mlabbas
There’s a lot more to the t-shirt business than meets the eye. Smart Company talks to Co-Founder and CEO Imad Shawa to find out more.
1. What’s Mlabbas all about?
Mlabbas is about challenging conventional fashion and lifestyle choices, and offering products that go beyond mainstream trends. The result is giving the customer the ability to express themselves and precisely than with other purchases in the market.
One of our first designs (from 2005!) that sums up Mlabbas is the “Swaqa Prison Football Team” jersey. It looks real but it isn’t. It combines all the elements that Mlabbas relies on: humor, satire, shock value, Arabic culture and the vintage feel.
2. Where did the idea come from?
It wasn’t called Mlabbas when it started, in fact the first appearance of the concept was
untitled and was at the first JARA Market off Rainbow street in 2005. It was JARA’s first year.
wThe second trigger was a t-shirt I wore in Amman during 2004 that had the words “Private School” in simple Arabic calligraphy. The reaction from the social scene was consistent amazement, simply because 10 years ago there were virtually no t-shirts with Arabic messages. There was a gap in the market that had to be filled.
Officially however, Mlabbas was established in August 2010.
3. How did you fund the business early on?
In 2005, myself and 3 other friends, all working in Amman and all aged 24 years old, put in 500 JDs each and commissioned some t-shirts to be sewn locally and printed 6 different designs on them.
This venture was profitable on a small scale. However in 2006, 3 out of the 4, including
myself, left Jordan to pursue graduate studies.
There was no activity until 2010 when I came back and started it again, naming the new venture “Mlabbas.”
In 2010 the 4 of us invested around 20,000 JDs in total and set up a kiosk in City Mall to test the market again, under my sole management. Up until this point, we all maintained full time jobs elsewhere, but from August 2010 I started devoting my entire time to Mlabbas.
4. At any point did you bring in investors?
Outside investors, no. I have been lucky to be able to obtain funds from my father beyond the initial 20,000 JDs, to keep taking Mlabbas to the next level. The Kiosk has always been profitable but the growth requirements of Mlabbas needed much more than organic cashflow.
5. If yes, what advice would you give other small business’ looking to bring aboard an investor/s?
Investment is the main lifeline for the progression of any startup. I won’t give you anecdotal advice on the “best” practice in terms of relinquishing shares or managerial control to investors, because in reality each start-up story is different. It would be like giving relationship advice.
I would recommend raising as much money as possible, whether through investors or lenders, if the business is promising.
Serious growth without serious funding is almost unheard of.
6. What has been the most rewarding part of running your own business?
The full control of the culture and philosophy of the work. I enjoy creating a unique work environment that our employees cherish.
I am passionate about certain social and political issues that sometimes I can dip my feet in with certain products we sell and certain alliances we make with the development / non profit sector.
7. How do you differentiate yourselves from your competitors?
A simple one is how involved the entire staff is about major decisions: the display in the shop, actual fashion items, the graphics we print, social media stuff. Even the warehouse guy walks in here and suggests improvements on counting inventory, changing box or carton sizes, and random stuff. Everybody has access to management and ideas to input. Our shop carries a lot of accessories that we don’t produce ourselves, we have them on consignment from different artists in and around Jordan. We’ve opened the field to our staff members, and almost all of them have brought something of their own, like something that their cousin makes
or something they have designed. Even the accountants, not just the retail guys have their own product in the store that when they sell they get a commission as if they are an outside artist. It keeps them involved.
We try and make our advertising really edgy. We’re about to do a shoot that looks like a very serious business deal, everyone in suits, looking very official, but the text will read something like, “Customer Off the Street Seals a Deal to Buy Two Hoodies.” It will look like it was for a $2 billion dollar deal, as if it is a newspaper clipping. We might try and push it on unsuspecting publishers and see if they publish it as a news story because it looks serious. We try to do political stuff, for example in the past with women’s rights we did a campaign against the rape law that allowed perpetrators to get out of jail if they married their victim. We did a breast cancer awareness campaign on T-shirts. We use language that’s sometimes inappropriate wherever we can, just to push it. Sometimes it’s cheap and there’s nothing behind it, but we’re trying to say that we’re all adults, that hearing a swearword here or there isn’t going to affect your morality. It’s like watching HBO. When you’re an adult your morals aren’t going to be eroded from watching a show. Nobody had really pushed the envelope in terms of expression for adults. We do weird stuff on Facebook and Twitter just because, just to get reactions out of people, to test social norms and stuff.
