We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alex Cronin. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alex below.

Alex, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

Our brand, Permanent Vacation®, was in 30+ stores when the pandemic hit, naturally all of that came to a screeching halt and we prepared ourselves for bankruptcy. Over the course of the following month we noticed a huge boom in our online sales, sure enough the fact that people were stuck at home turned them to online shopping! We were doubling our sales figures online every month and things were looking incredible until we hit the next wall. The global supply chain was in trouble and factories couldn’t get any more materials as a result of the lockdowns. The only thing we could find were cheap fabrics and low quality materials. I was left with a tough decision, move to cheap materials and keep the money rolling in or mark our products as sold out, kill our cash flow, and wait for the supply chain issues to resolve. I decided to stick to my gut and not compromise our brand’s integrity by downgrading to cheap T-shirts and hats. Our sales tumbled by 90%, it was hard to watch. My partners, and I knew we made the right decision regardless. We are dedicated to building a brand that will live on for many years and hold its integrity, we don’t want to ship our customers anything that we wouldn’t personally want to buy and so we’re confident we made the right decision.

I can recollect many times in my life where I’ve noticed brands or businesses cutting corners or lowering the quality of offering for the purpose of improving their profit margins. Most companies may do this with the hopes that the customer won’t notice or perhaps won’t care, but I do notice and I certainly care. I suspect Jonah Hill was right when he famously said in the movie super bad “people don’t forget”.

Alex, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I always had a passion for clothing and I felt that I could tell a lot about a person’s character just by the way they dressed. I had this idea to make a few hats with palm trees on them in 2016 and the idea of Permanent Vacation as the brand name popped in my head, I would have never predicted that I would sell thousands of hats, hoodies, tees etc in the coming years but I’m extremely grateful for all of the blessings in my life so here we are.

I think what people love most about Permanent Vacation is that wearing the brand allows them to express the attitude behind the brand. There’s a message in the name that hits home for our community, the idea that life is all play and no work if you really understand it.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

Once I had the concept for Permanent Vacation I knew my next step was to find a great integrator to help bring my vision to life. My partner/co-founder Andre Dumouchel is a talented graphics designer and apparel printer. Andre and I started Permanent Vacation with nothing but vinyl cutter and heat press. 7 years later we’ve purchased our own screen printing station, several top of the line embroidery machines and more. We’ve been slowly vertically integrating our operation so that we can depend mostly on ourselves to create Permanent Vacation products. We enjoy the process of touching all of our products and designing them in our own warehouse, we enjoy the process start to finish.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I started a wholesale company years before I founded Permanent Vacation brand. The company was very successful and went on to do 7 figure annual revenue. I was making great money and saving some of it which eventually was the start up capital for the brand, but I wasn’t happy or passionate about the company and so I knew deep down it was only a matter of time until I moved on. In 2016 I began dissolving the company and starting to think about Permanent Vacation.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://permanentvacationbrand.com/
• Instagram: @permanentvacationbrand
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/permanentvacationbrand

Image Credits
photo by Mikhail Cronin