Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did the company grow? How far did you get?

Adam Schwartz: It’s a while ago now, so it’s hard to remember exactly. I worked on it from 2009 to 2011. We definitely had thousands of SKUs of textiles and we’ve had hundreds of suppliers and thousands of designers who were using this site. The sample business of it was good. We were selling a lot of samples. That was happening a lot. They came through.

We went through two major iterations at that time. We played with subscription-based model and others. It takes a while just to get the product to a place where it’s something other than an MVP which probably happened for us a year in. Maybe, even later than that. Then you say, “It’s something more than an MVP. Is it any good?”

While there was certainly life, I was spending a lot of my time on the supplier side. I was starting to run into walls where I had run out of new sustainable textile companies, and running into larger textile folks who’re saying, “We’re not really sustainable, but we’re ISO 9000. We use sustainable dyes, but the cotton isn’t farmed organically.” What became apparent to me at that point was we needed to broaden what we were doing. We needed to react to the reality of the market in terms of what textiles are available and what buyers wanted.

While there are some sustainable fashion designers, most of the larger fashion companies try, but they definitely don’t do everything sustainable. We were not positioning ourselves to service anybody like that, and we needed to. We needed to work with suppliers who were not completely pure from a business standpoint and meet the market where it was instead of trying to force the market’s hand. That wasn’t what my co-founders wanted to do. They really wanted to be what it was. I think we disagreed on that.

There wasn’t enough traction where it made sense for me to stay and fight those battles everyday. I decided to leave and they continued. It was professionally difficult. It was a difficult time. There’s relationships and you personally sweat over this. It’s heartbreaking to leave. That was rocky, but I felt like it was the right decision in hindsight.

Sramana Mitra: How did it turn out?

Adam Schwartz: I left the business. The other two kept running it. One of the other two ended up leaving as well. The third has stayed and she still has it. She’s raised some money since then. She’s still essentially trying to fulfil the same mission.

Sramana Mitra: Give me the dates of where we are at this point in the journey.

Adam Schwartz: We’re in Spring to Summer 2011.

Sramana Mitra: At this point, you went through a startup and learned a lot. However, you decided to move on from what you had started with. What did you do next?

Adam Schwartz: I started talking to my network. From 2009 to 2011, I threw myself deeply into the New York tech community. It was very small at that time. We were trying to make New York successful as a city for tech and innovation. I was working on non-profits like the New York Tech Meetup. We were talking to Bloomberg trying to get more funding, land, and space for the tech community to start live in. I went to that network and said, “I think I’m going to do my next thing.”

One of those people was AJ Vaynerchuck who’s the COO of Vayner Media. He said, “You should talk to this friend of mine.” Josh was the founder of College Humor, Vimeo, and BustedTees. He sold those companies to IAC in 2006. Now we’re in 2011. He and I started chatting. He wanted to buy BustedTees back from IAC. He was still working there, running those companies. He was looking for a partner to help him run it. After he had sold those businesses, he spent his career running College Humor. What he really knew was media and advertising. I had spent the last couple of years in e-commerce. That was a good fit.

I felt like I had learned a fair amount about how e-commerce platform works. I was compelled by the idea because BustedTees had a brand name, P&L, and was profitable. In getting it out, we wouldn’t have investors. We would have this cash-flow generating business. I didn’t really have the heart at that moment to start from zero again.

Sramana Mitra: What was the scale of the business that you were planning to buy out of IAC?

Adam Schwartz: They had about seven employees. It was about a $3 million business.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz
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