Today we’d like to introduce you to Mike Martyka.
Mike, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I worked in management for Kmart for almost thirty years, but in September 1997, I was transferred from a store in Chicago, IL to a location in Indianapolis, IN. After being there for almost three months with my home in Mundelein for sale and another under contract in the Indianapolis area, I had second thoughts about my future. I really liked working for Kmart for my first 28 years or so. The last two had been very tough as the company was struggling in a lot of markets for many reasons, and had been doing a lot of things to cut expenses and save money. With two daughters in school in Illinois, wedding planning underway for my eldest daughter and no concrete plan for the future, I put in my two weeks notice the day after Thanksgiving, 1997. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.
I had dabbled a little bit in selling online and I thought I could find a way to make a living out of that. I was confident in me but really didn’t know what direction I was heading.
After taking the holiday season off, my older brother invited me to work with him in January. He owned a property maintenance company that concentrated on small, multi-unit office buildings. There was plenty to do. I was fixing toilets, painting walls, cleaning up trash, etc. My brother used to say that he’d do whatever someone else didn’t want to do, and he was paid well for doing it. That, plus being in and out of so many of these small businesses really opened my eyes to the numerous ways there are to “make a buck.”
In early 1998, I discovered eBay and began to sell there. I’d work for my brother from 7 AM to 3 PM and then go home and work on eBay in a space I set up in my basement. Before long I was starting to do well, but I needed more items to list and sell. My brother and I talked and he started to find items in some of the businesses we visited. It ranged from overstock, damages, out of season products or items the owners just wanted to get rid of. I would buy it at very cheap prices and list it on eBay. The thing about eBay in those early days was that you could list just about anything and it would sell at a fair price with lots of bidders.
A business in one of the units closed and the owner abandoned it. The building owner already had another renter but needed the space emptied. He paid my brother’s company to go in and empty it “to the walls” as they would say. Rather than put everything in a dumpster, I rented a storage unit, moved everything there and began selling it off on eBay.
The building owner was happy, the dotcom bubble was about to burst and we soon found ourselves with more units to clear out. Over the next couple years on eBay, we sold chef’s clothing, Hawaiian shirts, magnetic jewelry, collector plates, a car, a boat, a motorcycle, computer software, video games, electronic equipment, Barbie® dolls, records, photos, books, a lot of office furniture and equipment, refrigerators, small oak desks, fabrics, collector glassware, postage scales—the list goes on and on.
I eventually had three large storage lockers filled with items to list on eBay. Before long, the eBay thing was my full-time job. If my brother called, we’d go empty a unit and then I’d be right back to listing and selling. Eventually, my wife, Darlene, and grown son, Jeff, joined me on these adventures. It was like a treasure hunt as we dug through what was in these office and warehouse spaces.
I was working fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, but it didn’t feel that way. I was doing this for my family and myself, not a big corporation. I’d get up, grab a cup of coffee and be in the basement by 6 AM. I was doing so well selling on eBay that when eBay hosted their first eBay Live! Conference in June 2001, they paid to bring my wife and I to Anaheim, CA and honored us as one of their top 100 sellers.
It was becoming cumbersome to go back and forth from home to the storage lockers, so I eventually rented a small warehouse and office space in Wauconda, IL to keep everything under one roof. My son, Jeff, who has a computer science degree from Winona State University in Minnesota had come to work with me in the Wauconda warehouse after the software company he was working for in Minneapolis, MN closed.
At the same time, as we were emptying these units, my wife and I were also going to outlet malls looking for more items to sell. We walked into a mall in Kenosha, WI and spotted 99-cent sports-themed neckties for teams across the United States. I thought, not too many people in Wisconsin probably want a Los Angeles Dodgers tie, even at that price. But maybe on eBay, I could get six or seven dollars for them. We spent a couple hundred dollars, put them on eBay and they sold out. Before long, we were going back to that outlet store a couple times a week and spending over a thousand dollars each trip. The ties were doing well but the eBay fees were high, so I decided to create a website for them.
I had zero experience of building a website. I bought a copy of Microsoft’s FrontPage website software, registered a domain name and started working. It was frustrating—at times, I’d just give up for days, then go back and read instructions again and finally, the light in my head would turn on. After about six months, the website launched and sales slowly started coming in.
A TV personality had recently made wearing solid color neckties popular and I started to get numerous customer requests for the style. By that time, the outlet store had some available, but at a much higher price than the 99-cent ties, I was buying. I found a wholesaler in New York that had solid color ties at a good price, and I ordered a half dozen of twenty colors. Solid colors took off both on the website and on eBay. It didn’t take long before we were getting requests for larger quantities, many for 100 or more at a time.
Solid color ties quickly became most of our business, so I registered the domain name www.solidcolorneckties.com. This time, instead of building the site from scratch with FrontPage, I found a small company that offered a website creation package that wasn’t much more difficult than using a word processor. I put together SolidColorNeckTies.com and it launched in late 2003.
