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Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Beth Ewen
December 2011

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Horse sense

Lisa Bollin,
Cowgirl Tuff Co.:
877.868.7419
lisa.bollin@cowgirltuffco.com
www.cowgirltuffco.com

Cowgirl Tuff’s founder uses smarts & guts to compete

by Beth Ewen

When Lisa Bollin, CEO and director of design at Cowgirl Tuff Co. in Cokato, set out to launch a line of women’s jeans, she bought and ripped apart jeans from 12 different brands to measure the widely varying fits, then made her own size chart rather than using the retailing standard. The result, she says, is jeans that fit women of every size.

She also targeted the customers she describes as herself: barrel racers, horse fanatics and other “cowgirls” who couldn’t find jeans that fit from traditional Western-clothing retailers, never mind high-fashion jeans with rhinestones on the pockets.

Her company posted revenue of $3.02 million in 2008, the first year Cowgirl Tuff sold jeans in addition to its original line of screen-printed tops, $4.79 million in 2009, and $7.8 million in 2010. Her authenticity, retailing savvy and devotion to profitable growth make her the Upsize Business Builder of the Year.

Upsize: Describe your company as it stands today.

Lisa Bollin, Cowgirl Tuff Co.: We are a fast-growing apparel business; we have ladies apparel and a new men’s line coming out. We’re based out of Cokato, Minnesota. We started as a wholesaler eight years ago. We started out with just my family, to do a fun sportswear line for cowgirls. We were screen printers, putting our designs on shirts. We wholesaled them to 18 stores. We’ve grown from three people then, to 30 people now; from working out of a garage to 22,000 square feet now.

Upsize: What do you put in 22,000 square feet?

Bollin: We have a front office, for customer service. We have a business technology manager, HR, a finance department, a marketing room-five people in marketing. The bulk of our warehouse is our inventory of jeans. I would say now our company is 80 percent denim; we primarily sell jeans.

Another department is production; we still have a small screen-printing division. It’s called the Signature line. It’s pretty much custom ordered. We offer 40 different designs three times a year, through catalogs, and it’s customized. It’s staying in touch with the roots where we started from. It’s a fast turnover, creative line. In 24 hours we can have a new blank t-shirt with a new material. It’s a fast, creative piece, whereas when we import we’re working a year out.

For the jeans it’s one year from the time I come up with a design to the time it delivers to a store. Revenue in 2010 was $7.8 million. We introduced the jeans in 2008, and that’s when the growth started.

Upsize: Why did you think selling jeans was a good idea?

Bollin: Just myself, I had a tough time finding jeans that were comfortable and fit good. And everybody was telling me why I shouldn’t do it, and that does attract me. It’s kind of in my blood that way, the competitive edge. It’s in my makeup, I guess.

Upsize: Where else do you show that edge, or is it only in business?

Bollin: Barrel-racing. I grew up with horses, in Litchfield. We had backyard kind of horses. I don’t come from a highly competitive horse family, and I guess because I didn’t get that as a child, I wanted it, because we couldn’t afford it back then. When I got older and got married, I started buying horses because now I can have them. My husband was supportive. I was in my late 20s when I started barrel-racing.

Upsize: Isn’t that late to start barrel-racing? What’s the attraction?

Bollin: It’s an adrenaline rush, and working something so hard and your teammate is an animal with its own brain and its own thoughts. It’s challenging. You tip a barrel and you’re out. They put up three cans, and they’re approximately 60 to 80 feet apart, and you have to make a cloverleaf pattern around them, as fast as you can without tipping them over. And you could be up against 80 other girls that want to win the same thing.

Upsize: Your company has a great slogan. Share it.

Bollin: “Even though you’ve been bucked, kicked, bit and stomped, never give up.”

Upsize: When did you think of that slogan?

Bollin: I could go back eight, nine years ago. I was out selling my products as a retailer. I’m driving up and down the road, and I believe it was an event I did in Starkville, Mississippi. It cost me $1,200 to do the event. I sold 1,201 dollars’ worth.

Upsize: Oh. Depressing.

Bollin: Yeah, but I took it as a sign. That was frustrating. I was about to give up. It’s just a hard road to do, being away from my family. And I got home and tried to make a decision to make this work or am I going to give up. Just late at night it came to me. It was kind of a horse thing. I thought, I’m never going to give up on this. I’m going to keep going because tomorrow could be the change of everything. It was coming from a barrel-racer perspective. I don’t give up on that, so I’m not going to give up on my business.

