Raw Talent: Smells Like Teen Success

June 19, 2007 by Deborah Sexton

Twenty-four-year-old Cody Murray hasn’t quite ascended to the top of the screen printing world just yet. That will happen next year, he says. Even more impressive than the young man’s unbridled confidence, however, is the fact that he’s likely to achieve his lofty goals, if his amazing five-year track record in the industry is any indication.

Murray, co-owner and CEO of Raw Talent, Bethlehem, Ga., started his company five years ago with partner Corey Bramlett, CFO, out of a bedroom with only a computer, a telephone, and an unwavering focus. “We had the vision of Raw Talent and where we wanted it to be,” he says. “From that point five years ago to where we are now is a night and day difference.”

Where they are now is sitting pretty, doing custom printing, online store fronts, and fashion-forward design work for customers from around the world and across a number of industries, including the music business. Raw Talent’s roster of 600 clients includes heavyweights such as Anheuser-Busch, Sea World, Bellagio, Cisco Systems, Yamaha, and YMCA. Raw Talent also offers custom apparel, promotional products, wholesale fulfillment and retail online fulfillment — the latter of which means handling everything from apparel design to production, bagging, and shipping. “We’re a full-service, one-stop shop; we’re completely vertical,” Murray explains. “We can go from idea to out-the-door.”

That all-in-one approach led the company to annual revenues of $1.4 million last year, with Murray expecting that number to more than triple for 2007. Meanwhile, the company has 24 full-time employees and a 25,000-square-foot facility location being built, with completion expected to take place in the next 12 months. Not bad for a couple of guys in their early 20s who started with just a telephone and a computer. “In the beginning, we never made age an issue. We avoided it,” he recalls. “Now we exploit it.”

The company’s rapid success comes largely from Murray and Bramlett’s relentless focus on creative sales and marketing instead of the industry’s nuts and bolts side. “Production is something we’ve just learned along the way. It’s a different route than most people take,” Murray acknowledges.

Their route to success has been mostly right down the information superhighway. Murray and Bramlett learned much of the industry’s ins and outs by reading forums on Internet sites such as Screenprint.net, and they’ve found many of their customers on the Web. “You can attribute our success to different things, but if it weren’t for the Internet, we wouldn’t be at the level we are today,” he says. “Right from the beginning, we sourced our potential clients on the Internet. We did a Google search for them, then we called and sold them apparel, contracting out everything.”

Still, despite the importance the Internet played in the company’s success, equally important has been Murray’s focus on targeting desired clients. “The majority of our business is from direct sales, cold calling contacts. But this isn’t from a random list; we contact specific clients with a specific purpose,” he explains. “We let them know who we are, why we’re different, and what we can do for them. We direct them to the Web site, and we go from there. Our Web site is one of the most, if not the most, impressive sites in our industry. It has an art gallery separated by industries, including food and beverage, fashion, and music. We show our clients that we can do everything from corporate to contemporary.”

Murray’s History (Yes, He Has One Already) Although one might not expect Murray to have had much experience prior to launching Raw Talent while still in his teens, he actually got an even earlier start in the apparel world. At 15, he worked as a sales representative in the fashion industry. “Sales is my natural forte, and I was very successful,” he says. “After I finished high school at 17, Corey came on board, and we worked different trade shows. We carried five different lines, from girls’ pajamas to young men’s wear. Then we caught wind of this industry.”

Murray set out to produce apparel with a cutting-edge fashion sense rather than what he saw as “fairly stale stuff with no style,” he says. “We cut our ties with the fashion industry, and we started from nothing — just a concept. The backbone of everything was our design work (done via a freelancer).”

Initially, the company targeted traditional markets — restaurants, landscapers, corporate logoed merchandise, and so on—but they were thinking big right away. “We sold nationwide. We’ve never been bound geographically. In our first year, we were doing work for the Turks and Caicos Islands,” Murray says.

Raw Talent targeted companies with a retail presence, such as restaurants selling souvenir shirts, but who needed some hand holding. “That would be our way in. Then we could do the front of house, back of house, servers, and uniforms. But our ticket in was always the retail front,” Murray says.

Putting in anywhere from 12 to 14 hours a day, Murray made more than 100 sales calls every day while Bramlett processed orders, dealt with vendors, and handled finances. It’s a successful division of labor that the two still maintain today. “I put the gears in place, and he makes them turn,” Murray says. “We complement each other perfectly.”

As the business grew, the two moved into a 2,600-square-foot office warehouse with no equipment but enough room to handle fulfillment, which tied in perfectly with the custom online store fronts it built and maintained for clients. “On the front end, it looked like a lot more company that it was, but it was still just the two of us, working seven days a week,” he says.

Meanwhile, Murray immersed himself in the industry’s educational offerings, soaking up everything he could learn. “I read, read, and read — and more importantly, I learned from my mistakes. If you make a mistake, you enlist a policy to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he says.

Ramping Up Production As Raw Talent’s client roster climbed to 100-plus, the company brought on artists and a sales rep who has helped steer them into the music market, even while setting themselves apart from merchandising companies. “Some of those shops do low-budget work and poor quality. We don’t want to compete with, ‘Well, this guy can do it for less.’ We don’t want to convince someone who doesn’t really care why quality and service are important,” Murray says. “Only one order can fill that production slot at a time, so it’s our obligation to make sure that it’s filled with the highest-margin order by providing maximum value to our clients.”

Eventually, the company purchased its first press, a six-color manual, followed almost immediately by an automatic. Finally, in 2006, Raw Talent moved into its current digs, a 5,600-square-foot building, which currently has two automatic presses with plans to add three more in the next year.

While about 80% of the shop’s work is spot color, it also prints everything from foils, gels, and glitter to water-based inks and foils combined with discharge. Embroidery is still outsourced for now, as it represents less than 5% of Raw Talent’s volume. And while some screen printing is still outsourced, Murray is delighted that he has the manpower to handle all of the shop’s artwork in-house. “Art is so integral to landing our customers that we can’t afford to outsource it. We’re producing very unique, ground-breaking stuff,” he says.

Speaking of ground-breaking, Raw Talent has developed its own proprietary retail fulfillment software that gives back-end access to see inventory in real time. “Setting up an online store takes about two to three days per client with stock software, whereas we can literally set up a store in 15 to 20 minutes,” he says. “Instead of doing 10 to 20 retail fulfillment customers, we’ll be able to handle 200 just as efficiently.”

The company also recently launched a licensing division, for which its first client is Angry Little Girls, a comic strip and soon-to-be TV show on the Oxygen network. “We’re always in growth, growth, growth mode. It seems like every week we add someone new. Conservatively, we expect to gross $4 million for 2007 — and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Murray says. “We don’t only want to be No. 1 in this industry, we want to be in the top 10 fastest-growing, privately held companies in the country. Our goal is to make the Inc. 500, and to hit the top 10, if not No. 1.”