This is Part 4 of an ongoing series on how Soft Goods started. Missed a part? See below.
December 2012, the very first York beanie
PART IV: $0.85 BEANIES & A WHOLE LOT OF HUSTLE
It's been a while since the last installment of this story came out, but we've been busy! We've had a couple new product launches and our first ever pop-up event as a brand in Chicago, which was a huge success! Thanks to all who came out and joined us.
This week, I wanted to settle back in to the story of Soft Goods. Step back to 2012 with me, I was a sophomore in community college screen printing band merch in my parents' basement laundry room. I had started to print for other bands and local businesses and I was getting fairly decent at it. I was having so much fun and couldn't get enough of screen printing. I wanted to print more and more creative jobs than I was able to sell at the time, so I decided to lean back into my roots of selling iron-on t-shirts out of my locker and start coming up with my own designs.
I played around with a number of graphic concepts and names for this project, and ended up landing on my last name, York. I've always said I got very lucky having a brandable last name! In addition to t-shirt graphics, I was also inspired by the hugely popular beanie brand at the time, Neff, by a guy named Shaun Neff. Everybody was wearing them.
Early batch of beanies bought with my employee discount from ACO Hardware
I had recently been hired by my hockey coach at the time at my local hardware store (Livonia ACO for those that know!). One day when I was stocking shelves, we got a batch of beanies in. They were all kinds of random and, frankly, weird colors, but they were only being sold for $1! Lightbulb. Neff was selling their beanies for $10-$15 each at the stores in the mall. I figured I could use my employee discount (sneakily of course, this was a fireable offense) to buy beanies at $0.85, sew my screen printed label onto them, and sell them for at least $5 and make a profit. I bought my first burgundy beanie in December 2012, took it home, and started experimenting.
I had also been buying 3XL-5XL t-shirts at Salvation Army that I could use to practice my printing on. For $2 a tee, I could get a dozen prints on such a large amount of blank fabric. I happened to have a 4XL heather gray tee laying around, so I made a screen and printed a bunch of graphics that said "York" on each side. I screened them, cured them, cut one out, and then sewed it on to my maroon beanie and posted it on Instagram. My band was playing a show that night and I planned to wear it on stage.
The brand was officially born.
The picture at the top of this post is the photo I posted that first night. Pretty crude, but it was the spark that got us here, 14 years later and counting. I'll go deeper into what happened next in the November installment, but in the meantime, take a peek at our new beanie. 100% cotton, seamlessly knit in Cleveland, Ohio. They've come a long way since 2012!
As always, thanks for reading. You make the hard way worth it.
-Josh
Today's beanie: 100% cotton, seamlessly knit in Cleveland, Ohio.
