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

Larry , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

In 2018, family and I were on the North Shore of Lake Superior which is famous for Split Rock Lighthouse, waterfalls, hiking trails and so much more. We had so much fun and I wanted a unique shirt to commemorate our trip. As a designer, I felt that all of the shirts felt cookie-cutter and struggled to find one that I’d be proud to wear. I finally conceded and chose one that had ‘North Shore’ on it, but when I returned to work after our trip, I noticed that a co-worker had a shirt with the same design only with a ‘Madeline Island’ imprinted on it.

That’s when I realized that an iconic lake like Lake Superior needs to be celebrated with an original, custom design that people will be proud to where. After finishing the initial Lake Superior design I had to figure out if people would buy this thing. I shared it with friends and family and had gotten a lot of “yes, I’d buy that!”.

Then it got interesting. I wanted to continue this hand lettering thing for lakes, and I started thinking about all of the people in Minnesota that have lake cabins. Primarily, the only lakes that are represented on apparel are ones that have resorts on them, so if your cabin is on a lake with a resort, you’re limited to buying apparel with the resorts name on it.

Since then, I’ve designed nearly 150 lakes in 6 different states and have customers from all over the US and Canada that want to represent their family cabin, or celebrate the memories they made on a summer vacation at the lake.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

At a young age, I enjoyed drawing and wanted to be a cartoonist. Then computers and the World Wide Web entered the scene which pulled me into publications design, and ultimately digital design and user experience. To get back to my roots of drawing, I began dabbling in hand lettering and doing some side projects for logo designing.

Now I create designs for lake cabin/lake home owners and those that enjoy the lake life. I offer my designs on t-shirts, sweatshirts & hoodies, hats, coffee mugs, stickers and such, so that they can show off to others, the lake they love. One-by-one, I’m ticking off Midwest lakes, but am also getting requests throughout the US. I’ve even had some customers reach out about designing logos for their family cabin, vacation rental, or outdoor business and have tremendous enjoyment with those projects.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

After the initial excitement by friends and family, I needed to get the word out to others that may be interested in my products. Posting to Instagram allowed me to do that, but as they changed their algorithms, that excitement dwindled. I began selling my products at markets & art fairs and is a great way to talk with actual customers to explain my process and take special requests. That being said, markets are labor and inventory intensive and am keeping those to a minimum.

My main focus now is working with gift shops around popular lake destinations, to make my products known to folks that enjoy the lakes I offer. Online, I’m working on improving my SEO, but a challenge is that folks may not think that their small lake would even have something they can find online. I’m seeing the traffic has exponential growth as I create more and more designs.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

My online shop is through Shopify and am very happy with the integration I have with my vendor that prints and ships my products. Having a vendor do those things allows me to design more. With more than 10,000 lakes in Minnesota alone, I need all the help I can get. One challenging factor is that I don’t have insight into the printing quality. I haven’t had any complaint and have return customers, so as long as that continues I stick with the model.

I do have an Etsy shop, but limit that to just a few stickers that I stock and ship myself. The main reason I limit to just some more popular stickers is because there are so many shops selling discount shirts that dominate search results within Etsy – I just can’t compete with that.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lakessupply.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lakessupplyco/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lakessupplyco
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larrysickmann/
• Other: https://www.etsy.com/shop/LakesSupplyCo