 It was awesome. It was a little metal building in a wrecking yard. So, like when we'd print, you'd stand on an old wheel that we'd drug out of the wrecking yard. Yeah, the wrecking yard. Because you didn't have the right height to get the pressure to make a nice thin safety shirt print. Lime bitters, tobacco tincture. If he gets lower, he's letting you know where you're going to head down. And the rule is if you can step back and visualize it, then that's good. But if you step back and it just looks like a mess, it's not a good design. For all things in life. Hey everybody, welcome to the show. This is a show. Like what's going to happen tonight? This is a show about screwing up. It's about making mistakes. It's about having big dreams and how everything's going to be smooth and I'm going to be rich and famous or successful or change the world and then reality hits. And we screw up and we second-guess the things that we want to do because of that. So it's a show about being human and today we have two humans that are going to be on that is Tom and Jeff from Safety Shirts with a Z. And they're doing hip things with reflective gear. So on the job site, the work site, running, whatever it is, they make it look cool. It's like designer work. Everybody, welcome to the show. I am here with Tom and Jeff from Safety Shirts with a Z. Is it okay if I say Safety Shirts with a Z? Yeah, every time if you want. Every time if you want. Then you'll find us. It's all one word. I know. Tell us a little bit. Tell me a little bit about Safety Shirts. Like what is it? It's kind of blue-collar fashion in a way. High visibility. More and more industries need high visibility. All the warehouse people and traffic construction. So on tow truck drivers, you know, you go on and on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the people holding the stop sign that, you know, letting the kids across the deal. If they're wearing the vest. Yeah, exactly. If there's a need for a vest, there's a need for one of our products. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And most of what we do is we make them cooler than the ugly orange vest. We provide a unique option for everybody. For example. For example, yeah. Yeah, we're in both of them. You give them like a unique option. So it's not, you said also other. So like are there people that like don't need this? Well, runners. But they just want to wear like high visibility. Yeah, but that's a huge part of our market is people that just wear stuff because it's cool. And they have no need for high visibility. And you know, we have teenagers that wear them to school. No way. Yeah, yeah. Are you serious? Yeah, that's probably half of our business is people that we just have a cool fashionable item that happens to be high visibility. Okay, that's really cool. So it's kind of do birds with one stone. Yeah, this is really, really, really unique. So like I'm curious how you how you came up. Well, first, how did the two of you meet as kids? We both raised what are quarter midgets, which are like a little small race car for kids, kind of like a go-kart with a little cage. We race on a circle track. And so we both raced and I started when I was nine and he was already racing. And so we became friends with the racetrack and then spent the next. You became friends racing quarter midgets. Yeah. That's really, and you stayed friends. Yeah, I went to school together and then we kind of went our separate ways. Yeah, like high school, we didn't hang out much anymore or anything. But then when this thing sparked off, he. Yeah, he just called on with an idea one day. He's like, Hey, I see these safety shirts out there. And I think that we could throw a design in it. And I think it'd be a hit. I like the idea. You called him saying that. Yeah, it was I kind of hatched the idea, but I had had no art background or anything. And so then yeah, I called him and didn't know if he thought I was crazy when I first told him what I wanted to do or not. But hey, you know, I offered him to, you know, help me design it and I'll pay him and then I paid him to teach me how to use the equipment. When he had the idea, I'm like, you know that the orders are going to be tiny and so you're going to have to be in there all the time printing small orders. I can't do that all the time after on the shop. And he's like, all right, I'll learn everything. So he learned every LD clip in the shop and he'd come in after working at FedEx and then just print shirts and we'd get like a trickle of online orders and he'd load every design on the press and print all night. Yeah, that's how it all kind of got going. These are the ideas, at least in my experience, these are the ideas that are super, super viable. Like the ones that because it's so specific. Yeah. Instead of just be like, I want to create a t-shirt company. Yeah, exactly. I just want to make like whatever it is. You're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. I've got a cool drawing. I want to put it on a t-shirt and we're going to go global. Yeah, exactly that. And you have a lot of people with Jacks. It's really easy to do, print on demand and those types of things and put it together. Yeah. But you had something that was super specific. Well, and he's the artwork behind it. I'm like, this is what I'm picturing, but I have no way of putting it down on paper. Oh, okay. We used to call it the design filter. So Jeff would have an idea and then it run through the design filter with