Upsize: Did that moment also set you on a path to eventually launch the jeans, and change your company to something that could be much more successful?

Bollin: I don’t know that I thought of it at that time. As it kept evolving, I had to keep changing. That’s an important thing I know about fashion is you have to keep changing. You have to be one step ahead of your competition. And just always trying to get better, learn more. It’s been a constant. Every day here just growing the company is learning, evolving. Evolving and change are huge words around here.

Upsize: But how do your employees feel about that? Most people resist change.

Bollin: We talk about it all the time. The ones that have stayed with me and are growing with the company are adaptable, flexible, ready to change, self-improving. If somebody wants to come here and work and think they will do the same thing every day, that’s not a good fit with our culture.

Upsize: Do you make an effort to find that right kind of person?

Bollin: Absolutely. Right now we’re interviewing for a warehouse manager. We have interviewed 38 applications to 11 to seven to two. It’s going to come down to personality, being able to fit into our culture. I don’t want anyone to come in here and change us; they need to be adaptable to how we are. Character and personality are what it comes down to if you’re going to get a job here. You’ve got to be able to be a teammate. You can’t be an “it’s always about me” person.

Upsize: So how do you find those things out about someone, when everybody’s on their best behavior during interviewing?

Bollin: We’re using a personality test. It’s an in-depth personality test working with a consultant. She will tell me, “this is the personality of this candidate.” We hired her to do a leadership retreat with us. As we’re growing so fast, we don’t have time to bring in the wrong person; that’s too big of a hiccup. We don’t want to lose our momentum.

Upsize: Have you always done this? It’s unusual to hear about a detailed hiring process at a small business.

Bollin: We’ve learned the hard way, getting strong personalities in here that clashed that have a different vision of what they want out of a job. It’s really getting everybody involved that needs to work with this person. I’m sure that the person interviewing-they have to feel quite grilled when they get out of here.

Upsize: What do you think about being a growing employer, providing jobs in Cokato, a smaller location?

Bollin: We’ve hired some people that were commuting to the Cities, and the one thing I hear right away is, “Oh, I don’t have to face the sun.” She’d commute and have to face the sun all the way there and all the way home. We have a lot to offer to someone who wants to feel like they’re making a difference. They like the camaraderie we have around here. We do keep it kind of small-town, and we have potlucks.

Upsize: Share the details of your decision to launch a jeans line. What were the practicalities?

Bollin: It probably took a year of research, of meeting factories. You have to be able to communicate with the factory you’re working with. China is the master of denim-making. The second thing is to find out what their samples are like: is it the highest-quality maker I can find?

Upsize: You knew what to do because of your background in the retail/fashion industry, is that right?

Bollin: That’s right. I had started importing tops first, and actually tops are more difficult. You had all different fabrics, all different types of tops. We use the same denim on all of our jeans. It comes in kind of a canvas, and then a certain number can be made from that in the different sizes.

Upsize: And how do you figure out your sizes?

Bollin: That’s the key, figuring out how your sizes are going to fit. Other companies use a standard size chart. And I made my own. I knew about the industry, and I thought, I don’t know who is designing this, and who is saying that this is a size 8 or this is a size 10. It fluctuates all across the board.

I took 12 different brands of jeans, and just started out with my size, an average size, not a size 2. I took those jeans apart and measured them, and found out that some may be bigger in the size but then they’re lower in the back, or lower in the rise. Ours have a higher rise in the back of the jeans, and a little lower in the front. It’s a little friendlier fit. And it has 2 percent Spandex, which gives it a more relaxed, comfortable feel, and I think that’s another key to why they fit so many different women.

Upsize: Every woman has had the experience of trying on 15 pairs of jeans and finally buying that last one just because it was the least horrible.

Bollin: It can make or break your day; it can feel really good when you try our jeans and they fit and look great. If you put something on in the morning that isn’t comfortable, it kind of affects your whole day.

Upsize: Did you know the jeans were going to sell well, or were you worried when you launched?

Bollin: I feel blessed-I don’t say lucky any more, I say blessed-that all this came together. I found the right factory. If we had found one that really wasn’t high on quality it would have made a world of difference; we probably wouldn’t be talking to Upsize right now, as recipients of this award. Your relationship is very important. Twice a year they have an apparel market in Las Vegas, where they have sourcing partners, and that’s where I found my partner for sourcing.

Upsize: How long after starting to sell your jeans did you know you were on the right track?

