Grandex Stories: "You Can't Tell, Right?"
Reminiscing on the first big mistake we made at Rowdy Gentleman
Greetings-
Welcome back to SFPL- today we have our first iteration of my Grandex Stories series. As a reminder, these will be shorter stories that don’t fit in with the rise-and-fall narrative I am writing about my personal time with Grandex, but I think you’ll find these narratives to be some of the most interesting content on the blog.
Without further adieu, I’d like to speak about the first big mistake we made when I was at Rowdy Gentleman, and what we did about it.
It’s safe to say that Grandex made some mistakes throughout my tenure, but an early sign of troubles to come may have been our first batch of custom tees, that weren’t quite right.
A few months after I joined the team, we were set to receive a massive order of from a new factory overseas.
If my memory serves me correctly, this was actually the very first batch of truly custom tees we had created- all prior Rowdy Gentleman offerings were either printed on a Comfort Colors or Next Level blank tee. For those unaware, these are incredibly common blank tee shirt brands that probably line your closet to this day.
Creating your own blank tee template made a lot of financial sense- we had essentially cut out a middle man and dramatically improved the margin of Rowdy Gentleman shirts. However, these custom blanks were exactly that: completely custom to specifications we had laid out nearly a year prior. And I can assure you that we had no garment production or fashion experience in-house at the time. Barrett Dudley, who would lead our fit and fashion initiatives later on, had not joined the team yet.
While I never saw the proofs that were approved for production, I did see the final product. It was one of the most comfortable shirts I had ever held. There was just one problem…