Alumnus Raymond Lei created custom T-shirt design company in response to expensive shirts
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Alumnus Raymond Lei took this hackneyed proverb to heart when he opted to start his own T-shirt design company instead of ordering overpriced apparel for Tennis Club when he was a sophomore.
“We wanted a nice, three-color print black shirt,” he said. “I looked around both offline and online, and the prices were high.” Lei had visited China a year earlier and was startled by the sharp difference between the costs there and in the U.S.
After doing some research, Lei realized that he could create a more productive system without charging as much money as existing T-shirt companies and began importing shirts from China. After selling shirts to Club Council at some of its events, Lei decided to launch a website. It is now ooShirts.com, a custom T-shirt business worth an estimated $1.2 million.
According to Lei, the main goal of the company, which has six employees and rakes in a revenue of about $100,000 a month, is to provide high-quality T-shirts and top-notch customer service comparable to that of popular company CustomInk’s at a price that is 30-50 percent lower.
ooShirts is able to offer such economic prices because it has various printing locations that span across different areas in 25 states, close enough to any shirt order to increase efficiency—something Lei strongly emphasizes on his website. Another factor that makes ooShirts’ products less expensive is the small number of employees; it is a smaller company than CustomInk, which, based in Virginia, has more than 100 workers and offers yearly salaries that top $100,000. 
Although most clubs on campus do not order their T-shirts from ooShirts, students are by no means refusing to consider other options.
One club that has ordered from Lei’s company is Red Cross, whose co-chair senior Stephanie Wang found the company through a Google search. Aside from the price, she found no significant difference between CustomInk and ooShirts.
“We used one color [and ordered] 120 [T-shirts],” Wang said. “The price came down to $5 per shirt. The quality is exactly the same as that of our class T-shirts.”
Lei, who is currently a business major at University of California, Berkeley, says his company’s ideal plan for the future is to increase revenue. He has a special “strategy” he has used continually since his high school years to balance school and company work.
“[I try] to pick the easiest possible classes so I can stay in school and [run the company],” he said.
Lei believes that the most important thing for future teen entrepreneurs is to have faith in themselves and meet the challenge head-on.
“I think most people — when [others] tell them to start a business — would say, ‘No, that’s impossible; I can’t do that,’” Lei said. “But it is difficult… because you’ve never tried.”
For more information on ooShirts, visit http://www.ooshirts.com.