8. How many locations do you have?
Two existing physical locations in Amman and another one on the way [expected opening November]. Our online store [www.mlabbas.com] has been up and running for a few months and is growing its international sales quite well.
We have been solicited to open in several cities in the Arab World and the US but haven’t found the right recipe or partner yet.
9. How important has location been to your sales and do you have a different sales strategy for each location?
City Mall (which we have since moved to Taj Mall) is family-oriented. There are a lot of moms with kids who have birthday parties to go to. This is a big segment because they have a lot of purchasing power. Rainbow Street is a vastly different market, even the designs that moved that weren’t moving at City Mall. There is a more artsy, edgy vibe at Rainbow Street. We thought City Mall had a good chunk of foreigners, but Rainbow Street is actually more. We thought that during the day we would have no one at Rainbow Street, but tourists and expats are a lot of our business. I think non Jordanians and non Arabs make up 30% of our sales at that store, which is a huge chunk. At Taj Mall it’s just something that they don’t have there at all. It’s a risk because it’s at the cinema level. There isn’t much traffic there besides nights and weekend days, so it’s going to be more of a stop for moms. A lot of them call for an order, like 10 hoodies for a birthday, but no one wants to come to Rainbow Street to get them and we lose orders that way. Taj Mall will eliminate that problem.
10. What are you most excited about right now?
The website finally picking up. As you know sales to overseas is tax exempt so we are looking forward to getting in a bit of that.
But what’s special about our website is 1) you can customize your own products on the site itself through our design platform and we’ll ship it anywhere in the world. 2) you can set up your own shop for free if you have our own designs and photos. We relieve you of production and shipping, so all you need to do is sit back and get paid into your Paypal account.
A lot of our ready inventory at the Rainbow Street store is from local artists, most of whom do not have their own outlets. The new artists that we get on board on a weekly basis is a really exciting phenomenon because this proven sourcing database is going to help us scale the business across the region one day with brick and a mortar presence, not just online.
11. What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started Mlabbas?
How disorganized and unfair the tax system is, from collection to enforcement to audits and general policy.
12. What’s is one mistake you’ve made that you’ve learnt from?
Starting out with poor accounting software. In the Arab world there virtually no cheap and reliable ERP platforms for small businesses. We know some are on the way. We have had to switch software more than once and it is a real burden on our data and reporting.
13. What’s the biggest hurdle you faced or are still facing?
We recently had a forum with Jordan Strategy Forum, which is kind of like a private sector lobby. It’s basically trying to push the government to improve the business environment laws, mostly taxes, customs, and labor laws. They came out with a study that pointed to the fact that Jordanian customs officers, the ones who decide the value, assigns the duties and signs off on things, is the only one or one of the only customs employees in the world that has a financial incentive built into his valuations. In other words he gets commission. They’re incentivized to inflate the values. It makes it hard to do business because you never know how much it’s going to be.
In terms of tricks to make the process easier in taxes and customs there’s a few things we do that have helped. Hiring a tax lawyer is a good thing, ours is a former tax department employee who is now a consultant and knows everybody at the department. The paperwork isn’t too difficult if you have a lawyer.
14. Where do you see Mlabbas in 5 years?
The majority of sales to be generated outside Jordan – in much less than 5 years.
Our customization abilities are growing rapidly right now; I expect to cover completely unrelated sectors in 5 five years, such as customized stationary for both corporate and personal consumption.
15. What mediums have you used to market the Mlabbas brand and which has been the most successful?
We’ve used SMS, lots of Facebook ads, and a few magazines. Facebook is great, it used to be better because the returns to Facebook are falling. It has a lot to do with what time you advertise, though. 9 am is when everyone just gets into work is the peak Facebook advertising times. The market for advertising keeps shifting and sometimes it’s hard to compare different mediums. How do you know how many people saw your magazine ad or street poster? Facebook is transparent because you get very clean data on numbers and demographics. For what it costs to run a magazine ad, you can create a storm on Facebook. Especially now that our website is up, we need online. If you see an ad in a magazine for a website, you’re less likely to pull out your phone and type in a website than if you can click a link.
