Transforming Ideas into Impact: Navigating the Manufacturing Maze with Chris Cronin

If you're making something complicated, you're probably going to need to make it yourself, unless you find the right contractor, the margins are going to be tough, no one's going to want to wholesale it because they can't step all over it. As we say, in terms of markup and it's definitely the hard way to go, but I would say cater to the contractor that you know, and are working with, that's the hard part, finding the right contractor. And then coming up with products that they can make successfully versus giving them things that are way beyond their capability, because they'll probably say yes, because the price will be right, but they'll also screw it up and then you'll be hosed. So go carefully and it's okay to run out. We've always been a scarcity model of, oh, you better buy it because we're running it. Sometimes then a nice thing to do is pre-orders. We do that sometimes where we'll say, Hey, we're going to make a run of these. We only make them once in a while. Welcome to Super Entrepreneurs Podcast. Today we have with us Chris Cronin. Chris is the founder and CMO of Katanica. It's an outdoor adventure apparel company designing and manufacturing the world's most durable and high functioning apparel. Welcome to our show, Chris. Thank you. Thanks for being here Shane. Oh no, it's great to have you. We were just talking about how I was looking at your Instagram and saw that move, the video you made of the new location. I just got really excited seeing that advancement and the growth of your business to be able to move into a new location. Congratulations on that. Thank you. Yeah, it's been a long time coming and right now we're spread out on two floors and the old facilities neighborhood is terrible. It's an industrial Oakland. Yeah. And it's just really the neighborhood itself. Oakland is, you know, growing and vibrant and incredible city. I live in Oakland and there's corners of it that are just neglected and just the industrial parts. Everyone expects it to turn into a beautiful neighborhood at some point, but it just hasn't really happened in that spot. And it's just been, it's nice to get out of that and move to a new location that's really clean and beautiful and well lit and yeah, really nice. It's really nice. It looks like it's in a retail plaza or some kind of a retail environment. No, it's just that nice. We've entertained having a showroom in there for our products. We make a lot of different things. And so it'd be really cool to have a room that has everything we make on display. So if someone were to swing through, we're not really staffed to do like direct retail other that we do direct retail online and it's been our models for most of our existence, but we're shifting actually interestingly to a wholesale model as well, we're right in the middle of that as part of this like transition to the company. But you're a manufacturer, you would be wholesaling regardless, no? I don't know. So we've sold direct to consumer primarily factory direct basically for our existence. Yeah. So a little history is that we are a us manufacturer clothing and have our own sewers, have a dozen, 15 sewers, depends on like season on time, what we're making, how business is that kind of thing. Yeah. Currently we have about 12. And so we making things in the United States, making things in California is really expensive. We have really high minimum wage. And so unlike all the other clothes that everybody wears, they're manufactured overseas, our margins are pretty narrow. So we've always relied on the direct model to carry us in terms of margin so that we're not just wholesaling. We've done some wholesaling and a lot of our customers, wholesale customers are international. Even China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Russia was our biggest outside and then Europe as well. But we've exported about a third of what we make and yeah, we are shifting. We're starting to make things globally overseas. We started with a new line of bags in Vietnam and they've been really doing really well. We did a Kickstarter with this crazy fanny pack that we made. That's completely overbuilt has a billion pockets and zippers and all sorts of features. And that was, that was a whole, that's a whole podcast in itself. Kickstarter. Our first Kickstarter was like, it was great. It was successful, but so much work. Yeah. I can imagine. So what inspired you for you to create this company? Were you in the apparel business before this? And also is there a story behind the name Katanica? Yeah. So it's a family business. My brother, Beej Cronin is a designer and has been designing clothes since he was, I don't know, 10, probably 11 or 12, I think, probably 12. No way. Started making his own. He bought a pattern from a craft store in Connecticut where we grew up and started, made it on my mom's sewing machine, our mom's sewing machine. And then didn't like how it came out. So he changed the pattern to make it cool. And it was a three musketeer shirt. It had all these billowy, it was actually a cheese maker's shirt is what it was called. And he changed it all around and stripped down, took out all the billowy stuff and made it just this really cool kind of canvas shirt. And then the rest is history. So he's just a savant in terms of design