Ryan Moor, CEO & Founder, Ryonet & Allmade Apparel: How Sustainable Apparel Becomes Good Business
Mar 1, 2022
It started with a punk-rock band in Seattle in the 90’s and a kid who had a knack for screen printing t-shirts from his bedroom. That entrepreneurial start led to the launch of ScreenPrinting.com in 2004 which generated $8 million in revenues in under three years. As his business grew so did Ryan, as a successful business owner and social change agent. Through Allmade he is now reimagining what eco-friendly, socially conscious apparel and printing looks like and challenging the biggest brands in the world to buy more responsibly, to make sure everyone in the supply chain is fairly paid fairly, and to ensure the clothing we wear each day gives back to those in greatest need.
This episode of Lead With We was produced and edited by Goal 17 Media and is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Audible. You can also watch episodes on YouTube at WeFirstTV.
Guest Bio
Ryan Moor, CEO and Founder, Ryonet and Allmade
Ryan Moor, cEo (Chief Entrepreneur Officer), connector, maker of dreams, a builder helping people build things. Ryan found his niche screenprinting shirts for his punk rock band which turned entrepreneurial when he built an early version of ScreenPrinting.com in his bedroom in 2004. Fueled by ecommerce and YouTube first-mover success, the website rocketed to over 8 million in revenues in under three years helping thousands start and learn a screen-printing business. From there Ryan started to vertically integrate the company adding manufacturing of manual screen printing equipment and supplies which helped grow the company to 20 million of revenue by the end of 2010. The next decade was spent adding entrepreneurial ventures which included becoming the US Distributor of ROQ Automated Screen Printing Equipment and starting Allmade Apparel, a socially conscious eco-friendly blank apparel manufacturer. In 2020 he led the transformation of the company’s structure to create integral partnerships to scale each area of the business splitting off Allmade and ROQ.US into their joint ventures. Today Ryan spends time traveling to build relationships and ideas for each company and continues his entrepreneurial ventures as a partner of MADELab.io an apparel development and decorator education platform.
Transcription
Simon Mainwaring:
From We First and Goal 17 Media, welcome to Lead With We. I’m Simon Mainwaring. And today I’m joined by Ryan Moor who started printing t-shirts for his punk rock band, and now is founder and CEO of Ryonet and Allmade Apparel, a socially conscious, eco-friendlier apparel line that he’s with a group of pioneering printers committed to better serving the planet and ending the cycle of poverty in apparel supply chains. And we’ll discuss how to identify a marketplace need and stand out in a crowded space like apparel, and how to leverage partnerships to scale your business without compromising your integrity, and how to disrupt an industry so that rising market forces build your business for you. Ryan, welcome to Lead With We.
Ryan Moor:
Hey Simon, thank you so much for having me. Great to be on.
Simon Mainwaring:
Ryan, that’s quite the journey. So let’s start at the beginning. Tell me, you left high school and punk rock band. Were you any good? How’d it go? Tell us a bit about that.
Ryan Moor:
I think it’s all young musicians’ dream to make it, my idols were Blink-182 and Green Day, so they were huge. So we sounded probably similar between the two of those two bands in the late ’90s, early 2000s. I learnt how to screen print shirts because we had our first concert, actually, had a class in high school, I think it was part of the home ec course. And my teacher failed that part of my course because I was learning with a hand cut stencil, kind of archaic mode of screen printing and cut my hands open, got blood on the shirt. So we weren’t a death metal band, so the blood on the shirt didn’t work out, but-
Simon Mainwaring:
But that’s so authentic, the blood on the shirt, that’s the original screen print, but yes.
Ryan Moor:
Yeah, it wasn’t an actual screen print. So he let me come back after school and print again before our first show. And it was amazing to see that design, the name of our band was not long after that design kind of pop up on a shirt and people actually buy them and then wear them at school the next day. So that led to, about four years after high school, chasing the punk rock dream.
Ryan Moor:
And I think as an entrepreneur, being in a band is probably the best form of education. I always say I went to the university of rock and roll because, think about it, you have to learn business, you have to learn self promotion, you have to learn how to talk. You have to not care if you’re performing in front of 2000 people or in front of the bartender who’s booing you because you got booked at a heavy metal bar or biker bar, and you’re, basically, of a pop punk boy band. And so, it teaches you a lot about business, and a lot about life, and putting yourself out there and not being afraid to fail. So I’m really glad I got that experience and it led me into the actual world of business and doing it from a little bit more, I guess you would say, new school way of doing things as a pretty young person, I started in business at 23.
