they have a campus rep leader who is a college student in that area preferably. So it’s divided up into eight regions around the US, there are two regions of high school, East and West and then they’re all kind of, think about color wars at camp, they’re all kind of competing against each other and so it creates some community within their regions. But also they’re all competing for the grand prize which is a trip to Guatemala, the top rep each semester wins that.

Andrew: One person goes to Guatemala each semester?

Ryan: Yeah.

Andrew: And then you read “The Four Hour Workweek”.

Ryan: Yeah, so that happened senior year and that was a huge, huge moment in both my and Jeff’s life.

Andrew: Why?

Ryan: Because it really, when you’re in college you’re kind of being told how to think and you start reading like every business class this is how you want to run a business and blah, blah, blah. And then that book kind of made me start questioning everything and the biggest thing was traveling while running a company. That became, it seemed realistic now and it seemed like we could actually do this. So that’s when we got the idea, okay, we’re going to hire a manager in the shop and we’re going to go travel the world. And we’re going to do all the marketing, everything, from our computers, because we don’t need to be in the shop, we don’t need to be sewing all the shirts ourselves, you can’t think big when you’re worried about every day’s orders and it’s just a never ending vicious cycle.

Andrew: You have to systemize it, right? That’s one of the big takeaways from that book. How did you systemize your business to allow yourself to travel?

Ryan: So we broke down like every aspect of the business that was like day-to-day and we hired a manager for that, we had hired we call them sew pros to do all the sewing, and then that took us out of day-to-day, of production, so we see production as kind of outsourced because when you’re in the workshop you get tied up in a bunch of problems.

Andrew: So one person is in charge of the sew pros? Is that person in charge of other things?

Ryan: No. We have two like manager type people now, but at the beginning it was just one.

Andrew: I see. So was, looks like it’s Nate who came in to do that? No, Nate was one of the co-founders.

Ryan: Nate was one of the co-founders, he went to med school though. But he was with us at that point. He was not looking over the shop though, he was in charge of charities. But Monica, who’s still with us actually, she was our first manager we hired and she’s young also.

Andrew: Okay.

Ryan: And so once production is out of the picture you can focus on marketing because it’s all a marketing game.

Andrew: Well wait, let’s talk a little bit then about production and I can see how it’s a marketing game and that’s why I’m glad you’re here because you’re the marketing director at the company, right?

Ryan: Yup.

Andrew: So I still don’t understand how you systemized your production. The problem that I see you having is it’s hard to predict which tee shirt is going to sell, right?

Ryan: Well everything’s made to order. So this is how we were able to start with so little money.

Andrew: I see.

Ryan: It’s all blank. The inventory we have is blank, so it turns out there’s a million different combinations for a tee shirt.

Andrew: So as soon as a sale comes in you needed a process internally that would take the right fabric, pass it one to the sew pro, have the sew pro create the shirt?

Ryan: Yeah, [inaudible 00:37:51] now that we have the warehouse. And so you cut the fabric, iron it, top stitch, sew it on. So everything is customizable and made to order.

Andrew: I see. Okay.

Ryan: It took awhile to perfect a system, but now…

Andrew: How do you do inventory management with that considering that you have to cut before you can start the rest of the operation? It’s harder to predict that.

Ryan: Which part of…?

Andrew: Cutting the, you don’t make your own tee shirts, right?

Ryan: No, those are all white label.

Andrew: Cutting the pocket.

Ryan: Well I mean the fabric is one of the cheapest parts because one yard of fabric can make us 35 pockets and then if we never have, we always have a surplus of fabric.

Andrew: Alright. So once you get past that you have to do the marketing, we still haven’t hit the tattoo part of the story, right?

Ryan: Yeah so I guess where are we on the timeline right now? Senior year. So we’re traveling because I mean we started the company to travel and we really wanted to live up to that and also we wanted to be visiting these cause partners in these countries because we never wanted to just be sending a check every month, we wanted to get involved and set something up where we have a very good relationship with all of our causes. So that first summer we headed down to Guatemala.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Ryan: And Central America and then the whole plan was we were going to do this year long trip, we were going to start with Central America and then go to Asia in the fall and then go to Africa in the spring and then the summer we would do South America, so it seemed absolutely crazy, but we were like we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this. We did it. Yeah.

