Greater>Than Clothing

On Tuesday, Joey and I had a ‘planned’ meeting. I say planned because many times if Joey and I are hanging out, the conversation can just turn towards G>T. However, this time it was on our calendars…and that meant I would be taking notes…which means it’s business time.

We decided to meet in Ballard at the Old Town Ale House. We found a parking spot just down the street from our meeting destination and noticed a sandwich board on the sidewalk for Raw Threads. We decided to check it out and I’m glad we did. It’s a small boutique filled with unique and (for the most part) locally designed clothing. It was good to see a newer shop like that in Ballard. I’m sure there are many more like it that would be a good fit for Greater>Than apparel. To me, the visit to Raw set the stage nicely for us to proceed with our meeting.

Old Town Ale House is a clean, older place with good drafts, plenty of open tables, pretty good food and it’s apparently awesome for Greater>Than meetings. I started to jump right in and express my need for an online idea sharing space and it hit me. I had been eager to pay homage to the great (and fictional) Murray Hewitt, band manager for Flight of the Conchords and a Deputy Cultural Attaché at the New Zealand Consulate. If you have not seen Flight of the Conchords on HBO, please do so. See, Murray does not believe that ANY meeting can officially begin until role is taken. So we stopped everything and took role. Joey…present. Ryan…present.

Murray takes taking role very seriously. 

Now we can get down to business. The goals (for me) going into the meeting were simply to find out where we were financially and set some timeframes for completing certain critical tasks. From this, Joey had a great idea of creating a list of steps to complete in order to go from where we are ‘today’ to actually printing our first shirt. Ideally, we will create a list of tasks with important details about each task such as time dependancy, resources needed and essentially who will own it.

The hope is that we will be able to target and schedule larger more difficult objectives while identifying the smaller items that we can complete at anytime. The list will let us know exactly what we can do to move the project forward at any given moment.

It’s business time. 

Work on this infamous list will start immediately and we hope to share some of the tasks with you as well as the progress we make as we tackle them. We’re making progress and having this meeting was a big part of keeping the momentum going. Look for future posts with more details of the list and the actions we are taking to make the list a bit shorter.
Thanks for checking in!

Hey there. Let me be the second to welcome you to the new, improved Greater>Than Clothing blog, complete with actual blog posts! As Ryan mentioned previously, we are both going to be posting more frequently from now on. For me, this is partially going to be an exercise in stopping myself from over-thinking things, which does not exactly come naturally to me.

My strategy will be simple, however: I’m going to do stuff so that I have stuff to write about. The daily struggle to move this little enterprise forward an inch at a time should provide plenty of blog fodder, and I think we are finally in a place where we can really concentrate on the business. I’m pretty pumped.

So, in that vein, I have an announcement: we are temporarily suspending e-mail newsletter sign-up. I know it’s disappointing, but calm down; it’s going to be OK. At some point in the future, e-mail newsletter sign-up will be back. Every reputable e-commerce company has an e-mail marketing program, so it’s something we’ll have to do sooner or later.

For now, though, it’s coming down for two main reasons. First, honestly, I kind of jumped the gun when I put the sign-up widget on the site, seeing as how we don’t yet have any products to market. I read about this great free e-mail marketing service and I signed right up. We did not, in fact, find an occasion to send a single newsletter. Lesson learned: add features to the site only if they are likely to provide a near-ish term benefit.

Second, it has basically been all downhill for that service provider I was so excited about, Zookoda. First, they were purchased by an at-best-controversial company, IZEA (Michael Arrington is not a fan). After this TechCrunch post putting them on deadpool watch, I figured it was time to pull the plug. Lesson learned: even startups with well-reviewed, working products can turn on a dime. It’s good to have a backup plan. We got away with this one mostly due to the fact that we don’t yet rely on an e-mail program.

Which brings me to the e-mail sign-up post-mortem. I have to say, for something that I just slapped up on the site, we didn’t do too badly. Of the five people who signed up, four of them weren’t me, and one of them was someone I don’t personally know. I salute you all, but especially the unnammed t-shirt enthusiast with a hawaii.edu e-mail address. If you send me an e-mail, I’ll put you on a super-secret discount list that I just made up right now.

So I have been getting back into the forums over at T-Shirt Forums and I keep hearing these screen printers talk about this one book as the ‘must-have’ for any screen printer.

So I started to search for the book and it has proved to be quite elusive. The book in question is called How to Print T-Shirts for Fun and Profit by Scott and Pat Fresener. Admittedly I was turned off by the name. To me it sounded a little cheesy. However, these guys (and gals) on the forums swear by it’s extremely technical and user-friendly information. All sounds good, until you try to purchase it. I can’t find this thing anywhere. The closest I have come to finding it was on Amazon.com and the list price is $39.95, yet someone is selling it used for $135.00…all for a outdated edition. No thanks.

I think the trouble is going to be getting the latest edition of the book (there are 12 editions with the latest in 2005). So if any of you have favorite book stores that you frequent, please keep your eyes open for us!

Hey everyone! Seems like it has been ages since I tickled the keyboard to bring you any operational nuggets of Greater>Than. Honestly, I’m a little red-faced when I look back that my last blog post was in the summer. However, Greater>Than is picking up some serious momentum…believe it! So look for shorter yet more frequent updates from us.

First a quick career update…for about a year, Joey and I had worked together at a large Northwest-based software company. Then Joey had decided to make a career change (the right move by the way) and he now works for a large Northwest-based mobile-phone company. This meant we no longer worked together (booo!). Not long after Joey’s move, I was looking to solidify a bit of my future and the powers that be brought Joey and I back together in December. I tend to believe that good things happen to good people and ‘things’ just tend to happen for a reason. While we work hard at our day jobs, I am excited that Greater>Than has picked up some steam due to our daily proximity. It’s just easier to get together for lunch and discuss things. In fact, we have a meeting on the calendar for next week. We’ll post some details of that meeting for sure.

Hope everyone had a safe and happy New Years. You’ll be hearing from us a bit more often .