INNOVATORS

Making personalized clothes is an expensive proposition, but Chuck Beatty has big plans to take his company to the next level

Chuck Beat ty’ s goal for Twig a Clothing? Only to take down Lululemon’s Ivviva line.

There is a number written on the basement wall of Chuck Beatty’s parents’ house that he looks at every day: $200,000. That’s the sales mark he wants to hit before looking to start his own factory to manufacture leggings and other female athletic wear for his Twiga Clothing company. The number should be reached soon if he achieves another goal of reaching the $250,000 sales mark this year, with all the clothes made in his parents’ basement on seven machines — although he plans to get another two or three up and running. But the short-term number is just a step on the way to a much more audacious goal. “I always say I’m going to take down Ivivva. That’s the goal on the wall,” Beatty says. “It’s funny to say that looking out of the basement window.”

The basement was the cheapest place the former Lululemon Athletica Inc. menswear designer could find when he decided to start Twiga two years ago after realizing there was a market for personalized children’s clothing. That realization sprung after he bought some outfits for his niece that were part of a one-time line of Lululemon children’s wear called Copper and Chip. The niece outgrew the clothing, but not her love of them. Begging her uncle to make her some more pants, Beatty decided to make them special by silk-screening her name into the waistband — an idea that soon captured the imagination of her friends and their moms.

“My niece was wearing these pants all the time, showing them to her friends and their moms, and then I started getting these emails and calls asking where she got them because they wanted a pair,” Beatty recalls. “That’s when the idea was launched in my mind.” He tinkered for 18 months with different fabrics, learned to screen print and put up a basic website, but it was enough to realize that there was something to his idea. “From that point on, to be absolutely honest, it’s been an absolute grind,” he says.

One reason is that making clothes in Canada is not easy, nor cheap, especially when the business model is built on personalizing them. The apparel industry is built on volume, to the point where many of the companies that succeed are more marketing companies than anything else. Manufacturers need volume or else they charge high rates, while the quality from sample makers isn’t consistently good enough to justify what is still a high price. “At one point, I almost packed it up, said, This was crazy, forget it, there’s a reason these companies get volume production, it’s just easier, its the way the industry is, stick to it,” he says.

But Beatty bit the bullet, bought some industrial sewing machines to put in his parents’ basement, learned to sew and came across a process called sublimation dye printing to replace the arduous task of silk-screening people’s names. “Thank god I moved on from silk screening because if there was no solution to that I would have probably packed up a year ago,” he says. “There are five different ways to spell Mia these days.” Now he can use Adobe Illustrator to change the basic stripe line in one of his designs, print it off and adhere it to the fabric using a heat press.

At $72 for a pair of customizable leggings, Beatty knows he’s not going to sell a ton of the Twiga Plus line, but he’s a created a standard Twiga line that costs less. “My hope is that people will buy that one Twiga Plus pair, but then they will come back three or four times throughout the year to buy the basics as well,” he says. He’s set up a Shopify website, is looking into doing more direct sales and has a storefront on a tony part of Toronto’s Yonge Street that is connected to a dance studio and its 800 students — a connection that was responsible for most of Twiga’s early sales.

“In terms of an apparel company and creating a brand, there’s a certain point in time when a brand becomes justified in the eyes of the public and I don’t know if there is an equation for that,” Beatty says. “Obviously, I have to worry about revenue, but at the same time, my job is to really grow the brand and expose the brand. I’m going to do everything I can to get product out of the door and on bodies. It’s a pretty daunting task, but the response we’re getting is not bad.”