One month into the new venture...

...and not a whole lot has gone down. I've got the So Money shirts printed, and I'm waiting on 3 more shirts to come from the print shop. After that, I'll have to get the WackWear collection printed before I'm ready to "open" my Internet storefront.

With that opening in mind, I've begun tinkering with Yahoo's free web design program, Sitebuilder, and with the online Store Manager that comes as part of my web package with SBC/Yahoo. Because I was already an SBC client for my apartment phone's line, I get a nice discount on the SBC/Yahoo package...for $30 a month, they provide me with the domain name and the hosting services required to have a storefront on the Internet. The credit card processing company they're partnered with charges another $20 a month, bringing the total monthly cost to $50. (I should mention that both SBC/Yahoo and the credit card processor take a percentage of sales, as well...those commissions add up to about 4% of revenues, in addition to the monthly $50.)

Living in Ocean Beach...

...is as close to heaven as I think living can be. Newport Avenue, the neighborhood's main street and always a great place for peoplewatching, is pictured at right. Walk straight ahead for a few blocks and you'll reach the Pacific Ocean, with about a 1/2 mile of wide beach extending to the north.


While residents of Ocean Beach are typically white, they're all different types of white: homeless people, hippies, college kids, families, senior citizens, and so on. What many people in the area seem to share is a non-judgmental perspective and an appreciation of the beach lifestyle. I'll write more on OB in future installments. For now I'll just note that, in this environment, it's been easy to slow things down to a lazy summertime pace.

After a slow Friday afternoon bike ride...

...with a buddy through nearby Mission Beach and Pacific Beach, I stopped in at the screenprinting shop and picked up the So Money shirts, which looked good. I gave an XL to my friend, telling him that he would be the first person in history to receive a Wavelength Clothing shirt, and that he should be honored. He humored me with a little faux excitement.

When I got the shirts home, I undertook the meticulous task of folding all 120 of them, sorting them by size, and packing them away. I had decided to use 68-liter storage bins (each about the size of the freezer on a standard fridge) for storage. Each bin held about 40 shirts, so after an hour of folding, sorting, and packing, the So Money line was safely stored in 3 bins in my garage.

All the folding and sorting and whatnot allowed me to get a good look at all 120 shirts, and I noted that the shop did a very good job. I went back and gave them 3 more designs - the rest of what I've decided to call the "King George" collection - ordering 120 shirts in each design. As I wait for the shirts over the next couple weeks, I will finalize the five designs I've come up with for my "WackWear" collection and also begin to design the Wavelength Clothing website.

"So how is he financing this thing?"...

...you might be wondering, and that's a good question indeed. My plan involves my past experience with credit card debt, today's low interest rate environment, and about 15 large I've set aside in an account at my credit union. (That's right - credit union. Lower interest rates and no fees...as my Aunt Phyllis likes to say, there's a reason why "bank" is a four-letter word. Though I do love Washington Mutual's superfriendly ATMs.)

Basically I've mentally split the 15k into 10k for the business and 5k for my personal expenses for the summer. I'll spend the personal 5k as slowly as possible, though a Hawaii wedding I'm attending in September and recent work my car has needed are going to put in some substantial dents early.

As for the business's 10k, I'm actually going to keep it in my account while I make the business's first 10k worth of purchases on my new credit card, which offers no interest on purchases until June of 2006. I figure that once I've invested 10k in the business, I'll have a good idea of whether it's a going concern or not...and if not, I'll pay off the credit card with the 10k from the credit union and throw in the towel. But if so, I'll have the option of keeping the credit card debt on the books as a very cheap loan and using the 10k in cash as additional capital for the business. We shall see!

So here's where I work now...

...it might not be an upper floor of a neato office building, but please note that the easy accessibility of my DJ gear and speakers allow me to bathe my self in high-quality music whenever I deem necessary. Whereas at my former place of employment, I was not even able to listen to the radio "at a reasonable volume between nine and eleven."

Just finalized my "So Money" design...

...and took it to my local screenprinting shop, who will print it up over the next couple of weeks. My plan is to see how they do with this job. If I like the results, I'll ask the shop to print my subsequent designs as well. The shop is within a few blocks of where I live, and is owned by a local family, so I hope to be able to partner with them going forward.

By ordering a batch of 120 shirts, I pushed the per-shirt price for this order down to the lowest level the shop offers. Overall, I'm getting 120 white t-shirts - 60 XL, 40 L, 10 M, 10 XXL - with the design on front and my logo on back for about $700. The cost would go up if I wanted to print on a colored shirt or if my design used more than one color of ink.

The shirts are going to be ready in about 2 weeks. In the meantime, I'm going to finalize 3 other designs that I've almost completed, and I'm hoping to finish off some other designs that are in a preliminary form right now.

So why Wavelength Clothing...

...why did I choose that name? Well, first of all, it was available, which I confirmed as well as I feasibly could by searching the Federal Trademark Database, the California Secretary of State's trademark database (which, oddly, you search by phone - 2 names per call), and search engines like Google and Yahoo.

In general, I didn't think I should go with a name that actually mentioned Bush or otherwise anchored the company to something ephemeral. Eventually, I hope to move beyond anti-Bush shirts to other messages, including more positive ones, so the name's got to offer flexibility and timelessness, while at the same time capturing a key element of the company's identity.

My first preference, Remarkable Clothing, was taken by a company in Malaysia, which is far away geographically but, in the Internet age, might as well be down the street. I ended up going with Wavelength Clothing. I like it because my shirt designs will always be on a similar wavelength - one of peace, justice, and progress - and I think my customers will be on that wavelength, too. For the logo, I put the name of the company's website in the Airstream font, above a sketch of one wavelength of the sine curve. With that, the whole name thing was done!

I took a trip to the Coachella music festival...

...to help out a friend who would have had to eat the cost of an extra ticket. Getting away from home for a couple of days turned out to be a great way to get some perspective on my new situation. Here's my elegantly simple plan:

1. design anti-Bush shirts on my PC
2. have shirts printed at a nearby shop
3. sell shirts on an Internet site
4. ship shirts from the nearby post office

After returning from Coachella, my first task was to "create" my new company by registering it with the city, county, and state governments (no federal filing is necessary for sole proprietorships, which are companies with only one owner/employee, like mine). My small business start-up book from Nolo helped me figure out exactly which offices I needed to visit. With this list in hand, I headed to downtown San Diego at 9AM on a Tuesday to dive into the bureaucracy.

I was home before lunchtime. In quick visits to three different government offices, I registered my business name with the county ($20), paid the city its registration fee ($70), obtained a seller's permit from the State of California (no cost), and arranged for a local newspaper to publish a small notice of my county filing for four consecutive weeks ($20), as required by law. In all, these visits took less than 3 hours, mainly because the people I worked with at each office were notably fast and friendly. I was particularly grateful to the woman who helped me get the California seller's permit, which allows you to collect sales tax from California customers. She expertly explained the nuances of the sales tax rules and made sure that I understood how to remain in compliance.

After witnessing the efficiency of the government agencies involved in registering my business, I couldn't help but think of George W. Bush, his fellow Republicans, and the anti-"big government" theme that permeates much of their thinking. As a first-time small business owner (with admittedly only one day on the job), I was impressed and reassured by the operations of each of the government agencies I worked with today.