and hasn't taken any college classes or on design or anything, but it's just a fabric engineer that has really focused his, his efforts on like overbuilding things and making things that last and outlast anything on the market. So some of our jackets are made of 1000 denier Cordura. So you need certain sewing machines to make that. You need certain equipment, which is why we've made stuff ourselves because people would just screw it up or not make it to have that control or not be able to give up halfway. And then you don't even have a product and you've got a bunch of ruined. So we've been down that road many times. And so we've controlled everything by doing it ourself. And so anyway, it's family business with myself, my cousin, Len, our cousin, Len Riccio and, and Beej. And so we've just built this company around his design efforts and have blown it out to a whole bunch of different products and are just always trying to expand on what we're doing. Oh. And then second part two question about the name. Kitanica. Yeah. So my brother, like I said, he doesn't have formal design training. Every, we don't correct anybody as long as you're saying that we're good. No, I want, I want to know, I want to make sure. I said, I want to pronounce it properly. So part of that, yeah. Part of the name. Correct. Kitanica. So kite. Okay. C-H-I-T-I-N the molecular component for bug exoskeletons is and crustacean shells and it's that it's what makes them strong is basically we make exoskeletons for humans to be started with jackets and we started with really heavy duty ballistic nylon jackets and Cordura jackets and so that's the impetus of the company is making a jacket that outlasts any jacket on the market. And so that's where the company started. Can you, sorry to interrupt, can you dumb that part down a little bit for me and the audience? What material is this and where does it come from? So Kitan, C-H-I-T-I-N is like a molecular component for bug exoskeletons and shells in animals, in the animal kingdom. And so it's what makes crab shells hard for crustaceans and it's what makes beetle shells hard, which is why our logo is a beetle. How do you pull that out from that? Is there a process? No, that's just the name. So we're, we, it's just a, it's just in a name. It's a fanciful thing. We made it up and we spell our name. So we are the world of exoskeletons is what our vision is and the name. And we spell it with a K instead of a C-H so that people say, right. Instead of saying Chitannica, that's what they would say. We say it Chitannica and it looks cool with a K at the beginning of it. And we like the beetle logo. And so we, that we developed as well. And that's the impetus of the name, the world of exoskeletons, simply put. So what kind of, what kind of guarantee do you have of your product? It sounds like really heavy duty and how's the weight factor of your jackets, for example, your clothing, your apparel extra heavy compared to other brands? Yeah. And not everything we make is made of Cordura. We use a lot of ripstop nylon, cotton, ripstop fabric. So we're using like military grade materials to make everyday clothing, but it's a lot of people use it for work where they use it for motorcycling for those heavy jackets because they're made of the, a really strong thing. And you know, what's interesting and you're right, like when you're using a thousand denier to make a jacket, it has to fit right. It has to wear right. And so that is the arms are articulated. So it's not, you're not fighting against the jacket all the time, meaning they're like they're gauged around the elbows, it fits the human body. And that's something that small companies. And I read this in, in, in, in a book about making clothes and being a business that makes clothes is that small companies really can focus on fit. Whereas larger companies with that, because they're just making so many pieces and everything is just on a different scale that you can't pay that much attention to fit when you're cranking out styles and so we definitely do and that is like our knees are articulated in our pants, even our jeans and even they're just the patterns have that consideration, I guess you would say. So what is the most important factor when it comes to your manufacturing process? What makes you unique in that process when it comes to other manufacturers? I would say the way we build things and that comes down to material. It's all going to sound super cliche because everyone says it. We sew our jackets with boot thread. One of the things that people don't think about in our pants and everything for the heaviest thread we can, because that's what blows out is your scenes. And so you'll, you'll see sometimes that problem. Yeah. And we're focused on the things that blow out. For example, our jeans, we've made jeans. They look like everybody else's jeans. They have a cell phone pocket on the thigh. So that's super sweet. Once you have that, you never going to be able to wear another pair of jeans because, but it's, it's pretty seamless on the thigh and it's a great place to put it and you don't sit on it. But outside of that, we sew with heavy duty thread. We use a little bit heavy, heavier fabric, like a 12 ounce denim. And then we also, the two places your pants blow out and jeans are your belt loops because they get old and they're bar tacked