Simon Mainwaring:
It’s really interesting what you say, a pop punk boy band. I mean, what a great kind of platform to become an entrepreneur. As you say, you’ve got to wear all hats, whether you like it or not. And so, how did that kind of evolve into what Ryonet became? I know you started doing classes for other printers and it suddenly became a business, it took on a life of its own.
Ryan Moor:
Yeah. I never really wanted to be a screen printer and never thought that even starting a screen print supply company would be in the cards, wanted to do the music thing, but I think always wanting to not have to work a nine-to-five job, set me onto an entrepreneurial path, and even with our band, we did all of our own self promotion, a lot of our own records. We had a record label towards the end, but we did a lot of it ourselves kind of DIY ethos. And so, other bands in that same genre would be like, “Hey, that’s awesome. You guys do your own shirts, you make your own merch, can you show me how to do that?”
Ryan Moor:
So we eventually started selling, as a business opportunity, selling other bands the ability to make their own shirts, which then led to starting an eBay store, which led to my dad asking me to go to an internet marketing seminar and how to build your own online commerce business, kind of like a really, really archaic version of Shopify back in 2004, which led to starting a business that was called Ryonet and now is Ryonet, screenprinting.com. It is the largest screen printing supply website in world, which was awesome.
Ryan Moor:
I think the screen printing process is a very creative process. A lot of people start in that process through music, but at that time, it was a very interesting part of the industry and learning a lot about the apparel industry now, being apparel manufacturer, the decoration and the apparel industry really came in into its own right here in the US, and it was really driven by art and music and then sports kind of piggybacked on that through the ’70s and ’80s, and it became a thing, and then it became a worldwide thing, and then it became a thing that got outsourced.
Ryan Moor:
And so, when I got into it, we were through that first wave of outsourcing. The first thing to get outsourced really was the garment and the printer, the mass print house. And so, it was a really negative industry, but looking at it through the lens of entrepreneurship and through punk rock, we kind of put a different spin on it and put a lot new life into it. And really, over the past, we’ve been in business now for 18 years, have insourced a lot of that production back into smaller businesses versus the large print houses that were back in the day.
Simon Mainwaring:
No, it’s really interesting that you sort of stepped into this instinctively. I mean, you’ve got to tell me what is the biggest glaring gap in your knowledge when you started out where you’re like, “Oh my God, how did I miss this? This really hurt us and took us. It was a hard lesson to learn.”
Ryan Moor:
P&Ls.
Simon Mainwaring:
P&LS, yeah.
Ryan Moor:
Profit and loss statements. And ironically, we never lost money, but it just was knowing how to run a business and where your money was coming from, how to invest in things. I think a lot of small business owners, they look at that side and just like it comes after, and then knowing how to do business at a bigger level now, I wish I would’ve known a little bit more about that starting out. But made some beautiful mistakes and they all end up working. We always are only a part road that we came from, so always grateful for that.
Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah, you’re right, beautiful mistakes. I mean, it’s the right mindset to have because no one escapes in their entrepreneurial journey. We’ve got a lot of entrepreneurs, social enterprises listening to the podcast, what advice would you give somebody who wants to start a company? They have that instinct. What would be the piece of advice you’d give them that really made the biggest difference to Ryonet?
Ryan Moor:
There’s a lot. There’s always the cliche advice of do something that doesn’t feel like work or you’re passionate about. I think that finding a unique way to serve a market and an industry, and a way to communicate the channel is so important. When starting a new business now it’s like finding the channel of what you’re communicating from a marketing perspective and what you’re selling and making sure that that channel’s not too crowded. We’ve had a lot of people try to compete with us, both on the screenprinting.com side and the Ryonet side, screenprinting.com, or the Allmade side, now that we’re in the blank apparel business. And without that unique way to talk, and then the unique way to back that talking with a sale of something, then you’re in a much more crowded space, the blue ocean concept, you’re in a much redder ocean.
Simon Mainwaring:
And so, that journey from punk rock band to having a successful business like Ryonet, that doesn’t automatically point to doing good, a socially conscious, eco-conscious business. How did that come about? I mean, how did Allmade start? And was that something that you always felt was part of who you were, or when you saw a need, did you show up differently? How did that journey begin?
Ryan Moor:
It’s a great question. And it happened, the foundation was laid very young in my career, we weren’t even a year in business. I started in the first quarter of 2004, and in January 31st, 2005, my brother was killed in a car accident just like that. I was at work. It happens, the people were working with me at the time, they’re still at the company today and they were all there. For anyone who’s ever gone through loss or a tragic loss of somebody really close to you, that was impactful. And he was a mission-driven guy. I know I was kind of the black sheep the family, didn’t go to college, didn’t have a career path, was a punk rocker, didn’t kind of follow the way I was raised up, but he definitely did.
