We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Eli James. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Eli below.
Alright, Eli thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?
I am sure it’s like this in any industry .. but the short answer, in my opinion, is competition.
Competition in the fashion industry is HUGE especially in Los Angeles.
First to tell you a little about me, I was an int. touring drummer for several bands and then randomly decided to start making my own clothes. Quickly friends noticed and I ended up making custom cut and sew pieces from scratch for a ton of my friends (Frank Zummo – SUM 41, Josh Dun – Twenty One Pilots, Adrian Young – No Doubt, Kellin Quinn – Sleeping With Sirens, Tony Palermo – Papa Roach, Joseph Réohm – Int. Illusionist/ Magician, Joel Meyers – Int. Magician, Kevin Thrasher – Escape The Fate, Ryan Shuck and Amir Derakh – Julien-K and tons more..).
Word spread and did very well so I had to come up with a business / brand name (GhostCircus Apparel) and make it legit. Now since custom cut and sew wasn’t making much profit, although fun and creative, I got an opportunity to design for other brands based off what I was making for my friends (artists) and became an overnight fashion designer / head of manufacturing helping other brands expand their horizons from just printing on t-shirts to creating a higher quality and premium priced garment(s) mainly to help expand their brands and create more profitable business model. I said “yes, of course I can do that” and then had to figure it out QUICKLY. I put myself in a position to get paid while going to a “real life” schooling of cut and sew. It was a win, win for me. Of course a LOT of energy and running around and learning but did really well at it.
After word got out in my arena that I was helping other brands it caught on like wildfire and I started to help many other companies do cut and sew here in Los Angeles. We then expanded and started to source blanks and produce / create different kinds of garments. At that point GhostCircus Apparel started another branch of the business and made GhostCircus Merch (in 2016).
I always stayed creative and always thought outside the box. So instead of offering the same thing to customers I started to offer bleaching processing and that turned into a way bigger money maker for us. We ended up doing over 170,000 bleached garments in 2017.. I expanded into a 5,000 SqFt space doing that process. But as fashion goes that was in and then out so fast. I had to come up with something that subsidized for that income and instead of creating a printing department (mainly because all my friends were doing that already) I decided to go for embroidery.. took a HUGE chance and bought our first embroidery machine not knowing how to run it at all.. just figured it was easy and I/ we could learn fast. WAY different than I thought it would be and VERY hard.. but one thing turn to the next and about 90% of the business was embroidery work.
Now this is where the real competition comes in to play.
As I grew GhostCircus Apparel and GhostCircu Merch and got bigger, clients (they already had other vendors that they would use and these vendors are all in competition with one another to get jobs in to pay the lights). I promised myself I would not chase that kind of business and had to hold strong on our service and quality. Our clients will have to pay for that quality and service they are requesting. Although I would have to explain that to everyone in our customer list and to new customers/ clients, it is well worth the time and efforts to do so.. I would very politely say, “I am looking for a long term relationship here with you and in order for us to provide what you are needing/ wanting we have to stand strong on a fair price otherwise we will end up chasing to pay our bills and most likely won’t be here for you tomorrow. Again, we aren’t the cheapest out there but we have to get paid a fair price for our services.. so if you choose to go another direction, that’s totally cool and no worries at all.. my door is always open when you’re ready to move forward with a higher quality service and product.”
Now we could definitely get more work if we cut our prices down but would be working 5 times harder for that work and decided it wasn’t worth our attention and energy to do so. I have to stay strong for our company especially since inflation and hourly rates are all going up. Not to mention having to pay my employment taxes and other aspects to the company on top of normal overhead etc.
So with all that said, I believe competition is the hardest thing to overcome especially when you need to pay those bills, just honor your worth and your work ethic.. the right client(s) will understand and come along. I hope this makes sense.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
To tell you a little about me, I ended up coming down here to Los Angeles with just a few hundred dollars in my pocket and a dream to be the next A-lister (I know, funny right? ..lol) I was about 18 years old. I knew 1 person and stayed on their parents couch for a few months (luckily and gratefully) while I got on my feet. I started to get into acting class and also landed a job as a cold caller for a debt settlement company (super random), knew nothing about debt.. I literally came from working at a Blockbuster Video Store and a Pizza Hut at the same time (free pizza and movies was so awesome!), but I just got to it and figured it out as I went. I saw that the debt consultants were making commissions and a lot of it so I asked to become a debt consultant. Within a few months I was just that, a debt consultant!. Then as I started to get in the grove of my acting stuff eventually it was the time to leave my high paying job and focus full time on acting.. I did that (hardest thing to do ever, especially here in LA where the rents were very high and losing out on my income the was not fun, but anyway). Getting about 7 films and over 200 staged performances later I ended up in a tough spot with my acting class (more about that in a possible book).. I went to Indonesia on a Tsunami relief program to help where I could and from there I realized acting wasn’t the way to go anymore.. so I focused on my roots of music. When I got back to the states I got a job that provided what I needed financially (sales job selling skin care products one on one), I took the consulting experience and the acting background and became very good in front of people .. this turned into selling Super Shammys (sham-wow if you remember those) all over the U.S. at different grand openings for malls.. I did really good with it all and expanded my horizons with sales and people. But then a fun. twist, a friend of mine started a band and wanted me to be his drummer, I was still super young (in my twenties) and decided hell yeah! why not?! He had producer John Ryan on board already (STYX, Santana, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Doobie Brothers, Seal etc. HUGE and amazing producer). This opportunity took me for an amazing ride in the music world and started off getting my feet wet in the music scene here in LA! A few years of battling the music world and making my own moves in the space (touring for bands and my own solo show “The eli james Experience!”) I became an international touring drummer for several bands by the time I was 30! A huge goal of mine that finally came true! .. I was doing that for about 3 years and then randomly decided to start making my own clothes.. SUPER random.. but I took everything I’ve learned from my experiences and my amazing life and always applied it to the next big thing for me. Never thought of making a clothing brand (AT ALL),, but here I am.. with the acting experience knowing that depending on the clothes I where or what it was it would make me feel a certain way so knew I really wanted to go for “comfort” above anything else and my style as a musician/ artist was very post apocalyptic it came very natural to me to create something so unique, comfortable and different.. So here I go making my own clothes and soon EVERYONE of my closest friends and family got wind of what I was doing and I ended up making custom cut and sew pieces from scratch for a ton of my friends (Frank Zummo – SUM 41, Josh Dun – Twenty One Pilots, Adrian Young – No Doubt, Kellin Quinn – Sleeping With Sirens, Tony Palermo – Papa Roach, Joseph Réohm – Int. Illusionist/ Magician, Joel Meyers – Int. Magician, Kevin Thrasher – Escape The Fate, Ryan Shuck and Amir Derakh – Julien-K and tons more..).
