Shirts Reborn is not even a year old but it already has almost 40 employees, a corporate social responsibility program in which 5% of profits is donated to local charities, an evolving interactive website where customers can soon design their own products, sales on three continents and even a business succession plan.
All pretty standard fare for large corporations, but unusual for a business whose founders are barely eligible to drive.
The Surrey-based company is run entirely by high school students, who have garnered a business excellence award for its efforts.
For Aaron Li, 16, recently named the Surrey Board of Trade’s Student Entrepreneur of the Year, the business lessons have come thick and fast as Shirts Reborn experienced rapid growth after a slow January 2013 startup.
The T-shirt printing company, founded by Li and fellow Fraser Heights secondary school students Jacky Tian, Yuwei Peng and Kevin Li, provides custom apparel – including hoodies – to schools, clubs, event organizers and individuals.
Through word-of-mouth and social media, its products are being snapped up by students across the Lower Mainland. When schools reopened in September, the business sold 1,200 items, which sell anywhere from $10 to $35 each.
“The core idea was individualism,” said Li. “We thought that it would be very innovative to put the design into the buyers’ hands and they can come up with the ideas and our designers can design it for them.”
The company buys blank T-shirts, mainly from the United States, and personalizes them on its screen and laser printing equipment. Its products have been shipped to customers in Canada and to charity organizations in India and elsewhere in Asia. Production is done at the home of one of the company’s founders and at a Langley warehouse. Overhead costs are also low because there’s no store rent to pay.
Li, who has been through the Junior Achievement of British Columbia program, said he has learned several key lessons in the short time he’s been in business.
“Find the right partners, find the correct employees and find the motivated individuals to make what needs to happen happen.”
Once the current management team has completed school and is in university, Li said its members will institute their succession plan by mentoring students from the lower grades.
According to Junior Achievement, a non-government organization that teaches young people about business, teenage entrepreneurship is taking off in British Columbia because young people today are more inclined to start their own businesses than work for someone else.
“Kids today … don’t have the same sense that we might have had when we were younger that you would go into a career and follow it through and go and get a job and work for somebody else for the rest of your life,” said Andrew Sloane, the organization’s B.C. vice-president for marketing and communications. “Because there isn’t the confidence and stability that used to be a guarantee in life, they’re seeing now that one of the real options for them is to go out and become an entrepreneur.” •