Ryan Moor:
And so, reading his journals and what he wrote about life, and God, and a bigger purpose, and processing that loss. I mean the first year, I just poured everything into the business. It was like the personal side and life was just a blur and everything was focused on the business. But coming out of that blur, it was like, “What’s this all for?” And so, he had a big purpose in life, and I kind of took a lot, in a different way, a lot of what he did about caring for people.
Ryan Moor:
There was something that he wrote in a journal that… he was very religious and believed in a higher God and everything of that nature, I take a little bit more grandiose view of it. But he wrote down something that was very impactful for me, said that in the Bible, I can’t remember the verse, in that it says nothing shall pass between earth and heaven, you can only go with your soul or whatever, you can’t take worldly possessions with you. And he’s like, “Oh, I don’t necessarily believe that’s true because people pass. And so I choose to spend my time here with people showing their love, and showing them purpose and meaning in life.” And that was a really big thing. I thought that if you could do that through business, starting out with your team and your community, and then going into your supply chain, that can mean something. And a business can really affect a lot of people in a beautiful way.
Ryan Moor:
And so that’s kind of where the seeds were planted. It took a lot of processing and a lot of development out of that, dealing with anger, and issues from that experience, and just growing up, I was young. And so it wasn’t really until I became father five years later that it started to click in a different sense.
Simon Mainwaring:
It is interesting how kids kind of heighten that awareness of the need to play a more purpose role, but firstly, so sorry for the loss of your brother. And so, obviously, you’re in the apparel business, you’d had this successful screen printing business, but that doesn’t necessarily inspire everyone to go and retool, and launch a new business, and take on the industry, and try and do things differently. So why Allmade, why Haiti? How did that come about?
Ryan Moor:
Yeah, the title that I kind of go by now as CEO. Simon Sinek is a great a job, what does a E do? What’s an executive do? You have the CFO, the finance officer, you have the COO, the operating officer, what’s the E. I think in a book, he made a pitch for like, you should be the vision officer, or you should be. And I think that E for me stands for entrepreneur because that is a core part of a business, it’s not great… You have to be entrepreneurial as a business, even an old business, new business, you got to find a way. Old businesses have to find a way to do it successfully too, just like new businesses have to find a way to be successful being an entrepreneur. And so being an entrepreneur, being always entrepreneurial, looking for new opportunities.
Ryan Moor:
We basically built out the supply chain. The first 10 years of business was really about finding that niche and then building a supply chain that made it work. So we vertically integrated our business from making the screens, to making the equipment that people print on, to manufacturing ink and eco- friendly chemicals and we took it away. We had eco-friendly concept of it because not researching the apparel side, just the printing side, it’s a very wasteful industry. We use a lot of water, there’s a lot of waste. The main ink that we print on in the US is called all plastisol, so it’s made of petroleum and plastic, doesn’t feel great, there’s a lot of crappy shirts because the prints are so bad on them, they get thrown away or used as towels.
Ryan Moor:
So we had an eco-friendly part of Ryonet screenprinting.com. After about our 10 year anniversary, which we made a really cool 10-year anniversary video. And one of the pillars in that video was we want to create a greener industry. And so, starting water-based print lines, and chemicals made from soy base and from citrus-based enzymes versus petroleum or solvent base was really a way to do that.
Ryan Moor:
And I think that one of my mentors in screen printing that kind of helped that come to reality, he taught me a lot about the printing process and probably the person I learned the most about the physical part of printing. And he had a lot of health issues from the chemicals that he was exposed to throughout the last 30 years, 40 years of printing. They used to use very harsh solvents and he always used to say like, “Screen printers that have been printing for like 34 years, aren’t all there.” But it’s literally the fumes and everything they were building. And he, unfortunately, had a really bad, he had a whole drum of chemical spill on him, which really affected him long-term and ended up damaging his liver to the point of which he had some liver problems and didn’t end up making it.
Ryan Moor:
And so, that was another catalyst for me of like, “Hey, we can do this better.” And the next generation, my kids, myself, I don’t want to be one of those people that had to experience those types of chemicals and stuff.” So eco-friendly was a huge part about it and then the shirt itself is another thing. When you’re helping people, we’ve helped over 100,000 people start and successfully grow a screen printing business, and they’re all printing shirts. So being an entrepreneur is like, “Oh, looking at that shirt, maybe we could make that one day.” And the way that Allmade was started, the seed was like, “Maybe we could make a shirt, maybe we can make a better shirt that could be more eco-friendly.”
