Making custom “one offs” for neighbor businesses on Tempe’s Mill Avenue, Brand X CEO Charles Goffnet recognized a new market for his six-year-old T-shirt business. B.Y.O.U. (Buy Your Own Uniform), newly launched out of Brand X, aims to give business owners a solution for brand control. To its standard stock of T-shirts, tank tops and polo shirts it has added button-downs, scrubs and chefs coats — with access to virtually any type of apparel through distributors worldwide. “Keeping staff looking sharp all the time is a really frustrating experience,” says Goffnet, speaking as one whose career includes having managed several restaurants. Freeing businesses from having to maintain their own inventory of uniforms, B.Y.O.U. not only gives businesses flexibility as to whether they or their employees pay for the branded attire, but lets the employee “buy as many as they want to accommodate their laundry schedule,” Goffnet offers.
“As an entrepreneur, I love talking to other business owners,” says Goffnet, explaining how B.Y.O.U. “happened organically” to accommodate neighboring businesses’ employee turnover as well as special events where “the more appeal a bartender has, the more attention he gets and the more drinks he sells.” Goffnet says he’s used to people coming in frantic with an immediate need, and can usually get a single-shirt order done in one hour, orders of around five turned around in the same day, and orders of a couple dozen completed in six to eight business days. In addition to the 1,400-square-foot store on Mill Avenue, Brand X has a 2,000-square-foot space for backstock and offices and another 1,600 square feet for screen printing that Goffnet has equipped with new presses and printers.
