OUR STORY
tales from the woodshed
As a senior at UMass, Jeff was very hungry to gain some real world business experience, so he took up a family friend on an offer for a free trip to a tradeshow in Las Vegas in exchange for helping him run his exhibitor’s booth. At the show, they were going to debut a brand new apparel printing technology that merged silk screen printing and direct to garment digital printing… a revolutionary new technology in the field. After being introduced to the apparel imprinting industry for the first time, Jeff was hooked.
Upon returning from the show, Jeff’s family friend offered him the opportunity to sell printers to local screen printing and embroidery shops. As Jeff soon found out… local shop owners didn’t want to spend $30k with some kid who knew nothing about the printers he was selling. So… Jeff was never able to sell a single printer. Discouraged, he decided it might be a good idea to head home on weekends to learn how to print on a demo unit that Mario had at his house. In the process of practicing with the demo printer to gain some technical knowledge that would hopefully lead to a printer sale, Jeff ended up printing & selling beer league softball jerseys, bar crawl tees, and the like for his buddies at UMass. With this new found way to generate beer money, Jeff decided to throw in the towel with trying to sell a printer and instead figured it would be a better idea to start a business using a printer.
After graduating, he passed up some opportunities to work in the Finance field and began printing t-shirts in his parents’ basement. After a short time below ground, his father generously offered to renovate the woodshed on the side of the house to move the print shop into. Soon thereafter, Jeff had brought on his brother Mitch Lavin and long time friend Bob Skinner to help print tees. He also brought on another buddy from UMass, Mike Tran, to help with sales and at times Jeff also had to have his Dad come into the shop to help print tees when things got busy.
new frontiers
out of the house and into the wild
After many days and nights of working around the clock to get orders out, warehousing product in the living room & dining room, and having to constantly battle the family cat and dog off of stacks of shirts that were around… it was time to move out.
In mid 2008, we moved into an old Civil War era building in Millbury, MA. We had gotten an opportunity to split space with our friends at Newtek Design Group. We had developed a great relationship with sharing overflow work with one another. So, it made for a great pairing with us working together side by side and also solved our problem of needing to get out of the house.
After spending a couple of years in Millbury, we moved to a new print shop in West Boylston, MA in 2010. It was in this new 10,000 square foot facility that the business really started accelerating to new heights. With our core business starting to take off, we decided to launch a new retail arm for the business with a custom print shop & retail store – “The Kyoto Jungle” on Gloucester street in Boston in 2012 with our friends and long time customer Annie Mulz.
After Gloucester street, we moved the retail segment of the business to Newbury Street in Boston. One Off Apparel’s retail store and custom print shop was the first of it’s kind by allowing customers to produce private label quality apparel including All-Over printed tees, tanks, socks, and tons of other items in under 10 minutes.
Ludacris speed
journeying to the great beyond
At our production facility, we have made major improvements over the last few years with upgrading equipment and increasing our capacity to better serve our customers’ needs. Our team can produce 20,000+ units in 24 hours and has done this on numerous occasions for the Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox directly after championship victories or for last minute stadium giveaways.
We also have improved how we serve our wholesale customers by rebranding with “Golden Lab Studios” – our new wholesale division. We shifted our focus for the retail segment of the business from brick & mortar to online at OneOffApparel.com and so decided to separate our wholesale and retail divisions. This new and improved approach through Golden Lab Studios involves having dedicated sales reps and offering much more comprehensive service. We are excited to create a better experience and more fruitful partnership for all of our customers.
It’s been a long, difficult road to get to where we are but we are so happy to be still be at it and growing & improving every day! We are forever grateful to all of our loyal customers and know that we wouldn’t be here without you.
Thanks for taking the time to learn about who we are and where we’ve come from… now, we’d like to get to know you! Please contact us about your next apparel project!
