Success Stories Ep 101 - "Spinning Success from Farm to Shirts"

Many people talk about growing their business into success, but on today's Success Stories podcast, we'll talk to a young entrepreneur who is doing that literally. 

Zeke Chapman owns Magnolia Loom, a completely vertical operated apparel business in Georgia. This company is unlike any other you may have heard of. It sources the cotton from local farmers, mills the fibers, spins it into yarn, creates the shirts, dyes the garments, and then ultimately prints the shirts. 

How does that happen? 

We'll learn about that and more on today's show. So grab a cup of coffee and a pen and get ready to take some serious notes.

Transcript

Marshall Atkinson 
Many people talk about growing their business into success, but on today's Success Stories podcast, we'll talk to a young entrepreneur who is doing that literally. Zeke Chapman owns Magnolia Loom, a completely vertical operated apparel business in Georgia. This company is unlike any other you may have heard of. It. Sources The cotton from local farmers, mills the fibers, spins it into yarn, creates the shirts, dyes the garments, and then ultimately prints the shirts. How does that happen? Learn about that and more on today's show. So grab a cup of coffee and a pen and get ready to take some serious notes. Welcome Zeke to the Success Stories podcast.

Zeke Chapman 
Hey, Marshall, thanks for having me on this morning.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, I think it's great. And I'm I heard about your story from my friend Shelby Craig with Rocket Shirts, and as soon as he told me what your guys are doing, I'm like, dang, I need to talk to that guy, right? And so thanks for sharing your story with us today. I think it's gonna be lots of fun.

Zeke Chapman 
Yeah, looking forward to it. I'm excited to be able to tell that story to the people out there in the world.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah. So before we get going, where exactly are you? You were in Georgia somewhere, so, but let us know where you are.

Zeke Chapman 
Yeah, so I'm in a small town Georgia. We'd like to say we're not too far from anything, but not really close to a lot. Little town called Sandersville, two hours kind of southeast of Atlanta, is kind of our marking point for people. So it's a rural community, a very historic agriculture community, and we, you know, are got a lot of hard working people that live around us and work around us, and have lived here my whole life.

Marshall Atkinson 
Great, cool, right? So I think everyone wants to know how you got started in this industry, and what led you to create your own apparel blanks, because, you know, that's not common. So can you please share that story with us?

Zeke Chapman 
Yeah, so I'll kind of go back to really, to give you a little bit more of my history and my entrepreneurial spirit. My dad's an entrepreneur, and both of my granddad's are so I can say it's in my blood to own a business and to operate it and be a part of it, be in it every day and help make decisions and see something grow. So when I was 11 years old, I actually started selling produce in the summers in between school and would make some money. And, you know, have some money to spend during the school year, and every summer do that again. And so that really created my desire and understanding of agriculture, of knowing how things were grown, what it take to create things. Or you could put a seed in the ground and something would come to life. It's pretty neat when you really sit back and think about it. So from there, go through high school. I had some unfortunate issues in high school where I had to have four knee surgery. So the idea of being an actual farmer kind of went out the window, just so the doctors recommended me not being up and down stuff and doing this and doing that. So I found a way to get into the apparel industry. I graduated high school in 2015 and that summer, bought screen printing equipment and taught myself how to print. And from there, really, kind of got away from the agricultural side of things. Really, just because screen printing business was busy and I didn't know what I was doing, I had to learn, teach myself how to print, how to run a business. Thankfully, like I had my dad with me to help guide me and lead me on the business side of things. But from a printing standpoint, I was kind of on an island. So rock and roll for that for a few years, hired my first employee in 2017 and then from there, we've grown into the business that we are today. So Magnolia loom came into the picture of that in 2021 when we set out to create what we call a Georgia Grown and sewn blank, meaning that the cotton is grown in Georgia and the shirt is sewn in Georgia, and then we obviously print it in Georgia as well. The other parts of the supply chain we can't do here because they're not available to us.

Marshall Atkinson 
What made you think that, you know, I need my own t shirt. I'm just going to go ahead and grow my own like, yeah, so think that that was going to be a good idea?

