1 to a million t-shirt quilts
I went to sleep under a desk that night. It was July 31st, 2012, and the next day, we were going to launch a national Groupon selling custom t-shirt quilts.
We had an inkling it might work from all the requests we got at farmers' markets for this concept from Somerville to San Francisco, but it was just a glimmer of hope.
We were both in a new field and had no preconceived notions about how to make or sell a custom t-shirt quilt online. There were websites that did this, but it was a lot more expensive, and they were making a quilt that should have been hung at a museum, not for everyday use.
But we did not really know all that, we just were trying to solve a problem and charge a price that was more than what we had to pay to make it. Business!
At 5:15 am on August 1st, when I rolled over on the floor and grabbed my cell phone, I went to the Groupon seller's dashboard and saw 75 quilts sold. In 15minutes! We had sold more t-shirt quilts in that timespan than we had in the previous 60 days. Something was happening- a groundswell.
Twenty-four hours later, we had sold 300, and now I think it really hit us, we have a business. We have to figure out how to get people to ship us their shirts, cut and sew them, and then ship them out. And then figure out how to keep getting sales, and also answer questions pre-purchase, and post-purchase.
Shockingly, there actually was no playbook for how to sell 1,000 custom t-shirt quilts on Shopify, or how to get to 10,000, or 100,000, let alone, one million!
Over the next decade, we would film a Shark Tank episode, and take a deal, only for the episode to never air. We would have our ad agency learn everything about our business only to start a competing business. We would pick the wrong production partners, over and over again, but also pick an amazing one. We opened a retail store, only to close it down six months later. We built a marketing engine via the Meta mobile advertising platform, only to be torn down as collateral damage in the Cook vs. Zuckerberg privacy wars. We tried TV advertising, streaming, and everything in between, only to get too close to running out of money many times. Oh yeah — and a global pandemic that brought us to the brink as well.
We had set out to build a business that employed people in the US in a fair and responsible way and kept shirts out of landfills. We also were trying to make enough money to make this an actual business so we could dedicate ourselves to this entrepreneurial journey. Thank you Shopify for our own little version of a deal toy.
