Over the last few months I have designed a few tshirts that seem to be VERY popular. So much so I find myself running over to the local screenprinters shop to drop off a load of t-shirts about once a week and with it comes a bill for printing shirts and the hassle of the minimum order requirements, 1 week order prep time and all that. So, I thought I would try to bring that process in-house and bought a Heat Transfer press (on ebay for super cheap) and will start doing shirts in lower quantities so we can offer more designs. I would rather have 10 designs and have 3 of each size in stock than 3 designs and 10 of each size sitting in stock if you know what I mean. It’s a basic retailing concept called Wide and Shallow VS Shallow and Deep…I have typically preferred to run a Wide and Shallow especially with how quickly I can generally get restocked on the things we sell (in most cases 1-5 days on any given item). There are a few items that I stock hundreds and hundreds and some I stock dozens and dozens while others maybe 1-2 at a time….so anyways, having the capability to prints shirts at will and keep a few in backstock will be nice.

To top it off the owner of the company a few doors down that does nearly all of the label and decorative application sourcing for Victorias Secret, Abercrombie, Under Armour and a few other major retailers that are headquartered within a few miles of the OutMotoring World HQ is a good friend. Chris also happens to have patents on some of the most widely used innovative screen printing techniques and is a all around good guy who has all the connections one could image with Chinese printers, label makers, etc. So, he is the one that helps get our OutMotoring keychains made for us at a extremely good cost and is also helping get heat transfers printed. This will allow us me to design and offer about 6-10 new shirts and print them as needed and keep our inventory investment down while offering new and fresh designs.

And no, that shirt in the heat press below will not be one of the new ‘fresh’ designs…

I was thinking about how much money I pay the local sign shop to do stuff like make our hood stripes and stickers and the thought came to me to just start doing it in-house so I don’t have to wait 3-5 days for new stripes when I’m out of stock. Plus, we have added so many new stickers and other stuff that I thought it would be nice to have a vinyl cutter. So, I found a great deal on Craigslist and went to buy it this evening with my kids and wife in our trusty Mazda MINI van. It’s a pretty cool plotter style cutter that I hope will be put to good use. You gotta love Craigslist. This thing was a steal and came with a computer (running cough, cough, windows 95) but has the print software as part of the CorelDraw software that is loaded onto it well. I figure it will be paid for in about 3 months of hood stripes that we typically sell.

When I started OutMotoring.com in the fall of 2002 I never thought it would be much more than a way get upgrades for MINI while enjoying some tax benefits and maybe bring in a few bucks a month to cover a few bills. Well, as you may have guessed, I was way off. The hobby has truly grown into a ‘real’ business, with real expenses, a real warehouse, a list of equipment too long to think about and a lot of happy customers. And this month was one of those months that I was extremely busy all month, and it turned out the be the biggest month of sales to date.

People! I am not a real ‘business’ person, I used to design products for a living! I don’t have a MBA or any of experience that justifies being a part of anything this successful, although I do BS with the best of them. A new friend and customer came in the other day and as we talked about my business he said “the market put me in business”, which is completely 100% true. And it is the market that keeps me in business so I will continue to enjoy it. Thank you everyone.

On any given day it’s just me running the company although my wife comes in with our 3 year old a couple hours each week to help keep me straight and to make me stop for lunch. I am notorious for working through the day without eating breakfast or lunch and come home all emaciated looking most days. I think I lost 6 pounds this month. Next month I promise to stop and eat lunch at least 3 times a week. I promise.

I’ve known this for some time but everyday it becomes more and more clear. I need to hire someone to do the shipping, receiving, trash-taking-outing, sweeping, organizing, labeling, packaging so I can do more marketing, designing, thinking, customer servicing, emailing, blogging, developing, fixing network issues, adding products, photographing.

I keep holding back because I am getting ready to relocate my family and the business to Charlotte North Carolina  and don’t want to train someone only to leave as soon as my house sells. So, I am stuck here in this limbo of being overworked and not getting to the things that I really need to get done, like finally getting a chance to design some new stuff. I decided a few months ago that I wanted to release a new product every 4 months and to do that I will need to free up some time, at least 6 hours a week to focus on whatever it is I want to develop.

I hope that when we move I can get someone full or part time that has their head on straight so I can do the stuff I would prefer to do. I like answering phones and emails but packing boxes and running UPS labels…..not so much.

I was thinking today that we have lot of international customers at Out Motoring. Out of the 10 or so phone calls today 3 were from outside the USA. One from Australia, one from Puerto Rico and one from the UK. Pretty cool huh? The funny thing is that each country truly does have their own dialect and speech patterns. It’s fun to talk to people from Australia that often end conversations with “cheers mate”. Quite likable people in my opinion. In fact I don’t recall having a negative conversation from any of our international customers as they are often very happy to find someone who will take the time to actually help them get stuff for their MINI. I’m always happy to help.

By far the most asked question is how to get USPS shipping rates. Our site software was developed with some secret relationship with UPS and for some reason by default it only shows UPS rates and the only way to get USPS rates is to use the drop down menu at the second page of checkout to select “other carriers” which will then allow USPS rates to show up….sounds like the developer of the X-cart shopping software may be getting some sort of kickback or something for doing this kind of crap. Of course there’s no way around it unless maybe we have a some custom code made to work around it??