Zeke Chapman 
So Georgia, and if I remember right, George, is I should know this off the top of my head for sure, but Georgia, the second largest cotton producing state in the country, Texas, is number one, if Georgia had the acreage. That Texas did. Georgia would by far beat Texas every year, but we're not the size of Texas, so that's kind of hard for us to do, but the Georgia produces a lot of cotton agriculture is the number one industry in our state. It produces over $70 billion a year to our economy. One in six or seven people in the state of Georgia work indirectly or directly in agriculture. So it touches a lot of people. So I said, How can we take that? How can we take my desire and passion for agriculture and connect it to the consumer through a cotton garment? And, you know, we searched high and low. Couldn't find anybody that was doing what we were doing in the state of Georgia, and we set out to do it. We thought there was a story to tell. We thought there was a connection to be made and an opportunity to make a quality USA made item. You know, that was during COVID When you couldn't get a blank. You didn't know if you could get a size run on a gill AMB blank or a comfort colors blank, right across the country. So we were also trying to find a way to solve a problem where we were in control of a supply chain, that we knew what was going on, we understood the problems, and we knew how to overcome that.

Marshall Atkinson 
And so you literally know the farmers that are growing your cotton like their friends.

Zeke Chapman 
That's right, yeah. So we, we personally know every farmer that we buy cotton from. We've met every one of them. We go to their farms. We, you know, give pictures of them to use throughout our social media and websites, and we build a connection with them. Because what we're doing for our farmers is, while we're not we're not making them rich off of what we do. We do pay them about 20% above market price on their cotton, which they're ecstatic about. We're not buying a lot of it at a time, but what they get to do is, for the first time ever in their career of farming, they get to know where their cotton went and how it got produced into something because that's something that they don't otherwise get to do when that cotton leaves the farm and heads to the gin after that, who knows where it goes. 75% of it leaves the country to be developed somewhere else. So they really have no connection to the commodity that they grew past the farm, and we're able to bridge that gap for them.

Marshall Atkinson 
So I've seen these pictures of the farming family in front of their house that you guys take, right? And I think it's just miraculous. It's just so awesome. And, and I love the fact that you're paying them a little more, and that must guarantee the crop a little bit to you, right? So, hey, we'll pay a little more that way we know we've got what we need.

Zeke Chapman 
That's right. So, so cotton is a interesting. It's a natural fiber. You know, we in the world of garments, you have naturals and you have synthetics. So you take polyester, it's man made, you can make it exactly how you want to, within the constraints of the chemistry that's able to make it. And you know exactly what you're going to get every single time you make it where with a natural fiber like cotton, wool, hemp, you know, it's kind of coming into the game now. But with cotton, there's about 10 or 12 data points you have to assess and Abel a cotton before you're able to take it to spinning. You know, because after, after the cotton leaves a field, it goes to the gin, they pull out all the seed and trash, and that's where they also do testing through the USDA to let you know the fiber length, the true color of the yarns, how much trash is left, the uniformity there's like. So there's 10 or 12 data points that we look at within a bell of cotton to know what we're getting and to know that it's going to spin the best yarn, because that's the next step. So yeah, that that 20% extra that we pay is really to make sure we get the best of the crop. We're probably picking from the top five to 10% of the crop each year off of these cotton farmers.

Marshall Atkinson 
And you're spinning that into the yarn, and then you're you're creating the shirts. So talk about the shirt blank. You give us some. Okay, there's people out there that's going to nerd out on this, right? So what's what tell us about the shirt blank, and how many colors and you're, you're dying it. But you told me, I think you can. You can custom dye, right? If somebody wants a particular color, you can, you can work with them to make their own color. So tell us about that.