Bollin: It didn’t take long. The first summer we had jeans we took them to Winstock, which is a country music festival in Winsted, Minnesota, and women were trying them on and they would buy two or three pairs. I was like, Thank God, because it was a huge adventure.

Upsize: It must have been a big investment, to design and order many pairs of jeans.

Bollin: Actually I got kind of lucky, because this actual factory had a minimum of only 500, and that’s much lower than many others. You have to put 20 percent down when you place an order. Within two weeks from submitting a design to this factory, I get a sample and then I decide if I want to put it in a line. Then the sample sales people go out and get as many pre-orders for these jeans as they can. We have those pre-orders in hand before we decide to produce.

Upsize: Do you do all the designing yourself, or do you have staff members who do that also?

Bollin: I have an assistant right now who helps me. In the past I had someone who clashed with me. I knew that I had to stay in that driver’s seat. It has to stay my main focus; it’s kind of what has got us here. I have an assistant who’s amazing. She understands that a lot of times I’m not trying to design just what I like, but I like to design what other women will like. Then I have my daughter who’s helping doing the graphic design now. She grew up in the business, too.

Upsize: Our contest judges, especially the banker and the accounting firm executive, were impressed with your focus on profit margins. How did you develop that?

Bollin: Boy, you know, before I started this line I used to hand-paint on clothing. That’s where it got me started thinking, I know how much time I have into this, and I know how retailers have to work; they need their margin, too. When I started this line I had learned so much from that, and from selling.

I was always amazed how much people would pay for something that made them feel good and fits good. I try not to think what I would pay. I’m frugal that way; I’m a wholesaler. And then it’s years of retailing and understanding how people think. A woman will pay more for something if it makes her feel good about it. And then it’s putting ourselves at a higher standard and keeping it at a higher standard of quality, fit and comfort.

I get excited about making profits. If you make profits you can do more with your brand. My husband tells me, you don’t even care about money. That’s not why I do this.

Upsize: But that’s how you keep score in business: making money, making profits. Maybe it’s the same as barrel racing, that you want to win.

Bollin: It’s about always doing better than you did last time. I tell my salespeople, build up your accounts, and each time you go in there try to build them a little bit more.

Upsize: Tell me about launching your men’s apparel line. That seems like a risky and bold move. Why are you doing it?

Bollin: I held off for a long time; people said you should do a men’s line. I held off. I have to feel what I want from that, first. How do we want the guys to feel? How do we want the women in their life to feel about it? Men want the same things women want. They want to feel good. They like compliments even more than women like them.

I wanted to do something that wasn’t being offered in the Western industry, to try to ease them into change. Once they change, I think they’ll like it. I kind of do the same thing as with women. And fit is very important, and there again we use premium denim. I just watched from my own husband, Kirk, who used to just say, Oh, I’ll go into JC Penney’s and buy some Wranglers. I started buying him a little different shirts and I watched him get compliments and how that made him feel.

Knowing that women buy 75 percent of men’s clothing, that’s exactly how we direct our marketing and advertising. We work on getting the attention from the primary buyer in the family.

Upsize: I’ve been noticing the Levi’s national ad campaign, which must cost a fortune, where they say women’s curves are a “national treasure” and sell jeans in demi curve to extreme  curve, or whatever. You go into the store and they’ll measure you, and tell you what “curve” you are, and then leave you to wander around wondering how to fit your curve into a pair. I have to believe there’s a disconnect between that corporate campaign and the retail customer.

Bollin: You have to have substance behind it. Like our new campaign is “unbelievable fit” and that comes straight from our customers. They actually say that, when they try on our jeans, that they can’t believe how well they fit. We have a great marketing department, and they took that line and developed it. We have tags on the jeans that say that. We have size charts in the dressing room, and the rise goes up as the hip size goes up. So we do everything to reinforce the slogan.

Then the other program is our Tuff Rewards, which is getting the salespeople in the stores on our team. So if their buyers or owners or whoever is selling want to be part of Tuff Rewards, they get one free pair of jeans. Then the salespeople know exactly how they fit. Then we get them motivated with a punch card, and if they sell 15 pairs of jeans they get another free pair of jeans, and they can do that up to three times. Then we give them information about our brand and our story.

Upsize: How do you picture your company in five years, say? How big will it be?

Bollin: It’s bigger than I thought it would have been five years ago. Sometimes I feel like I have to just keep preparing for growth. I would like to be well-known in more than just the Western industry as a great-fitting jean. I would like to branch into more mainstream markets, boutiques.

Upsize: Isn’t that dangerous, getting away from that core market that you know so well, because you are the market?

