For the next year we barely survived by selling “private label” shirts to a chain of young men’s stores named Jeans West. We’d sell Jeans West a quarter million shirts and make between 05 and 10 cents a shirt. Needless to say we weren’t exactly rolling in cash. Then, one day a buddy who used to be a buyer at Eddie Bauer introduced us to a guy who wanted us to “knock off” a fly fishing shirt. When Rick and I saw the shirt I remember saying “Is this the best that the fly fishing market has to offer?” Let’s make fly fishing shirts! And, so we did. This single idea became our company’s most important pivot.
Would making fly fishing, outdoor shirts finally give ExOfficio its much sought after reason for being? Although ExOfficio’s pivot to fly fishing and the Outdoor industry was game saving, it wasn’t going to be our last! We quickly realized guys who were doing outdoor activities around the world often needed dual purpose clothes that were functional and also looked good while doing other things. While presenting our clothing line at the outdoor industry’s trade show called Outdoor Retailer, we had an appointment with a former LL Bean buyer I knew who was starting a travel wear catalog called Travel Smith. After he left, Rick and I simultaneously agreed that ExOfficio was really about “adventure travel” clothing and we decided right then and there that’s how we would market our brand. There it was, our second major pivot.
Here comes our next slap in the face! When we told the buyer for our largest account, the outdoor store REI, that we were going to market ExOfficio as adventure travel clothing, he said, “What’s that?” Our realization was that when you are the first to create a new clothing category, it isn’t always readily accepted! But fortunately, we persevered. Since we began designing for adventure travel, no one ever said to us again that we looked the same as so and so. Now, other lines began to copy ExOfficio’s look and feel. We finally had a real “reason for being.”
One day we were showing the same REI buyer a new sun protective shirt we created utilizing a sun protective technology first developed in Australia and a similar technology Rick discovered in China. The shirt Rick designed had amazing UPF protective properties. At the time, REI was carrying a sun protective shirt that was not even close to being the same quality of our shirt. Rick and I just assumed the REI buyer would buy our sun protective shirt over the competition’s. Now here comes our next slap in the face; the REI buyer told us that although our shirt was clearly a better garment, the other company was doing a great job of marketing their shirt and he would continue buying it over ours. This moment provided the realization that in order for ExOfficio to grow, we had to transition from being a product driven company into a lifestyle and marketing driven company. After researching about who our customer was and what they did, this pivot was the next foundational step eventually leading to a successful sale of ExOfficio.