Welcome to the second edition of Founder Fridays, where I pull back the curtain on three brothers building a Florida apparel brand rooted in Faith, Family, and Freedom.
I promised myself I would be consistent with this and already missed a week. For good reason, though. Corey and I were headed up to Ocala to set up our booth for the North Central Florida Outdoor Expo.
A Weekend in Ocala
These shows are a gambit.
I love meeting our customers face to face. Watching somebody pick up a shirt, turn it over, and recognize the place it came from is the whole reason we do this. You cannot get that from an analytics dashboard.
But there is a mountain of prep and expense that is unavoidable, and none of it comes with a guarantee. You pay for the booth months out. You print inventory on a guess. You load a truck, drive a few hours, talk about your brand for a few days, and find out at the end whether any of it worked.
This one came out about break even. For that I am thankful.
Every Design in One Place
Here is the part of an expo that does not show up in the sales total.
We do not have a storefront. Our shirts live on a website, in boxes, and on people. An expo is the only time every Raised On It design hangs together in one place, on hangers, where you can walk the rack and see the whole thing at once.
It is a good feeling. It is also a reckoning. Because when you can see all of it in one place, you can also see exactly what is left of each one.
Some designs still had a full run. Others were down to a handful of shirts in sizes. Standing there with Corey, it got obvious which ones had reached the end of the line.
Closing Out the Originals
So we are closing them out.
Some of these are our most popular original designs, the artwork that built this brand in the early years. The Florida heritage airboat tee. The swamp buggy. The Florida cowboy. Final run on each one. We are not reprinting them. When the last one sells, that design is done for good.
The whole closeout collection is marked at 25 percent off. Sizes are thin on most of them, so what you see is what there is.
I want to be straight about the pricing. We set it there because it matters to me that anybody who wants to hold onto a piece from this era of Raised On It can. Not as a sales tactic. These are the shirts people have been wearing since the beginning, and I would rather they end up in somebody's closet than in a bin in our garage.
The Film That Took Fifty Years to Finish
QuickDraw Films put out a short earlier this year called "The Way It Was."
An Alaskan adventurer and his grandson set out to finish a 16mm film he shot 50 years ago, and end up working out whether it is better to remember the past or relive it.
Watched it this week. It goes straight to the top of my list of things to consume instead of doom scrolling. Put it on the TV and give it your full attention, not a second screen.
The Profit I Forgot to Document
Document the journey.
Standing in that booth this past weekend, I thought about every event, expo, and trade show we have done these past six years. Some profitable, some costly.
Looking back, I remember feeling the work and the sacrifice at the time. As a business owner it is hard not to think in terms of profit and loss. Every show gets a number attached to it. This one made money. That one did not. Next.
But what I was missing is that each one was also a piece of the legacy being built.
I forgot to document the unseen profit. The character it took to load the truck again after a show that lost money. The integrity of standing behind a product face to face with the person buying it. The grit of three brothers who kept going when the numbers said quit. That is the kind of profit that adds up over time. Sometimes a long time.
That is what caught my eye about the film. A guy had the sense to point a camera at his life 50 years ago, and half a century later his grandson is inspired to carry on the legacy and tell the story.
If you are building something right now and it feels insignificant, take the picture anyway. You are not going to remember it as well as you think you will, and the part worth remembering is not the part you are measuring for.
Verse of the Week
Psalm 145:4
"One generation commends your works to another; they tell of your mighty acts."
Have a great weekend, y'all. Talk soon.
CJ George
Founder, Raised On It
About Founder Fridays
Founder Fridays is a weekly letter about building Raised On It. Three brothers, six years in, still figuring it out. Every week it is the same four things: an update from the founder, something that caught my eye, a lesson I wish somebody had handed me six years ago, and a verse or quote of the week.
It goes out by email every Friday. Read the first edition here.
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