Bollin: I think the challenges would be that there’s a lot more competition in denim in the mainstream market. I think the more we can get our story out, the better. Consumers like to know the story. They like to feel connected to a brand. I love to read people’s stories. I like to know where stuff comes from.

Upsize: How will you finance your growth, and is that different from what you’ve done so far?

Bollin: Our bank is our partner, and of course in this retail/apparel/seasonal industry, you have cash flow issues, that’s a given. There are certain times that are slower. Having the right bank on your side, and believing in your company, and being the right partner for you is essential. I believe that there will be a point in time where we might have to bring investors in. What does that entail? I think that type of investor would have to be like the employee. It has to be the right fit.

I know this new bank that we’re working with now has a lot more growth potential to help us. I don’t know that it’s going to be right in five years.

Upsize: Let me ask you a few philosophical questions. Can you describe a tipping point for your company, when something happened that caused things to go much better than before?

Bollin: Besides introducing the jeans? Another turning point was we have a showroom in the Denver market. And we had a showroom that was 350 square feet. There’s a big market out there that all the buyers come to. It is like, you can write a lot of orders. We couldn’t show the line enough, and I made a big decision to move into a huge showroom; I believe it was 2,200 square feet, and it’s now expanded to 3,000 square feet. So that’s where each of the 10 reps have their own little room.

That was a big play; that was a big risk. We pay $3,000 a month to use this room, and we only use it maybe 10 times a year. But if you want to play with the big dogs, you have to show it. You have to show that you have staying power, because they don’t want to work with someone who’s going to be a flash in the pan. That was a big tipping point, getting that large showroom. That was three years ago. When you take a big risk like that, you’ve got to finish it.

Upsize: What about the flip side, when something went very wrong at your company. How did you recover, and what did you learn?

Bollin: I have made mistakes in bringing on a president, who could run the company for me so I could design more. He was here for about a year. My husband and I grew this company to $5.3 million by ourselves. And we just needed help. We thought, we don’t know if we can double it again. I didn’t know if I had it in me, I didn’t know if I was capable. It’s growing so fast, and there’s a lot of stress on a marriage, too. So I brought in someone to run the company part of it. And just thinking he had done this before, he had his own business, he was a great guy and everything. My staff was just at their wits’ end. He didn’t have the same communication style as me; he just wanted to run it like a tight ship.

I found out two things: one thing is I have to run the company; it’s got to be my vision. I am a big communicator and my employees appreciate that. Everyone has to have a clear idea. Those are my strengths, so I need to focus on those and hire other people to take care of my weaknesses.

Upsize: What’s the other lesson?

Bollin: As I’ve gotten bigger I’ve learned a lot of HR things. I have to watch my p’s and q’s. As we’re growing I have to think about what I’m going to say before I say it. It’s kind of a struggle being the boss. I found out the hard way you can’t be friends. You have to have a line. You can be friendly, and you can respect them and they can respect you and you can have laughs together, but you can’t let it go too far. It’s a struggle, because you want everybody to like you.

Upsize: Which is more important, in your opinion, talent or experience?

Bollin: I’d have to say experience, like on the job experience. Because you’re going to come with a past of knowledge and maybe you’ve learned some things that you can teach others. Somebody can be super talented but if they don’t know how to do something, learn the hard way-sometimes it’s easier to have someone say, Yeah, I know how to do it

Upsize: Which is more important, money or ideas?

Bollin: I love ideas. Ideas can make you money. I love to see something grow. I’m always thinking, What if we did this? What could that be? For me that’s the most exciting.

Upsize: What’s one thing you wish “they” would have told you, about being an entrepreneur?

Bollin: If I would have known how hard it was going to be, maybe I wouldn’t have done it. It’s probably good that I don’t know; it’s probably good that I still don’t know what’s coming. You have to get through, and you have to tell people we’ll get through it.

I preach believing in the mission. That’s the growing pains. You’ve got to have faith that it will work out.

Upsize: You said you still barrel race. What’s your favorite barrel event?

Bollin: Once a year we at Cowgirl Tuff put on a big barrel race and have it at our home. It’s a way to give back to the industry that has done so much for us. This past September we had 400 barrel racers. That is the biggest barrel race in the five state area. The main reason is we make it fun. We have a great announcer that plays great music, so it feels like a party atmosphere. We hire a whole team to put it together. We do it right, and that’s why it’s my favorite barrel event of the year. Once again it’s like running a business: If you’re going to do it, do it the best you possibly can or don’t do it at all.