Zeke Chapman 
Yeah, so I'll back up just a tad, just to make sure that, because I'll be totally honest with you, Marshall in 2021 when I started this, I was a screen printer. I was somebody that knew how to put ink on a shirt, but I did not know how to make one. I did not know what it take, what it takes to turn cotton into a garment. So I set out for us to make that educational part a huge thing of what we do to add value to the garment we're producing. So just to make sure, for the people out there, like me, three years ago that didn't know what all goes into making a shirt, once the cotton leaves the farm, it goes to a gin like I said, that's where the trash and seed is pulled out. Now, most of the weight in cotton from the field is actually in the seed, and then that seed by product is either put in cattle feed. Or can you cotton seed oil? You know, if people are familiar with cotton seed oil, that's where it comes from. The cotton seeds that are harvested in the field are not the cotton seed that are replanted the next year to two totally different ways to mean zooming in there. But anyway, from the GN, you go to a spinning meal where the cotton is spun into a yarn. That yarn is either we run a 20 singles comb yarn. You know, you can run open in or comb. You can run carted. There's about four or five different combinations of yarn. But so in the correlating that to the regular screen print world, when you see a spec on a garment and it says 20 over 130, over 124, over one. That's your singles rate on your yarn. So that's what that correlates to. So from the spinning meal, you go to a knitting a knitting plant, where this fabric is literally knit, or the yarn is literally knit into fabric. Most people don't know that fabric is knit in a circle. So everything is knit circularly in a tube, and then we actually run an open width fabric. So from the knitter, it goes to a finishing plant where it is cut open into an open width, meaning that it's about a 65 to 70 inch wide roll at that point, and they're about 70 yards long each. And they finish the fabric, so they bleach it white. Fabric is not as white as we think it is. It's more of a gray color. It's actually referred to as a grades good before it's finished, so it's bleached, and then it also goes through some finishing processes that allow us to have a more consistent and uniform fabric. You know, cotton shrinks. We all know that you can take a cotton garment and throw it in the washing machine and dry it, and it's going to come out a different size, unless it's already been garment dyed and laundered in a way that's going to prevent that. So anyway, from the finishing plant, it goes to our cut and sew plant in Georgia, where the shirts are laid out, the fabrics laid out cut, we do a lot of testing to know our shrinkage rates, so that our shirts are consistent, because there again, fabric, or cotton, is a natural fiber, so that fabric is not all The time consistent, so it may shrink 10% in the length today on this lot, and the next farm may shrink 6% in the length. So we have to do our own testing to know that when we give you a garment after it's been garment dyed, it's going to be consistently sized. So we do that. Garments are cut and sewn, and then they go to garment dye, which is where really and cutting. So garment die is really where a lot of flexibility opens up. It's kind of a blank slate at that point to do what you want. So, you know, in cut and sew, we can produce youth size garments. We can produce adult size garments. We can do short sleeve, long sleeve. We can do, you know, hoodies and sweatshirts, if we have fleece, which we're developing now, a lot of different things we can do. And then from there, I said, it goes to the garment dye house, where, yeah, the colors are kind of endless. We stock about 15 standard colors that seem to kind of be our best sellers, but we can develop new colors with you. We can also pick from about 60 total standard colors that are that the dye house offers, outside of what we stock on a consistent basis. And then we also, that's when we add the neck label to the garment as well. So within that neck label, connecting the consumer to the farmer, we put, obviously the shirt size. You have to put the country of origin, what it's made of, all that kind of good stuff. We also put the farm name that grew the shirt, and we put the county in which it was grown. And the way that we know every garment that we produce, how we can pinpoint it to that farm, is because we do the very, very hard task of keeping that farms cotton separated throughout the entire supply chain. So when we buy cotton from a farmer and never mixes with another farm, another farms cotton, it is kept totally separate the whole way through.

Marshall Atkinson 
So that's just amazing. And so this ends up being what, like a five and a half ounce shirt?

Zeke Chapman 
Yeah, we're flowing right around. A little under five ounces. Is about five one is where we come out to. So we rock, so we run a 20 singles yard, but we do a very open, loose knit, so that it's, it's airy and has some it breathes, you know, kind of what we compare our garment to, because it is a ring spun yarn, because it is garment dyed, meaning that it's pretty well pre shrunk, we compare it to a comfort color shirt. You know? We don't, we're not trying to mimic that. There's some things we personally think we do better, and there's some things that we know that are a challenge to do better. And comfort colors, but in our in our construction, and how we've built out our patterns, and just even simple things, of how thick the collar is on a shirt can really change how someone how much someone enjoys it, or how the pockets placed, or the amount of space you have. Do you want a wider length across the sleeves or across the chest, so your sleeves are more of a drop sleeve, or would you rather have a longer sleeve? There's a lot that we've learned and gone through the pattern process to get to where we're at.