16. Have you had any mentors along the way?
The idea eluded me growing up. I didn’t really connect with a bunch of professors, which is really the first kind of mentorship you can get. A mentor would have been good for advisement early on in my career, on the different paths you can take. It may have led to more courageous decisions that he didn’t make. A mentor doesn’t have to be from the same industry, but someone who has been through a lot of career decisions and can give advice or help. A lot of my career before Mlabbas I played it safe. I worked for the family business after finishing my undergraduate degree and went to get a master’s in something I wasn’t that excited about but got a scholarship for. Career advice on how long to wait before you really pursue your dreams would have been helpful. A lot of people delay or are in denial about what they really want to do, they put aside things they are passionate about for years, and a mentor can help push you to pursue what you really want. A mentor would have been useful for advice about projected growth and the importance of growing fast because this industry is very experimental and people aren’t really pumping money into your business—you have to make do with what you have. That made the growth really slow and later I realized from listening to the lectures of successful entrepreneurs that we needed to go bigger much sooner. I would have benefited from mentorship through the growth cycle for the first two years. I was proud we were doubling sales and revenue every year, but what is doubling when you’re starting at nothing. Our growth has been modest in terms of where we are today, a mentor could have given a push, told me to get a loan, grow, open another shop, hire four more people, but there was nobody to give that kind of advice. Instead it was cautious, cautious, cautious. A progressive, new age business mentor could have been great to show us what’s out there: funding possibilities, growth potential, in terms of the potential for a company to become valuable quickly to outside investors. I wasn’t exposed to that whole world initially, because probably for lack of a business mentor.
17. Where do you draw the inspiration from for new ideas?
Some designs are designed in 20 minutes and from inception to the shelf can take an hour. Other designs brew for months. We have designs in folders unpublished for two years. The process can be tough since we do do a lot of freelance and have been relying on submissions recently from a few key people that done good work in that past. Sometimes people will submit designs off the street, but not that many of these are printable. We recently came up with a design in about ten minutes. The shirt is a housefly, which there are lot in the Jordan Valley. There some statistics on it, the species name, Arabic street name, and population: 17 quadrillion. Our printing capacity really helps us because we can do huge designs, multiple-color, which not many people, can do here. We don’t even have to do bulk to keep costs down, we can do just one.
18. Who are your principle target audience?
Intuitively you might think it is young people. But in reality parents in their 30s and forties are the largest buying segment.
We’ve shied away from “target audience” studies and focused on improving the qualities of products. As for product mix we’re now growing horizontally, adding more customizable items every month.
19. How important has social media been to your brand?
Pretty important, although I wouldn’t say critical like some of our competitors. Ask yourself do you really check the Twitter or Facebook pages of the shops in your local mall? We indeed are deeply invested in social media yet we’re careful not to over assume its importance. It’s as important to see where social media trends are going as riding the saturated wave of existing trends.
20. What advice would you offer to a start-up or a small business in its early stages of growth?
Use a cloud accounting software.
Hire 2 inexperienced accountants instead of 1 experienced one. Seek mentors.
21. Where have you had the most traction? Online sales or your brick and mortar storefronts?
In storefronts. Online selling requires more marketing investment which we’ve only started doing a few months ago. Let alone the lack of experience and trust in the market in buying online.
Many Jordanians believe that when they enter their credit card data on a Jordanian website to buy something, an employee from the company gets to see all their information and hence may one day misuse it. In reality no card data is visible to anyone. Getting local customers to trust the web with their money seems to be a slow process.
22. How much of your stock is manufactured by Mlabbas and how much of it do you resell for your partners?
We are in charge of 70% of all items sold, half of those are printed in-house and the other half is outsourced. The remaining 30% is either on consignment from artists and partners or items we’ve purchased upfront directly from them.
Once you’ve outgrown local suppliers, I highly advise sending a business manager to visit trade shows. If you want trusted suppliers, don’t go to tradeshows in China as much. Go to European or North American tradeshows. It might be a bit more expensive, but we’ve had better success finding really good Chinese suppliers who have taken the trouble to market in, say, Germany. It’s like a filtering process. In China you’ll find a thousand suppliers for a T-Shirt. At the European or North American Trade Show you’ll find the one company that’s made it through out of thousands that you can trust as reliable. A lot of people have gotten the wrong stuff shipped and it’s really hard to get your money back from a Chinese factory. That’s if you’ve outgrown local suppliers. If you haven’t, don’t dismiss local suppliers straight up. For example, for our mugs our supplier 9 out of 10 times has stock and it’s cheaper than getting thousands of mugs shipped to myself because he gets hundreds of thousands.
