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The Shirt Off Her Back

Smith student Rachel Imhof ’10 began designing Tshirts for her own use when she arrived on campus last year. But when strangers began requesting her edgy items, she needed to design something else: a business plan.

So last year, Imhof developed a plan to launch the clothing company 410 BC with her friend Nicole Giambalvo, Mount Holyoke  College ’10.

The business model of the women of 410 BC (a reference to the year democracy was restored in Athens) seems to be working. Since starting the company last June with a trickle of orders, it has grown each month, Imhof reports. In the past week alone, Imhof has filled 30 orders.

For both women, who are also artists, the main focus is the art they produce before having it screen-pressed onto their apparel—T-shirts and hoodies, for now.

“We treat the shirt as a canvas,” explains Imhof, who launched the company last summer. “We’re not trying to appeal to any audience in particular. We’re just creating art.”

Many of the company’s sales are to people in Europe, mainly the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, Imhof says, who order from the company’s web site. The women also sell items in Northampton, at Unite on Main Street downtown, and shop their items in consignment shops in San Francisco.

Imhof and Giambalvo, who are both from Port Washington, New York (on Long Island), create their designs on the weekends, both by freehand and with the help of computer programs such as PhotoShop and Illustrator. Once they feel their designs are complete, they send them off to Blue Collar Industries, a screen-printing company in Kansas, which produces the finished product.

Imhof attributes her success to her company’s personal and personable interaction with customers—that, and the appeal, especially to young people, of their artistic depictions of knives, molars, a Polaroid camera and a typewriter. “People seem to like what we’re making,” she says. “I think people respond to us partly because we’re very unique.”

The women have made a practice of including personalized notes, often with hand-drawn characters, to their customers, and they are committed to responding to email messages quickly, says Imhof. “I think it’s important for people to know they can have a relationship with people they buy things from.”

Imhof began 410 BC with a personal investment of $3,000—saved from her summer job with the Nassau County (New York) Economic Development Agency.
           
“This was something I always wanted to do,” she says. As a young girl, Imhof recalls putting her entrepreneurial sense to use with a business in which she produced horse magazines and sold them to her friends and family. That sense has been further developed at Smith, she says, through several economics courses she has taken. 

So far, even with the quick growth of her company, Imhof says it has not been a burden on her schedule. She spends at least a few hours a day filling orders. As her company grows, Imhof says she’s considering her future steps. She has consulted with an accountant to determine the most prudent budgeting principles, and she knows she may have to hire employees to help if 410 BC keeps growing as it has.

For Imhof, that’s a welcome prospect, and she hopes to expand her company’s wares, possibly to scarves and dresses, and to get their product in more stores.

“I would love if it got big enough so that I could live off this company,” she says, “but I don’t know if that’ll happen. For now, it’s a lot of fun. I definitely don’t want to stop.”