Simon Mainwaring:
But does the world need another t-shirt company? How did you-
Ryan Moor:
It did not.
Simon Mainwaring:
… think that you could do something differently? I mean, it seemed like, as you said, a blank is just a blank t-shirt, you’re in the blank business, there are so many t-shirt manufacturers out there, what made you think that you could do it differently? Was it the sustainability side of it?
Ryan Moor:
No, and that’s why we didn’t do it for so long is because, A, there were so many of them out there and B, I didn’t really do the research on how expensive it would be to start and how hard it would be to start. I just knew it would be expensive and hard. I just knew that we could focus on other areas that were not as competitive, or costly to get into and be successful doing it, which we did. And it wasn’t really until I met a nonprofit called a Global Orphan Project, that we really learned a lot about the orphan cycle of abandonment, and the fact that, hey, we started out going to areas of the world that had orphans and we started, like everyone else, creating orphanages, and then we really realized that “Wait a minute, 80% of the orphans in a lot of these areas are not orphans, they’re not true orphans, they’re economic orphans. They have people that could take care of them, they just don’t have the means to do that.” So [crosstalk 00:15:49]-
Simon Mainwaring:
So people actually give up their kids to an orphanage because they can’t provide for them?
Ryan Moor:
And I never knew that, not knowing that. I mean, my family was religious and you see these things in church growing up, like, “Okay, let’s give money.” And you see these commercials and it’s always from that side and so, you’re… I even went on a couple of mission trips in high school to orphanages and didn’t realize that. And so, realizing that, they started to try to create a platform that could create jobs, that could create an economy around a community to not have to give the kids up or implant better knowledge for the next generation to do things differently. And so, through schooling and then through job creation, they changed their purpose from global orphan care to orphan prevention. And one of the things they started to do in Haiti specifically, was to make garments.
Ryan Moor:
And it was actually a very interesting story that they got into that side of it. But they started making garments, they started doing it in a way that paid what they call living wages or responsible wages, which was, at that time, about five times what a normal garment worker would make. And then they also started a school to teach this trade to kids that were coming through this orphan system. And they asked me five times to go to Haiti and never had the time or really the desire to do that. And they actually ended up becoming a customer of ours on one of our businesses that sells high-end automatic equipment called Rock. And that equipment was a very expensive purchase for them. They had a living wage, not orphan prevention, but they took criminals and took kind of rehabilitated criminals and homeless in Kansas City as one of their missions. And so, as part of that, they did a screen-printing business there. So they would make the shirts in Haiti and then they would print them in Kansas City. And I basically made a bet with them that said, “Hey, if you invest this in us, I’ll invest this in you.”
Simon Mainwaring:
So you were still playing at it, kind of keeping them at arm’s length and not sure if you’re going to dive in or not?
Ryan Moor:
Yeah, and they were the ones that made the first investment. And so, having that reason, really things always work out for a reason. And going to Haiti for the first time, I ended up taking my wife and my two oldest kids, who at the time, they were five. And just seeing the privilege that my kids have and the opportunities that they have versus the future generation that was being raised in these orphanages in Haiti or these group care facilities in Haiti and then seeing the fact that they could go to a trade school and that literally we could create something through our industry, through our hundreds of thousands of customers that were already printing shirts, that could affect lives and they could give them opportunities that my kids just got for granted being an American citizen and being raised in Washington State. And so, that was the catalyst. And all those seeds that led from my brother to being aN entrepreneur, to being in this industry, all happened in a way to want start to Allmade or an apparel company.
Simon Mainwaring:
Isn’t it funny, when you look back at your entrepreneurial journey, all of these markers along the way inform where you end up, but you only get the benefit of hindsight later on and you go, “Oh my gosh, of course, this all makes sense.” But I also know that Allmade is a coalition of printers and you brought together partners in the industry, how did that come about? It’s an interesting sort of collaborative model.
Ryan Moor:
Yeah, so Haiti, I think is one of the hardest or the worst slave importers in the Americas. And it was French-owned and they literally imported, and the average life of a slave there was less than two years, very bad. And so, being there and understanding that side and then researching, there’s two things that really came out of that experience is, A, the coalition of the abolition of slavery was founded ironically in a print shop in England and there was 12 founding members of that. And then the Global Orphan Project and also with my background in religion and the Bible, the Global Orphan Project is a religious organization, and the idea of 12 apostles that basically spread this message.
