At Spreadshirt, Global Demand Turns Tee-Shirts Into a Middle-Market Business

Boston – If you think running a tee-shirt printing company is strictly a mom-and-pop operation, you haven’t spoken to Philip Rooke, CEO of Spreadshirt, an e-commerce platform that produces custom tees and accessories on demand.

Some 46,000 virtual shops operated by designers, celebrities and brand names order their tee-shirts, mobile phone covers, tote bags and other marketing and sales items from Spreadshirt’s inventory of 140 different products and 2000 color schemes and sizes.
Founded in Leipzig, Germany, Spreadshirt opened its first U.S. office and factory in 2007. Rooke came aboard in 2009, when revenue was about $30 million a year but the company hadn’t reached profitability. Under his leadership Spreadshirt has tripled in size in the past four years and U.S. sales today represent 40 percent of its worldwide revenue.

“Unfortunately, I think we’ll miss the $100 million target that I wanted for this year by two or three million, which is frustrating,” Rooke says. “We expect this business to keep accelerating. In fact, I am in Boston now working with my U.S. sales team and marketing team about how we become essentially a $200 million business within the next three years.”

Rooke says the No. 1 topic of the company’s management conversations at the moment are “What are the most important things we have to do to change the business for the customers in order to make it better? And what things are we not going to do so that we actually have more time to achieve those things?” Once you concentrate on that one thing you are going to do, he says, “You can really achieve something.”

Within the first three months of Rooke’s stewardship he reorganized his employee groups so that they would do fewer things better and have more resources – primed by $12.7 million from two London venture capital firms, Kennet LLC and Accel Partners.

When Rooke arrived Spreadshirt was supporting six or seven different types of virtual online shops that gave customers access to ordering through Facebook, other social media, even through the client’s own website. Each shop had its own technology and maintenance requirements. Spreadshirt technicians have now devised a unified code and technology that should be running within six months.
“We’ll be maintaining only one [set of code],” he says, so the maintenance and development work will ease and “we can concentrate on making our system and as effective as we can.”

Rooke says he used his previous experience at one of Britain’s largest grocery chains to refocus the nature of Spreadshirt’s business. He recalls that when new managers took over Tesco, they didn’t look at what competing grocery chains were doing or spend time on new ideas. “They actually went out and asked the customers what is it you want, why do you like using us and what is it we can do to actually make this [company] work for you?” he explained. “If you get that right, it’s one of the easiest jobs in the world. You ask your customers what they want and you give it to them.”

Talking to customers, Rooke’s team found that they wanted more than just tee-shirts, they wanted other wearable and portable items as well. “So now, because our customers wanted it, we’ve had to learn how to manufacture and print mobile phone cases and bags and other things that people carry with them,” he says.

But supplying the world with custom tee-shirts remains Spreadshirt’s stock in trade. The company even sells American-made tee shirts to China.

Among Spreadshirt’s leading clients is George Takei’s (Star Trek’s helmsman Mr. Sulu) popular logo themed tee-shirt business on Amazon.com. Spreadshirt fills the orders in most cases within three to four working days, handles customer service and oversees the transactions. Then, Rooke says succinctly, “we send him his share of the profits.”