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I recently had a chance to sit down and talk with Dennis over at YoungMoneyBlog about his up-and-coming E-commerce business, One Greek Store. Dennis is a 22 year old college student attending the University of Florida pursuing a degree in Marketing and Political Science. He may not be quite an A-list blogger or an E-commerce mogul yet, but what makes Dennis’s story worth the read is the fact that he’s actually setting up his own E-commerce business from his college apartment. One Greek Store is still extremely new but is already experiencing tremendous growth.

Matt: Okay well lets start off by you introducing yourself. Age, location, a bit of background. How did you get started in online business? What made you get into it?

Dennis: I am 22 years old. I am from Gainesville, Florida and will be graduating this year with a degree in Marketing and Political Science. I got started with the online business idea from being a member of an Asian American Fraternity. I recogized that this portion of the Greek community, along with Hispanic/Latino Greeks and Multicultural Greeks were not targeted by many of the major online retailers. Along with the personal relationships I have through my fraternity and other organizations, I felt that a greek store business would do well.

Did you have any sort of online experience before starting One Greek Store?

Originally, I wanted to build a website and work closely with a local business to produce our products. Essentially I would give a local Greek business some online prescence in exchange for a piece of the profit. One Greek Store was the first business venture I’ve ever done.

Okay well continue with your story - how did it evolve in your mind and then in reality?

First we wanted to work with a local retailer… that fell through. So our next step was to outsource all of our production to a local seamstress/embroiderer. But what we found was that these local businesses didn’t product clothing to our quality standard with a fast turnaround. Our final evoluation was to purchase an embroidery machine and do everything in house.

So you do most of the work yourself? In your apartment?!

Yessir. About 80% of our work is done in house … apartment… we also do screenprinting that is outsourced and we order general products, like paddles and pins from a distributor.

So tell me how that works. Give me a walkthrough of a typical operating day in an eCommerce business run out of a college apartment. How do you have it organized? What are some common problems? Does it affect your life much?

In a common day, we would recieve an order, whether its online or through the fone. Once we get that order, we check to make sure we have products in stock… like blank garments and greek letters. If we don’t have the garments/letters, we order them from a distributor. Once we have all the pieces together, we put it through our machine and get it made. We then ship it out to the customer. This is done constantly everyday for the week… including weekends. We also target conferences and different Greek events that we could potentially sell products. Therefore we have premade products in stock that can be sold.

In terms of organization, I am working with 2 other partners. I handle most of the sales an customer interaction, one of my partners handles the finances which includes ordering products from distributors, and the third partner handles the production. But for the most part… all of us can do each general task. As a startup, our major problems have been learning the business. We’ve also had trouble dealing with distributors and manufacturers. Also there was a huge learning curve for us to learn how to operate the embroidery machine. One of my partners even got a needle stuck in his finger haha.

Life wise, im sooooooo busy. I have school, business, organizations, a gf… it’s crazy.

Hah yea I read about that little incident on your blog. So how did you go about finding suppliers? Have you learned any tricks of the trade as far as dealing with distributors and manufacturers?

I found suppiers from a lot of digging. My partners and I did a lot of google searches and asked a lot of questions from embroiders/seamstresses. We then called a bunch of people and asked more questions… the more we asked the more we found. We then tested the people we found and asked them to send us samples… or to make products for us to sample. We finally found a few that we liked that met our satisfaction. Also, we are now able to attend tradeshows for the clothing retail business… which has helped with our connections. I haven’t really learned any new tricks perse. Just that we have to be determined in finding the right people to work with.

If you don’t mind my asking … how is the buisness doing? Is it profiting? Are you expanding it - will you eventually have to move the business out of the apartment? How is the growth comparing to what you planned on going into it?

Sure, the business has been doing great. We expanded to three more machines last week. We are also reasearching retail space and hope to have enough moeny to rent one by the beginning of August. I don’t think we’ll be profitable for a while … hopefully by the beginning of 2008.

Are you guys alloting yourselves a salary at the moment or just putting it all back into building the business?

Everything is in the business. We’re a startup … so we literally work 7 days a week whenever we have time to work. Being a student takes a lot of time out of our schedule which forces us to work through the night if necessary.

How did you finance the startup?

My partners and I pulled money out of our savings and we used credit cards. I admit it was VERY risky… but we felt that we were young enough to take that risk. If the business fails, we will have time to recover any lost.

So how did you guys manage the web development front? Is one of you a programmer, did you hire someone, or did you use software to power the site?

None of us know very much about web stuff. I know some basic things… but nothing significant. We use virtuemart.net which is a free open source shopping cart. The software is easy to use and allowed us to save a lot of money from hiring a programmer or having a custom shop made.

Alright well do you have any other advice for anyone planning on getting into the eCommerce industry?

Just do it.

I’d like to thank Dennis for the chance to get to know him a little better, and I wish him and his partners luck with One Greek Store and any future projects!

The main thing I’d like you guys to get out of this interview is the work ethic that goes into starting up a web business. It’s not easy money.

As a final parting gift, check out Dennis’s warehouse:

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