Andrew: By the way you’re smiling a lot in this interview, makes me feel like, are you just nervous or is something else going on?

Ryan: It’s a good day, I’m in southern California, it’s nice.

Andrew: Alright. I don’t, I’m moving around a lot and I’ll tell you why. Since I’m asking you to be open I’ll be open with you. For some reason I can’t breath, I’m just really stuffed up. I’m too embarrassed to admit this, but I’m going to use Afrin right now, not on camera, I don’t think the world need to see that, they need to see your butt for some reason, but not me doing the Afrin. I’ve got to breath, right? Why don’t you continue with the story, I’m going to be right here like this, like hi. Is it weird to continue your story while I’m like that? This is like, when I was a kid I dreamt of being on the radio and I said how am I going to be on the radio? I can barely breath, I’m very nasally too. Alright, I’m back on camera so we can talk like human beings. I might need to step away again for another hit of nasal spray, but hopefully not. Alright, you’re traveling, get me to the marketing, how do you get to a million bucks?

Ryan: So the campus rep program was absolutely huge in combination with Jimmy Tatro coming out with his line, that was huge because then he was really endorsing it, so that was getting us a ton of new fans and then really growing the rep program was huge and capitalizing on social media. Again, social media was such, it’s an even playing field, like all these big brands had the exact same Facebook page as we had, so we just really, really capitalized on that situation, so we were able to I mean, we knew what kids were doing because we were those kids, so we knew how to market to ourselves basically. And we knew kids were spending all day long on Facebook, so we’re going to hit Facebook as hard as we possibly can because that’s how we’ll get in front of them.

Andrew: So what did you do that worked?

Ryan: Again, it was a ton of like giveaways on Facebook, getting people to share stuff to their page, and then I mean those were all huge, huge things. But again, it goes back to the campus rep program, that was one of the biggest things for us.

Andrew: How did the campus rep program help with Facebook?

Ryan: So we knew how to look, it’s all about image, right? We knew if you see us, or at least back then, Facebook’s changed so much. If you came across a page and it had over 100,000 likes on it you’re going to think oh, this brand’s legit, it’s probably pretty big, why don’t I know about it yet? So we were incentivizing our reps to get their friends to like the page so we were able to like really every semester really boost up Facebook likes really, really fast.

Andrew: What kind of incentives could you give that you can keep track of?

Ryan: Just like free gear. And then on Facebook it would be you have this many friends that like the page so we’d have them screenshot that and send it in. So it’s like if you have 200 friends like the page you get this, if you have 300 friends like the page you get this. And I still don’t know of any other company that started doing that, but it was easy.

Andrew: That was really clever. This was your idea?

Ryan: Yeah, yeah. It was an easy and cheap way to get real Facebook fans instead of just paying for them or something.

Andrew: Alright, so you’re incentivizing people to spread the word, what else are you doing on Facebook? Or what else did you do on Facebook that worked?

Ryan: Every semester we’d have a new wave of reps and we’d do the Facebook profile picture change which would get us a ton of new likes.

Andrew: And that kept working for you.

Ryan: Yeah it kept working, we don’t do it anymore just because the landscape has changed so much. But that was huge because if you change your profile picture that means this is something you believe in and it gets people asking and kind of like you announcing you are your campus’s campus rep, come ask me about this.

Andrew: I see.

Ryan: So that would get a nice buzz and again it didn’t really cost us anything.

Andrew: What else? I’m clicking around to try to deconstruct it from the outside but I’m never going to understand it the way you do.

Ryan: We also got a ton of good press, we got featured in Entrepreneur, Forbes, National was the next year. So we’re starting to get some good press because we were these college kids that started a company that was giving back and now we were starting to actually be able to give back a good amount of money to these causes and start fulfilling our mission.

Andrew: How did you come up with 13% of the profits as the way to give back?

Ryan: That was at the beginning, now it’s between 5 and 15% depending on the fabric. If it’s celebrity endorsed we give back more. But it was just a sustainable way because we didn’t want to, first of all we wanted to be completely transparent, there’s all these companies that are like we give 10% back of net profits, and like what are your net profits? You probably don’t even know what your net profits are. So we wanted it to be we’re taking this percent from what you’re paying and that’s exactly what’s going back.

