Fortified Threads

What was it?

Like every aspiring entrepreneur I tried my hand at building a t-shirt company.

Well actually in 2013 my best friend at the time did, and he enrolled me to be in charge of strategy and operations.

The entire approach was that instead of using normal screen printing and okayish quality t-shirts, we were going to use a new product called Lumi, that effectively lets you develop prints on clothing with sunlight.

Just like a photo.

We'd then only use the highest quality sustainable materials from the box to the shirt, do limited runs, and produce a new kind of premium shirt.

What were the results?

• We printed a bunch of designs on a few shirts
• We spent a week in Abu Dhabi (endless sunshine) experimenting with Lumi and working out how to get great prints
• We got to work on a cool project together outside of work

Post mortem

Why weren't we t-shirt billionaires?

• Manufacturing with the sun in the UK is unpredictable
  
• Lumi is really hard to use - hard to iterate on design & you won't know if the shirt looks good until it's finished
• Producing a single item would take ages
• We focussed on supply side product - no idea how to find customers and sell
• The project didn't have a leader/executor. Even if you're working with your best friend you need someone to drive the project forward.
• The marginal effort to create an item could never pay itself back
• The t-shirt market is over saturated and hard to stand out in
• We never really released the product