There’s nothing yet outside the long cluster of warehouses, where 1015-A sits just off Collier Road, to indicate this is where Stephen Glasgow and Matt Watson do business.
But inside the 12,500-square-foot space, there is no question that this is Country Club Prep, the fast-growing online retailer founded in 2012 in Watson’s unfinished basement.
It is filled almost to capacity with shelves and brown boxes stocked full of all manner of preppy clothing and accessories from polo shirts to cocktail dresses, hats and T-shirts.
Just last month, the company, which is all about making Internet shopping a one-stop venture sans any shipping fees, opened its first brick-and-mortar store on the campus of the University of Virginia, where Glasgow and Watson earned their law degrees.
They started with 17 brands on the site but quickly grew to 80 by December 2012, just nine months later.
“We’d go to our day jobs and after reviewing legal briefs, talk to customers on our lunch breaks about seersucker pants on our cellphones, then after we got home pack and ship orders well into the night,” Watson said.
By last September, Country Club Prep had grown from two shelves in his Atlanta basement to three-quarters of Watson’s two-story home.
“My wife was done,” the 32-year-old father of two said. “We had to move.”
And so they did.
A push to rethink future
Other than a dream and a passion for preppy fashion, Watson and Glasgow had little to no experience in the e-commerce industry when they launched Country Club Prep two years ago.
But by then, both Glasgow and Watson had grown weary of the legal profession. The economy was tanking, and as they watched nearly 15 percent of their associates at Alston & Bird and Powell Goldstein lose their jobs, they realized the career path they’d chosen was not what they’d imagined.
“With the economic downturn in 2008, we were working our butts off, and the threat of losing our jobs was always hanging over our heads,” said Glasgow, a 33-year-old father of one.
In late 2010, they began rethinking their future.
“We figured if we were going to work this hard, let’s work on something we wanted to do,” Watson said. “We couldn’t picture ourselves sitting at a desk still worrying if the ax was going to fall.”
They began re-examining their skills. The former University of Virginia classmates possessed strong oral and written communications skills, and they were adept at setting priorities and assessing needs.
Even though they hadn’t set foot in a shopping mall in years, it didn’t take long for them to figure out something was missing in their search for the bright colored clothes they loved so much.
“The way we shopped was from website to website, placing orders independently and paying separate shipping fees,” Watson said.
And so they asked themselves: Why isn’t there a one-stop shop for preppy clothing?
Their answer: offer people a different way to shop.
“Instead of trying to fit into the aging mall and specialty store model, we wanted to push forward into this new model that caters to people who want the convenience of shopping online without the shipping fees,” Watson said.
They began by getting brands to buy into the fact that two soon-to-be-recovering attorneys knew something about the fashion industry, retail and the Internet. Brands like Smathers & Branson, Castaway Clothing and Southern Proper, located in Atlanta, agreed to take a chance on them.
A successful second act
In March 2012, they launched Country Club Prep in Watson's basement with two shelves and free boxes from the post office. For $3,000, a Georgia Tech grad built the company website, www.countryclubprep.com.
On day one, they took 50 orders. Over the next six weeks — virtually nothing.
“It was crickets,” Watson said, smiling. “But we learned from it. We learned how to deal with costumers, to ship efficiently and to streamline the process.”
From March to December 2012, they did $300,000 in sales, the amount they were hoping to accomplish in their third year in business. 2013 saw a 600 percent increase in sales over 2012, making Country Club Prep’s founders part of a huge wave of white-collar professionals seizing upon a moribund job market and cutting ties with the corporate grind to chase second careers.
Indeed, more Americans have started businesses since the start of the Great Recession than at any period in the past decade and a half, according to the Kauffman Foundation, which tracks statistics on entrepreneurship in the United States.
Today, Country Club Prep sells 118 brands from its site, including Ralph Lauren, Vineyard Vines, Sperry Topsider, and, yes, Country Club Prep’s own brand with its signature madras fox logo, now the fourth best-selling brand on the site. The company now has six employees at the University of Virginia store and 10 — including Glasgow and Watson — at the Atlanta warehouse.
With $5.5 million in projected revenue for 2014, the way they figure it, they are limited only by their warehouse space.
In January, the friends gave up their day jobs, and last month they opened their first brick-and-mortar store on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville.
“We’ll see how it pans out, but early indicators is that it’s going to be a smart move, and it gives us an excuse to go back to our alma mater,” Watson said.
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