in there and they're really thin, think about thin, they're very thin. And they pull out after they've been washed a hundred times. That's where it's going to blow out is with all the needle holes from bar tacking those little bands of folded over denim as the belt loop. So what we use is really heavy duty nylon. It's about three quarter of an inch wide nylon webbing and bar tack that in. And those things, it's like a harness. That thing's not going anywhere. I've never had one of our belt loops blow out on me. Second place is your pockets, the pocket liners, we call them pocket bags, pocket liners of your jeans. And I actually, I actually have a pair of eyes stand up and show you what I'm talking about. But the pocket liners, we use nylon cotton ripstop. How many times have your keys poked through an old pair of jeans, your favorite old pair of jeans, you know, poke through the pocket. That's where they also blow out. And that's why we use Nikon, Nikon nylon cotton ripstop in the pockets. And we also use camouflage fabric just because it's cool on the inside of the pockets. But our jeans sell for 99 bucks and inside of the pockets. Yeah. That's cool. I don't know. Just for, so these are the belt loops batter belt loop. And these are the pockets. Cool. Anyway, that's awesome. That's cool. That's basically that. And those are just our jeans. So everything we make has that consideration. Everything we make and they're tested people, they come back and you asked about guarantee. We guarantee everything against craftsman defect. Like we've made it. We didn't make the fabric. So if you stick a knife or something like that, we might be able to bend it for you, but we got to charge you for selling on that. Cause we've got to pay the person to do it. But if we get stuff back and we fix it and we want to know how it blew out. So we want to see it. So we always work with whatever customer has any issue with anything we've got, just, you know, we've always taken care of everybody and stand behind it unless they're idiots. I just get it. Chris. Yeah. Tell me about your most successful product. That one item that is just on fire. It's the best item you have and you're just always producing it. And can you tell us more about it? That's interesting. And it changes over the years. We've had different products catch fire when it gets. So we had a jacket on myth busters and that was one of that's a TV show here in the U S and that kind of caught fire and really start and energize the company in the very earliest days. We still make that jacket, but we make a different version of it. We've updated it. We've made it like completely redesigned it since then. But that one really caught fire in a way where we're like, Oh, people really want this thing, we should start making it again. And so we had shelled the company. My brother went into teaching and that thing, like there was a Google and it was on the show for years and people just were like looking for it and looking for it and nobody was making it of course, because my brother made it, um, originally and sold it to Adam Savage, the host of myth busters and one of the, and, and so people were just looking for it. So that's one from the scorpion pack. Most recently is this overbuilt fanny pack. And it's really like a lumbar pack that you got big giant fastex clip buckle. But what it is, it's, you know how a backpack has like a real waistband that sits on your hips and you can put real weight in it. We made a fanny pack like that. Yeah. We made a fanny pack like that. That also has a shoulder strap so you can use it. You can remove the waist belt, use it as a shoulder bag. And then it also that, so that funded on Kickstarter in five days was in the top 4% of Kickstarter earners. So the thing about Kickstarter that nobody knows, or I didn't know when I started doing it, when we first went into it was that only 4% of Kickstarters make over a hundred thousand dollars in revenue or raise that much, only 4%. There's a lot of Kickstarters out there. And so that we were in that tier. I think we are raised 123,000, but people want to carry it. People want a bunch of them. And so we're looking, then that was made in Vietnam by one of the premier bag making companies in the business. And so it's super high quality, very, and all designed to our spec. We designed it, came up with the ideas and made the samples, sent the samples there. They make it, we check them, give them feedback, make sure they're made right with our materials. Cause that's happened before at other shops where you send your stuff, you order them all the supplies that you need to your spec, and then they use somebody else's thread or they use somebody else's, and then you're like, you sewed this with fashion thread. This thing is going to pull itself apart because the material's so heavy. Anyway, so the, yeah, the Scorpion Pack is really cool. And it's, and we, yeah, we've sold out. We're doing some crowdfunding now in Japan and South Korea. And so once you get successful on Kickstarter in the U S they, you know, you get, I was reached out to by maybe 30 companies that want to carry it and do a crowdfunding in their country. And so it catches fire a little bit, but it's a ton of work chasing down the backers for the Kickstarter and their details. I didn't realize that going in, but yeah, it's been. It really