In those days, everything was about links. You wanted your site linked to as many websites as possible. It didn’t matter if they were relevant or not to what you were selling, just get more links than your competition and you would be successful. A young man in England created The Million Dollar Homepage. His idea was to sell 10,000 pixels as advertising for $100 each on the page he created, earning him one million dollars. Purchasers would buy a block of pixels, upload an image and provide a URL to link to.
I spent $600 and put the word TIES on his page. It really made a difference; he sold all the pixels on his website and SolidColorNeckTies.com sales started to take off.
By 2005, a lot of the liquidation items that we’d been getting had slowed or stopped. We had a lot of people who saw our success on eBay, copied us and diluted the business. My brother, who had been the driving force behind the liquidations, decided to retire and move to Florida. Jeff then left our Wauconda business to manage the property maintenance business for my brother.
While the eBay liquidation business was slowing, SolidColorNeckTies.com was quickly growing. I made the decision in 2006 to close the Wauconda warehouse and move the tie business home to our basement. It would be simple to manage out of the house, so I thought.
My Goal:
IF I COULD SELL 100 TIES A DAY, I WOULD HAVE REPLACED ALL MY INCOME, PLUS, FROM WHEN I WORKED IN MANAGEMENT AT KMART.
Boy, did I screw that up!
I started dabbling with Google advertising and before long there were many days I was shipping several hundred ties. I advertised that I would ship all orders received by 5:00 PM each day on the same day, so it was not uncommon to see large orders coming in at 5:00 PM. UPS was picking up packages in the early afternoon, I’d make a run to the post office by 5:00 and then UPS was making a second stop at the house after 6:00 PM.
By Spring 2008, half our garage was filled with boxes of ties. Our family room had boxes of ties in it. The basement was filled with plastic shelving bins, all filled with ties. In the evenings I would be packing orders in the basement while my wife would be upstairs putting ties in bags for future orders.
I needed a warehouse for the business.
A local realtor had an ad in the paper for a 1,000-square-foot unit in a town a few miles from our house. I contacted him, went and looked, but it was just not quite what I had in mind. He told me there was another unit closer to my house in Mundelein, but it was larger and the rent was higher. I decided to look anyway. It was one of four units in a brick building, all separated by roll-up doors and was a little over a mile from home. When we walked in, the unit was completely empty and had a freshly laid epoxy floor coating. Even though it was more money than I had planned to spend, I knew it was the right place. I don’t think I thought about it for more than a minute before I said I’d take it.
The owners formerly had a machine shop in the building. They were now retired but kept one unit as a place to come to each day, read the paper and mail and drink coffee. We walked over and talked to them, told them what I had in mind and I’ll never forget the first comment. “That’s a lot of room for ties, don’t you think?” We laughed together at that comment many times over the next couple of years as we filled that space and kept expanding.
We moved in on April 15, 2008. I was working the business full time and my wife was coming in part time. Darlene had been a stay-at-home mom while our family was growing up, but during much of the previous ten years, she had been working at a clock store in Mundelein.
I thought we could handle everything ourselves, but within a month I had to hire my first employee. I think I was a reluctant entrepreneur as I was still a little burned out from my Kmart days, so admitting I couldn’t do it all and hiring someone was a big deal.
We officially became Solidcolorneckties.com Incorporated and I sought out the services of an accountant to help me figure out what I was doing.
We continued to grow throughout our first year in the new space and I found myself hiring another person to help.
Next to arrive, our youngest daughter Amanda. She had spent two years at Drake University in Des Moines, IA and finished her last two years at Roosevelt University. She graduated with a degree in Journalism and English and was working as an editor for a magazine publisher. She was also taking care of the content on their websites. I offered her a job to take care of our website and she came to work for us full time in October 2009. Amanda is our Vice President of Website Development and has helped us grow the website in ways that I never imagined.
In 2010, my brother decided to move back to the Chicago area and run his property maintenance business again. My son, who had been running his business, came to work for us in August. Jeff took over all advertising and became our technical go-to person. Jeff is our Vice President of Marketing but does much more than that. He’s always coming up with new and better ways to do things and is responsible for many of the systems we now have in place.
Daughter number two, Kimberly, also joined us in 2010. Kim graduated in 2003 from Lake Forest College with degrees in Economics and Spanish. She previously worked at Hewitt Associates as a benefits operations manager. Kim took over all the planning and ordering of product for the business from me. She serves as our Vice President of Purchasing. Kim is much more analytical than I, so she has done a much better job keeping our products in stock by flowing the inventory to us on a more consistent basis.
Our oldest daughter, Christine, graduated from Illinois State University in 1995 with a degree in Psychology. She worked as a management recruiter and a human resources manager before spending 12 years at Hewitt Associates as a systems analyst, quality assurance analyst and in customer service. She joined us in March 2011 as our Vice President of Customer Service. While we get great reviews from our customers (all visible on the link at the bottom of our website) and get it right most of the time, Christine is great at making sure that we take care of any issues that may come up, so our customers get what they expect, or more.
