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

Alright, Kevin thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

When it comes to corporate uniforming and for a lack of a better word “swag”, the industry standard is to have their customers purchase an upfront amount of products that then sit on a shelf waiting for a team member or customer to buy. This leads to huge waste and the inability for the customer to update and keep their items fresh. We’ve spent the last 7 years investing and building software that allows us to build and manage online stores for our customers at no upfront inventory costs as well as no charge for the storefront! By using on demand printing/embroidery technology paired with our software, we are give our customers flexibility as well as reducing waste of products that never get used.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Kevin Oakley and I am the co-owner of Stoked On Printing and Merchloop.com! The company started by my partner and myself out of a need of printing our band merch. After a small tour up the coast of California we stopped in to pick up a shirt order, only to find out that they were being printed in a garage. Seeing this demystified the idea of screen printing and once we got back we started printing in our parents garage (we were 16 at the time). We moved into our first 1400 sq ft warehouse in 2011 and really started to pick up steam with other bands, but also working in the corporate side of the business. Over the next 13 years we have expanded into Embroidery, Digital Printing, Print On Demand and cutting edge web to print software!

Have you ever had to pivot?

Through being in business for 13 years we have had to reinvent or pivot based on either market conditions or bets that we put down on where we think the business would grow best.

The best story I have around this is our foray into Print On Demand. Since we started out in traditional screen printing where most shop minimums are around 12 pieces to 100 pieces, the idea of being able to deliver one piece at a time based on a purchase already done by a customer was super foreign and a daunting task to get our heads around. To get into this line of business we had to build a completely new division inside our comany which we call “Merchloop”.

Our first assumption on getting into this space is that we would be able to tie into Shopify, Etsy & WooCommerce stores and work with the store owners/creators to fulfill their orders. However once spending a lot of time and money we quickly realized we were out-capitalized and out-scaled by existing players in the space who were constantly driving down prices as well as pushing the limitations that we simply couldn’t afford to keep up with. This really started a journey of how can we think outside the box of what this technology could do and who it could serve, which can be a hard thing to do when you’ve had your mind set on a specific customer.

After about 1 year of constant trial and error of building out features, offers, product selection and talking to different customers we were able to put together our previous customer base of corporate customers and pair our storefront/backend software to give a really unique proposition that this customer base hadn’t seen before.

The takeaway from this for us was that moving forward before we look at a new process/equipment/software that we look to see how this can benefit our current customer base to give an edge over our competition instead of trying to go after a completely new base of customers.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I have a fairly recent story around resilience and that pertains to our move in the Print on Demand space. I will start by saying a large lesson is that I think as humans we have a tendency to think that projects will take less time and less money than what acutally ends up happening. For us when we started moving into the Print on Demand space we had no web application, no digital printers/experience, production backend and no customers to sell this product into, but with blind optimisim and sheer naiveite we pressed forward to start working on building out this side of the business.

We started at the begging on 2018 fully intending to have all of these items sorted out and live by the end of the year latest. We officially launched our app in the winter of 2020…. While there were some small wins and picking up customers before the app was officially launched, the reality was that we were far over budget on what we thought it would take to build the application/backend as well as the costs of productions were far higher than we originally anticipated. With all of this going into 2021 the outcomes of our new business venture were looking very bleak and all signs would have pointed to pulling the plug, however undeterred we continued to make our application better and pivot to different printing technologies that would bring the costs of production down. It took another 2 years for us to really turn the corner and brought me to the brink of packing the whole business up due to the stress of it not working out. However as we stand here today, this side of our business is growing on average 200% YoY and is poised to become the largest and most profitable segment of our business moving forward!

Contact Info:

• Website: Merchloop.com / Stokedonprinting.com
• Instagram: @merchloop & @stokedonprinting
• Facebook: @stokedonprinting / @merchloop
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-oakley-a0952190/
• Youtube: @stokedonprinting

Image Credits

Kevin Oakley