MLABBAS
There’s a lot more to the t-shirt business than meets the eye. Smart Company talks to Co-Founder and CEO Imad Shawa to find out more.
1. What’s Mlabbas all about?
Mlabbas is about challenging conventional fashion and lifestyle choices, and offering products that go beyond mainstream trends. The result is giving the customer the ability to express themselves and precisely than with other purchases in the market.
One of our first designs (from 2005!) that sums up Mlabbas is the “Swaqa Prison Football Team” jersey. It looks real but it isn’t. It combines all the elements that Mlabbas relies on: humor, satire, shock value, Arabic culture and the vintage feel.
2. Where did the idea come from?
It wasn’t called Mlabbas when it started, in fact the first appearance of the concept was
untitled and was at the first JARA Market off Rainbow street in 2005. It was JARA’s first year.
wThe second trigger was a t-shirt I wore in Amman during 2004 that had the words “Private School” in simple Arabic calligraphy. The reaction from the social scene was consistent amazement, simply because 10 years ago there were virtually no t-shirts with Arabic messages. There was a gap in the market that had to be filled.
Officially however, Mlabbas was established in August 2010.
3. How did you fund the business early on?
In 2005, myself and 3 other friends, all working in Amman and all aged 24 years old, put in 500 JDs each and commissioned some t-shirts to be sewn locally and printed 6 different designs on them.
This venture was profitable on a small scale. However in 2006, 3 out of the 4, including
myself, left Jordan to pursue graduate studies.
There was no activity until 2010 when I came back and started it again, naming the new venture “Mlabbas.”
In 2010 the 4 of us invested around 20,000 JDs in total and set up a kiosk in City Mall to test the market again, under my sole management. Up until this point, we all maintained full time jobs elsewhere, but from August 2010 I started devoting my entire time to Mlabbas.
4. At any point did you bring in investors?
Outside investors, no. I have been lucky to be able to obtain funds from my father beyond the initial 20,000 JDs, to keep taking Mlabbas to the next level. The Kiosk has always been profitable but the growth requirements of Mlabbas needed much more than organic cashflow.
5. If yes, what advice would you give other small business’ looking to bring aboard an investor/s?
Investment is the main lifeline for the progression of any startup. I won’t give you anecdotal advice on the “best” practice in terms of relinquishing shares or managerial control to investors, because in reality each start-up story is different. It would be like giving relationship advice.
I would recommend raising as much money as possible, whether through investors or lenders, if the business is promising.
Serious growth without serious funding is almost unheard of.
6. What has been the most rewarding part of running your own business?
The full control of the culture and philosophy of the work. I enjoy creating a unique work environment that our employees cherish.
I am passionate about certain social and political issues that sometimes I can dip my feet in with certain products we sell and certain alliances we make with the development / non profit sector.
7. How do you differentiate yourselves from your competitors?
A simple one is how involved the entire staff is about major decisions: the display in the shop, actual fashion items, the graphics we print, social media stuff. Even the warehouse guy walks in here and suggests improvements on counting inventory, changing box or carton sizes, and random stuff. Everybody has access to management and ideas to input. Our shop carries a lot of accessories that we don’t produce ourselves, we have them on consignment from different artists in and around Jordan. We’ve opened the field to our staff members, and almost all of them have brought something of their own, like something that their cousin makes
or something they have designed. Even the accountants, not just the retail guys have their own product in the store that when they sell they get a commission as if they are an outside artist. It keeps them involved.
We try and make our advertising really edgy. We’re about to do a shoot that looks like a very serious business deal, everyone in suits, looking very official, but the text will read something like, “Customer Off the Street Seals a Deal to Buy Two Hoodies.” It will look like it was for a $2 billion dollar deal, as if it is a newspaper clipping. We might try and push it on unsuspecting publishers and see if they publish it as a news story because it looks serious. We try to do political stuff, for example in the past with women’s rights we did a campaign against the rape law that allowed perpetrators to get out of jail if they married their victim. We did a breast cancer awareness campaign on T-shirts. We use language that’s sometimes inappropriate wherever we can, just to push it. Sometimes it’s cheap and there’s nothing behind it, but we’re trying to say that we’re all adults, that hearing a swearword here or there isn’t going to affect your morality. It’s like watching HBO. When you’re an adult your morals aren’t going to be eroded from watching a show. Nobody had really pushed the envelope in terms of expression for adults. We do weird stuff on Facebook and Twitter just because, just to get reactions out of people, to test social norms and stuff.