That opportunity quickly turned into helping other brands create their own cut and sew departments which turned into me making a Merchandising company which turned into a Cut and Sew / Embroidery Studio.. which turned into an overnight household name helping millions of people through covid then after that calmed down we went back into the Merchandising swing of things but took the business into doing 20 times more revenue and today I’ve turned all the above opportunities into Investing in the Real Estate market.
I see life as a game, staying creative and working on things that interest me is the key to my successes, hoping to inspire others to do the same thing!
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Looking back at it all it seems like I got a crash course on “pivot” through half my life.. I’ve had to learn and relearn new paths almost every few years.. which helped me to do the most amazing pivot in my career and that was designing and creating masks for the covid_19 pandemic. I had GhostCircus Apparel up and running as a brand online for ever (well since 2015), no real attention on it since I was concentrating on other brands and making their cut and sew pieces plus starting GhostCircus Merch side of things.. so I didn’t put much attention on it until I made my first face mask in March of 2020. I made randomly and didn’t think anything of it and my wife said I should put them online and sell it to help as many people as I could, it’ll give me something to do for a few weeks (okay let’s all laugh together) plus it’ll probably do okay in sales. I literally thought “sure, we will maybe sell like 5 and it’ll give me a chance to help others.” which is really what I loved doing in the first place.
Next thing we knew.. we are eyebrows deep in making masks in my garage and also fulfilling them from my garage. This quickly turned into us becoming an essential business and then getting my team DTLA on board to help. EVERYTHING was closed and literally no one wanted to help because they didn’t want to get fined from the city. We had to sneak around and get my team thousands of yards of fabric almost every other day. The shops were blacked out on the front but were full on in the back. At one point we were selling so many masks we felt we got to a point where we could hardly keep up, we didn’t know what to do.. a family member said to shut the site down to catch up.. BUT my only other thought was to do something so outrageous and so I connected with the only FaceBook promotion guy I knew and decided to start promoting (yikes, but wow!).
To give you an idea we went from doing 300 orders at the end of March 2020 (7 days or s0) to doing over 25,000 orders in April of 2020. Each order had an average of 3 to 4 face masks.. PLUS we were making thousands for the local firefighters and police stations, veterinarians and hospitals etc.. It was NUTS to say the least. We helped millions of people in 2020-2021. It was the biggest pivot of my life and if I hadn’t gone through all the other pivots and changes through my 20’s and some of my 30’s I wouldn’t have been ready at all to go through that.
It’s hard to explain what was going on every day in that time of my life but from only sleeping about 2 hours a night, negotiating on fabric and spending tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands on materials and production costs as an investment .. plus sometimes spending over $30k a night in promotion on FB.. this really got me to look a business and money in a different light and see all the ways we can shift and make this opportunity God provided happen.
And then we had to pivot back to GhostCircus Merch where we continue to grow our Embroidery and cut and sew services! Highest ever statistics each year after 2020!
One thing I know is that I am ready for whatever God and/ or the Universe has to offer. I am very grateful and count my blessings every day for my life, my family, my friends, my home and everything in my life today. :)
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
Well if the above story doesn’t tell this then I don’t know what would.. it wasn’t always pretty or rainbows and butterflies.. I’ve thought about shutting GhostCircus Apparel down MANY times to get a “get real” job.. my amazing wife Tara Conner really stuck by my side and always reminded me of what that would look like and that I love doing what I do especially for others. So I stuck it out..
If I shut it down and then the pandemic happened then there wouldn’t be that platform I had to sell online and change our lives for the better.. so I guess the point is to just stick to it, if it makes you happy and you love to do what you do then you’ll never have to “work” a day in your life.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.ghostcircusapparel.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elijames
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elijames.co
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/designerelijames
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/elijames
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@GhostCircus_
- Other: http://www.ghostcircusmerch.com https://www.instagram.com/ghostcircusmerch https://www.instagram.com/ghostcircus_ https://twitter.com/ghsotcircus_ https://www.facebook.com/ghostcircus
Image Credits
Erika A. Vincent JC Sutherlin