Two Parkites didn’t wait for business degrees to start their own company.
Less than two years since graduating from Park City High, Brandon Moore and Tyler Breton decided to make their mark on the entrepreneurial world.
“About a year and a half ago, we came up with an idea that we wanted to do a clothing company,” Moore said.
After going through a long list of names, they settled on “Worthy Adversary.” So far, they have three T-shirt designs and a polo shirt with the fleur de lis as its main logo.
“We figured that the T-shirt would be a good foundation to start up and get our name out there,” Moore said. “We are trying to be original. We are coming up with fresh designs and new stuff.”
The shirts are designed to provide young adults with an original look.
“It’s for fresh people that are looking for something good and new who are tired of all the generic skater company shirts,” Moore said.
Moore’s girlfriend, Crystal Carling, also develops the designs. The shirts are made with cotton that is put through a special wash to make them more comfortable.
“We blew through 200-300 samples of shirts,” Breton said. “Eventually, we found the shirts we liked and then sent them through an enzyme wash to make them softer.”
Since they started selling the product in January, they’ve had decent success.
“We’ve sold a pretty good amount of T-shirts,” Breton said.
“We’ve moved about half of our inventory,” Moore added.
Moore said since the Web site, www.worthyadversaryclothing.com, has been online in November, it has had roughly 4,000 hits and 20,000 page views.
“We’ve had some people buy the shirts off our Web site from all over the U.S. We’ve had people look at it from Switzerland, China and South America,” Breton said.
Breton said getting into the clothing business was a “natural fit” for them to start a business.
“We both know a little bit about style and we just needed the means,” Breton said.
The means came from convenient networking. Breton’s father, Neil, worked in the fabric industry and developed contacts in Los Angeles, which enabled the two friends to have a quick learning curve.
Without those contacts “we would have never known anyone in L.A. or where to get our shirts made,” Breton said. “We wouldn’t know what kind of sizes to make. For every one small you need to make three mediums. There are all these rules and we would never have found it out,” Breton said.
Their main contact, Billy Kapler, has “been in the clothing business for a long time,” Breton said.
“He took us under his wing for a few days and showed us the ropes,” Breton said.
Kapler took them to warehouses and showed them how the industry builds the shirts from the ground up. They learned about developing a design such as screening graphics and embroidering letters. There they made contacts to build the product and returned to Park City to run their business.
Once they got the wheels rolling, the required startup costs of roughly $10,000 stunned them.
“I never realized how many costs there are,” Breton said. “You can’t anticipate half the costs. The money going in was a little bit of a struggle. It was really tough putting in an extra couple hundred bucks a month.”
Not only, that, they have to continually pay people in L.A. for their services.
This summer, Breton and Moore plan on expanding their line to include more sweatshirts, hats and women’s lines. They will also try to put their products into boutiques.
“The ladies have been chirping about getting stuff too,” Moore said
“From here we are going to go make a women’s line and expand on guy’s lines, eventually hats and fuel it from there,” Breton said. “We’re going to do a lot of work this summer.”
Some of the additional designs ideas are on the Web site and people can go there to vote on which shirt they would want to have.
Part of the reason they started the business was to make a little cash while they get through their business degrees. Moore attends Snow College and Breton is studying at Bentley College in Boston.
But it’s not easy to juggle the responsibilities of a new business while also scoring high grades in school.
“It’s definitely tough to balance this,” Breton said. “Everything takes time, it’s hard to do. It’s just the way it goes.”
But the payoff is worth it, Breton said, although not merely in financial terms. The business experience will be valuable down the road.
“It helps me become more organized and it helps with my business (knowledge),” Breton said.
Moore said he hopes the business will become a springboard for other future opportunities.
“We want to take it and run with it as far as we can and do something new all the time,” Moore said. “Hopefully it will become a major thing and we can get a jump in the business world and we can do other stuff.”
Breton also sees their business as a sort of stepping stone.
“Obviously, if it takes off that’s great, but it’s more of a side project. It’s a lot of fun, we can use all the creativity we want while also making money,” Breton said.
Breton enjoys seeing their creations come to fruition in a finished product.
“The cool thing is seeing something you design come to life,” Breton said. “You put all these designs up and they send you a T-shirt and it’s something you made and it’s pretty cool.”
For more information, log on to www.worthyadversaryclothing.com.