There is an old saying that says necessity is the mother of invention. The day started out with me just killing time on what was a cold winter day. I was a young guy about 27 years old who used to be in the paving business. I can remember really having to work hard for my money. Fortunately for me, I was young enough to pull it off. This was well before the home computer was ever invented and just like everyone else at that time, I had a go about sales and marketing the hard way. Every time we would pull into a new subdivision to do a job. I would take notice of all the other driveways that were in the immediate area. I would then take some very detailed notes and write down any problems that I had noticed. I would then go to the local library and use a book called a crisscross directory. This was something that would indicate who lived there, along with their telephone number and I was able to get this information from everyone on that same street, just by writing down the address and doing a cross reference in this particular book.
After coming home from a long day’s work, I was usually exhausted, but then it was time to start selling. I would call the same people up and introduce myself and tell them that I was working down the street at one of their neighbors and I just happened to look over and noticed that they had a particular problem on their asphalt and wanted to know if they might be in the market for a quote while I was just a few houses down. I told them that if we could potentially address these problems at the same time that we happen to be in the neighborhood, it would be a lot less expensive because we wouldn’t have to make a special trip out there. It would also work it to our advantage if it happened to be a very small repair because the least amount of material we could buy at one time was two tons. That might seem like a lot to someone who is not in the business, but this stuff is extremely heavy and it is really not as much as you would think.
You also have to take into consideration that this happened to be a time when people actually did answer their phone. Unlike today when you are forced to leave a voice mail and quite often nobody even bothers to retrieve it in a timely manner. So to make a long story short, I was just hanging out trying to kill some time because I had nothing else to do being that it was too cold outside to actually do any work.
I noticed almost everyone that walked was wearing some kind of custom T-shirt printing or embroidery application and I said to myself, I think I could do that. I didn’t know the first thing about it, but I thought I could actually sell this type of thing. I can remember going to a store to get some business cards that said St. Louis screen printing company.We also provide digital T-shirt printing and custom embroidery throughout the Midwest. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that my career would change that day but it certainly did. Unlike fixing a driveway that is in need of repair, people are constantly in need of more t-shirts and there is more than 1 million reasons to buy a T-shirt. One of the greatest things about being in this business is that my average client places a new order about every three or four months, not to mention every time the season changes. They go from long sleeve apparel to short.
St. Louis is an excellent place to be because we have seasons. It’s not like we’re way down south where it’s always constantly warm throughout the year. Give us a call for a quote for your custom apparel.