“Busy,” is the reply that someone gets if they ask how things are going at Indigo at the moment. It has almost become a stock phrase and I hardly thought about it until someone said to me “Well isn’t that what you said in the summer?”

They would be right of course. I was saying that in the summer. But in the summer we only had 50,000 visitors a month to indigoclothing.com, at the end of October we were up to nearly 100,000. We are industriously producing work for blue-chip clients like the BBC, Kodak and the Royal Festival Hall, to name-drop but a few, whilst staying committed to helping out our core of small business clients, like Wooferz, a dog care service with a regular short run of twenty t-shirts and two Regatta jackets. We expect the growth to carry on through the winter, with the inevitable pre-Christmas dip in December. Our key challenge now is to effectively manage the growth without needlessly taking on more staff and maintaining the close knit ethos of the company.

In my mind the key to tackling the growth challenge is to start doing things better, behaving more like a bigger company whilst trying to avoid the bureaucratic pitfalls that can come with that. For example, Indigo has never been a ‘meetings’ company but once a week we are now sitting down to review the past week and to focus on the forthcoming one. These meetings are not an opportunity to have a cup of tea and for shows of one-upmanship but a twenty minute assessment of our current position. These meetings really do work and the team is becoming more like a well oiled machine everyday. In fact, it is not just the sales target boards that indicate how hard people are working at the moment. The water consumption amongst the team seems to be a testament to how intensively people are working. Ten litres a day is being guzzled by six people, much to the astonishment of the nice lad who changes our water cooler bottles, he probably thinks we water the plants with it, it disappears so quickly.

The credit for our ability to cope with the increased work load isn’t just to do with our internal attitude but also because our suppliers, who are evermore aware of our desires to succeed in this marketplace, understand our need for a efficient and reliable service.

This combination of internal focus, supplier reliability and our continued emphasis on improved IT systems, which are bespoke crafted by our in-house team of Jeremy and Rob, are helping what was only a company of three people last winter, thrive as a eight strong unit this winter. And it is not all just hard work either. In October Indigo had its late (it was meant to be in June) fourth birthday party for our friends, families and suppliers, enjoying a drink and raising money for charity. The raffle, which included a signed Arsenal football shirt (sadly won by a Spurs fan!) and a flight over a London in a private plane was in aid of Get Kids Going.

Next time someone asks, I’ll try to say something more intelligent than just “busy,” but to be honest, it is far easier than explaining the above.

[Note: This article was written for a future edition of Printwear and Promotion, a trade publication. Alex is a regular contributor]

A client of mine invited me to drinks and a talk he was hosting near Trafalgar Square last summer. I agreed, thinking maybe it would be a good networking opportunity, would keep my client happy and it was hardly out of my way considering Indigo is based in the City. At the same time I was concerned that the event would be a terrible bore with endless chat about how expensive it is to get on the property ladder, the general theme of most conversations with strangers at dinner parties, cocktail parties and any other event where twenty-to-thirty-somethings are in a room with a luke-warm glass of non-descript white wine in the hand. So I decided to bring along a friend, and at that time, colleague, Dickie, a fun guy with a slightly odd gun obsession (he is in the Great Britain Rifle Team, not a Brixton yardie, just in case you were worrying about my taste in friends) as protection from such boredom, being able to fall back to his position should such a conversation start to rear its ugly head.

We traipsed into the venue on a hot sticky evening, dismayed to find out we had to pay an entry fee and made me wonder whether my cynical view of this event could ever be dispelled. Within five minutes an odd thing happened. We were talking to this South African guy, an accountant (I remember because we ended up doing a job for his firm), who had been on the Indigo Clothing website in the past and seemed genuinely interested in what we were up to. After about 2 minutes into the conversation I realised I had forgotten to introduce Dickie. To my astonishment the South African turned to him and said with out any prompting,
“Oh so you are the Dickie that shoots for Great Britain and wanders around the Indigo office, shirt untucked, hitting Tim sporadically with a toy light sabre left over from a BUPA marketing conference.”
I think my jaw actually dropped open, in a cartoon fashion.
“How did you know that?” I exclaimed.
“I read your blog,” he replied simply.

The evening wore on but this conversation left an impression on me that from this day I have never shed. The point of the Indigo blog was to personify the company, to have a quirky medium for publishing news and to go beyond the ‘press-release’ model of marketing. This was all well and good in theory but to meet a stranger who knows about you and the inner workings of your company was a great affirmation that I wasn’t wasting my time typing about what staff were doing and what websites we were reading.

The talk later that evening was given by the US marketing guru Seth Godin. Seth is very American, bald and short, but talks in a confident, punchy way, peppering his talk with funny anecdotes. He talked specifically about one of his books, ‘Purple Cow‘ (available at all good bookstores). The point of a ‘purple cow’ is it is remarkable. In a field of black and white cows it stands out. And so he argues so should your business have a remarkable element, something that defines the product, service or brand that makes it shine out from mediocrity. For Indigo our purple cow (excuse the pun) is our use of the Internet. The blogging story earlier was not a piece of self-aggrandisement but an example of how our blog has given us an ‘edge’ in a market full of product catalogue pages and second-rate clothing models.

