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Startup Business Perseverance: Rich Keppler

 

Rick Keppler’s Story: Selling “message” t-shirts is almost the definition of entrepreneurial opportunism. Jump on whatever’s hot and you can ply hundreds, thousands or even millions of shirts.

Rick Keppler was a commercial artist when he started Brew City to sell promotional t-shirts to Milwaukee tourists. And over the last 20 years, by staying attuned to pop culture and following their guts, he and his sons, Frank and George, have turned their “side” project into a $2 million retail business.

T-shirts came to mind, in 1986, when Rick tried to think of how to monetize the hundreds of thousands of people who lined the streets of Milwaukee each summer to see the spectacular Circus Parade. He rented a kiosk in the downtown Milwaukee mall for $700 a month and started peddling t-shirts and other apparel tied to local events, sports teams such as pro baseball’s Brewers, and brands including Miller beer.

Over the years, Brew City has been in and out of several metro-Milwaukee malls. Recently, Rick and sons decided to pare back to their original mall store in order to focus on originating t-shirt designs and supplying them wholesale to major trendy retailers.

“We’ll come up with some clever lines and tie them into a popular graphic and do a quick turnaround,” Rick explains. “We conceive something, send it to a client and then print their shirts within a couple of weeks. We have to pick up on what’s out there and do a quick turnaround. We’re hoping to create the next hula hoop.”

The trio plan on pushing their ideas out to retailers faster and responding even more quickly, a strategy that has generated hopes that Brew City could reach $5 million in sales in 2006. “One idea could take it to there or beyond, overnight,” he says. “You’ve just got to find the right hook.”

Rick’s Key Move: Trying, and Trying Again

There’s little mystery to the “shirt” part of the message t-shirt business. The trick is in what image or words to put on the shirt. Rick, Frank and George have demonstrated enough creativity over the years to stay ahead in this game.

But the real key, Rick says, is that they don’t give up on their “messages” just because they may not get a great reception at the start. Like many a determined entrepreneur, the Kepplers have pushed ahead through marketplace rejection, difficulties with their wholesale customers, wrong sales venues, bad timing and the other vagaries that can afflict a startup. And like Rocky, they’re still standing!

In Rick’s case, if he and his sons are absolutely sure that the marketplace ultimately will recognize their wisdom and that consumers will want t-shirts that bear a particular idea, they’ll try, and try, and try again until they succeed. And after all of this tenacity, if they still can’t get traction for a particular idea, only then will they jump to something else and put their shoulders behind that.

“I never doubt myself,” Rick says. “And usually, in one way or another, the market ends up validating what I’ve been saying or promoting.”

Rick’s “sticktuitiveness” is especially remarkable considering that Brew City’s typical ideas for t-shirts are the kind that will automatically alienate vast swaths of the marketplace. The cutting-edge subjects of the shirts tend to be “bad-boy” themes like alcohol, sex and decidedly non-politically correct slogans.

His first really controversial idea, for example, came to him in 1998: Why not produce t-shirts like the government-issue ones that prisoners might wear? Or, for that matter, how about making orange jump suits that look exactly like what jailbirds wear into and out of court?

Rick didn’t get any takers when he displayed his jail-wear idea at the national industry trade show, Magic, that year. But the prison-themed gear succeeded so well locally that a man in one of Rick’s jump suits was arrested on a city bus because passengers feared he had escaped from the county jail. Rick got national publicity on that.

And so the Kepplers went to Magic in 1999 with new determination to create a market for their jail-wear. Guess what? Other novelty-apparel companies already had beaten them to the punch and were showing their own jail-wear at the show, before Brew City had a chance to establish its own product line nationally.

From that experience, Rick and his sons took away a conviction that they were pretty good at coming up with t-shirt ideas that resonated with the popular culture – and that they shouldn’t give up on themes that they deemed worthy.

So the next year, they took shirts to Magic that bore the logo “Pabst,” a defunct Milwaukee-brewed brand. At the show, buyers skipped past the Brew City booth. But then after the show, a buyer for Urban Outfitters, the hip apparel retailer, ordered some Pabst shirts. They quickly proved such a big hit in Urban Outfitters stores that Brew City was able to sell the chain “Blatz” and “Schlitz” stuff as well.

“Suddenly, almost every single retailer who had turned us down started calling us,” Rick says.

Nowadays, Rick doesn’t get flustered at all when a theme his company has concocted doesn’t take off immediately. They still come up with some clunkers, such as a complete line of t-shirts for “teams” in a mythical, nationwide “Rollergirl” league similar to that in the like-named reality-TV show; the show tanked, and so did the shirts.

But they have found great success through Urban Outfitters with their Sensitive Guy theme, and even with licensed merchandise that bears the Trojan condom brand. “It doesn’t have to be dirty,” he says. “The ideas just have to be clever.”

And now, Rick is looking for some politically charged issues to exploit with t-shirts. “Right now, I’d love a good tagline that has to do with Mexican immigration to America – without being offensive to either side,” he says. “If I do, I’ll sell a lot of them.”

Rick’s Bonus Insight

From the perspective of 20 years as a small-time retailer, Rick is finally souring on having his own Brew City outlets. However, he’s very bullish about expanding his wholesale business.

“Retail isn’t a good place to be right now because mall-startup stores are having a hard time,” Rick says. “Rents have skyrocketed. Meanwhile, there are a variety of other places that people can go to buy things, like the internet. And [retail] will get a lot worse before it will ever get better.”