Journey: My Home Business Story

When a bad car crash left my left shin shattered, I knew my life was going to change. Clearly, the rigours of a corporate Delivery Manager were beyond my abilities. I was shuttling between one orthopedic doctor to another. At first, it was my open wound that had to heal up before the doctors would touch the broken bone. The next doctor turned out to skimp on the material used for the thigh-length plaster cast which cracked in the first night while sleeping. The next diagnosed a mal-union of the bones and gave me a walking stick and an external metal brace.

Not a good turn of events when you have a wife and two-year old to look after. While most of the medical costs were taken care of by insurance, I spent weeks racking my brains for some ways to generate income to meet the household expenses. Clearly something needed to be done and done as soon as possible. Here is my story from broke to businessman.

You CAN Always Get What You Need

Internal Reflection: Well, my wife was a painter and a pretty good hand at visual design. I had few interests outside my hectic office schedule, namely one. I still had my Dad’s old ’69 motorcycle and took every chance to go riding with the local biker clubs on weekends. I’m sure you know how it is; priorities change in life after marriage. When in college, I would hand-paint t-shirts and sell them for extra pocket money. I had always toyed with the idea of putting out a line of biker t-shirts that would appeal, you know, to people like us.

So here I was, looking at my existing abilities and business ideas and wondering how to get an idea off the ground.

External Analysis: The next stage in my journey came when I did some research on the existing market for custom t-shirts. I spoke to an old schoolmate of mine who was in the fashion industry and understood about screen printing and transfer decals. The bad news was that like Columbus, I thought I had found the new continent but fell short of convincing myself. The t-shirt market was saturated and the pricing offered was very, very competitive. Even if I sold online and saved considerable overhead, I would still have to wait a long time for any profit. For example, I read in a Fortune article how the guys behind Life Is Good T-shirts drive a used van up and down the East Coast, selling T-shirts printed with their artwork for five years, barely staying afloat and ending with just $78 in the bank before they had the next big idea. There was no way I could survive that long. I was also inundated by the zoning laws and home and other things to figure out as described in this article on About Money.

Figuring out the profit angle: It was time for the litmus test. The ratio of inquiries to orders on custom T-shirts as almost zero from what I had learned. Things looked bleak until one day I came across a Facebook page for ‘battle jackets.’ You know, those jackets that are covered with patches and are seen at every heavy metal concert. What was interesting was that people actually cut up t-shirts too old to wear and make jacket patches from them. There was my idea. Ten times rarer than t-shirts, so much smaller in size and therefore easy to stock up in my kitchen and far more versatile as a clothing accessory than actual clothing (in my case, the t-shirt). In fact, I finally had a viable business plan.

Clean Follow-through: I had not compromised on the quality of my product, kept it affordable and scalable. A quick website build later, all I needed was a delivery partner. The answers to my questions came from the experts at Boss Fulfillment who recommended bulk inventory storage, shopping cart integration and more importantly, custom order fulfillment.

Today, I am doing quite nicely. The leg finally had a rod inserted in the shin and though I lost half an inch in resetting the mal-united bones, I am fully functional now. What I really learned was that there is no way you can start a successful home business without rolling up your sleeves.