| Bev and Rich Stepanian are
co-owners of B&R Sports. We opened our
storefront location in 1994 in a private
community of about 600 families. The location
was decent but didn’t afford main street traffic
for volume selling. Through word of mouth and
simple advertising, we built a steady core group
of customers. We printed one-of-a-kind T-shirts
and also provided for schools, recreation, and
youth groups in the area. We started
with our only piece of equipment, a Stahl’s
Hotronic clam machine. As our business continued
to grow, we invested in a single station screen
printing press with a conveyor dryer and flash
cure unit and began our screen-printing
adventure and later added a four-color press,
which was obtained from a friend selling his
business. Then one lucky day, a customer came in
looking for football uniforms, and we helped him
out. This was around the time that embroidery
was in its early stages; he mentioned he had an
embroidery machine for sale so we purchased a Melco Starlet single head –single needle
embroidery machine from him. Now we became a
little more diversified.
So here we are now both working full
time jobs-utilizing high school students to open
in mid-afternoon and working in the store till
7pm. Since the store was too small to place the
equipment, we had to operate our printing and
embroidery from home. As business increased, we
found we were working till midnight to keep up
with the demand, Rich doing the screen printing
and Bev handling the embroidery.
We found over the years that we kept
our customer base. We made the move to the home-
based business in 1998. We also added a Happy
Embroidery single head 15 needle Embroidery
machine with software to digitize our own
designs and for others. Our most recent purchase
is a Vinyl cutter, which allows us to make our
own prints and names for shirts. Now we cut out
names and prints for customers who do work in
the field and will be getting into the sign end
of business soon.
We found SportsLife on the computer as
we were browsing looking for wholesalers and
joined last year. SportsLife has proved to be
such a valuable tool; just the bulletin board
alone helps so much. People here are very nice
and Monica never fails to help a customer in
need. Most of our work is in the t-shirts,
sweats, jackets, and uniforms where we use
suppliers we have been using for years but the
suppliers through SportsLife are a great backup
for us, and to find a product they are
fantastic.
We are both retired now, Bev as a
documentation specialist for Hewlett-Packard and
Rich as a teacher, athletic director and coach
for 41 years. We know how hard it was back then
and we try to help new people here with advice
as best we can. We are working at a nice steady
pace but have time to schedule our jobs &
vacations on our own time. We recently purchased
a condo in NC, and we are looking to branch out
there as well. Perhaps next time we are asked to
write here, we will have B&R Sports north and
south. |
