Twelve years ago today (May 12), I received an acknowledgement to my letter of resignation from my then employer, Acid House Records, and the seeds were sown of what was to become Continental Clothing, one of the first T-shirt companies to introduce and wholesale women’s Tshirts into the promotional industry.

It was the heady days of ‘Madchester’ - the Stone Roses, Acid House, raves and big baggy Tshirts were heavy on the scene. Fruit of the Loom Tshirts were then called ‘Screen Stars’ and Gildan Activewear was just a glint in an executive’s eye.

By pure chance, in 1992 I had landed a job in a small record company in London’s famous ‘Tin Pan Alley’ called Acid House Records, owned and managed by sharply dressed Mods, who celebrated all things retro and cool.

The guy who looked after the ‘merchandise’ was an unlikely and very likable character called Mark Cushty, who wore Levis stay press jeans, and had a hair cut much like the early Beatles. His claim to fame in this account was that he came across some genuine 70s stock of plain white fitted interlock women’s T-shirts in an old warehouse in the East End of London. He bought a few hundred, printed some band names on the front of them, and he had himself a cool and retro merchandise range, circa 1966.

Six months later, I took over running the merchandise company, aged 23, essentially because nobody from the ‘cool’ record company wanted to work in our windowless basement on Gray’s Inn Road where the T-shirts were printed and stored. And then it happened, just like that, the catalyst that was to change the unisex promotional garment industry – the 70s stock of fitted tees simply dried up.

It was now June 1994. I and my school friend and co-worker, Paul Hughes, who like me, had migrated to London, decided upon a radical venture: we would manufacture and sell our own women’s fitted T-shirts.We went to the library on Gray’s Inn Road, and leafed through a telephone directory. A few days later, we were on a National Express coach from London to the manufacturing town of Derby to visit a number of garment factories. Settling on one, Paul and I each invested £1,000 (all we had) into a new company bank account, and on July 19, 1994, we placed our first order for 1,000 white fitted T-shirts at £1.15 each.

We kept them in a small room we hired on the ground floor – our first step up in the world.We didn’t own a computer, or a fax, or a telephone, but we began selling the T-shirts to one or two friends in bands as gig merchandise.We had only three customers when we then tried to repeat our success by adding more colours, black, navy and red.

I was a good friend with a young woman called Jacqui Bracey, who worked for a company who did lots of T-shirt printing for bands. Paul and I decided that we should offer her a partnership, so in January 1995 she joined us, and during the next three months introduced our T-shirts to all the bands she knew, and sales rocketed (from three to about 20 customers).

Having experienced such success in such a short space of time, I decided to concentrate full time on our fledgling company and resigned from Acid House Records.We moved our stock of 20-odd boxes into Jacqui’s spare bedroom in Archway Road N7, and I started working from there.We were already working with screen printers in London such as Fifth Column and Things, among others, mainly selling black and white fitted tees and the newly designed fitted baseball T-shirts for women.

Working full time to find new customers I went to the reference library in Central London and photocopied all the yellow pages listings of T-shirt printers (there was no internet). Then I hand wrote their addresses onto envelopes and sent them our first ‘one-page’ catalogue.

Our next step up was when we first exhibited our fitted T-shirts at the Printwear & Promotion exhibition in March 1996. ‘Jacks’ was then the ‘big T-shirt company’ and very few people really took notice of our little fitted T-shirts.

Thereafter, every year, we added new women’s T-shirt styles to our collection, and introduced new concepts to the promotional industry such as women’s underwear and women’s hooded sweatshirts. Being a very small niche company, we were able to experiment, adapt quickly and pick up on new ideas.

After the first five years of exhibiting at the exhibition, and marketing in the Printwear & Promotion magazine, garment decorators started to take notice. Other women’s T-shirt styles started appearing in multi-brand garment distributor’s catalogues, and the women’s wear sector of the promotional industry started to grow quickly. This has accelerated rapidly in the last five years, with every company battling to establish themselves in this highly competitive sector. The result is the proliferation of women’s activewear and apparel of every shape and style imaginable, which you see filling the pages of distributor catalogues.

Where Paul and I started out in 1994 with a onesize fitted T-shirt in four colours, we now have a 120-page catalogue, containing 68 styles, 118 different colours and six sizes, and that’s just Continental Clothing.

18 months ago, I left the UK to establish Continental Clothing in the USA. I now live in New York, and manage the company from there, courtesy of a wireless broadband connection and the Internet - something else that was unthinkable twelve years ago.

Philip Charles Gamett is the director of Continental Clothing Company Ltd, This article recounts his personal experiences only. He can be contacted at: phil@continental-usa.com

Printer friendly version

Email this article to a friend

Bookmark this

---