In the brave new world of globalization, even small companies can tap the global talent pool through the use of the Internet. One such local company is t-shirt maker Analog Soul, which has found that the great number of Filipinos based abroad represented a huge pool of talent for their company.

Tapping designs from Filipinos based from as far as Dubai, New Zealand, and New York, the company is using the Internet as a tool to drive down costs and get variety for their products. By banking on these freelancers instead of employing a full time design team, the company is able to save costs.

“We’re opening our doors to anyone who wants to put up their design. Of course there’s still a quality criteria, but we have found that even Filipinos based abroad can be tapped to design stuff for us. We’re hoping that soon, even foreign designers will be submitting their work to us,” says 32-year-old co-owner Miguel Naguiat.

The company has keenly leveraged this growing popularity into outsourcing most of their designs to interested individuals. The good number of hits their website (www.analog-soul.com) gets also generates interest from designers from all over.

“We get emails requesting if they could design t-shirts for us. We always welcome this, and we ask them to submit their designs for evaluation. Once the design is approved by the Analog Soul team, we pay them an up front sum of P3,500-P4,000 per design, or even more if the design is a really good one,” Naguiat said.

In fact, the company recently opened a t-shirt design contest on their website that is open to all designers. The company will then select two winners, one based from user votes a design generates, and one hand picked by the Analog Soul team. The winners will receive P4,000 and P6,000 respectively, and will get a chance to have their designs printed on Analog Soul shirts.

STARTUP BLUES

The relative success of Analog Soul can be partly attributed to its clever use of the web as a marketing platform and some lessons from the school of hard knocks. Founded in 2004 by a pair of avid t-shirt collectors and Ateneo socio-anthropology majors Miguel Naguiat, and Mica Bautista, they enlisted the help of a designer friend, Paolo Lim and started Analog Soul with P30,000.

“We thought why are we spending so much on a simple shirt? Since some of our friends were artists, we figured we could make our own shirts,” Naguiat shares.

Their original plan was to make a couple of hundred shirts and sell them in bazaars in time for the Christmas season for extra shopping money. But due to their inexperience, the partners experienced a letdown on their first try.

“But since we didn’t know what we were doing, because none of us were business majors, it took as a while. We didn’t know any manufacturers and printers. By the time the shirts were done, we missed all the bazaars,” Miguel recalls.

Not knowing what to do with the piles of t-shirts they had, the group decided to divide the shirts and put them in the trunks of their cars. They started a house-to-house marketing campaign by inserting brochures under the doors of people they knew. In no time, the tactic paid off as soon there were people calling them about their shirts.

It also helped that the trio put up an account on the popular networking site Multiply.com to help sell their goods. Naguiat says this move helped them generate more buzz for their wares, and also gave them better access to their target market.

GETTING IT TOGETHER

Later, still smarting from their earlier setback, they produced their second batch of shirts in time for the holiday bazaars in late 2005. One of those was the Rockwell Vintage Bazaar, held in an upscale shopping mall, where they were a late addition.

“We did really well that they invited us to join the next bazaar. We joined the next bazaar and we did well again. It just so happened that during the second bazaar for Analog Soul, Rockwell was building their Independent Lifestyle section, so the three of us decided to rent a space there and I think it snowballed from there,” he said.

The general themes of their shirts are music, the beach, the city, and the fact that the world we’re living in has become smaller because of technology. Business has been good enough that both Naguiat and Bautista have given up their day jobs, as a government employee and sales executive respectively, to run Analog Soul full time. Lim continues to be a freelance graphic designer, and is now based in Australia.

Aside from Rockwell, they also have a branch in Trinoma, Glorietta 4, and are opening a new branch in SM Megamall. According to Naguiat, being in a mall expanded their market and gave them more credibility. They also decided to put up an online store and a website where they now receive orders all the way from the United States and Australia.

Their shirts retail for P495, and they recently started selling customized jeans for P1,690. They have also collaborated with Alterations Plus so their customers could get their pants altered the way they want it.

Having experienced their share of let downs, the company and its owners are slowly coming into their own.

“Challenges are always there. At the beginning the challenges were finding the manufacturers, the right suppliers, knowing where to sell it. As we grew, the challenges were how to improve the quality of our products and how to be seen. Today, because we are expanding, our challenge is to grow. I’ve come to realize that growing is a very tricky thing, managing that growth without falling off the cliff,” Naguiat said.

Contact Details:
Miguel Naguiat
migs@analog-soul.com
Website: analog-soul.com

LESSON LEARNED? Outsourcing, if done right, can benefit small businesses as well.

-interview by Nadeth Rival