Ryan Moor:
And so, it’s like, “Whoa, wait a minute, one of the things that was really hard for me to get over starting a business is, how are we going to do it?” And taking that whole burden on yourself is really the barrier of doing that, and having the reason to do that, in Haiti being there like, “I’m going to do it, but how.” And then figuring out, “Wait, what if I just found 12 customers, that would do this with me? And they could become our first customers, they would buy the first lots of shirts that came off the line.” And then that started a different business model that I have never seen before, and not even very many times since of starting a business with your customers, it was really interesting. And it was a big feat, we invested in, first of all, finding them, creating a pitch deck, giving the story, and then going around throughout the country.
Ryan Moor:
I wanted a very diverse group of printers that were some men-owned, female-owned, LGBTQ, it’s like the whole breadth of this industry that we’re in from different lenses. So that we’d have a diverse group, people that could give us a different DNA. And so, finding those and then getting all of them to come to Haiti for the first time, was kind of the first challenge. And that took about four months to put together. We all ended up going to Haiti at the end of 2016 in what a lot of them will call the real world Haiti for screen printers, it was crazy because taking everyone outside their comfort zone, first of all, and then into a place, and trying to put this together, it’s so special how it all worked out.
Simon Mainwaring:
Yeah, before I come to the fibers and how you make a better t-shirt, what is that factory experience like? Is it your factory? Do you share it with someone else? And how do you address those human rights abuses that you talked about before? How do you make the experience for those workers that much better?
Ryan Moor:
Well, we are all very experimental, I mean experiential. There’s a concept in lean manufacturing called Go to the Gemba and it means go to the source. And there’s so many people that start just an apparel company and they just go to a broker and they buy this apparel that’s made in some factory they don’t even know and it’s coming from fibers that they don’t even know. So the first thing that we did is we went to the source, we went to the source of our fiber, the cotton fields in Texas. We went to the source of our recycled plastic in the Carolinas. We went to the source of where our fiber was turned into yarn in the Carolinas at Parkdale and the dye houses in the Carolinas. And how much energy did they use? Were we using eco-friendly dyes, were they using eco-friendly dyes, did they care?
Ryan Moor:
And then we went to Haiti. And we did that over the course of about 10 trips, over the course of the first two years of Allmade, we took about 10 trips throughout our supply chain to really know more about it. And then by knowing more about it, experiencing it, we’re like, “Okay, well, we could invest in this factory, or we could invest in this supply chain of yarn, or this supply chain of recycled plastic because we know, we’ve been there, we know how people are treated.”
Ryan Moor:
And it was not just in Haiti that we wanted to make sure we had good jobs, we wanted to make sure we had good jobs in the US too. So we basically started our supply chain in the US and in Haiti, we wanted a fairly closed supply chain so that we could get fabric made in the US to support US jobs and then get the fabric down to Haiti for cut and sew and then back here. But as far as factories go, and you can tell when a factory is good, first of all, just by how clean it is. And that goes for screen printers too, the best screen printing factories, the ones that have the most profitability and have the best culture and the longest retention of employees, are the ones that are the cleanest.
Ryan Moor:
And so, cleanliness, how people are treated inside, how safe it is, and then, what kind of certificates are they signing up for? Are they doing the bare minimum just to get by or are they actually going and getting certified above and beyond with a fair trade organization or with better work or some of the other organizations, they’re nonprofits that are investing in making sure that people have good supply chains. The number one thing is going there. And since then we’ve expanded our supply chain, we’re in Honduras now.
Ryan Moor:
We don’t manufacture in Haiti because Haiti’s been a very hard place to do business in over the last two years through the pandemic and with the government instability they have there, but we’re still involved there. We still are very involved in the community, we help people that we knew there, from security guards, to kids that we met at the schools and the orphanages, and then we’d love to manufacture there again someday as well. And then still support the life factory that we’re there through other areas of business, and then we’re also manufacturing in India as well. So we’ve expanded our supply chain, but that’s kind of the thing is go there, make sure it’s good and then follow that goodness up with how are they being responsible from a certified perspective?
Simon Mainwaring:
And let’s get back to that P&L that you talked about with Ryonet. This is where the rubber hits the road, is there a business in it? So talk to me about the type of t-shirts you made, I don’t know what cotton, polyester, you’ve got these different blends to make a better t-shirt, but also is it competitive from a price point of view and does the difference you in people’s lives and the supply chain, translate to value to the business and its bottom line?