Andrew: Oh, it’s of the tee shirt sale.

Ryan: Yeah.

Andrew: Oh I thought it was, I thought you also listed, I thought you also used to do 13% of the profits.

Ryan: That was at the very beginning before we were like we don’t know what our profits are, this isn’t fair to our customers, we’re not trying to be, we want you to be happy with your purchase and know exactly how much is going back. We don’t want to hide anything.

Andrew: I see. I’m reading the 13% from your Buzz page but I guess that’s a little outdated.

Ryan: Yeah, we, yeah. We haven’t had a Buzz page in a while.

Andrew: Oh okay. It’s still up, you might want to kill that thing. I’m misreading it. Alright, let me do a quick sponsorship message, the next one is for Bench Accounting. ONe of the coolest parts about Bench Accounting is how they pay attention to details. In fact if you go to Bench.co/Mixergy you’ll see they got the Mixergy audience, they get what the Mixergy audience is about, they don’t just do things, they pay attention to those kinds of details. And the reason I recommend that you use Bench Accounting is that accounting is tough. Ryan, when you started systemizing your business what did you do about your bookkeeping?

Ryan: Quickbooks and accountants.

Andrew: And accountants?

Ryan: Yeah, we have accountants.

Andrew: Who did you pay to do it? How much did you pay somebody?

Ryan: We did it ourselves through Quickbooks in the beginning and it was just a huge pain in the ass.

Andrew: So that means you were typing in every single sale? No, you would do an export and import, wouldn’t you? You’d at least do that.

Ryan: Yeah.

Andrew: You’d do that and get that in there and then how did you finally outsource that so you didn’t have to do it yourself?

Ryan: We hired accountants, it was absolute nightmares at the beginning. Most of these services didn’t exist back then.

Andrew: That’s what I’m hearing, a lot of people are just hiring accountants as bookkeepers and that’s a very expensive situation because accountants are like professionals, like they’ve gone to-sorry?

Ryan: I didn’t say anything.

Andrew: Oh, I thought you said something. They’ve spent, accountants are like bringing a Howitzer to a knife fight, we’re talking about a lot of gun power when really you don’t want to pay for all of that. All you’ve got to do is go to Bench.co/Mixergy, they have a team of bookkeepers so if one of them gets sick it doesn’t mean that that’s an excuse for you, the person who is listening to me, to not have your books taken care of. If one of them decides they want to quit and go pursue a life a life of travel you still get your book done because they have a team of people that are working for them at Bench Accounting. And they also have software that backs them up. One of the problems with having just software do your books for you is that software doesn’t understand that the name of a local restaurant, sorry, some random name on your credit card statement is a local restaurant as opposed to a client, so they might miss categorize things. I want real human beings to do it, so far software is not smart enough to do it. And so Bench has real human beings doing it, they’ve got incredible customers, one of the best things that I noticed when I went to them, let me go to Bench.co/Mixergy. Not only do they have Patrick McKenzie, a past Mixergy interviewee that’s obsessive about systemizing on their site showing his love for Bench, but I see Jason Freed, the founder of Base Camp is on there. His Tweet that they posted on their sales page is “Love the idea behind Bench.co, it’s not just software, it’s a person plus software that you use to review what they’ve done”. It’s really a great service, I urge you to go to Bench.co/Mixergy. Why add the /Mixergy at the end? Because then it gives me credit and hopefully they’ll come back as sponsors. But if you do that you will also get, let me see what the big discount is that they’re giving us. There it is. Sign up through Bench.co/Mixergy and you’re going to recieve 20% off for the first six months and they’re already way cheaper than an accountant. Way cheaper and very, very reliable. Bench.co/Mixergy. They’re doing like a three ad run, so if you want this 20% you better do it now before they take it off and we move onto other sponsors. Bench.co/Mixergy.

Ryan: I’m going to have to check them out.

Andrew: Yeah, you’re still doing accountants, huh?

Ryan: Yeah it’s expensive.

Andrew: Alright, so now you’re finally hitting $1 million, is it this Facebook stuff and college programs that are getting you there?