What interests me is what other purple cows exist and are going to appear in our Printwear and Promotion industry. Some companies like Continental Clothing with their sexy models and slick catalogues are clearly onto something. Their brand makes a difference from a Fruit of the Loom catalogue and both companies (like us) and end users stand up and take notice. As for the clothing wholesalers there is little to differentiate them yet. Their brands are so similar, with similar catalogues and even more similar products. I can’t wait for one of them to start being different! Perhaps give away free catalogues rather than charging for them, come up with unique product lines, invent different pricing strategies, even have staff who sound enthusiastic about their job? I have heard colleagues in the advertising industry sneer at our end of the market. We aren’t TV, nor Radio and not New-Media so they don’t credit us with much respect. It is time the marketing snobs had something to notice down our end of the market. Let’s see more purple cows. It is good for business.

[Note: This article was written for a future edition of Printwear and Promotion, a trade publication. Alex is a regular contributor]

The ethical consumerism bandwagon is more like a bullet train than a trundling horse-drawn cart, driving through more and more industries, and textiles is no exception. Many will see this as a move in the right direction – the knowledge that a little under one fortieth (2.4%) of the world’s arable land is planted with cotton, yet cotton accounts for almost a quarter (24%) of global insecticide use, is disturbing to say the least .

The Organic Exchange, whose annual conference, in the Netherlands on September 11-15, 2006, brings together the captains of the cotton industry, will look at the entire organic cotton cycle from farming, supply chain and retail perspectives and will seek to further the cause for organic cotton usage. Whilst companies that supply ethical product to the promotions industry may be rubbing their hands with glee at this growing support for the cause, the fact is that strong market conditions are causing problems, with the supply of certified organic cotton now lagging behind demand. Even Nike, the largest retail user of organic cotton in the world and one of the sponsors of the conference, admits on its website that among the challenges it faces are the availability of cotton fibre and how to buy it at a competitive price. The question is, will the continuing popularity of organic cotton mean that big manufacturers like Nike or Marks and Spencer buy up the bulk of the available certified cotton; leaving the smaller suppliers, who provide the promotions industry with eco-friendly products, with higher costs – resulting in higher unit prices for those of us that sell the end-product?

We at Indigo Clothing jumped at the opportunity to supply organic cotton products when Saf contacted us last summer with an offer to promote their organic clothing range. What specifically attracted us to Saf was their choice of colours as they allowed us to offer something other than the traditional ecru/muddy brown colours. As a company whose original client list consisted of students, a strong ethical policy has always been an important component of our business ethos and being able to offer something that clearly had green credentials was a definite must. After a year of supplying organic products and having considered a number of other manufacturers and suppliers, we are concerned that the growing high street popularity of organic cotton is going to make it even harder to sell what was already a highly priced product. Our organic range has prompted a lot of interest from our clients and we have featured it heavily on our website, but when it has come down to making a purchasing decision, organic has simply not been a viable option for many because of price.

Ultimately, I believe it comes down to simple psychology called ‘reference price formation’. When a consumer is buying goods – t-shirts, for example – it is believed that a consumer evaluates price in relation to their belief about what something is worth, known as the reference price (Rosch, 1975). Because t-shirts are a product that consumers often have a lot of exposure to, they have a strongly formed reference price. In other words, a consumer has a good idea of how much they are willing to pay. Across sectors, organic products usually command a premium (for example, we know that an organic carrot at a major supermarket chain costs more than a ‘normal’ carrot). Consequently, it is predicted that consumers are increasing their reference price – but not enough when it comes to organic t-shirts, as despite their ethical credentials the price is simply too far from the reference price. Larger companies looking for ways to tick the ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ (CSR) box can do this more effectively by buying other ethical products such as recycled promotional gifts like pencils, whose price is far closer to the reference price for stationery.

Therefore, those in the business of selling t-shirts are faced with a dilemma. The media and the high street stores are driving a growing desire for organic product but suppliers are faced with high costs, as demand now outstrips supply and a consumer will only pay so much for white t-shirt. We can either reduce our prices (and our margins) to try to encourage organic cotton sales, or wait for a bigger supplier such as Fruit of the Loom or Hanes to enter the organic cotton marketplace. With their economies of scale there is a strong possibility they would offer organic cotton products at lower price than the current suppliers. The other alternative is to simply do nothing for the time being, continue offering expensive organic cotton products and simply get the brand benefit of being linked to the fair-trade movement whilst in reality still selling a majority of traditional cotton goods. Sadly, economics is preventing green products from being great products.

[Note: This article was written for a future edition of Printwear and Promotion, a trade publication. Alex is a regular contributor]