Marshall Atkinson 
These are the things that your average t shirt printer doesn't even think about.

Zeke Chapman 
Oh no. And I mean, like I said, 2021 naive Zeke is a 24 year old. Had no clue what I was going to have to learn to make the garment that we're producing now, and it's an ever I don't want to say it's an ever changing process, but there is no like I said, no two lots of fabric are the same. So our shrinkage rates are always adjusting. We have to make different patterns per lot to know that it we're going to have that consistently sized garment. And there's just things that it, you know, torque is a big thing that no, no, no regular screen printer normally knows what torque is in fabric and what that comes what that means when you're producing a garment, so torque is how much is that fabric going to twist? Because remember, it was knit in a tube, so it naturally wants to go back to where it was created. So we, our garments are side seamed that there again. We use an open with fabric. Most of your garments produced in the world or tubular, which means that the literal tube of fabric is knit to the size shirt that it correlates to, and that's great when you're producing millions of garments like the big players in the game. But for us, we need flexibility, and that's what open width gives us. We can cut three Xs from that fabric. We can cut smalls from that fabric. We can cut anything in between, so that torque can be really tricky to overcome sometimes, because if you have 5% torque, you can suddenly have a shirt that's square at the top, but the bottom the side seems three inches over from where it needs to be at the bottom.

Marshall Atkinson 
And I've printed on some shirts that have some issues, where you know the grain of the shirt isn't straight, and when you print, like our a horizontal design, that's just like some words in a row, that it's really hard to get it to line up, and that's there. It's always diagonally. Weird, yeah, because on press, it looks perfect. When you take it off, it's all jacked up, and that's lot to do with the grain of the shirt, more than anything. And that's right, yeah, and comes into play, yeah. So, alright, I think you know most shirts, most shops here, you know, they simply buy the shirts, they order it from s and s, and then they decorate them. And you know, but you're not doing that, you're growing your own inventory, which to me seems like that would add a lot of complexity to your production cycle. So what are your biggest hurdles? Like, you're taking orders from people and you're printing on your own blanks. So how does that work, where you know maybe they're ordering a color you don't have, or like, normally, we just order it from somebody, but you're not doing that, right? So walk us through how that works in your world.

