A Chat with Fred Meyers, President & CEO, The Queensboro Shirt

FM: I started the business in New York, and as I mentioned, I started moving every two to three years. I was having a lot of trouble putting together a group of people with any kind of longevity. I'd hire someone, get them trained, and they'd either get married and leave New York, or they'd go to work for a bigger company. New York is a great place to start a business, but it's a pretty difficult place to run a business because you're always competing with the biggest companies in the world for labor. We were growing, but it was really hard to put a good group of people together. I was in a loft in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, back before Williamsburg was the hot neighborhood that it is today. And I was not getting and heat from my landlord. I had about 30 people working for me at the time, and most of the orders were coming in by phone at that point. And we were taking orders in this loft and there literally was ice on inside of the windows; that's how cold it was. And we were close to the East River, and the wind would just come whipping up off of the water. So I got into a dispute with my landlord and ended up losing the dispute. My lease was terminated. I was confronted with the situation of having to find another similar kind of place in New York, but the real estate market was heating up in those days. You were seeing a lot of places that were asking a lot of money for pretty depressing looking work situations. I still really believed in the concept. My customers were telling me it was a really good idea, but I still hadn't figured out how to run the business properly. I was struggling to find people, to pay the bills, and it was challenging just dealing with New York. I decided to move the business to a different environment to see if maybe I couldn't do better in a different place. So decided to pack everything up and move to Wilmington, N.C. We were doing a lot of the manufacturing of the shirts in the Southeastern United States at that time. I thought I'd be a little closer to my suppliers, and the culture of the South was different. I just thought it would be a good fit. I didn't have much money at the time, so I wasn't able to do extensive planning for the move, but we got a couple of tractor trailer trucks, closed down business as normal in New York on a Friday, moved over the weekend, and opened for business the following Monday in Wilmington. To our customers it was totally transparent. We've been down here since 1995. So we're over 11 years. And in the past several years, we've really started to do well. I've got a good group of people. I've got a very nice location. For Wilmington, they consider kind of rough, but considering where I was in Brooklyn, this is like Fifth Avenue if you ask me. And we're one of the more attractive employers in town. We're on the beach in Wilmington, and it's kind of a tourist oriented economy, so there aren't a lot of great jobs. We have some of the better jobs available. So we get a lot of great people who really want to live in this area because of the lifestyle. It's a great place to live. We survived the move, and it took some time to get reestablished. It took some time to repopulate the company.