Ryan Moor:
Yeah, so when we started in 2016, very commoditized, very price-driven, and a shirt that was comparable to the shirt… So we started making a couple of t-shirts. We wanted to make a cotton shirt, we wanted to make a blend shirt and we ended up wanting to make a tri-blend shirt because a tri-blend uses three fibers, it uses a tinsel or a cellulose fiber, which is moisture-wicking, it uses a polyester fiber, and it uses a cotton fiber and they typically sell for more. So we knew it was going to cost us more anyway, so we may as well play in a higher field. And then we wanted a cotton shirt because everyone uses cotton shirts. And we wanted to make high-end quality garments.
Ryan Moor:
So we didn’t start out 100% sustainable fibers, we used just US cotton, which is done in a more responsible way if it’s farmed in the US because of our EPA parameters, but it wasn’t organic at the beginning. And then we did an organic cotton that we used in our tri-blend shirt. So our tri-blend shirt was eco-friendly, was made from organic cotton, it was made from a cellulose fiber called modal, which is a tree fiber. If you think about the supply chain of how things grow, cotton needs a lot of water, it needs a lot of cultivation, trees pretty much just grow, they’re pretty resilient. So it uses about 6% of the environmental resource base by using a modal tree fiber versus using a cotton fiber. And then we used a recycled polyester versus just a virgin polyester.
Ryan Moor:
And so, that was a sustainable shirt. We launched with two shirts, the sustainable shirt went like this. People wanted it, they paid more for it. The non-sustainable shirt we discontinued in about six months, just because it wasn’t different enough. Back to that thing, it’s like, you have to have a different way of talking to people and you have to have a different way of selling to people. And so, trying to compete in a bloody market that wasn’t any different, yeah, we had this human story, but we didn’t have that environmental story. And that decision became a part of our DNA after that point in time.
Simon Mainwaring:
And it’s interesting, you were doing this from a purpose point of view and something very personal, but the market forces were rising to meet you. What we are noticing at We First is that the economies at scale are there now, where you can compete with these larger commodity alternatives, but increasingly, especially with younger demographics, they want to buy from companies that are doing good. They want to work for investing companies doing good. So those companies on the right side of history are being pushed forward.
Simon Mainwaring:
I was also fascinated by the way you tell that story, because a lot of purposeful companies, they do all the right things, but then how do they unlock the ROI of doing that at the return on investment? And I know you do QR codes and your labels, you’ve got cards that go in with your products, tell us about how you bring the impact to life when people buy your product, whether it’s a customer or whether it’s a consumer, so that you can get that return.
Ryan Moor:
If environmental product does not have a good story behind it and then it doesn’t have a way to tell that story on a kind of instantaneous level, it’s really hard to make that additional investment again, and again, and again. And so, people buy off convenience typically and so, if you’re not really creating a way for people to understand the impact of that convenience, then… And that’s where kind of the Fill Your Impact came from, which is our tagline. It’s like, “How do you really understand that impact?” And that really came from, we were working with an environmental club at a large university in the Northeast, I’m not going to say the name. And they were looking at several 100 of our shirts through one of our customers who was a screen-printer. And they decided to go with an alternative brand, also I’m not going to say the name. That was literally the worst shirt you could buy. I mean, it’s like they didn’t care about the supply chain of people, they didn’t care about the fibers they were made of, it is the cheapest shirt.
Ryan Moor:
And so, I was mind blown, because we like to highlight some of our prestigious customers, this would’ve been a prestigious customer, that we could highlight and tell the story of helping other people kind of to sway that direction. And he’s like, “Yeah, they just went with the cheapest options.” “Do I understand the impact of this? Wait a minute, let’s do the math, let’s figure this out.” So we kind of got a bunch of spreadsheets out and we started doing a bunch of research of why we chose these fibers, which you had. We had the water savings, we had the chemical savings, we had the labor supply chain savings or adding to people’s lives.” And so, we did the math on that. We came up with six areas of impact, five environmental, one humanitarian, and then we presented it to them and it was insane. This one order, you can go to Allmade.com/impact or click on the impact button of Allmade.com and you can do the math yourself. Plugin 200 shirts and it’s like tens of thousands of gallons of water, just a couple hundred shirts saves. And that’s just one of the impact factors.
