Stickers Outsold Shirts, Closing the Store & Live Screen Printing with John Pugh

My name is John Pugh, and I run a company called House of Swank here in Raleigh, North Carolina. We’ve been at it about fifteen years or so. We produce shirts and stickers that are kind of more Southern-based, definitely Raleigh and North Carolina-centric, to help folks feel where they’re from. Lots of snark. We’ve done festivals all over the place, we’ve printed stuff all over the place, and we’ve had this weird little journey over the years.

I through-hiked the Appalachian Trail when I was thirty. I was fresh off a divorce and just needed a break, and I’d thought about it for years. I picked up Johnny Swank as a nickname, a trail name, and I used it for music gigs and writing gigs and all that kind of stuff. I did a newspaper column as I was going along. I was playing gigs and needed a shirt, so I Googled how to make a T-shirt. I made one, sold five, sold ten. At the time I was still employed with the university.
I call it lightning in a bottle with the state pride stuff. It started going off like gangbusters on Etsy, and we created a website. We did every festival, every event, every farmers market, every place I could put up a tent. At some point my job with the university went away. I thought I would do this for a year or two just to do a thing, and that was fifteen years ago.

For us it’s super authentic. I grew up in the big city of Climax, North Carolina. They have more cows than people, and one stoplight now, which they’re pretty proud of. I’ve lived on the coast, in the mountains and in central North Carolina. I’ve bounced around, but I am basically the biggest homer in North Carolina. What bigger brands don’t get is that you have to have authenticity. People can smell B.S. from a mile away. If you don’t have that authenticity, you might get along for a little while, but once you go through the super casual folks, there’s no there there.

Great question. Early on I really didn’t have a filter. As we got a little bigger and had more stores with our wholesale accounts, I started filtering a little bit, probably five or six years ago. Anybody who follows us at all knows where I stand on basically everything, so if they can read the room, maybe we’re not for them.
Especially with the political stuff, I think there’s just a tiredness. People are tired of being angry, and I am too. I’d rather just do stuff, and we’ve stepped back a little from that, because at some point you’re beating a dead horse. I’m not so much worried about alienating folks. Anybody who follows us knows where I stand, and they can make their own choice about whether to go with us.

We have a lot of Gen X, a lot of Gen X women. That’s kind of me, I mean, I’m not a woman, but anyway. Those of us of a certain vintage recognize some of the humor. It’s not so much for the under-25 set, but Gen X, particularly Gen X women, are kind of our core folks.
We essentially have four different businesses. We have the B2C business, our website. Then there’s business to business: we have wholesale accounts, we do a tiny bit of custom work, and we do a lot of live screen printing, where we do brand activations on site at conventions and conferences. Juggling all that can be a handful. We try to thread the needle as best we can.

You’ve got to be there. You have to show up when things are dirty, messy and not easy, like showing up to clean up the school or helping the PTA. You have to be there for real, and not just say, “Hey, we cut you a check.” Money is great, money greases wheels and gets things done, but people can smell what you’re about easily. We show up for city council meetings because I’m a total political junkie, which is a terrible disease, don’t do it. We show up to lots of things, and we’re pretty visible.
My wife and I run the business, and we have two kids now, so we’re getting involved with that. Over time, instead of going to every bar all the time, it’s PTA meetings, and I’m playing in a cricket tournament this weekend. I don’t know anything about cricket, but we’re going to raise some money for cricket. You just have to be there. Especially if you’re the face of a smaller business, you have to show up for real, not just like things on Facebook. That’s fine, but it’s not what drives things.

It’s funny. We had a brick-and-mortar storefront in downtown Raleigh, and when we were moving out and cleaning up, I found a newspaper column someone had written about me from an interview I did. It was about mobile retail. We were doing a lot of festivals and pop-ups at the time, with a big fashion truck. One of the quotes was, “You don’t really need a brick and mortar to do retail,” and I wish I’d listened to that dude. That dude being myself, ten years ago.
The overhead dropped by 70%. The headaches dropped in half. We’d had a strong online presence to begin with, which didn’t hurt, and we leaned into the wholesale side to beef that up. It’s a different set of headaches now. We do a lot of live screen printing, which is a lot of coordination with companies and their event planners, and I actually really like doing that. I don’t have to have someone staffing a store on January 22nd when it’s raining and thirty-three degrees and no one’s walking around. Every once in a while I get the itch and forget that I’m actually around on the weekends. I get to see my kids and my wife, and that’s pretty cool. It’s also golden handcuffs. I was up at four in the morning writing newsletters and emails and all that jazz this morning. But for us it was a good move. It was totally scary, but it was a good move.

We’re getting discovered through AI. New people are finding us that way, and we’re doing a lot more out-of-state business. I’m not sure exactly how folks are finding us, since our analytics are all over the place. Most of our customers are within about a hundred miles of where we are, and that’s just proximity. We don’t advertise that much online, so we haven’t really leveraged it. It’s more a matter of me sitting down and making myself do it for a week.
We use AI for cleaning up the website and a lot for analytics on our products: what’s selling, what’s not, and what I’ve had for two years and can clean out. That lets us get much leaner, and the leaner we get, the better we can be to our employees. I’d rather my guys and my family get the benefit of that than have dead stock. Leaner, meaner, cleaner is just the way we like to roll.

We still do a ton of local stuff. And we had the first year that stickers actually outsold shirts. We brought our sticker making in-house, got all the equipment for that about three years ago, which is something I wish I’d done twelve years ago. Our sticker sales have gone through the roof. Shirts have been steady and are still growing. Margin-wise, stickers are much better than shirts. They take up a lot less footprint and they’re easier to store. Along with live printing, the sticker business has been a really big thing.
It’s good and bad. It’s good to have a physical product in your hand ten minutes after you have it in your head, but it’s also terrible if you have the attention span of a sugar-wired squirrel like myself. We use AI for helping us analyze what we’re doing and having a third eye on things.

We have a couple of folks who do most of the production and most of the shipping. They’re wonderful guys, I love them to death, and they’ve been around for years. My wife handles payroll and some of the financial stuff, basically anything that requires responsibility. I’m mostly on the marketing and product development side. I also do ninety-nine percent of our live print gigs, because it’s good for me to get out and do something physical and be around people for a day or two.
I really like showing people the process. With the live printing, we’re selling the experience more than just “here’s a shirt,” because anybody can do that. People watch their shirt being printed, it comes out of the dryer hot, and they’re rubbing it on their face saying, “It’s so soft and so hot.” That kind of experiential stuff is really cool to see, and I really enjoy it. My background is actually in parks and recreation, so the whole experiential thing is good stuff.

Our wholesale is up a lot this year, and we’ve really leaned into it, so I think that side is going to grow. Web sales are still growing okay. But our biggest growth is the live printing, which is turning into our bread and butter, because there aren’t many folks who do it. It’s a real pain. It took the first hundred activations to get dialed in on equipment, loading and the whole thing, because in a shop everything is bolted to the floor and you know where the ink is going to be, and you’re not dealing with a thunderstorm.
Now that we’ve got it dialed in, it’s a lot of fun, and I think that’s where our growth is going to come from. Generally, every time we do a live gig, we book at least one or two more from somebody who was there and saw us. We’ve flown to Salt Lake, Vegas and LA, and we’re doing more out-of-town and out-of-state work, so I think that’s really where our growth is going to be.

Hey, thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Take care.