Jericho welcomes Pro Wrestling Tees founder, Ryan Barkin to the show.
Barkin informs that they started Pro Wrestling Tees as an independent business and now they’re making shirts for “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Chris Jericho, Mick Foley and a lot of huge stars. New Japan Pro Wrestling in their biggest client, but if you’re not working for WWE odds are you’ve had a shirt made by Pro Wrestling Tees. Barkin informs that they sell roughly 3000-4000 pro wrestling shirts each week.
He started One Hour Tees 10 years ago; a shirt design company that provided custom design t-shirts for people with a variety of requests. He points out that this company took off somewhat, but not as much as it should have and his partner left the company. He decided to change his pricing model, and focused on quick turnaround times and things started to grow. He has a digital printer that can make shirts in 2 minutes, and this was a big part of One Hour Tees’ growth.
He points out that his start in the wrestling business occurred when Colt Cabana needed a shirt to wear on Smackdown that said, “I broke Big Show’s hand”. After that he began providing bulk orders for independent wrestlers so they could sell merchandise at their weekend shows, but he knew there was a way for wrestlers to sell merchandise all over the world throughout the week as well.
They started ProWrestlingTees.com and the rest is history. He recalls making a shirt for Kevin Steen in the early days of the business, and it was a big deal that he was selling one shirt per day. Now they sell 300-400 daily. He says that there are roughly 1000 wrestlers with shirts available on prowrestlingtees.com.
He considers Steve Austin to be their biggest name, but their biggest sellers are The Young Bucks. He informs that he wrote Jim Ross and told Ross that he should sell merchandise. After winning Ross over, he was introduced to Steve Austin and Austin called him personally. He sent some shirt ideas to Austin on cheap materials and Austin didn’t like it at all.
He begged Austin to give him another chance and sent him much higher quality shirts the next time around. Jericho points out that Austin is a fan of quality and always designed his own shirts. Barkin says he’s sent Austin some design ideas but Austin never likes them. Austin still plays a huge role in designing all of his shirts.
Jericho asks Barkin if he has ever run into legal troubles due to certain shirt designs. Barkin informs that he’s received Cease and Desist letters from various companies such as Jack Daniels for a Candice LeRae shirt, LEGO for a Johnny Gargano shirt, and McDonalds as well. When he receives those letters he quickly removes the shirts and discontinues their sales because the legal risk isn’t worth it for him.
Jericho thinks it’s great that every wrestler has an opportunity to sell shirts nowadays. If you have 10,000 social media followers or more you can set up a store on ProWrestlingTees.com for free. If you don’t meet those requirements there’s a $75 fee.
Jericho recalls asking Eric Bischoff for a shirt during his WCW days, and Bischoff said you don’t make money from shirts. Jericho wasn’t worried about making money; it was all about perception for him. He pointed out that if people saw Hogan and DDP shirts everywhere but didn’t see Jericho shirts, he’d be perceived as “less than” those other competitors.
Barkin mentions that he’ll sell anything as long as people will buy it. He tells Matt and Nick Jackson to take advantage of this opportunity while they can because if they ever sign with WWE they won’t be able to capitalize on these merchandise sales. Jericho points out that WWE will not budge on their merchandise percentages either.
The original Bullet Club shirt is their highest selling shirt of all time, and it’s still in the top 3 best sellers now even though it’s been around for close to five years. He mentions that Marty Scurll is the highest selling solo wrestler right now, and the top 3 sellers last year were The Young Bucks, Marty Scurll and Steve Austin in that order.
Barkin informs that Pro Wrestling Tees now has 30 full time employees, and his mother handles the Human Resource side of the business. He also points out that he purchased Pro Wrestling Crate when it had 300 monthly subscribers. He’s now grown that business to 3500 monthly subscribers and handles that basically on his own which is a lot of work.
He says his favourite wrestler of all time is Steve Austin, and he was sweating while talking business with him on the phone. He informs that he started the business to give wrestlers money, and he splits the money with wrestlers basically 50/50 after the cost of business.
That sums up today’s episode of Talk is Jericho. You can listen to the show yourself anytime here, and I’ll catch ya next week for another recap!