Ryan Moor:
And so, seeing that was like… And I was kind of joking with them, for a commercial, what we should do is we should just take all this plastic, and all this water, and all this oil, and all these chemicals, I think this order has saved 54 gallons of chemicals. Let’s take 54 gallons of roundup and just dump it on their front lawn if they say, no. This is the impact of going with a cheaper shirt. And luckily we didn’t have to do that. Once they saw that they were like, “Oh my goodness, we’re in the environmental club, we have to go this better way.” But they didn’t understand that. So I think that was a huge connection point in our story of success to this day of that impact calculator, and seeing the impact of a purchase and really realizing, “Oh, that one decision can either save all this or spend and use all this, by just one decision.”
Simon Mainwaring:
Absolutely, I mean, I think that the big missing piece of the puzzle for so long, it’s just been the education piece. Consumers, customers couldn’t make an informed decision because they didn’t know the carbon footprint, the chemicals, the cost of what they were buying, the true cost, not only bottom line but also to the environment, to our future, and so on. And now we’re getting those tools in people’s hands and they’re making very, very different decisions, simply because they know. So one of the great opportunities for brands are I think today is really to level up the understanding of all stakeholders in their community so that everyone can disrupt the industry, but on the strength of their shared knowledge. And I know you have larger ambitions to disrupt the apparel industry and the supply chain all the way down through tier one, tier two, tier three, tier four, what’s the broader ambition, what’s the bold ambition you want to see for Allmade in the next 10 years?
Ryan Moor:
We’d love for Allmade to continue to be a brand name and be used by influencers that are telling this story. So we don’t want to be the number one shirt out there, we know that we’re probably never going to be the number one shirt out there, but we want the people that are important in those decisions to be using it, to use it as a platform to influence other brands to do better.
Ryan Moor:
And so, the rising tide lifts all ships and we’re not going to make every shirt out there, but if we can be a voice to influence other people to make better shirts. And then, by doing that… And COVID has actually been really good for our industry. It was really, really bad for our industry for three months, six months, horrible. We dropped 80% because all the events got canceled, the schools got canceled. But coming out of that, it changed the supply chain model, and we’ve seen a lot of inflation in garments and that has allowed us to re-level the expectation of where we’re paying.
Ryan Moor:
And so, looking at releasing a new fabric, it’s like, “Should we release this shirt for $4 or $5 on a wholesale level. And wait a minute, we could release it for $4 and still be profitable but if we lease it for $5, there’s going to be less pressure on us to negotiate with our factory. And when they need a raise, we’re going to have the money to give them the raise or we’re just going to proactively give them the raise to keep them happy and more productive.” And that’s the thing it’s like, if you add value into an industry and if you sell a product that has value into it, you’re not taking, you’re adding value throughout your entire supply chain and you’re not taking people. If you’re taking the person that negotiates the worst of everything, ends up they get shorted at the end of the day too because people who care less about the product they make because they’re getting haggled with to make it. And so, let’s not do that, let’s add value throughout the entire thing.
Ryan Moor:
And this actually shifted a lot. We were literally 50% more than competitive products, now we’re within 10-20% more than competitive products, the environmental responsible solution. And so, when that competitive product goes to make their next shirt, their next season, they’re going to look at it and say, “Hey, wait a minute, we have this brand out here, that is only selling for 10-15% more than us, but they’re using sustainable materials, maybe we should do that.”
Simon Mainwaring:
And the market forces are there now and they’re building momentum. And the more companies do it, the more companies Lead With We, the more companies lean into these purposeful practices, the more… It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, it builds, and then it rewards companies. I mean, part of all of this and clearly, you believe this as well, you’ve got to leverage partnerships to scale your impact. The partnership you formed with the other printers in the first place, through to I know you’ve got larger power of customer and people you work with like SanMar, help us understand how the partnership component has helped you scale your business?
Ryan Moor:
Well, that was part of the DNA from the beginning but wasn’t part of the DNA always because we kind of formed a clique almost with these founders of like, “Hey, this is us, this is ours, we’re going to do it ourselves. It’s us against the world, screw those other guys-”
Simon Mainwaring:
Taking it on, yeah.
Ryan Moor:
They’re the big, bad guys. In fact, some of our marketing even called them out. And so, going to market with it, and realizing how expensive it was, and the P&L impact that it really had, we knew that there’s no way that we could scale it, and we came very close a few times to not even making it. And fortunately through the course of circumstance, we were able to do enough, and have enough, and be able to pull enough strings. And the Ryonet company that started it, invested an incredible amount, put a lot of its own growth and a lot of its own investments aside, to invest in this Allmade Company and this side of the business, which was much smaller than our other company. So the only way we could grow forth is just to scale and there’s only two ways to do that, you could either… I mean, three ways, you could sell your company, you could get investment, or you could create partnerships.
