We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bob Namar a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Bob, thanks for joining us today. Almost every entrepreneur we know has considered donating a portion of their sales to an organization or cause – how did you make the decision of whether to donate? We’d love to hear the backstory if you’re open to sharing the details.

We believe that every business, as a product of the community, owes the community and should give something back. Our first step was deciding to help the homeless situation, and chose Austin, Texas as our primary target because so many of our customers live in and around the Music Capital of the World. By sharing proceeds from sales with three different organizations, we are contributing in some small way to help people experiencing homelessness, and by extension, help the city of Austin and our clients. Following our lead, we’ve had designers who suggested their own causes and we embraced those suggestions, contributing portions of every one of their sales to the causes they support. It’s great for the community, it’s great for our partners and it sets a great example for businesses everywhere. We are proud to be doing some small part to affect change. We will continue this practice as part of our culture and expect it will help us to attract and retain talent and customers, all while doing good.

Bob, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Having spent years as an advertising and marketing professional, and with a fascination for how great design communicates and inspires, we created Yesercool.com to present cool, vintage and retro designs on a variety of products. That’s how we came up with “Yestercool”. We’ve seen tremendous growth in the interest for vintage clothing and a large part of that attraction is the design aesthetic that came from another time. Like classic rock and roll, classic designs from another time and place are appreciated adn folks are embracing the opportunity to wear looks from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and such. We encourage our designers to seek out and find, invent or reinvent designs that say something or represent something of our collective past. And the response has been electric; we sometimes have trouble keeping up, but we pledge to keep every customer satisfied. We see out tees and sweats on the streets — which is a thrill; and we hear from our best customers how they are making mugs their gift of choice for those hard to shop for friends, as our designs can’t be found in any store or anywhere else online. Yestercool is unique and always will be.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Early in my career, I worked for an owner who was only about the bottom line. He leveraged the goodwill of his employees to support his lifestyle and keep the company profitable. I was taught how to do without, watch every penny and not spend unless you have to. I understood the motivation for that, but by observing the operation over time I saw how opportunities and talent were lost due to the philosophy. What followed were people of lesser talent and character who were less motivated and the opportunities we were presented with had smaller margins and were more challenging to maintain. It was a downward spiral. Relationships are an investment — in time and other resources and the only way to truly build a business is to invest in the people, places and things that support your business. There is no substitute for quality and loyalty is not a one-way street.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

We believe in the many voices/one song approach. Find adn establish a message that communicates who you are and what you do, and then distribute that message across every channel you realistically can, Of course there is social media –so many that you may be stretched to hit them all. Pick a few and go. But don’t forget the voices of your customers. Get them to help tell your story. Seek local media opportunities. Attend events. Sponsor a Little League team. Seek partnerships with other businesses that do — and don’t–align with your business. And most importantly, make every one of your employees, partners, and vendors raging fans of you business and purpose so that they do the promotion for you.

Contact Info:

• Website: yestercool.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yestercool.designs/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Yestercool/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/yestercool

Image Credits
Photos by Thar Ginley