My Old Boss Yelled at Me Because of T-shirts

My old boss yelled at me because of t-shirts.

This is how the Salvation Army ended up with hundreds of t-shirts from our first “failed” business.

This was probably one of the dumbest things we did.

Shortly after college, I had just started at Shredz

Ron was still working at Deloitte.

We lived together, and we would be really, really bored all day.

We would always scheme up different business ideas.

Just stuff we could work on.

This was a really cool learning experience.

Just like every great entrepreneur,

You sell graphic t-shirts at some point in your life.

(hopefully earlier than later)

But we were designing these t-shirts, and we got really, really in-depth with it.

We had hang tags, the custom tag inside the collar that prints,

Not just some champion t-shirt that you're printing on.

The coolest part about this business was I learned a little bit of how manufacturing works.

The twist on these t-shirts

(because everybody selling graphic t-shirts)

Was that we were going to put them in these really cool bottles.

I mocked up these see through bottles where we would roll the shirts up and put them in there,

Kind of like this capsule.

The business name was Tunnul.

These were kind of like a tunnel shape, but we got really intricate with it.

They had this frosted frosted matte finish,

Really bright green, kind of a lime green look to it.

And honestly, the packaging was just super cool.

People really loved it.

Anyways, we built this thing up.

We did these little content shoots in our living room.

We hired models one time to wear all our stuff.

You know, get content for the website.

It was basic business stuff that you would do to launch any brand,

but this is also prior to us EVER launching any brand.

I created a 3D render of the bottle in Cinema 4D at the time.

I didn't really know how the process works.

I hit up some manufacturer on Alibaba who did custom packaging,

And sent him the mold and the look of the bottle.

I still think it’s pretty cool.

They sent some samples back.

Obviously, it took forever because it was coming from China.

We went back and forth a few times on the quality, color, etc.

Once they were ordered, we had all these bottles shipped to our apartment building.

The building was NOT very happy

Because one day we just got like 100 boxes of these.

We stored them all in our apartment.

Just boxes everywhere, all over everything, all over the apartment.

Anyways, long story short,

We obviously were not in digital marketing at the time.

I had just started working at Shredz,

So I didn't really have a grasp for it.

I was just a designer and Ron was an accountant.

We did this for only a couple of months.

We would get back from our day jobs and turn our living room into a whole office workstation.

We had these really nice desks. We got monitors.

So every day after our day jobs,

We’d just come home and start working on this.

It was the first website that I built other than doing them in school.

It was the first ecom website I built on Shopify.

I don't think it's still up.

(I hope I'm not paying for it still)

The reason we stopped doing this was

Obviously, we weren't getting a lot of sales besides our friends and family.

Which we didn't really mind because we just wanted something to do.

The MAIN reason we stopped doing it was because my boss at Shredz saw it...

It was kind of petty of them.

They called me into their office one day and pretty much started yelling at me about starting the business.

Shredz is a supplement business.

This had nothing to do with supplements,

At all.

It was just kind of a side hustle we were doing.

To this day, I think that was pretty wrong

Because we encourage all of our employees to do stuff, build stuff and we'll support it!

As long as they're not directly competing with us.

But that wasn't the case here.

They said that it was taking time away from work and other things.

And even though I was working like a dog anyway,

I came home pretty disappointed.

They said to shut it down.

And so I called Ron and he was pretty disappointed too,

I think it is one of those businesses where we put a lot of time into the detail of everything.

It wasn't just your standard,

“Hey, we print these shirts and sell them.”

I think we got maybe even too detailed by getting custom shirts, custom packaging, etc.

But still a cool learning experience.

We ended up filling up all the bottles with t-shirts and dropped them off at the Salvation Army.

I always wondered if I’d see a Tunnul shirt out in the wild some day.