I've got some quite important news. We were going to step back from DJTees and sell it on to our friend Andy who was going to pay for it from turnover. That has been the intention for the past year, when we had moved. So this summer I started doing a serious look at the numbers to make it all happen
At which point I realised that for financial reasons it just wasn’t possible. Basically there’s not enough coming in to pay for the business and make much of a living. This is because in the last year both the US and the EU have introduced tariffs. The effect of which is to make everything more expensive and 70% of our trade is overseas. So it’s had a big effect on our profit margin.
I hadn't realised the full extent of this until I did the numbers because the money from the Lifetime Mortgage rather hid it. This has caused us a major change of plan. So now, rather than sell it, we’re keeping on keeping on. Albeit in a slightly less intense demanding fashion. This affects Dawn much more than me because I was planning to keep writing blogs etc anyway but she’s got her art career to develop and grow and needs time and space to do that, which was the plan all along.
We’ve come up with a compromise solution whereby I’ll continue to do what I do, writing, customer interaction, quizzes etc and Dawn will spend 2 days every month designing new shirts. So she’ll be strictly part-time and we’ll keep it that way going forward unless someone wants to buy it with a lump sum, which I doubt.
So you’re stuck with me going on about bands like Sam Apple Pie and Moxy. This is quite a change to get our heads around, as we expected to put the business behind us but things change I guess. In a couple of years, all these tariffs might have been abolished because only a bad business person would think they’re a good idea. All they obviously do is cool trade. Eventually the customer pays, they have to. We’ll have to put prices up later in the year to cope with them. This at a time when prices - tshirts, ink and postage are all going up. Not sure why that’s not obvious to their proponents. Protectionism doesn’t work. So it seems ironic that supposed believers in free trade might propose them.
This all means I shall continue to travel the rock n roll highways and byways and we’ll continue to make shirts of bands that will cause you to say “Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about them.”