me and all of a sudden, boom, we got a cool idea to run. So did you go to school for design? Yeah, the Cornish College of the Arts up in Seattle. No way. So you did that and then ended up with a small print studio? Well, I worked for other people. I worked for a couple of companies and I just never really wanted to work for somebody. I always wanted to work for myself. Yeah. Like, all college I spent freelancing and my teachers hated it because I was always working on projects. I'd be like, look what I did and they're like, that's not the project that you've worked on. But I'm going to make money for this one. And so it makes money. And I always had to work in a design studio and I tried that and that wasn't my cup of tea. So I just, I had a friend that wanted to invest. He was like, quit working for people. I'll buy your startup shop. I'll help take care of it and get me back later. So he helped get me my equipment. And in my old screen printing shop I worked at in college, they were selling half of their shop. No way. So I bought half the shop and then we had a screen printing shop and ran with it. But I just, I always had the itch. That's amazing. And I always wanted an apparel company, but there was just never that connection with somebody else that I knew where I felt like that's the guy to be a business partner with. And Jeff knocks on the door one day and I'm like, all right, this is it. Like, Jeff's a witty guy. Like, let's get it. We'll pull this off. Did you just follow him like you knew what he was working on? Did you guys ever talk? Yeah. At that point in life, you know, a few years, I mean, quite a few years out of obviously high school and all that. So we hadn't seen each other in a decade almost. Yeah. Facebook friends. Yeah, exactly. So just kind of through Facebook, I'd see what he's doing. I knew he had a little t-shirt shop or whatever. Yeah. So when I conjured up the idea. Two little t-shirt shop. It was awesome. It was a little metal building in a wrecking yard. What? A legit movie-style wrecking yard with the forklifts driving outside. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Like, where they like smash up like, like cars and stuff? Yeah. We go to get, you know, a new door. Like when we'd print, you'd stand on an old wheel that we'd drug out of the wrecking yard. Yeah, the wrecking yard. Because you didn't have the right height to get the pressure to make a nice thin safety shirt print. And so you had to get some leverage. So you find the right wheel. Yeah. Yeah. It was a nice wheel with a lot of coverage on the top. Yeah. And the angle was perfect. Jack, are we, are we ready on drinks? We are ready. There's a lot of flame going on. I know you can smell it here. I feel closer to it. I keep waiting. I feel the heat. I feel fire. Yeah. So, Jack, what are we drinking? Today we have, slow down, don't hurt yourself. So the drinks got a little bit of candy guava syrup. It's six years candy guava syrup print style. Chocolate infused tequila de pesado. Suisse, aperitivo, maraschino liqueur, big gin, a little bit of orange blossom water. Lime bitters, tobacco tincture. See how he gets, if he gets lower when he's talking to you, he starts to like, get in there, get in there. I'm like, he's letting you know where you're going to end up. Yeah. A little bit of brulee fruit on there for you today. Is there brulee involved? There's brulee going on. There's brulee involved. The whole education process. Oh, here we go. Beautiful. Oh, I see the brulee. Oh, serving platter here. Yeah. Wait, what is the brulee on? Is that an apple? Yeah. So this is a dehydrated apple. Brulee with tangerine infused sugar. I mean, there's more. Cheers. Thank you. Thank you. Where do you begin? All right. So, I make the mistake sometimes of saying, what do I do with this? And then he says, you drink it. Because we're a schedule of events. We're supposed to. Okay. So this is scent. This is the smell that comes with it. I don't do anything. Yeah. So that's your aromatic diffuser. There's a little bit of, again, more ingredients. Cinnamon bark and cavendish tobacco. Turkish cavendish tobacco. Okay. Wow. So we've got this. And then we'll eat apple and things like that. What's your favorite way to say, whatever we're about to do? I was going to lean on you for this. I'm not sure if I have a cool one. Cheers. I meant to get your heads up on that. No, that's good. No, we're good. Cheers is great. Cheers. I can say that, right? Yeah. All right. So cheers. Cheers. Okay. Let me know what you think. Let Jack know what you think. It's fantastic. Wow. That is good. Yeah. It's like a mule but refined. You see there's chocolate in it? Yeah. Rip us out of the kilo and fused with cacao nibs and Mexican stone ground chocolate. Wow, man. That's good. So we had Tate on the show for the Gambler 500. Have you guys both done the Gambler? I've done it a couple of times. Tom doesn't miss an event. Well, I do miss one. You've done it twice though. Like how many times have you done it? Seven of them or so I think. All right. So if anybody hasn't seen this already, like we won't get into a ton on the Gambler, but this is like... It's our people. This is like Cannonball Run. Yeah. Like across Oregon or Washington. Yeah. Or wherever. Now they're all over the country. Yeah. Meets Burning Man, meets everything fun. No, it is. Everything fun. It's like Mad Max meets Burning Man. Yeah, okay. Mad Max meets Burning Man. Yeah. He's got an old beater Volvo. We have a friend's