helped our bag line. Yeah. It was a good experience too, right? Yeah. We'll do another one. We're looking for so the next product, because it's gotta be, it can't just be a shirt or like a jacket, although the yeah, we want to have a something unique that nobody else makes that needs to be made that's often kind of how we start our product design process. That's good. The uniqueness, what is needed, right? And what's different about what we're making, which is better. How? Yeah. Oh yeah. So are there any kind of tips or advice you want to share with anyone that may be looking to start their own apparel manufacturing company in the United States? It's the tough way to go. And if you're making something complicated, you're probably going to need to make it yourself unless you find the right contractor and it's almost impossible. No, I wouldn't say that the margins are going to be tough. No, one's going to want to wholesale it because they can't step all over it, as we say, in terms of markup and it's definitely the hard way to go, but I would say cater to the contractor that you know, and we're working with, or you have access to, or that's the hard part is the finding the right contractor. And then coming up with products that they can make successfully versus giving them things that are way beyond their capability, because they'll probably say yes, because the price will be right. Or they'll, Oh, if I'm going to make this, I'm going to need 35 bucks a piece or whatever. They'll say yes, but they'll also screw it up. And then you'll be hosed. You won't be able to get your money out of it because you can't sell it. And then you're stuck in a really hard spot because you're, you're going to owe people money if you borrowed money to make it, or you're just going to be out your own money, which is also bad. And it's yeah. So it's, and go carefully and it's okay to run out. We've always been a scarcity model of, Oh, you better buy it because we're running it. Sometimes then a nice thing to do is pre-orders. We do that sometimes where we'll say, Hey, we're going to make a run of these. We only make them once in a while. We have these three quarter length shorts called the mountain shorts. They have 13 pockets. They're tactical capris. So they're like calf length short that go over the knee. And that's the whole idea is that they, if you put your knee down in shorts, your knees in gravel or the dirt or whatever, and then these, you, you have coverage there and, and so we, they're very unique. People make fun of them. Oh man. I'm pretty as well. That's totally tough. And some people get it and think it's super macho and some people don't really wear them or wooden and critical. So I'm of the, I think they're cool, but I don't wear them personally, but they are totally bad-ass shorts. If you ever cool. I just don't, I don't like the way they look on me personally. I'm probably my legs is the issue, but at any rate, we do a pre-order for those. And that way you're collecting the money upfront. It's like your own Kickstarter. That's a cool way to go. If you have a decent social following and then you have, you know, you need to have a delivery timeline and you say, Hey, these are going to deliver in June. I we're going to have this pre-order window open X, Y, Z. That's been very helpful and an easy way to get into it and not be over your skis, but you can still, you still got to watch the production and make sure that they're doing it right. It's coming out. Okay. Got to really check them all the time. Not just wait for it to be done, but in the process of being done. That check-ins with the main practice. Got it. Chris, this was amazing talking to you about this. I absolutely excited where it's headed because when you create something unique, when you create something better, a good quality, long lasting stands out. You're going places. I'm seeing that the product like this is going to help people. If it helps people, I don't see why you shouldn't be growing like anything as you are, so it's great. I can see this expanding to a whole bunch of countries and you guys are on the right path. Again, congratulations on your new location. Yeah, thank you. No problem. Anything that you wanted to announce, let us know. We'll see what we can do. Or if you wanted to come back on our show, let us know and appreciate you so much, Chris and best wishes to you. Thanks Shahid. Appreciate it. It's been great on talking with you. No problem. And audience, thanks again for joining us. Chris's information will be in the show notes. Take a look at his website, his social media and what they're manufacturing in USA. So if you're locally there and you're looking for a product that is unique, you should give it a try. They're manufacturing in a very unique way when they're keeping that process within their control. That is the key there that they did. And manufacturing is a fun game. It's not for everyone, but definitely we also, yeah, it's not, but we're also involved in manufacturing and it's a passion. We love it. And it's like you said, it's not for everyone, but definitely it's something to look into. If you're looking to create something new to help people, don't hold back. Go for it. Take that action. Take that step. You can do anything literally. So thank you again. Thank you so much, Chris. Yeah. Thank you Shahid. Take care.