Ryan: Yeah, that’s honestly a huge help and then we got involved with an MTV guy named Tyler Posey, he’s one of the biggest MTV stars, he’s the lead on the show called “Teen Wolf” so he’s just absolutely massive. And he started helping us out and that-

Andrew: You recruited him?

Ryan: What?

Andrew: You recruited him?

Ryan: So he was best friends, is best friends with one of our campus reps.

Andrew: Okay.

Ryan: So we had a great warm intro that way. He absolutely loved it, he’s extremely passionate about raising money for a charity called LLS, Leukemia, Lymphoma Society and so he was completely hooked, he loved the gear so we got him his own line and then that was also another huge, huge moment.

Andrew: I see, Posey’s Paradise.

Ryan: Yeah.

Andrew: So he’s not working for you guys, it’s just that he created his line? Or is he doing more?

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah and then he endorses it and he helps raise money for a charity that he’s incredibly passionate about. And he has raised a ton of money for them. It’s been a great working relationship.

Andrew: Does he also make a profit selling these tee shirts?

Ryan: Yeah he makes a small royalty also but he cares so much more about, just giving back to the cause, that’s what he’s all about, he’s a really, really good guy.

Andrew: I see. I’m trying to figure out how much does he give out, do you know?

Ryan: We’ve, with him we’ve raised well over 15 grand for LLS. Significant money.

Andrew: So has he made more than $50,000 from this?

Ryan: No.

Andrew: No?

Ryan: I said he cares way more about-

Andrew: Yeah, it seems like peanuts. Frankly is it enough? Well there is no enough. Even $15,000 I would have thought an MTV guy could toss that out like it’s spare change.

Ryan: I don’t know.

Andrew: Maybe they’re not as wealthy as I imagined. I was just interviewing a guy who had a tee shirt company that worked with UFC and he said everyone thinks these guys have tons of money, they’re all doing incredibly well because they see them on TV, but really it doesn’t take much to get a sponsorship to sponsor one of these guys because they don’t have a lot of money. At least not when he was doing it.

Ryan: Yeah, I think he’s doing well but this is like a fun and easy way for him to raise money. Because he doesn’t have to do much because it’s all residual and it keeps coming.

Andrew: I see.

Ryan: The customers keep coming in.

Andrew: His tee shirt looks good.

Ryan: Yeah I know.

Andrew: We’re looking at the one with the parakeet, right?

Ryan: Yeah. Two very good fabrics.

Andrew: You donated how much so far?

Ryan: So we’ve raised and donated over $150,000 now to causes around the world.

Andrew: Who is Rosa from Guatemala?

Ryan: It’s, this is her fabric right here.

Andrew: The one on your shirt?

Ryan: I saw her about a week ago when I was down in Guatemala. She’s probably our greatest success story. So she started weaving for us about three years ago, she was in a really tough situation. She didn’t have very much money and she was just trying to make enough money so she could finish up high school, but her lifelong dream was to become a nurse, but it was just seeming further and further away. And we got connected to her through our friends who filmed a documentary down there called “Living on One”. And so the first year we met her she just laid it all on the line, told us everything about her story. And we had just been working with her for about two months, but then the demand for her fabric kept growing and growing and growing, so when I was down there, so this would be the third time I met her in three years, now she just finished, just through her fabric sales, she just finished her first year of nursing school and she’s doing incredibly well. She put her, she raised all the money herself working hard weaving these fabrics, because we pay fair prices. And then now she has 25 people down there weaving her fabric.

Andrew: Oh wow.

Ryan: It’s insane. Because she couldn’t handle all the demand, so she got 25 people from her rural village in Guatemala involved with it to hopefully have a similar outcome.

Andrew: Hey, you’re rooming with Tory Reese, that’s the guy that introduced us?

Ryan: Yes, Tory, great guy.

Andrew: I thought Tory lived right here, did you say you’re in Southern California or Northern?

Ryan: Yeah, I’m down here, there’s a youth leadership conference I’m talking at today.

Andrew: Oh I see. But otherwise you live here in San Francisco.

Ryan: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew: Okay.

Ryan: But all of my employees are down in LA.

