Appendix II: Milesone Publishing, 2004-10

I wanted a new lawnmower. I had half an acre of would-be Ozarkian jungle, and only my father-in-law’s battered, undead John Deere to tend to it. I wanted to create a side-hustle to be able to pay for things like that and I wanted something that combined two of my biggest passions: illustration and college sports.

I did the research, communicated with the licensing director at my Alma Mater, Oklahoma State University, and was awarded a license with the Collegiate Licensing Company. I developed two 18x24 signed, limited edition print runs and actually sold some to local frame shops and fan stores. But the vast majority wound up in the recycling. I covered my expenses, but I could tell this particular product was not going to work.

But I had this license. It had been a capital-G Grueling experience to obtain that license through CLC, and I didn’t want to just waste all that. And there was something else. CLC acts as the licensing clearinghouse between manufacturers and a huge number of colleges and universities. Once you have that initial main license, you just add additional schools for the same product, as long as you can afford their advance on royalties and actually have sales performance to take up and exceed the advance (anywhere from $50 to $1,000 at the time).

At this time I had been creating greeting cards for HobbsHerder Marketing (see Appendix I) for a couple of years and one day it all just came together… Collegiate Holiday Cards. I started small and local in 2005, just OSU and the University of Oklahoma. My Dad and my cousin were my sales force and I did everything else. We had a very strong response from the school stores, mom-n-pops, regional chains, and even local distribution in national chains. It grew.

In 2007 I added licenses for all the remaining schools of the old Big XII Southern Division, except Baylor (that’s Texas, Texas Tech, Texas A&M) as well as Kansas, K-State, Arkansas, and most importantly, LSU. That year I also expanded my product line to include everyday Collegiate stationery… blank note cards, thank you’s, grocery lists, baby announcements… though all of that was more graphic than illustrated, so not represented in this gallery.

2007 was also the year that Milestone went from being a side-hustle to my full-time gig. Our den had been converted to rows of shelving, groaning under the weight of so much paper. Eventually I rented a non-climate controlled space in a run-down West Tulsa strip mall, and I loved it.

Everything rocked on through 2007. This, however, was a highly seasonal business. Not only was the flagship product, holiday cards, inherently seasonal, but the remaining product line had a very heavy summer buying period… by fall, when kids are on campus, it’s too late.

So when July came, and my phone and (sigh) fax had not rung in a month, I knew something was very wrong. It was at that point, in July of 2008, that I looked outside my strip mall rat hole and the walls of my house to realize that the economy was in absolute free fall, that people were hurting, and I was about to be one of them.

Somehow we survived 2008, but things were circling the drain. In the Spring of 2009, what should have been one of the happiest days of my life became a means to an end. For 3, maybe 4 years, I had been courting the seasonal buyer at WalMart. We finally struck a deal to have 12 packs of cards in every WalMart in an area from Texas to Michigan to Pennsylvania to Florida. This was what I had been working toward for 5 years!

But the previous year had taken a serious toll, I was already in substantial debt, which would be paid off by the WalMart order, but I couldn’t get financing to produce the order because I was already in so much debt. Capitalism. Anyway, I wound up allowing a couple of guys to buy in, cover production costs, provide a clean slate and basically set up a 2 vs 1 partnership. Less than ideal, but beggars and choosers. It did not take long beyond the completion of the WalMart order that I fully understood this new arrangement wasn’t going to work, and in February, 2010, I managed to get them to buy me out of my remaining stake. So at least I’d walk away with something.

But by then, I was already on my way to the next thing. (Appendix III)