Ryan Moor:
And selling the company, takes your story and gives it to somebody else, gives it to the hands of somebody else. Getting investment, really dictates how you write your story moving forward. And if you don’t have a super profitable, cash flow rich company in the first place, even we went to impact investing, we always had interest, we always got to the third round, the fourth round and at the end of the day, cash flow is king and profit is king. And so, if you’re not making enough of that, you don’t have enough of even impact investing to do it at a big scale. We got small impact investments, but not big scale investments.
Ryan Moor:
So the partnership idea was formed when we were actually offered to get bought by one of the companies and we were like, “Oh man, not going to sell this is our thing.” And then it turned into like, “Wait a minute, could we, the thing with the podcast, could we do this together? Could we make a bigger thing together? We could take the good parts of over here, the good parts of over here and mesh them together, create something bigger.” And that’s the route that we were fortunate enough to be able to do. So creating a partnership that manufactured and distributed our product through SanMar, which is a billion-dollar company that happens to be in our state, that was already doing a lot of the things that we were doing from the humanitarian perspective and the clean energy perspective that we didn’t have the capital to do either.
Ryan Moor:
So their factories in Honduras that manufacture it, use all green energy. And they’re recycling all this, in fact, our next shirt coming up is made from 100% recycled t-shirt scraps. And so, they’re taking the stuff that is already there, whether it be t-shirt scrap waste or using solar energy or using biofuel energy, to power the factories versus use… Literally, our factories when we started out, were running on diesel generators. They were paying people great and we were making responsible product from a fiber perspective, but we were putting CO2 in the atmosphere as we made it because we didn’t have the money to invest in solar.
Ryan Moor:
And so, kind of combining all those things together allowed us to have it even better impact than we had starting out. And it’s been, from a sales perspective and a channel perspective, back to that, making sure that you have a way to talk to people and you have a way to sell to people, that really brought in the way to sell to people. And it empowered the way we talked to people too. So it was great.
Simon Mainwaring:
It’s so important what you said there, because every opportunity comes at a cost, whether you sell the company, whether you get impact investing or whether you leverage partnerships, as you say, and one of those powerful aspects about Lead With We, is that it forces you to pre-qualify those partners and find those shared values and those people who prioritize the same things. And then the efficiencies are there to take your product to market.
Simon Mainwaring:
Ryan, I got to say, thank you so much for sharing your entrepreneurial story and the personal component and for the leadership you’ve shown in terms of building a new business model, rallying this coalition of printers, and then constantly sort of leveling up the game so that you can take a better product to market and make everyone feel like by buying your product, they’re actually making a difference, not just doing less harm, but doing more good. So thanks for your insight, and here’s the most success for Allmade.
Ryan Moor:
Thank you so much for having the platform to talk about this and telling these stories. They’re inspiring for us, even as you’re going through this, you have days that are hard and you have days that you think about doing other things, but hearing other people’s stories through this channel and through other channels like it, really keep that fire lit. And so, one of our values at Allmade is bring the fire and you’re helping to stoke a lot more fires throughout the world, positive ones though.
Simon Mainwaring:
I was going to ask you of one piece of advice to social entrepreneurs out there, but it might bring the fire, right?
Ryan Moor:
Bring the fire, yeah. And I think those partnerships and not being too proud. A lot of entrepreneurs put everything on their shoulder, and so, social entrepreneurship allows you to do that differently. And one of the great pieces of advice that I got through actually the CEO of the nonprofit, Global Orphan Project is, “Tell your story to as many people, literally put your story, try to make your mission of one to two sentences and put it in the bottom of your email signature, why are you doing this, and tell it to everyone that you can because you never know who’s ear that’s going to catch and what partnership door that opens up.” So don’t think that you have to do it all yourself, but also don’t keep it all to yourself, proudly tell your story.
Simon Mainwaring:
Awesome, thank you for the advice and also for the leadership. And we’ll be following with interest, what happens next with Allmade.
Ryan Moor:
Awesome, thanks.
Simon Mainwaring:
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Lead With We, and you can find out more information about today’s guest, Ryan Moor in the description below. And if you enjoyed this episode, give it a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to this channel. Lead With We is produced by Goal 17 Media, and you can listen to all the episodes on Apple, Google, or Spotify. And if you want to do a deeper dive into the world of purposeful business, check out my new book Lead With We, that’s now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Google Books. See you on the next episode and until then, let’s all lead with we.oble and Google Books. See you on the next episode and until then, it’s all lead with we.
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