Andrew: Ah, I see. How much money did you make last year, how much sales?

Ryan: Just under $2 million.

Andrew: Why do you need a roommate if you’re doing under $2 million in sales?

Ryan: It’s San Francisco.

Andrew: I see.

Ryan: Most expensive city in the country.

Andrew: What are you paying for rent? My wife hates for me to ever say what we’re paying but if you tell me I’ll tell you mine.

Ryan: 1770.

Andrew: For each of you?

Ryan: That’s what I’m paying.

Andrew: Okay.

Ryan: I have five roommates.

Andrew: Wow.

Ryan: And I’m home about two months of the year.

Andrew: I see, so you just need a place to crash in San Francisco?

Ryan: Yeah.

Andrew: I’m paying like 5000.

Ryan: That’s insane.

Andrew: For a two bedroom. We have a great yard.

Ryan: Yeah. But it’s all about travel, I’m all about the lifestyle.

Andrew: You still are continuing to travel while you’re building up this business?

Ryan: Yeah. Now I’ve been to, me and Jeff combined have been to a ridiculous amount, I’m at, I’ve been to like 65 countries now, I just got back from Panama on Sunday, I leave for the Philippines next Tuesday. So it’s all constant travel, travel, travel.

Andrew: So who’s doing marketing? How are you doing marketing while you’re away?

Ryan: I do it, I still run it from my computer, I work on ads, I keep up with my emails. And we’ve hired a creative director now in LA, Brittany, so she helps out with social media and actually generating the content and I kind of just oversee it all now.

Andrew: So tell me a little bit about how you structured the business? In a way that you wanted to learn when you first read “The Four Hour Workweek” because you structured it in a way that allows you to travel and allows the company to keep growing.

Ryan: Yeah. Just like in “Four Hour Workweek” only the biggest problems are going to get to me, and they’re going to go up through other people before I even have to hear about them. So it starts with customer service which are just, we call them ninjas and they’re all around the country, mostly college kids, so they know where to forward emails, either to the shop or to Brittany or something like that. So I’m not hearing many customer emails at all unless they figure out my email address. Which is inevitable. And then the shop problems are all resolved mainly by the managers in there and all internal issues are managed by them. So I don’t have to hear about those. And then, so I’m really only working with the campus reps, not the campus reps themselves, but the campus leaders and then Jeff my cofounder and Brittany my creative director.

Andrew: What kinds of systems allow you to do that? Or is it just that somebody is already on board to handle all the headaches?

Ryan: Yeah, just having people to handle the headaches.

Andrew: I see, so it’s not even a deeply structured company that you set up, it’s just that you’ve hired people who are managing it for you.

Ryan: Yeah. But we set them up with the system so they can handle it also. Like the whole process of making the shirts.

Andrew: Yeah, so what’s the system?

Ryan: Like we made all the templates and stuff and we taught the people in the shop how to make the templates for the pocket and all of our other items because we’re way bigger than just pockets now. So we went down there originally, we taught them all how to do that and now they’re way better than we ever were. And then the Ninja program, we just have a bunch of documents for like how to answer customers and FAQs so they can basically teach themselves how to do it and they have all the resources they need so they don’t need to go and ask a million questions. Only the most important things will make it up the ladder.

Andrew: I’m spying on your traffic as we’re talking, that’s why my eyes are going everywhere. According to Similar Web you’ve gotten some traffic from Twitch TV. Is any of that because people like Tyler Posey, or because celebrities, online celebrities are sending traffic to you? Is it that there’s someone who has created a tee shirt with you who’s promoting it on Twitch and promoting it on Tylerposey.com.br, is it that kind of thing?

Ryan: He’s international, he’s absolutely massive, so traffic comes from all over. And he wears it on MTV all the time, he wears it on the show.

Andrew: I see, I see.

Ryan: We obviously make sure that that if someone is typing in Tyler Posey pocket, Tyler Posey tee shirt that we’re going to show up.

Andrew: And what’s Shop With Meaning? It looks like that’s sending you some traffic, Living One, LivingonOne.org, that’s the documentary, right?

Who should we feature on Mixergy? Let us know who you think would make a great interviewee.

x