THE JEM DIGEST

In association with StudioBook

In my first ever business, I closed a $10,000 contract.

That seems like a lifetime ago and is also kind of crazy. My first business was a clothing line called Konquer. Originally, It was started by myself and two other friends in the gym. We were in our early 20’s and the gym-life fad was on the upswing and going strong. I came up with the idea for the clothing line, my other friend came up with the name, then the other friend created the logo. We were off to the races. Made a couple shirts, wore them everywhere, posted on instagram, the whole thing. We never sold one, but the hype was there. Eventually, those two friends got disinterested and started doing other things.

I however was still very interested in building this into a business. I had seen other local clothing lines find some success and I thought the brand we had made had a bunch more potential. I researched everything. Found local screen printers, looked at places I could get the shirts from, marketing strategies, built a website, the whole deal. I quickly realized that all of these gym brands that had popped up over the last year or so, really took off on Instagram first. I consider myself very tech literate, even then, but I have never been a social media guy. Better said, I’ve never been good at social media. I realized I needed a partner who could fill that role.

Enter Manny.

Manny was a relatively new friend at the time, but he had a good understanding of how to leverage social media to build a following. You see, Manny is a sneaker head. Another social media trend at the time was sneakers and Manny was killing it. He had thousands of followers, which seemed like a crazy amount at the time, and he understood social media in a way that I just didn’t. After a pitch one night at his apartment, Manny was in.

We jumped right in and Manny grew our following from under 100 followers to over 1000. It was big jump. We had solid website traffic, and we were making a few sales. We probably only ever sold $500-$1000 worth of shirts the whole time, but it was exciting. We quickly started to make investments in equipment, in-housing all of our production so that we could make more profits.

Then, well, it didn’t work.

Manny and I were just regular dudes who worked retail. We didn't have a bunch of extra money laying around, and we were having a really hard time focusing on Konquer consistently. So, when sales didn't come in like we wanted, we really began to get discouraged. We went a few months without getting sales. We relaunched, fell off for a couple months, relaunched and really continued this pattern throughout.

At some point, we were getting to the end of our rope. Then, something fell right into out lap…. Manny’s friend had a company softball team that needed jerseys. Game changer.

After that, Manny and I changed our business model. We found a manufacturer in China that made quality products that we could still make a substantial profit from. We sold a couple of these accounts each year. This was great, but once again we get pretty complacent after each sale. This resulted in long periods where we didn’t really do anything towards the growth of the company. This all culminated in one, final sale. I got a warm lead from someone who I knew in the semi-pro football circuit that one of the biggest and oldest semi-pro teams in Indiana needed jerseys. I quickly followed up and got on a call with the team’s owner. This led to the EASIEST sale I’ve probably ever made. They had 60 players, 10 coaches, and a few miscellaneous products they needed. All this came to little under $10,000.

You would think that this would be the beginning of a success story. The unfortunate truth is, this was basically the end of Konquer. By this point in time, Manny and I were pretty burned out. We had been working on Konquer for a few years at this point, but we felt like we were stuck in this never ending cycle of highs and lows.

We understood, but I don’t think we wanted to admit to ourselves at the time, that Konquer failures were squarely on our shoulders. After we got our profit, we invested in another line of clothing, that completely flopped because we did the bare minimum to promote it, and that was the final nail in the coffin.

By the time Konquer ended we had built a cool brand, that had a reputation of missing deadlines, not doing what we said we were going to do, and just generally being disorganized. What can I say? It was our first shot at the whole business thing.

I look back at that sometimes and think what could have been. I still own the domain and keep up a makeshift website just in case. Konquer.shop if you want to check it out, but it’s probably something that will stay in the vault forever.

After this, I’ve moved on to other things that have been much more successful for me. Manny has also had more success with some of his side hustles over the years. I guess the point of this particular post is to just tell you to keep going and stay consistent. Chances are, the moment you really want to stop is when your breakthrough is right around the corner.

You never want to leave yourself thinking “What if?”.