SUCCESS STORIES IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Marshall Atkinson They saw you coming, Scott. Scott Dawson Oh yeah. They got me a hook, line, and sinker, man. Marshall Atkinson All right, cool. So you move from that. And now I think a lot of your success really dovetails with your hobby that you're so passionate about, which is motorcycle racing. So why don't we get started telling everyone about your business and that hook between printing and motorcycle racing? Scott Dawson Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, I've been racing for years and years and I'm at these events we have 14 to 15 races a year. And we do have a season, we have an off-season, so roughly every two weeks, there's a race at these events. They sell t-shirts there. The artwork on them was really not that great. It looked like a lot of hand-drawn stuff, kind of comic book looking. And once I started getting into t-shirt printing, I naturally wanted to be able to do a simulated process right out of the gate. I would ask people, and even whenever I went out west to Fresener's courses and went to Atlanta for some courses, they would tell me, "Well, that takes years to do that." And I said, "Well, I don't have years. I want to be able to do it in months." And I had an old gentleman take me under his wing and the next town over and showed me a lot. He was on his way out, he didn't mind giving me secrets and showing me things. And so whenever I started presenting designs that we could do for these motorcycle clubs, I didn't know if I could still print them, but I knew I could do the artwork. A club gambled and gave me a shot. They sold all their shirts, literally in an hour, as opposed to two days, which the events are always two-day events. And it just kinda snowballed from there. Everybody was really happy with it. It was modern graphics, it didn't look like it was from the 60s or 70s and it just kinda has grown from there. Being a rider racer, I kind of had an idea of what they wanted to see on a t-shirt because I'm one of them. I tell people if somebody came to me and wanted me to design a t-shirt for a sailboat race, I probably wouldn't be very good at it cause I don't know anything about it -- it's not my passion. So I think that just kind of comes full circle to us being good at what we do in what niche. Marshall Atkinson And how does understanding the market, because you're a member of the tribe, right? You know, all the buzzwords, you know, the secret handshake, so to speak of what people really like in that group. How does knowing that translate into a better design and more sales? Can you give us an example? Scott Dawson I think where that comes into play is whenever I see a t-shirt designer, I see some artwork that's motorcycle-related, I look at it and go “Now that's something that I would buy, that's something I would wear." And being one of the tribe, we all do think, we're very like-minded and we have young people in there and old people in there. And I try to span the gap with the ages to generate some artwork that kind of covers everybody. And we do pretty well at it. We've been doing this since 2004 for these motorcycle organizations and it's not uncommon for everybody to sell out on Saturday. They will increase their numbers, their quantity, so they have shirts for Sunday and they continue to still sell out.

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