and I have an old Porsche 924-77. I think it is. A Porsche? It's only a really bad four cylinder. No, but I don't care. It's a Porsche. That's what we see. We're Porsche owners. Super proud of the whole deal. I know dude. Every time we see a nice Porsche or there's somebody with a cool Porsche jacket on, you know, we're like, yeah, it's nice to be tight in with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're one of those guys now? You're one of the ones driving down in a beat up Porsche. Yeah. Like raise your hand out the window. It's like the Porsche sign. Where you racing gloves. Get out of my old, you know, Chef track and I've got like, no, the Porsche, you know, key chain. Oh man. I'm one of those guys. The racing gloves. The racing gloves. The scarf. The leather hat. We got hats and everything that we wear at the Gambler. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Backing up a little bit. Did you both come from like entrepreneurial families? Like, did you have sort of like that example growing up for doing this type of stuff or starting? Pretty much both sides of my family back through generations and now, I mean, I feel like everybody's, you know, trying or succeeding at being some sort of entrepreneur. So I guess it is kind of hardwired. I don't know. So I mean, ever since, yeah, I was a kid. I had 10 side hustles and then spent most of the rest of my life pursuing a career driving race cars. Yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of like its own. Yeah. Total. You're running a business. Yeah. Promoting yourself and trying to get through. Yeah. Yeah. Which I didn't quite make it all the way. Which is why I'm selling shirts now. It wasn't quite what I pictured when I was supposed to be the world famous race car driver. Now it's becoming like a Bruce Springsteen song. What about you? You were doing side hustle in school even. Yeah. Like doing freelance work, stuff like that. Yeah. So when you first, like doing the design work and things like that, you think that that helped prepare you for what you're doing now. So doing freelance stuff before you started doing this type of work. Well, I always liked working with other people that had an idea. So I like when a company, they wanted a vision for their logo. That helped me along. Like school projects are always an open platform. They're like, okay, do whatever you want. That wasn't what I worked with. Like give me your ideas and let me turn into something. Yeah. So that's probably why I did a lot of side work. Yeah. Because it was keeping me entertained. Well, they say constraints drive creativity. Yeah. So as soon as you start to put the boundaries on it and things like that, you're like, okay, well, I know what I have to work with. Don't. You're just like a good business idea. You can't just say I need a restaurant. You've got to. Know what you're going to work with. You've got to find a niche. Yeah. Tell me about some of the things that you experienced. We were like, maybe this is a bad idea. What are we doing? Like maybe we should do something different. We've laid a few pretty good eggs on. I mean, I've still got, I laugh. I was just moving some around last week. There's like 20 boxes that were shirts we printed in 2010 or 2013. Yeah. 2013. And you still, oh yeah. And they're just sitting in the boxes. Because we thought, oh, this is the next best idea. Yeah. And so we ordered. You make a million of them and so then nobody likes them. No. Okay. So now we're sitting on them and you pay for them more. We don't do that anymore though. First order is always small. First order is always small. Yeah. Wait, wait. Do you have boxes of like one particular design? Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It's still sitting in the container. Yeah. It's still on one of them. What? Yeah. Pray tell. What's the design? Oh, I don't know if I want to know what it is. Yeah. Like you're the designer. You're like, you really walked it out. The design's good. It's one of my better ones. I liked it. Nobody else liked it. And we sold the fair amount. We just didn't sell as many as I thought we would. It was a passion project. I was the one that went huge on ordering them. Because our previous one had done so well and then we're like, this one's going to do awesome. Yeah. And I have too much going on. It's just going faith in you. Yeah. Well, the design was way too complex. Yeah. It's got a lot of innuendo in there. It was the presidential seal wrapped into something else, but you couldn't tell the seal was there anymore. So we decided our stuff needs to look good from 30 feet. Yeah. You got to get the idea. And the rule is if you can step back and visualize it, then it's good. But if you step back and it just looks like a mess, it's not a good design. For all things in life. Yeah, really. Yeah. Step back. It's a mess. Like as you've been growing, what else have you run into? Well, I mentioned a story earlier, but the whole idea when I started my shop, I thought a great advertising tool was a 32-foot Chevy Silverado duly truck limo. Wait, did you say limo? Limo, yeah. No, it's like a duly Chev truck limo. Yeah, full bed in the back, four-wheel drive. It's like 100 feet long. It's a truck limo. Wait, I don't even know if I've seen a truck limo before. It's pretty fancy for 95. It was, especially when we put the wrap on it for my company at the time. Like it looked good. Oh, my God. And I didn't have any money to spend on a wrap, but I did. I wanted, like if I