Zeke Chapman 
Yeah. So the best way to put it is, we take all the risk to do what we do. So from the cotton that comes from the cotton farmer to the finished garment that shows up at your door. Us as a business, have on that inventory and added our own investment and our own money to it the whole way through, where, as a regular screen printer, which we still print on other blanks, where we don't solely print on our own blanks, our roots are in doing just like everybody else does. We, you know, we can go to s and s, and we can buy a g8 1000, and it'll be here tomorrow, and we can print it the next day. And I had absolutely no risk in that garment other than screwing it up on press. You know, there's nothing else that I have any risk in that garment, S and S is going to cover us if it shows up with a hole. You know, the customer approved the artwork. Everything's good to go. We're going to print it where, with our goods, it takes about six to nine months to see cotton turned into a garment in a US, complete US supply chain. So still, when we buy that cotton, the clock starts ticking. Interest is being accrued. Line of credits are being used. We're, you know, we're getting it spun. We're getting it finished the whole nine yards. And then we have a garment that I can put on the shelf out here in our shop that we can pull off the shelf and print. But that doesn't always mean we have it in stock. We're not. Talking stock in 10s and hundreds of 1000s of garments, like your big, big players in the game do. So there again, from a flexibility standpoint, what garment dyeing does for us is we have a stock of finished, totally finished goods here, meaning that I can go pull a shirt off the shelf today and print it because it's dyed and it's got a neck label in it, and it's size and it's ready to go. We have a stock of shirts at the dye house, so I have white shirts sitting ready to be dyed. And then we always keep fabric it cut and sew. And we all we have. I mean, the rest of the supply chain is backlog too, but basically at every point we can hit go and make something happen. So that what that does is, is, while we have a stock here with you, were to call me and say, Hey, I need, like, for example, this week, we had a customer order about 350 shirts, and we had about 275 of them in stock. So that 75 shirt balance, we call the dye house and say, Hey, we need 75 shirts. And these sizes in this color, we dye it and ship it to us, and, you know, they take care of it for us. But so the really, the challenge that presents is it's not plug and play and just hit go like it is when you're ordering from another outside vendor. We have to manage every bump in the road that comes through this supply chain in the past month, one of our major parts of the supply chain has decided to close. It's made a huge ripple effect in the industry that we're not totally sure we know how to overcome it. We don't know when or where yet. We also have to manage things like shipments coming in late, like there again, for example, this week, I made about a 12 hour round trip from our cut and sew facility to our dye house and back to the shop, but make sure some garments guide to the dye house to be dyed on Tom. So that's the kind of things we get to manage and overcome and and work with while we've got about twice as much money tied up in a blank as you could go buy a comparable comfort colors blank for so it's on top of it being just harder in general, and having to go through those challenges and overcome those different things, it also cost more, and we carry that cost the whole way through where otherwise I could just go on, go on the s and s and s website, and I could buy 100 garments. They beat well, but, you know, they'd be here soon. We could print them and be done. Totally different way for us to do what we do. And those challenges are are tough. It makes you really learn and understand what goes on to produce a garment. I have so much more value in apparel. Like said I knew how to print shirt, so I didn't know how to how to make one. We're involved with our cut and sew facility heavily. I'm not saying I know how to sew a shirt. They've tried to teach me, but I could, I could give it a whirl, and we you just really, truly learn the people, the hands, the families, the businesses that are all involved to take to make a shirt in a world where we wear clothes every day rightfully so, we don't want to walk around naked. That it's it's important for us to know who's involved in what we do and how it affects people, and be something that I really take to heart and claim it and know that I can if someone wanted to show up to my shop today and say, take me to every person that helped make the shirts you produce, I can do that, and about a two day trip if You came to my office and said, Let's go me, and you could get in the car, and we could go shake the hand of every person that helped produce the shirt that we make. And quite frankly, that's it's unheard of in the modern day apparel industry, because most of the people that produce our goods are overseas, or some people don't want you to know who makes it because they're unsure if what they're doing right or wrong. We have total confidence in our supply chain and our transparency.

Marshall Atkinson 
So you know, Zeke, one of the things I really love about your brand is that you have a QR code sticker in every shirt that connects to your web. Site where you can meet the farmer that grew the cotton. Right? Do you find that the end consumer is interested in that story? It seems like that could resonate and really dominate with people who value made in the USA products. But I want to hear what your thoughts are on that.

Zeke Chapman 
Yeah. So we, we do that two fold. We there's two main reasons we we connect that garment to the farmer, the main one being the consumer. You know, how what other garment Do you own that you can scan a QR code and meet the farmer? And then also, what other garment Do you own that has the farm name and the location it was grown in printed in the tag. There's not many people that do that, very few, really and truly that are connecting the way that we do and and the other reason we do that is to have let the farmer have some pride in it, let the let the guy or the lady, the family who started this whole thing by grow putting a seed in the ground have a connection to the very item they produce, because, like I said earlier, they don't know where their cotton goes. It goes into a cooperative program that they get the most money that they can out of it. Somebody buys it, and it goes, like I said, 75% of the cotton grown in the US leaves the country before any values added to it. So we're able, we're able to pass that on to the farmer and say, hey, you know these people are wearing your garments. We know that they're proud of it. It also gives the people in that local community an opportunity to connect back to their farmers in their area. So every time we introduce a new farmer, we partner with that farmer, pick a local charity or group to donate some money back to, and we'll come up with two or three different designs that we'll put on our website for a two week time period, pre sale goods and that and what it does is it gives that local community an opportunity to buy the shirt that was grown in their county or in their area, because we say, we guarantee for that two week time period, these these designs and these shirts that you're buying will come from your area. So it's really cool to see that. And for to the consumer standpoint, I think, in the world we live in today, if you can tell a story, you can sell a product, and and we're able to do that, we're able to connect people. We're able to say, hey, we know the person that grew this they're proud of what they grew. They understand what goes into making this garment, and they thank you for making this purchase, because it truly supports them and what they do, and it's a huge part of what we do now. We display it in our trade show booth. It's on our website. It's in every shirt that we grow, and it's pretty cool to us to slap a sticker on a shirt that says scam me to see who grew me, and you can meet the person that literally grew that shirt. That's something that's pretty unheard of in today's world.

