Vineyard Vines. Brooks Brothers. And now, Coastal Prep.
The Connecticut-based Vineyard Vines revitalized the preppy clothing industry by infusing Atlantic seaboard roots with a certain nautical touch — sailboat-embroidered belts and the trademark whale. Brooks Brothers hemmed Leonardo DiCaprio’s trademark salmon suit in the film version of “The Great Gatsby” by hand.
Coastal Prep, a preppy clothing startup based in Elon, has its eyes on the same sort of heights. But the view, for now, is a little less glamorous than that of the Brooks Brothers’: a straight shot down New York City’s Madison Avenue skyline.
The founders of Coastal Prep, after all, are three college students at Elon University — and freshmen, at that. Their office window is a dorm room window in Smith Hall. And it gets a little stuck sometimes.
“Oh, you know, it’s just another day in the office here,” said freshman and Coastal Prep co-founder Ben Kleiman, 19, from Philadelphia, as he struggled with his window. “And that smell? It’s just the guys downstairs smoking again. Wafts right up here every time.”
Shep and Ian Murray, the brothers who quit their Manhattan day jobs, maxed out every credit card they could get their hands on to produce an
initial run of 800 Vineyard Vines ties, are role models for the Coastal Prep bunch. But the Elon trio has been a little more cautious, taking out no credit and drawing only from their own savings.
Money earned from caddying and years of assorted summer jobs went into the pot. While their parents, most of whom have business backgrounds, provided advice, none contributed a penny to the startup.
The three chipped in equally — for a total of $2,250 — to fund the first run of 120 shirts printed in two designs — a $15 short-sleeve and a $20 long-sleeve.
Selling the full first run should leave the trio with a slight profit, if all goes according to plan.
“One thing we’re proud of is we didn’t have our parents help us financially in any way,” said Griffin Wolno, 19, the second of the founding trio, hailing from Charlotte. “And I think they were surprised, a little, to see us really get this off the ground and actually do something.”
The three agree it’s much more about the experience than the money, even if the venture fails, and the funds are flushed away by the market.
“So what we if lose the money?” asked Kleiman’s roommate, co-founder Tyler Britt, 19, from Boston. “I’ve gained a ton of experience from doing this. The worst-case scenario isn’t really the worst-case scenario.”
But the business venture isn’t a game or a school project or an experiment for the freshmen. They have registered Coastal Prep as a limited liability company (LLC) in North Carolina and will file federal taxes this coming April. The LLC classification prevents Kleiman, Britt and Wolno and their parents from being personally sued.
Any potential lawsuits have to be filed directly against Coastal Prep, and only the money the company holds at a given time is considered fair game by the court system.
To further cover their bases, the three have trademarked and copyrighted the name Coastal Prep, as well as its symbol: the outline of a turtle. It differentiates them, the founders like to say, from other student startups who don’t understand the legal ramifications of not doing so.
What passes for an office in Coastal Prep is a working environment most professionals would avoid like the plague. Smith is home to 125 freshmen males, most of whom are living away from home for the first time.
With the clock approaching midnight on a Sunday, music continued to bump through the aging walls, a pulsing mix of 2Chainz, AC/DC and something sounding an awful lot like opera laid over a trance-like electronic beat.
Britt said he feeds off Smith’s energy, something he could never find in a 9-5 job, though he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of claiming his own cubicle one day.
“It’s crazy here,” he said. “There’s such energy, with people running around and music blaring, and, yeah, it can be difficult to focus sometimes. But there are three of us, and it’s great to be able to pull such energy from all different directions.”
The office usually has an open-door policy because if the door is locked, their Smith friends will beat it down if no one opens up, Wolno joked.
Like the business’s working environment, the hours the three keep are nothing close to conventional. Kleiman and Britt are both members of the university’s club golf team, and Wolno pads up for club hockey several times a week.
Add classes, homework, meals and, sometimes, sleep, and you get a social life that can be challenging, especially on the weekends when Smith really comes alive.
Over the last two years alone, Smith has racked up thousands of dollars in damages — everything from torn-out water fountains to golf balls shattering hallway windows — prompting official warnings from the university and routine patrols of the halls by members of the Town of Elon Police Department.
Amidst the chaos, the Coastal Prep founders have somehow managed to stay in on more than one weekend night, lock the door when possible, and go to work. At first, it wasn’t something to look forward to, the trio agreed, but they now relish the opportunity.
“There was a Friday night recently, and all of our friends are trying to go out, and we’re sitting here figuring everything out,” Wolno said. “It wasn’t always easy, and of course it’s tempting sometimes to go out and have a good time, but we’re all in this together now. It’s something we’re committed to, and I’ve had some of the best times in college sitting here with these guys, bouncing crazy ideas off of each other.”
No idea is off-limits, Britt said, as he explained the initial inkling of Coastal Prep was for it to be a direct competitor to Vineyard Vines.
“We like coming up with big crazy ideas,” he said. “Someone will come in with a ridiculous idea, and we’ll shoot it down and come back to reality. We said, ‘Let’s start the new Vineyard Vines.’ At first, they were just a couple of guys selling ties out of the back of a car. Why can’t we?”