By Eric Brown
You may not realize it, but chances are that somewhere in your home is a product made by Broad Bay Cotton Company. If it’s made of fabric, particularly cotton, the Virginia Beach-based company makes it.
Broad Bay is a leading manufacturer of licensed NCAA cotton fabric products and specialty print products that are sold by more than 5,000 retailers both nationwide and internationally. The company’s products are licensed by over 60 colleges and universities, where students use the school logo products every day. Their tote bags and duffle bags are carried in airports; the vibrant-pattern boxer shorts and beach bags are sold in resort shops. Backpacks and cell phone cases are used by college students all over the country, while business people and schoolchildren carry their environmentally friendly insulated lunch totes to the company lunchroom and the school cafeteria every day. Moms use Broad Bay’s insulated coolers for picnics and family road trips. Golfers and other athletes wear visors made by the company, and cooks and tailgaters enjoy their aprons and oven mitts.
“We started out selling T-shirts in the dorms,” says Jim Marx, who founded the company in 1989. Jim began his company’s expansion a few years later with insulated fabric lunch bags. “We went to a local sewing shop and had some samples made up, then we sent them out all over the country,” he recalls. An order quickly came back for 5,000 of the lunch bags. “I had no idea how we were going to get them made. I was cutting the patterns myself.”
Today the company has about 15 employees, including staff artists who design their fabrics and products for both function and fashion. “The typical screen printer does just a few colors. We do up to 18 different colors and we’re known for our all-over prints,” Jim says proudly. Most of the manufacturing is now done in Korea and China. “We would love to bring it back to the United States,” he adds. He is currently searching for a U.S.-based manufacturer for his products.
Up until about a year ago, more than 90 percent of the company’s business was wholesale—to stores such as Cracker Barrel, which sells their oven mitts and aprons. But the changing economy and changing technology have caused him to rethink his business strategy. “For us to survive we had to make a big push to E-commerce,” he explains.
“Direct to retail is the way to go,” Jim now believes. The company sells its products through its own website, www.broadbaycotton.com, as well as on Amazon and eBay, and has changed its sales mix from mostly wholesale to about 50 percent retail in just a year.
“I love computers. I’ve gotten into the whole database end of things and linking up with Amazon. All of our inventory goes up to Amazon and is updated a couple of times a day,” says Jim. Having the right database software is critical. “Once you get it up and running there is no difference between listing 4,000 products and 20,000 products on a site.”
Understanding keywords—the words that people most typically use to search for a product on the Internet—is paramount. “Many manufacturers don’t understand keywords. We do. That’s one of the reasons that on the internet we can compete with anybody,” he says.
For example, Wal-Mart, one of the biggest retailers in the world, has made their mark by being able to sell lower than any other retailer. The Internet, however, levels the playing field. “We can now retail it ourselves direct to the customer for less than they can buy it at Wal-Mart.”
Selling directly on the Internet also decreases inventory problems, he says. “In wholesale, if you have 50 pieces left over they are almost impossible to liquidate. You have to call around to everyone and hope to sell them. With the Internet, you can put everything on your site, even if you only have one piece left. Everything sells.”
Jim recommends that businesses wanting to get into E-commerce learn about search engine optimization and how to improve their rankings organically—using optimization techniques versus paid advertising. Along with optimizing keywords, he has created a number of linking sites that feed into his own website. Relevant links into and out of a website are one of several things search engines use to rank sites. “We tried pay per click and had horrible results,” says Jim. “Organic growth is slower, but in the end it really works.”
Jim now hopes to expand his business in another direction, helping other companies to improve their search engine rankings. “If you search for men’s gifts on Amazon you will probably find only our products on your first page,” he says. “If we can do that for our company, we can do it for other people, too.”