Marshall Atkinson 
So, I have to ask this. So I know there's somebody sitting out there going, that's great, but that sounds like that's gonna be a more expensive shirt. My customers won't pay for that, right? And you're finding that's the exact opposite, because they're buying into that story, and they literally celebrate the fact that it's made in the USA, and you can meet the farmer and all that, and that extra money that they're spending just it doesn't matter anymore, because they're they're investing in that Story. Is that correct?

Zeke Chapman 
Yeah. We find that the people that get it are all for it. Most people that understand the value in America made good that tells a story, connects people. And then we also give back to ag in different ways. It's important to us to give back to the industry that helps us do what we do. Most people are not balking at the price whatsoever, and we try to still be competitive. We know that today's economy is tough. We're not trying to gouge people, but we really, we really think it's important for people to understand what it takes to make an American made good, what it takes to do what we do. The education side of that's huge. So we try to add a lot of value. We're not just selling you a shirt, we're selling you a story, and the shirts what you get and basically and through that, and on top of that, it's a great garment, but we've worked really hard on how it fits, how it feels, the hand of it, how the print is, all those good things that go into it's really important to us.

Marshall Atkinson 
That's great. So let's talk about the future of your business of Magnolia Loom, right? So how are you expanding and growing can if I'm a printer out there somewhere, and I do a lot of stuff for FFA, or some other thing that might really resonate with. That story, can I buy these blanks from you so I can print on for my customers? I mean, what? What's it look like?

Zeke Chapman 
Yeah, so the future for us is growing into the blank market. Currently, every every blank that we produce, we print in house. So the only way you can buy a good from us is to get it printed through us, whether that's online, through our website, where you can go buy our standard in house designs or our partnership designs with different groups, then we do custom printing as well. Like I said, that's our background. That's where we're good. It's custom printing. We do orders anywhere from 48 pieces up to we've ran some recently in the 1000s. So you know, it varies as to how people are getting our garments currently through that way, but our long term goal is to offer blanks, and the way that we're planning to do that is by basically consuming parts of the supply chain to bring our costs down so that we can have more things under one roof. Right now, our garments travel from the farm through the supply chain bag to us. It's about a 1500 mile journey on the high end. It's about a 1200 mile journey on the low end, depending on where the cotton comes from within the state of Georgia, so we're planning to reduce that by about half over the course of the next year, so that we have full control over cutting so garment dye and printing, and that would drastically reduce our cost. Also give us even more flexibility, and at that point, blanks is something that we do plan to offer, not in the traditional way that someone like SNS does. We're not going to have 1000s and 1000s of blanks on the shelf ready to go, but we could partner with screen print shops and, you know, basically say, Hey, we're going to have the white good sitting here. And when you're when you need blanks, we'll dive and put neck labels in them, and we'll offer private label programs and all that as well. But you know, to really be totally honest with you, Marshall, from a growth standpoint, like I mentioned earlier, a huge part of our supply chain closed or is closing in the next 30 days. They announced it about three weeks ago. That really makes what we do tough. So that's our finishing plant that decided to close, probably one of the better ones in the game in the southeast. There was one other person that does that. Our next closest option from there is Pennsylvania, which kind of disrupts what we do and changes our story. And then you have another one in New Jersey. And then after that, we'd have to send goods to California, which nothing against California, but with us being in Georgia, that's just outside of our realm, kind of outside of our we're wheel house. We're a small business. Shipping cost can eat us alive. We don't want to send stuff to California, if we can help it. So it really puts us in a place of, you know, you gotta stay ahead of the game. You gotta be nimble. You gotta be quick. You gotta know who to trust and and who to work with. And so the I guess I'm just expressing in this growth strategy, the US textile market, just to be totally frank and honest, is not in great shape. And that, you know, we have great international partners in South and Central America that produce a lot of the clothes we wear in this country, and there's a lot that's produced in the eastern part of the world as well. But what we do is hard, so we have to really keep in tune and keep in touch with our supply chain so that we know what's coming what's not and not be, you know, forward by something that does happen, like the phone call I got three weeks ago when one of our most important parts of the supply chain up and closes.