8. How many locations do you have?
Two existing physical locations in Amman and another one on the way [expected opening November]. Our online store [www.mlabbas.com] has been up and running for a few months and is growing its international sales quite well.
We have been solicited to open in several cities in the Arab World and the US but haven’t found the right recipe or partner yet.
9. How important has location been to your sales and do you have a different sales strategy for each location?
City Mall (which we have since moved to Taj Mall) is family-oriented. There are a lot of moms with kids who have birthday parties to go to. This is a big segment because they have a lot of purchasing power. Rainbow Street is a vastly different market, even the designs that moved that weren’t moving at City Mall. There is a more artsy, edgy vibe at Rainbow Street. We thought City Mall had a good chunk of foreigners, but Rainbow Street is actually more. We thought that during the day we would have no one at Rainbow Street, but tourists and expats are a lot of our business. I think non Jordanians and non Arabs make up 30% of our sales at that store, which is a huge chunk. At Taj Mall it’s just something that they don’t have there at all. It’s a risk because it’s at the cinema level. There isn’t much traffic there besides nights and weekend days, so it’s going to be more of a stop for moms. A lot of them call for an order, like 10 hoodies for a birthday, but no one wants to come to Rainbow Street to get them and we lose orders that way. Taj Mall will eliminate that problem.
10. What are you most excited about right now?
The website finally picking up. As you know sales to overseas is tax exempt so we are looking forward to getting in a bit of that.
But what’s special about our website is 1) you can customize your own products on the site itself through our design platform and we’ll ship it anywhere in the world. 2) you can set up your own shop for free if you have our own designs and photos. We relieve you of production and shipping, so all you need to do is sit back and get paid into your Paypal account.
A lot of our ready inventory at the Rainbow Street store is from local artists, most of whom do not have their own outlets. The new artists that we get on board on a weekly basis is a really exciting phenomenon because this proven sourcing database is going to help us scale the business across the region one day with brick and a mortar presence, not just online.
11. What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started Mlabbas?
How disorganized and unfair the tax system is, from collection to enforcement to audits and general policy.
12. What’s is one mistake you’ve made that you’ve learnt from?
Starting out with poor accounting software. In the Arab world there virtually no cheap and reliable ERP platforms for small businesses. We know some are on the way. We have had to switch software more than once and it is a real burden on our data and reporting.
13. What’s the biggest hurdle you faced or are still facing?
We recently had a forum with Jordan Strategy Forum, which is kind of like a private sector lobby. It’s basically trying to push the government to improve the business environment laws, mostly taxes, customs, and labor laws. They came out with a study that pointed to the fact that Jordanian customs officers, the ones who decide the value, assigns the duties and signs off on things, is the only one or one of the only customs employees in the world that has a financial incentive built into his valuations. In other words he gets commission. They’re incentivized to inflate the values. It makes it hard to do business because you never know how much it’s going to be.
In terms of tricks to make the process easier in taxes and customs there’s a few things we do that have helped. Hiring a tax lawyer is a good thing, ours is a former tax department employee who is now a consultant and knows everybody at the department. The paperwork isn’t too difficult if you have a lawyer.
14. Where do you see Mlabbas in 5 years?
The majority of sales to be generated outside Jordan – in much less than 5 years.
Our customization abilities are growing rapidly right now; I expect to cover completely unrelated sectors in 5 five years, such as customized stationary for both corporate and personal consumption.
15. What mediums have you used to market the Mlabbas brand and which has been the most successful?
We’ve used SMS, lots of Facebook ads, and a few magazines. Facebook is great, it used to be better because the returns to Facebook are falling. It has a lot to do with what time you advertise, though. 9 am is when everyone just gets into work is the peak Facebook advertising times. The market for advertising keeps shifting and sometimes it’s hard to compare different mediums. How do you know how many people saw your magazine ad or street poster? Facebook is transparent because you get very clean data on numbers and demographics. For what it costs to run a magazine ad, you can create a storm on Facebook. Especially now that our website is up, we need online. If you see an ad in a magazine for a website, you’re less likely to pull out your phone and type in a website than if you can click a link.
