By Lauren Coleman-Lochner, The Record, Hackensack, N.J. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Oct. 7--A guy in his 20s decides to start an Internet company. It's the Nineties. It's the thing to do. He gets two brothers to invest, and waits for the business to come.
It doesn't.
But the funny thing is, three years later, Steve Blood is still running an Internet business -- four, in fact. The collection of small companies, based in Hawthorne, prints and sells T-shirts and other apparel.
And another funny thing: These aren't the same businesses he started with. He tried about eight different things, and four took. Such is the ever-fluid world of the Internet.
Plan A called for a real estate listings Web site, launched in late 1997. With business sparse, the fledging cybergroup paid its bills by designing Web sites. That was serendipitous, too -- Blood, 29, found his first Web site designer at Kinko's, copying his resume.
Still, Blood says, "we had more time on our hands than we had work to do."
Blood and colleagues, of course, jumped into a torrent of Internet activity, when anyone who could form a start-up did. Now that's dried to a trickle, and many companies that once thought they would rule the world are dead or gasping for breath.
With little paid work, the handful of employees became philanthropists, says John Lefkowitz, the president of Punctuate, which prints T-shirts. They concocted sites for fire departments, chambers of commerce, anyone who asked and could get their name out there.
"You name it, we were doing it for no money," says Leftkowitz, who came on board through mutual friends from Ridgewood High School. "We were just trying to get our feet wet. Any work is good work when there's no work."
In November 1998, the team started Copyleft, which sells tech-related apparel.
It donates a portion of sales to organizations that support open-source software (which allows programmers to read, modify, and redistribute coding). Its Web site notes that it has given almost $100,000 in donations to various often-source promoters.
Copyleft's business took off quickly, so it needed a reliable local printing company to make the shirts. Most silk-screeners, Lefkowitz says, were either too large to bother with them or too small to handle orders.
When it couldn't find a suitable partner, Copyleft created Punctuate.
Now, Punctuate, in addition to making T-shirts for Copyleft, prints shirts for companies and organizations. Unlike Copyleft, it does not yet operate a Web site, although it is preparing to launch one.
Copyleft had $750,000 in revenues last year. Punctuate, which has about a dozen customers, had $400,000.
Like many companies, it is revising its estimates for what lies ahead. Punctuate is off $20,000 in revenue since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Blood says, and couldn't make its payroll last week.
Without the deep pockets of larger companies, such a falloff can be devastating, he says.
Despite an uncertain outlook, he says, he is "not going anywhere."
Another of Blood's Web sites, Goatgear.com, based in New York City (and founded by friends in 1997) could be the biggest of all, he says. It sells urban wear, and expects $350,000 to $500,000 in revenues this year.
The newest company, Lax.com, for lacrosse fans, was started in January 2000 and had about $500,000 in sales in its first year.
The operations aren't strictly online: Goatgear operates a Manhattan showroom, and Lax has a store in Ridgewood (Laxshop), with another scheduled to open Nov. 1 in Boonton.
Blood family members have invested about $1 million in these enterprises -- plus room and board.
"I've never drawn a salary. I still live with my parents," says Blood, who studied art at Williams College before plunging into the Internet world.
The companies do no advertising or catalogs, Blood says, but word is spreading -- about a quarter of the orders come from overseas.
And, he adds, many of his competitors spent millions and millions of dollars and are now out of business.
But by keeping a tight rein on spending, and by finding unusual niches, they have been able to prosper as others failed.
"If only," Blood says, "we hadn't wasted so much money being a design firm."
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(c) 2001, The Record, Hackensack, N.J. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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