In 2018, longtime friends Jerry Kozak and Ricky Winowiecki moved their T-shirt company to their 30,000-square-foot warehouse on 505 S Maple Rd, Ann Arbor. The two business partners, who began in 2008, have grown their longtime business from a college dorm room to one of the city’s largest distribution companies.Â
When Kozak and Winowiecki began the Ann Arbor T-Shirt company (or Ann Arbor Tees), the two friends considered the idea an activity for pocket change, believing the business to be a recreational gig, making custom material based on pop-culture references.
Kozak says the premise for a business did not officially begin until his first year at the University of Michigan, where he became business partners with his longtime friend and now dorm-mate, Winowiecki, whose major in computer engineering helped for website design.Â
The two began the new website for printing & selling t-shirts out of their dorm room at Mary Markley Hall.
RELATED: Rebel Nell: A Jewelry Venture with a Mission
“I brought that press to Michigan when I came for freshman year, and we set up a little web store,” Kozak said. “We sold bootleg Chuck Norris T-shirts. We learned about intellectual property, but we did not expect it to be like a full-time thing.”
According to Kozak, the two now business partners barely made over $1,000 in their first year, spamming various groups on Facebook for sales connections, which he says would often reach thousands of people at once.Â
“The idea was based around Facebook’s structure at the time,” Kozak said. “It was group-based, you did not have a newsfeed. And whoever owned the group could message everyone, even if they had thousands of people. We thought this business pilot could be cool because the groups were built around novel things we could make into a shirt.”
Kozak, who worked as a freelance landscaper, said business continued to be slow after graduation. However, their company would eventually gain momentum with the arrival of “A Very Potter Musical” (AVPM), a 2010 parody of the Harry Potter series, which earned over 80 million views on YouTube.
Kozak said the opportunity for success came with the play’s sequel, “A Very Potter Sequel,” which he recalls the showrunners reaching out to himself and Winowiecki to print and sell merchandise throughout the lobby of each show.
“It was eye-opening. After the show, we set up a website for them. That became the production group called Team StarKid, which became a big deal,” Kozak said. “That was the first time I felt we caught lightning in a bottle. We printed around ten times more that year. With one tweet, they could send 100,000 people to the website.”
According to Kozak, with Winowiecki going on tour with the theater troupe to continue selling their product, the success laid the building blocks for what the company would represent today, translating the earned income by investing in Amazon product offerings to grow the business.
Business after college
Kozak, who said their business now has between 65-75 members on staff, now offers more than 200 items in their catalog, and is projected to make over a million custom items this year.
All of this is due to the company’s long list of active contracts which resulted from their viral Harry Potter parody series’ continued success. The Ann Arbor Tees were able to Segway that success into partnerships with organizations like U-M medical, the aforementioned Amazon and the U.S Navy.
“Apparel is interesting because it just applies to every human organization,” Kozak said. “What we found has been a really good niche, where we set up these stores to process items one by one. We are finding our shine, or niches in these bespoke stores, mostly businesses, nonprofits and other organizations.”
The company’s newfound success has come primarily from Amazon, where Ann Arbor Tees sells over 70% of its products, advertises its thousands of designs, and stores most of its materials, earning their business $14.5 million in revenue in 2018.Â
According to Kozak, the company has found a primary focus with their current distribution system. However, one of their key goals has become finding ways to give back to the city of Ann Arbor.
“We just sent a big annual batch of shirts and hats to We the People Opportunity Farm in Ypsi,” Kozak said. “Washtenaw County supports small businesses, and we have been lucky. We view that as karma. Now, we are on our feet, we are successful, we try to pay that forward and help other businesses along the way and buy local ourselves.”
Antonio Cooper is a freelance journalist from Detroit, Michigan. His coverage of music festivals and interviews with local celebrities appeared in The E-Current Magazine, The Detroit Metro Times, XXL Magazine, RichMagDigital, The Ann Arbor Observer, and Pop Magazine.
