Franco Shade | The End

A lot of people don't realize the importance of a sound business plan and book keeping. Not to say that this was the downfall of Franco Shade but with some of these street brands and start up t-shirt brands that have some small successes early on, the reason they cannot sustain themselves long term is they just can't manage their money and budget accordingly. The dusty economy doesn't help the situation either. Now more then ever one bad decision can cost the business significantly. It can be as easy as doing a tradeshow budgeting that you will do a minimum of $10,000 in orders. The booth runs you $5,000, the airfare and hotel another $1,500, food and transportation $500 and like Joe said brands like to act rich. Take that into account and recent tradeshow results where no one is looking to make on sight orders anymore and you could potentially toss $7,000 out the window in one weekend if the show doesn't fair as well as you anticipated. It is sad to see Franco Shade/FRSH go as they were on the cusp of some solid growth.

"So some of you might have wondered why the blog has been so dead and some of you might have already heard the news but today I am announcing the end of Franco Shade/FRSH. Although I wish this was some sort of sick joke it isn’t and I can assure you all that we tried our best to not have this happen. I don’t want to only blame the economy as our downfall because there are other brands that are surviving in the same climate, along the way we made some poor choices which really hurt us. At this time I would rather not name those choices because I think it honestly doesn’t matter anymore. We hoped to come out with our Fall 09 line which finally had denim and what we thought was our best collection to date, unfortunately we couldn’t even afford to that and are going to be losing a lot of deposits we had placed on all those items. We have built quite a following on this site thanks to all of our loyal readers and daily visitors. I say this now with no promise of financial reward from any of you, I really appreciate you all. You hear people say without our fans and customers we are nothing or whatever corny cliche there is, but that is the truth here. I started this company 7 years ago and to think it could have lasted even this long is laughable.

I really can’t say how much I appreciate everyone who was involved, I can’t even begin to name everyone but you see them on the blog on a daily basis you know who I am talking about. Our staff, like most staffs in the street wear industry worked for pennies. Thats one thing that most people don’t know is when you are seeing peoples blogs and they’re poppin’ bottles the truth is most of them all chipped in with 20 other people to buy that bottle and its a industry wide practice to just be broke and act rich. I will be starting a new personal website where I will still post videos and information about my friends brands and anything related, also I will be documenting my travels and transitions into the next chapter in my life. I will also keep you updated with all of the FRSH crew and what they are up to. I will post that site on twitter so if you want to know it, just follow me @teamfrsh if you aren’t already and I’ll get you guys that link.

Again thanks so much for your support and I am sorry we couldn’t stretch it out a bit longer for you but sometimes you just gotta move on."

Joe

“FRSH”