16. Have you had any mentors along the way?
The idea eluded me growing up. I didn’t really connect with a bunch of professors, which is really the first kind of mentorship you can get. A mentor would have been good for advisement early on in my career, on the different paths you can take. It may have led to more courageous decisions that he didn’t make. A mentor doesn’t have to be from the same industry, but someone who has been through a lot of career decisions and can give advice or help. A lot of my career before Mlabbas I played it safe. I worked for the family business after finishing my undergraduate degree and went to get a master’s in something I wasn’t that excited about but got a scholarship for. Career advice on how long to wait before you really pursue your dreams would have been helpful. A lot of people delay or are in denial about what they really want to do, they put aside things they are passionate about for years, and a mentor can help push you to pursue what you really want. A mentor would have been useful for advice about projected growth and the importance of growing fast because this industry is very experimental and people aren’t really pumping money into your business—you have to make do with what you have. That made the growth really slow and later I realized from listening to the lectures of successful entrepreneurs that we needed to go bigger much sooner. I would have benefited from mentorship through the growth cycle for the first two years. I was proud we were doubling sales and revenue every year, but what is doubling when you’re starting at nothing. Our growth has been modest in terms of where we are today, a mentor could have given a push, told me to get a loan, grow, open another shop, hire four more people, but there was nobody to give that kind of advice. Instead it was cautious, cautious, cautious. A progressive, new age business mentor could have been great to show us what’s out there: funding possibilities, growth potential, in terms of the potential for a company to become valuable quickly to outside investors. I wasn’t exposed to that whole world initially, because probably for lack of a business mentor.
17. Where do you draw the inspiration from for new ideas?
Some designs are designed in 20 minutes and from inception to the shelf can take an hour. Other designs brew for months. We have designs in folders unpublished for two years. The process can be tough since we do do a lot of freelance and have been relying on submissions recently from a few key people that done good work in that past. Sometimes people will submit designs off the street, but not that many of these are printable. We recently came up with a design in about ten minutes. The shirt is a housefly, which there are lot in the Jordan Valley. There some statistics on it, the species name, Arabic street name, and population: 17 quadrillion. Our printing capacity really helps us because we can do huge designs, multiple-color, which not many people, can do here. We don’t even have to do bulk to keep costs down, we can do just one.
18. Who are your principle target audience?
Intuitively you might think it is young people. But in reality parents in their 30s and forties are the largest buying segment.
We’ve shied away from “target audience” studies and focused on improving the qualities of products. As for product mix we’re now growing horizontally, adding more customizable items every month.
19. How important has social media been to your brand?
Pretty important, although I wouldn’t say critical like some of our competitors. Ask yourself do you really check the Twitter or Facebook pages of the shops in your local mall? We indeed are deeply invested in social media yet we’re careful not to over assume its importance. It’s as important to see where social media trends are going as riding the saturated wave of existing trends.
20. What advice would you offer to a start-up or a small business in its early stages of growth?
Use a cloud accounting software.
Hire 2 inexperienced accountants instead of 1 experienced one. Seek mentors.
21. Where have you had the most traction? Online sales or your brick and mortar storefronts?
In storefronts. Online selling requires more marketing investment which we’ve only started doing a few months ago. Let alone the lack of experience and trust in the market in buying online.
Many Jordanians believe that when they enter their credit card data on a Jordanian website to buy something, an employee from the company gets to see all their information and hence may one day misuse it. In reality no card data is visible to anyone. Getting local customers to trust the web with their money seems to be a slow process.
22. How much of your stock is manufactured by Mlabbas and how much of it do you resell for your partners?
We are in charge of 70% of all items sold, half of those are printed in-house and the other half is outsourced. The remaining 30% is either on consignment from artists and partners or items we’ve purchased upfront directly from them.
Once you’ve outgrown local suppliers, I highly advise sending a business manager to visit trade shows. If you want trusted suppliers, don’t go to tradeshows in China as much. Go to European or North American tradeshows. It might be a bit more expensive, but we’ve had better success finding really good Chinese suppliers who have taken the trouble to market in, say, Germany. It’s like a filtering process. In China you’ll find a thousand suppliers for a T-Shirt. At the European or North American Trade Show you’ll find the one company that’s made it through out of thousands that you can trust as reliable. A lot of people have gotten the wrong stuff shipped and it’s really hard to get your money back from a Chinese factory. That’s if you’ve outgrown local suppliers. If you haven’t, don’t dismiss local suppliers straight up. For example, for our mugs our supplier 9 out of 10 times has stock and it’s cheaper than getting thousands of mugs shipped to myself because he gets hundreds of thousands.