Gorde's capitalism celebrates the right of every individual to be "free and creative." But before that can happen, he believes, people must "get above the economic necessities of their lives." The corporation is a means to this end, a stop along the way to fulfilling personal dreams and goals as diverse as the individuals involved. Personal freedom within the corporation, however, must promote profit. "Without the bottom line," Gorde says, "the dream is jeopardized, the whole thing becomes a joke, and we've all wasted a lot of time."
The best way, he asserts, to satisfy individual economic necessities and preserve personal freedom while at the same time maximizing profits is by letting employees own the corporation and by giving every shareholder an equal vote in major corporate decisions, regardless of the number of shares held. Any given individual's value to the corporation is then based on the merit of his or her specific contribution. "The other owners listen to you," he says, "because you've made more right decisions than wrong ones, and wrong ones are inevitable." Ultimately, the corporation perpetuates itself because as owners take their profits and leave to pursue their dreams, they hand over their responsibilities to others who are equally inspired to reach the same threshold.
"My father gave me the bottom line," he says, "and the Yippies gave me a philosophy. And the idea was to determine whether I was going to have to remain outside society to survive intact or whether I was strong enough to enter the belly of the monster, promote a different sense of business philosophy, maintain a bottom line, and at the end of that period, assured of monetary success, would still have enough of myself left to reach my goal."
On September 9, 1977, Jerry, Wendy, and Jerry's old Miami friend Bobby Tarren were officially in business. Gorde had given his cousin $3,000 in cash from his leather-craft savings, and the three partners had signed papers to take over payments on an existing $8,000 bank note. They paid themselves $50 a week each and checked the cash register every hour to see how much they had made.
Dirt Shirt was business primeval. Customers would wander in off the street, select one of the irregulars from the rack, spell their names out from the initials that hung on the wall, and have them ironed onto the shirt. It was a slow, maddening process for three people who had enough energy among them to trigger nuclear fission. And it was exactly the kind of dead-end challenge a former Yippie leader needed to restore hs sense of urgent opportunism. As it turned out, Gorde's Yippie experiences were more than loosely connected to his success in business. The hours spent negotiating with contentious radical groups and local government officials had given him a compelling verbal dexterity. But above all, he had come away with an almost visceral certainty that, given enough thought, most difficulties could be turned to his advantage.
It was obvious, for example, that the meager drop-in trade would never get anyone to Katmandu. The business needed more traffic, but it couldn't pay for the advertising to get it. So Gorde went to a local radio station and offered to supply it with T-shirts bearing the station name in exchange for airtime. "This developed a retail traffic," Gorde says, "that was substantially better than the store deserved." The partners soon added more racks of T-shirts, and so began an expansion program that is still underway.
At the same time, the partners started to develop some crude systems that would help them organize and manage the growing enterprise. "It was kind of ludicrous how much attention we gave to setting up systems, given what we had to work with, Tarren says, "but we were always conscious of their importance. At first we tried very basic stuff like which rack we would start with first when we took inventory and what color shirts to count first. We got better at it as we went along."
While Wendy ran the retail operation, Gorde and Tarren were busy calling on other radio stations, advertising agencies, restaurants, and bars. Not only did they offer T-shirts, but they also came equipped with an appropriate "concept." For example, when the owner of a local pizza parlor couldn't understand why anyone would want to buy a T-shirt with the name of his parlor on it, Gorde explained that if "Had a piece lately?" was printed on the front of the shirts, they would go flying out the door. That owner has since sold more than 1,000 T-shirts, and is still a customer. The "I only sleep with the best" T-shirt, which was sold in the gift shop of The Hyatt Richmond, was another big winner, until company officials questioned its taste. At the end of its first fiscal year on March 31, 1977, Virginia Textiles recorded about $80,000 in sales and a minuscule profit of roughly $2,000.
By the end of fiscal 1978, sales had doubled and profits tripled as the trio expanded its list of corporate accounts. They had hired Jerome Golfman, their first salesman and greater volume had enabled Gorde to build up his credit with the bank. They had formed custom screen printing, their first division outside retail sales, through a merger with the textile division of Richmond Graphics Inc., a local screen printer and billboard designer.
But the merger with Richmond Graphics represented more; it created a new level of production control. At first, when orders called for only 100 or 200 shirts with simple lettering, Bobby, Wendy, and Jerry would complete the order themselves, working through the night with a converted photographic film dryer that they cranked up to the highest temperature possible.
As orders grew, they invested in a custom-made machine that could do both screen printing and heat transfer. And still the orders grew, 1,000 then 2,000 shirts, forcing Gorde to rely heavily on subcontracts with other screen printers. Most of these screen printers could neither deliver high-quality product nor could they deliver on time. "The customers were accepting it," Gorde says, "because there was nothing else around. But I just knew it wasn't good work. I just knew it wasn't under control. The people at Richmond Graphics were truly good artists and technicians, but they were very poor at business." Gorde settled Richmond Graphics's Small Business Administration loan and paid its back payroll taxes, and the combined company set up shop in 1,000 square feet of rented space behind a lithographer's plant. Today, the custom screen print division has roughly 3,500 customers, most in the central Virginia area, and is the company's second largest division, accounting for about 35% of total sales.
