Startup tees up T-shirts with punch, passion (and a pretty face)

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Charles Molineaux

January 30, 2008

The market niche is hardly selective. Barriers to entry, almost nil. Competitors?  Tens of thousands. What motivates an entrepreneur to start, of all things, a T-shirt company? "We were naïve," admits Matt Walls, CEO of Alpharetta-based Snorg Tees, "and like many first time entrepreneurs, just dove right in." 

Four years after startup, that naiveté continues to pay off and Snorg Tees is a thriving online store enjoying consistent buzz with its millennial generation customer base, even featuring its own fresh-faced Internet phenom cover girl.

Of course, the sometimes snarky, sometimes cute, pop culture-themed T-shirt designs may have something to do with it too.

"With a shirt like this, who needs pants?" asks one shirt. "I'm kind of a big deal," proclaims another, one of Walls' favorites. And while the shirt that reads "Sweet dreams are made of cheese" may resonate with music fans old enough to remember Eurythmics, Snorg Tees aims squarely at today's hip twenty-somethings. "Our customer base is a lot bigger than the 18-to-30 age group," Walls says, "but that is the sweet spot for us."

It's a familiar demographic for Walls who, at 27, has already made the transition from the corporate world into that of the small businessman. After taking Management Information Systems at the University of Georgia, he joined Accenture in 2003 but left after just one year for more flexible hours at software company Alogent, already feeling the entrepreneurial urge. "Starting my own business was something I've always been interested in," he recalls. "It seemed overwhelming, but I saw other young entrepreneurs succeed."

The infrastructure was already there. Since his days at UGA, Walls, along with friends and his brother, Bryan, had been putting together Web sites. Their creation, fiftynine.org, of which only long term archived versions exist today, featured cartoons, geek humor and pop culture. Walls billed himself as "a liaison between the nerds and cool bubs of the world" and offered reflections on college life. "Mostly we were having fun building the website and creating content," he says. "I think we got up to where we had a thousand visitors a day. To us that was a lot, but to the world it's really not very much. It's not like you can make much money serving up a thousand ads a day."

Walls figured it was time to look in a new direction. "We kept thinking of T-shirt ideas we wanted to sell once our audience was big enough. In early 2004, it finally dawned on us that perhaps we'd be better off marketing our T-shirt ideas on our own. That summer, we started Snorg."

It certainly is a big field to get into. Domestic U.S. T-shirt sales hit $23.2 billion in 2007 according to the latest stats from marketing company NPD Group, and that was a 3.5 percent increase from the previous year.

And the name? Walls says "Snorg" is a nonsense word he, his friends and his brother came up with. "We wanted a name with no preconceived meaning, so that our customers would associate our name with our products and services, and it would come to define itself."

With an initial investment Walls insists was less than $10,000, he, his brother Bryan and a few friends started the company in his family's Marietta basement and fired up what was then a tiny Snorg Store, offering half a dozen T-shirts, and made their first sale in August 2004. Last summer, the operation moved into a new office and warehouse facility in Alpharetta to handle its expanding business.

Walls withholds specifics but says the company was turning a slight profit after three months, hit a brief lean period after six months, and now "I will say we are seeing huge percentage growth each year, and each year we've surpassed our projections."

Keeping the emphasis on a Gen-Y customer base, Snorg Tees concentrated much of its advertising on youth oriented social networking Web sites like Myspace and Facebook. The focus was a deliberate strategy, but it was completely unplanned online explosion that delivered the company a viral marketing jackpot: the Snorg Tees Girl.

"Let's just say we are very lucky to have grown up down the street from Alice," Walls gratefully acknowledges.

Alice Fraasa, now a sophomore at Auburn, became an Internet sensation modeling Snorg Tees' tees in the company's online ads. She's one of many friends and neighbors who model the shirts. Virtually the entire Snorg Tees staff models them too. (Matt Walls may be the only one who doesn't)  But Fraasa's wide-eyed smile and Girl-next-door look struck a special chord.
 
"I don't know when it happened," Walls marvels, "but at some point she became ‘the Snorg Girl' or ‘the Snorg Tees Girl.'  There is something about her that has always drawn people to check us out. We constantly get people asking who she is." 

Through 2006, Fraasa was the focus of numerous blogs, message boards, online interviews and even a short lived Alice Fan Society. She was discovered again, this time by more mainline media outlets, when Atlanta's Creative Loafing featured her last fall and then the Associated Press profiled her in a piece that was picked up nationwide in January. Each time, Walls reports seeing a welcome spike in attention although to this day, he says, Fraasa still refuses any offers of payment for her modeling, except for free T-shirts.

Not that Snorg Tees' relationship with the Internet zeitgeist is without rough patches. The Snorg Tees Girl phenomenon also brought criticism in a volatile world where one bloviating blog can sometimes carry the same weight of a major media Web site. A quick search easily turns up anonymous online opinionators who refer to Snorg Tees as "lame" and provide less than flattering assessments of Alice.

"I guess there are some risks there," Walls concedes. "There are a few people who send us messages and send her messages saying some pretty mean stuff, or posting it in groups. The Internet depersonalizes things so people can say that stuff and not feel bad. We just try to put ourselves out there in a straightforward way. And let what happens happen."

According to Walls, Alice Fraasa's about-to-burst-into-laughter smiles are not only genuine, but reflect the actual circumstances under which her pictures are taken. He says Snorg staffers routinely clown it up behind the camera to get precisely that reaction on photo shoots that are often more like recreational outings.

"It's pretty informal. We want them to be actually having fun." he laughs. "We go to local Atlanta landmarks, Marietta Square, Atlantic Station, places where there are simple cool backgrounds. We just walk around; everyone puts on a shirt and we'll just start taking pictures."

Snorg Tees' informality and entrepreneurial adventure captured the imagination of millennial serial job hunter Sean Aiken. In October, Aiken's oneweekjob.com Web site highlighted his experience working for a week at Snorg as part of his nationally publicized odyssey to explore 52 jobs in 52 weeks. The online episode highlighted the whimsical perception of dreaming up cool T-shirt ideas versus the more grueling reality of running a growing business.

"A lot of it is execution, work" Walls cautions. "I spend a lot of time answering e-mails, writing and planning. There's a lot of people who have an image of a T-shirt company like us that we just sit around and think of ideas. Which would be pretty nice, but the reality is that you still have to do everything that any business has to do."

Walls admit his plans for the future are fluid, pointing to the name under which his business is incorporated, Digital Basement LLC, not Snorg Tees, leaving open the possibility for new enterprises down the road. "Will I still be doing this at 30?  Yeah. I don't know about 40. In the Internet, that's like a life time."

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