We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michael Spielman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Michael thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We love asking folks what they would do differently if they were starting today – how they would speed up the process, etc. We’d love to hear how you would set everything up if you were to start from step 1 today
If I had it to do again, it’s entirely possible that I wouldn’t do it at all. I don’t say that with regret, but in recognition of the fact that it’s often better not to know the difficulties that lie ahead. It’s ignorance that allows us to take the risks we might not otherwise venture. The struggle is important. The mistakes are instructive. I’m not sure they can be avoided. I’m not even sure my future self could have meaningfully guided me in the absence of actual experience. That being said, I’ll still offer up some practical lessons. I sunk way too much money into inventory at the outset. I’m still saddled with boxes of shirts that no longer reflect my best work. I should have gone with much smaller runs and contended myself with smaller per-shirt margins. The advent of high-quality, private-labeled, print-to-order T-shirts has been a life saver for the Surfside Beach Company. They emerged at the perfect time—just before it was too late!
Michael, 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’ve been a T-shirt junkie since the first time I walked through the doors of the Balboa Beach Company in 1987. I was 11-years-old. More than three decades later, the Surfside Beach Company is the natural culmination of a journey that began that day. I’ve been designing T-shirts since I was 14—starting with my mom’s fabric paints. The first shirts I designed in college (1994) were screen printed from drawings done in pen and ink. But by the time I graduated, my designs were being printed from a new illustrator program called… Illustrator! After college—and aside from a couple designs for friends getting married—it would be more than a decade before I started designing shirts again and another decade more before I formally entered the T-shirt business. The Surfside Beach Company combines my love of beach, tees, and ’80’s design—along with a healthy dose of my favorite pop culture references from the last 40 years. What’s not to love?!
Have you ever had to pivot?
The Surfside Beach Company had to pivot right out of the gate—which wound up being a wonderful thing. At the outset, the idea was to just sell T-shirts for Surfside Beach, SC. For those unfamiliar with Surfside Beach, which is almost everyone, it sits just to the south of Myrtle Beach. It’s smaller, less-developed, and way less touristy. It’s a great place to live and visit. But while you can buy Myrtle Beach T-shirts on virtually every street corner in the region, Surfside Beach T-shirts are much harder to come by. And Surfside Beach shirts that I’d actually wear were entirely nonexistent. The Surfside Beach Company emerged to fill that gap, but the stores I envisioned selling our shirts weren’t interested. Not at the outset. So I signed up to be a vendor at the annual festivals sponsored by the town of Surfside. Then they told me I wasn’t allowed to sell “Surfside Beach” T-shirts at their events. At least back then. They maintained an exclusive right to sell Surfside Beach T-shirts at town sponsored events. But I could sell shirts that said “Surfside Beach Company” or shirts for other regional beaches. And so I did. We went from being the [Surfside Beach] Company to being the [Surfside] Beach Company. That opened the door to markets from coast to coast and turned us from a company into a brand.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
In the absence of personal savings, I put together the necessary capital to get started by floating myself a series of loans via personal and business credit cards. And I’m still trying to pay down the balance! Traditional loans may have been a better option, but I couldn’t qualify for nearly as much as the credit card companies were willing to lay out. The downside, of course, all that interest! Every year I tell myself, this is the year we break even. And every year I tell myself: nothing ventured, nothing gained!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://surfsidebeach.co
- Instagram: surfsidebeachco
- Facebook: surfsidebeachco
- Twitter: surfsidebeachco