Oct 304 min read

How Ink'd Came to Be: A Story of Persistence

Today is Ink'd Stores 9 year anniversary.

I've highlighted some of the madness when we left the Pop Up retail store in this blog post here - what I didn't share was how Ink'd Stores came to be.

The answer is baked in two simple words: failure and perseverance.

In 2012, I was asked to run a fitness business by a partner whom I had had success with at Marquis Jet. Having just spent two years toggling between Newport, RI and St Barths building for someone else, I was ready to be close to home and at the helm.

The idea: bring college and pro teams logos to fitness equipment, transforming home gyms into inspirational workout spaces like your favorite teams. It made sense to me, I'm an avid sports fan and as I was getting older, wanted to live healthy.

And for the next 3 years, we chased this opportunity hard, amassing over 200 college licenses and all major sports except the NFL. We partnered with Cybex to market larger machines, but the core of the business was in our handheld small fitness items, yoga mats, medicine and stability balls, towels and more.

People loved the idea and this led me to my biggest lesson in retail: what people say and what they buy are different.

We had chosen retail as our main distribution channel over online direct. A mistake? Possibly, but we had secured major agreements with Fanatics, Amazon and nationally with Kohls and were shipping units in the thousands. But that's where the success hit a snag. "Sell through" is a retail term for the velocity in which retail partners sell the items they buy from you to their customers. "Selling through" your inventory results in repeat orders and for retailers, more sales. Not doing so, is death to the brand.

And ours was not good. In fact, one of my lowest moments was when a friend in South Carolina called me to congratulate me, he had seen our Clemson product in Kohls for the holiday season. Sadly, Kohls featured it for LAST holiday season - meaning it was on the shelf for over a year!

Then in January of 2015, by chance and action, my theory of Ink'd was born.

We agreed "last minute" to have a display booth in Las Vegas at the PPAI trade show, the largest get together of manufacturers and distributors in the promotional products industry.

We displayed our fitness products with company logos on them - not sports teams.

Distributors loved us. Loved! We were flooded with leads and presumably unlocked the hidden market - corporate clients. But over the next 6-months, we would learn differently. The same distributors who loved us, couldn't get their clients to buy in. And while distributors present ideas, clients make the end decisions and enough didn't choose fitness equipment to make it a viable business.

But something else happened. Because we were so late in agreeing to display at the show, we were placed in the last row next to the small section called "Decorate". This section is an offshoot few rows that has manufacturing machinery for sale - and in this specific show, Brother was featuring a Direct to Garment machine that made printing 1 tee shirt as easy as pushing a button. I fell in love with this machine and technology. I came back to the office and told our then COO, if we can ever get a retail space, this thing would be a hit.

In the previous 3 years, we had developed a muscle in learning about decoration. Yoga mats were thick pvc foam and hard to embellish. As were leather medicine balls; and stability balls were plastic PVC that expanded, again, hard to logo. And working with licenses, there's no faking it, the colors and the logo need to be spot on. And since we had already learned to decorate hard stuff, what if we just switched the products we were decorating to the things people purchased?

But this Direct to Garment machine was the bridge to our future.

"People own more tee shirts than yoga mats", became my mantra and the race to start Ink'd and pivot from fitness was on.

While I chased down every last lead to try and sell fitness, our COO delivered the store opportunity; a popular boutique in Mansfield Crossing, my hometown and 1 mile from our office was going to have a vacancy just prior to holiday season. He pitched them on us occupying that space as a "pop up", we signed a lease for 90-days and on our first printing machine inside the same week.