Marshall Atkinson 
So it seems like that could be an opportunity for somebody, though.

Zeke Chapman 
It could be. It very well could be. And that's kind of when we heard the news. We thought, all right, somebody will come in behind them and help fill their shoes. But once we figured out a little more, and I'm not trying to tell anybody's business in this, but once we figured out more of their reasons for closing, it's interesting just to hear the rumblings kind of going on about the US textile market as a whole. There's a lot of a lot of your spinning capacity has left the country. They're again going to Gildan smooth plants overseas, and a lot of that good stuff and and so it's just interesting how the ripple effect that happens in an ever changing market, and that's kind of the place we're living in today is, how can we keep what we do true and right and quality and a great product and continue to sell our story? And how can we really help you know our partners who are involved in what we do every day, a float and in business.

Marshall Atkinson 
So. Um, it seems like you probably have learned some crazy lessons along the way that I think maybe other people haven't encountered yet. So what are one or two things that maybe you've learned that somebody listening they can take away and like, use that in their own business. What do you think about that?

Zeke Chapman 
I think one of the main things that's really important to me and what we do is don't be afraid to tell a story. Don't be afraid to take the time to make a connection with people, to walk people through things to help them understand why things are done a certain way, why you do things a certain way, and why it's important to you. That's something that Magnolia Loom really allows us to do. Like I've said, earlier, education is a huge part of what we do. We think educating people on how garments are made, is probably of the extreme most important. So what we do Canadian farmers is extremely important as well, and then giving back to something that's important to you. We've had we've been blessed over the past three or four years through Magnolia loom to give back nearly $200,000 to different ag programs throughout our state and the country, and that's very important to us. We're helping raise the next generations of agricultural leaders through that giving. So I've really learned to to be proud of what you do, take heart in your story and grow with it and know that people want to know your story. Not everybody's just a tire kicker. Not everybody just is out there just to try to get something for free. But there's people who will connect to what you do and and and they will support you through that. And that's probably one of the most important things I've learned. I'd say more on the business side of things, something I've learned is to that don't be afraid to charge what's appropriate. You know, we produce a garment, like I said earlier, that the blank is about twice as much as what I could go buy a comfort colors blank for. So that means that we have more cost. We carry that cost throughout the whole process. You know, I had to start making that garment well before the customer ever paid me for it where otherwise, you know, most screenprint shops, you pay up front when you place an order and your money's in the bank before the garments ever leave the leave the shop. That's that's a very different for us. So, you know, we've had to learn to charge appropriately and also to love and appreciate your vendors and suppliers, but don't be afraid to have corrective action when it's needed. That can be a tough road to walk. You work every day side by side with these people, but you also have to be willing to get on to them when it's when it's needed. That doesn't mean you did pick that doesn't mean that you're micro manager, but it means that you have a product you have to uphold. You have a quality standard you have to uphold, and you also, at the end of the day, have a bottom line you have to cover to run a business.

Marshall Atkinson 
That's great. I love that. And I love the idea that, you know, there's, there's always people who want to pay less, right? And the other end of the coin is there's people who are willing to pay more, and we just need to find them.

Zeke Chapman 
That's right, that's right. You just gotta search high and low form. And those are the people, as we've learned, that the people who want to like I said, we sell a story and you get a product, you don't buy a product and get a story with it. To us, we see it the other way, so the people who are willing to pay more will pay you for your story, right? And then the fact that they get a quality product with it is just the icing on the cake for them.

Marshall Atkinson 
Awesome way. Zeke. Thank you so much for sharing your story of success was today. What's the best way to contact you if someone wants to learn more about what you do or maybe how you can help them?

Zeke Chapman 
Yeah, best way to reach out is probably just really go to our website. We got a contact us form you can fill out that comes directly to me. I'll be in touch with you. If you fill that form out, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram, both under Magnolia Loon can really get a deeper dive into what we do and how we do things and those connections we make that'd probably be the two best ways to reach out, except through the website or through social media. And if you want to reach out directly to me, you can email me see get chapmantradingco.com and love to hear more.

Marshall Atkinson 
Great thanks Zeke. Really appreciate you.

Zeke Chapman 
Yes sir, enjoy being here.