saw that, I would make you haul a mattress in it just for fun. And just lesson learned was I didn't have money to spend at that time, and I was spending it on something that really probably wasn't the most important. Yeah, the big wrap for your company at the time probably didn't sell that much product for you. Well, it's an enormous wrap too. The truck came, it probably would have been more important than doing that. It was the end of my single years. So I, you know, it was fun when you get all the buddies out and you go to the bar and you fill up in your own limo and everybody's like, who are these people? And they're like, we're just average joes. As you move forward with the stuff that you're doing now, have either one of you, I mean your friends, obviously you've known each other forever, do you kind of like spur each other on? Or is it like, have either one of you had to have the conversation and you're like, ah, I don't know if I can do this or maybe I want to do something different. Or have you both just been kind of all in the whole time? Yeah, I mean, we're very, very different. I would say that we compliment each other well in that regard and in different roles and keeping the ship moving, you know, definitely lend themselves well to our partnership, you know. He's much more of what you would picture to be an artistic designer guy and I'm probably more of what you'd picture to be the business entrepreneurial guy, which is where I could never do his job and he could never do mine. You're like, you go talk to the money people. We make a million decisions together and we do a new design and we, you know, whether we're texting 500 pictures back and forth or we're sitting next to each other at the computer we both have an influence or deciding what we're going to take to market and so on but, you know, but when it comes down to kind of the two different things we have our niche spot that works pretty well. I'd rip my hair out every day if I don't with things that Jeff deals with daily. Oh man, it's a lot of numbers. It's a lot of the stuff that artists don't like. Do you have one that covers like most of the shirt? So our class-rated line, we have our camo designs. Our backwoods camos all covered. Do you have a camo design that's covered in, like, it's totally an oxymoron. It's high-viz camo. High-viz... Well, and then we just came out with a new design called American Grit Stealth and it's... Wait, wait, wait, wait, stop, stop. Are you calling it stealth? Yeah, yeah, and it's high-viz. We're full of oxymorons. A lot of people are just wearing for fashion, right? Like the camo pants, camo shirts, whatever they are, but see those like wander around the streets of Seattle like boom, just really bright all the way through. It's the whole thing bright? The whole thing's bright. If you had to give advice to somebody like starting their own thing, putting their own thing together, something that like... And I mean, when I say advice, I mean, yeah, not the advice that makes you feel like how you've been forgiven to them, but this is what it really is like. This is what you can expect. Be prepared to be broke for a few years. Oh, yeah. Jeff was smart. He kept his day job for a while. I didn't. I just started on my own and then I'm like, well, I better figure out how I can eat and make money. Maybe that's good, right? I made like 16 to 25 a year for the first two, and now it's hard living. That is hard living, yeah. I think I was the lowest paid employer or least paid person at the Wreck and Yard. At the Wreck and Yard way. Well, at least they're like, I'm just doing this to keep it real, man. And you just got to stay with it, too. I mean, everybody says that, but it can really be difficult at that time. How long can you stay with it? I know. That's probably it. I think a lot of people, if they stay with it, you'll make it through it. Yeah, it's not a place you want to be, but it was a place that I had to be in order to keep going. Now you have it, right? Which is really beautiful. It's worth it. What would you say? I don't know. Bet on yourself if you're worth betting on, I guess. I mean, make sure you've got some chops or whatever. But then, yeah, bet on yourself and take your idea and run with it. It's like building a business is kind of like these stepping stones. You've got to kind of over-commit almost and just jump into it and then you kind of clean up the back end. Okay, now I'm committed to doing this and I just made the commitment because that forces you into it and then you've got to figure out how you're going to make it happen. I mean, he had the art background, but I hadn't had any background in apparel, certainly. Other than printing on it. Well, in sales, even. Trying to sell to stores and he would be on his FedEx route and he would stop in the stores. Yeah, which we had no idea about and we're still learning, you know. It's not like I came with an MBA on this is how this is all supposed to look. Like you've got to go out there and kind of fall down. Well, cheers. Thank you. Bottoms up, man. That's too good to bottoms up. That's true. We love what you're doing. I love what you're doing and I love the tape because I love tape and if you love because we've got a love fest going on right now love the show and love what we're doing on the show then subscribe. Ring the bell. Click on the bell. Like what we're doing. Make a comment, whatever it is. If you have your own mistakes, go to fup.com We'd love to have you on the show.