Adam Van Lente is 24 years old, and the company he manages from the second floor shop at the corner of Grand River and Abbot in downtown East Lansing is advanced enough to be comfortable with its odd moniker.
RetroDuck.com launched in 2003. It spent a year-and-a-half at the coveted number one slot on Google’s online search for vintage t-shirts. They’ve amassed what they believe to be the largest collection of vintage iron-on transfers in North America, created their own web-based shopping cart sales tool, and recently launched www.ownshirts.com, allowing customers to design their own t-shirts online.
Adam talks like an entrepreneur because Adam is an entrepreneur.
“It’s hard to say I have a formula for putting ideas into action, because every idea needs a different set of circumstances to work,” Adam says over a cheeseburger at East Lansing’s Beggar’s Banquet. “You just have to be prepared to try, and you have to love failure a lot. I love failure, and that’s the key.”
Adam probably knows as much about success as failure. Ever since they attended high school in Holland, Michigan, he and his buddy Sean Maday (president and founder of Retroduck.com) have been birthing online businesses.
“Sean and I grew up near each other and never met until we found out in the ninth grade that we were the only two people we knew who had web sites. Sean had a joke site, and I had this Smashing Pumpkins fan site where I traded tapes of concerts and stuff. We kind of matched our skills, and we’d sit in the computer lab like a couple of geeks after school and compare notes on basic HTML.”
While in high school, Adam and Sean launched web sites and set up free email accounts for family and friends. Later, “We had an idea to start a business putting together computer parts and helping kids build affordable computers before they went off to school.”
Vintage Tees
In 2001, while studying philosophy at Northern Arizona University, Adam and Sean were roommates, coming up with another new enterprise: buying vintage, iron-on t-shirt decals from places like Ebay, printing them up and selling the shirts online.
“He called me the summer before the site launched, and he said, ‘All these iron-ons are in my basement; you’ve got to come see ‘em.’ He had just boxes and file cabinets full: Paul McCartney, Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles." So as I’m studying philosophy and just getting really overwhelmed with school and trying to do some stuff with my music, he’s whispering to me, ‘T-shirts! Iron-ons!' and it wasn't necessarily something that I was ready to believe in. But when he took this project on for real, I came with him."
By the end of summer 2003, back in East Lansing, the site was up, and gathering steam. "Sean would call me freaking out with a stack of t-shirts and a stack of orders,” says Adam. “He was like, ‘Please make sense of this for me.’ That was a fun time, running it out of this seven-person house in East Lansing, just using bedrooms as stock rooms and production areas.”
The RetroDuck.com team soon raised the capital to move into their prime office space on Grand River Avenue by throwing a party. “We had this transfer that everybody really loved, and it said, ‘Guinness: Tall, Dark and Have Some.’ We bought a couple of kegs of Guinness and threw this party and sold cups and shirts, took the money we made from that party and paid for the first months’ rent at the office.”
Approaching the company’s five-year anniversary, Adam estimates they now have about 600,000 transfers in the shop, many acquired through small purchases.
Going original
In 2004, the guys added original screen printing to their plan. “We wanted to compete with people who were showing up on Google searches for vintage t-shirts. We had a bunch of vintage iron-ons. Everybody else had screen printed t-shirts that were made to look vintage, or that were basically just funny t-shirts they were calling vintage t-shirts, but there was really nothing vintage about them. So we said we ought to start competing in this market.”
Retroduck.com added four original designs to the more than 600 vintage transfers they had online. “By the end of the month those four designs accounted for about 40 percent of our sales. So we kind of dropped everything and bought screen printing equipment.” Later, they built the software to launch the sister site, www.ownshirts.com,
“For the most part, everything about our beginning and about getting off the ground, and any success we’ve had, has been sort of unbelievable to me,” Adam says.
Constantly evolving
Watching the web, and keeping up with the latest trends, is a constant theme in a conversation with Adam. “This week I was working from ten in the morning until two in the morning, training new shifts to run at night. And I’m always looking at what other t-shirt companies are doing, looking at what we might be able to do, reading news, and just seeing what’s happening with the web.”
Web 2.0 sites, like Facebook and Mashable, and the resurgence of new media are hot topics. “I love looking at sites that just talk about sites; that say ‘here’s what’s coming.’”
In addition to employees who work on the shirt graphics, production, web sales and customer service, Adam says two staffers are “keeping an eye on the online and local markets, and making sure we know what’s happening with our competition: Where are we on the search engines? What’s going on with the search engines? What are people looking for this week? What are people blogging about this week?”
Adam has started or been involved in lots of other sites recently, including Polispeak, an online forum tracking and posting political news, and Adam and the Rubber Band Band, where he posts his own original music (playing all the instruments, singing and mixing himself).
“I read a lot of news. I’m always looking for opportunities in the news, looking at what can we do here. Not just in terms of topical shirts, but what can we learn from what other people and business are doing? One of the biggest things I think about is, how do you become a place where people spend money? We concentrate on being remarkable, and making a product that people get excited about. It’s nice to be in a business like this, where we can be creative.”
Brad Garmon is the managing editor of
Capital Gains.
Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer of Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of Trumpie Photography specializing in business, advertising and public relations photography.
Photos:
Screen printing screen
RetroDuck's screen printing studio
Vintage, iron-on t-shirt decals
Adam Van Lente in his East Lansing shop
All Photographs © Dave Trumpie