Our son-in-law, Doug, came to work for us in July 2011 as the manager of our warehouse and shipping operation. Doug graduated from Illinois State University in 1994 and was working in a suburban school district as a technology coordinator before joining us. Besides overseeing the shipping operation, he also keeps our computers up to date and functioning smoothly, helps out with any special events and serves as our representative to the Mundelein Business Alliance, a local organization that works to make the local business community stronger.
As the company grew, our official business name needed some adjusting. While solid color neckties were still a huge part of our business, and still are today, we were selling so much more than solid ties—stripes, paisleys, novelty prints—and the name SolidColorNeckTies.com has held us back. In 2012, we acquired the domain name www.tiemart.com and by 2013 the company officially became Tiemart Incorporated.
While we originally rented one of the four units in our warehouse, we continued to grow and needed more space. Within 18 months we took over a second space and a third space followed about a year later. In the Spring of 2013, the owners of the building offered it to us for sale. We never imagined we’d be the owners of commercial property, things worked out and we closed the sale in August of 2013.
In July of this year, we will take over the fourth and final unit in the building from a screen printer who has been renting the space from us. They are also seeing strong growth and are moving to a new location just down the block from us.
Has it been a smooth road?
There are always challenges when you’re running a small business. Many nights I’ll wake up at 2 AM and my brain will be running through so much that I don’t get back to sleep. Not always problems. Many times, it’s just ideas that I have and scenarios that I’m running through.
I’ve experienced a lot in 50 years working for others and now myself. I try to keep an even keel about things. Not too high, not too low.
One of our biggest challenges early on involved a labeling error on an imported shipment. We had thirty days to either correct it or forfeit the goods. Within a week we purchased and set up equipment to correct the issue, hired some temporary help and got the job done with time to spare. It was hectic but proved to be a good learning experience.
We lost a shipment of ties to water damage once when a sea shipment container leaked. Fortunately, we had the foresight to carry insurance on inbound shipping and all of our losses were reimbursed, but it was still a major hassle to deal with pallets of wet, smelly cases while the claim took its course.
We struggled in 2015 and 2016 to get a new version of our website up. We hired the wrong development company and it cost us time, money and sales. We put the job in the hands of another company in mid-2016. We paid more, but the job was done right, and we launched a newly updated website in January 2017.
We’ve had highs and lows and I always think it’s okay to feel sorry for yourself today when things aren’t going right but by tomorrow, that’s done. Find a way, move forward.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Our business has grown more than tenfold since we first moved into our space in 2008. What’s made us successful is that we’ve listened to our customers and have tried to provide them with what they are asking for and at a fair price. We have a great group of employees who enjoy working together and they share our passion for getting orders shipped quickly and accurately. Our warehouse is efficient and well organized. It is set up to make it easy to pull an order quickly. We still ship all orders received by 4 PM, Monday through Friday, the same day. Many online companies cut off shipping at noon.
We monitor seasonal changes for colors that will be popular and then we work with our suppliers to get the products made and shipped to us quickly. We have over 150 different solid colors in stock in a wide variety of items. In many cases, we can sell you a tie, an extra-long tie, a skinny tie, a bow tie, a pocket square, a boy’s tie, a pair of socks and more, all in the same color or print.
We are popular for weddings and we offer our customers free fabric color swatches from our ties to ensure that what they buy will match their wedding colors. We send out several hundred free packs of swatches each week, The wedding website The Knot awarded us “The Knot Best of Weddings 2018”. The WeddingWire website named us as a “2018 WeddingWire Couples’ Choice Award®” winner.
Our motto has always been simple, “Neckties and More at Affordable Prices”.
Despite our past success, we’re not done growing or expanding. In 2017, we purchased equipment that allows us to make custom neckties and pocket squares on site, as little as one piece at a time. We’ve already seen a lot of excitement from our customers by having this option and see it as a place that can really spur our growth going forward. We have other top-secret ideas to continue to grow the business and I think 2018 is going to be our best year yet.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
The Chicago area is a great place to have a business, especially one that is involved in a shipping product. With our central location, orders shipped today can arrive at over half of the states in two to three days. The Village of Mundelein has been a big supporter of our business and has been great to work with.
One of the most satisfying things that we do is to be able to give back to help others in our community.
We’ve been honored to receive a 2016 Gold Star Business Award from the Village of Mundelein, the “Leland Trig Watson, Jr. business of the Year” for 2017 by the Mundelein Community Connection and an Annual Award for Business Excellence from the Daily Herald Business Ledger in 2018.
Contact Info:
- Address: 525 Morris Ave
Mundelein, IL 60060 - Website: https://www.tiemart.com
- Phone: 847-566-5980
- Email: service@tiemart.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tiemart/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SolidColorNeckTies/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SolidColorTies
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