Why We Haven't Taken Institutional Investment

People generally assume the main reason entrepreneurs pass on angel investors, or institutional ones, is giving up some of their company – the equity dilution. For us, though, that wasn’t the chief cause.

It stems from differing ideas of what the company should be – the sort of business we’re determined to establish, and how best to look after our craftspeople and our customers.

Over the last two years, we’ve had a number of talks with possible investors, brought to us by friends, or people from my undergrad or grad school days, people who had the capital and a genuine excitement in what we were building; and I sincerely appreciate them all. But one angel wanted us to move production from Porto to Vietnam or Bangladesh to get better margins. The suggestions were sensible, and were offered with kind intentions, but they were just wrong for the business we are creating. Porto is a single night’s flight from New York. I’ve seen our items being cut and sewn. I’ve made a proper friendship with the person who makes things for us, over two years of discussion about stitch-counts and collar designs. I wasn’t going to give that up for a cheaper unit-price, and I didn’t want anyone at the table who might force our hand to.

Because of this, everything at Terlingua Threads goes through just two people – my cofounder and I.

I suspect most people don’t quite understand what that means. They hear “bootstrapping” and think of long hours and lots of effort – which is right, but not very helpful. The reality is more like this:

I’m on the Bx train on the Metro do Porto, somewhere between Póvoa de Varzim and Trindade station, and found out earlier, while at the production site, that the sticker labels were off by half a millimeter when we tried printing some practice labels. So I open Adobe InDesign on my laptop, on the train, and start correcting them. Save, look at, save again, re-look. My stop arrives. I close the laptop, open it again in a café, and keep working until the file is perfect.

Or I’m back in NYC, at The Pony Bar on the Upper East Side, drawing the shapes of the animals which will go on our product tags in Procreate on my iPad. Or I might be writing something for the blog or the national park book I'm working on (P.S. if you’ve ever seen some guy working away on his laptop at The Pony Bar or The Penrose on the UES at 1 a.m. on a Friday night, it could well be me, feel free to say hi).

Or I’m at a coffee shop (HUGE shoutout to the WONDERFUL staff at The Fancy Kook in UES) sorting out and reconciling transactions QuickBooks. Or I’m in my gym entrance-area, trying to make sure payments to our freight forwarder went through. Or I’m replying to a journalist’s questions on a Saturday afternoon.

The list goes on, because the jobs go on. I’ve learned to use my Canon EOS R7 so we can do product shots ourselves and get professional-looking pictures quickly without needing to hire a studio and a photographer every time we need something new. Because I wanted to be able to edit our own promotional videos, I’ve taught myself Premiere Pro to design reels to post and not have to rely on AI video generators. And I’ve ended up learning about designing GS1 product barcodes and needing to get the database codes to match up between our website and the system the warehouse in Brooklyn uses.

All of these things would be separate, full-time jobs in a larger firm; for our bootstrapped startup, they’re all a typical Wednesday or Sunday night.

Pre- and post-grad school, I did several years in management consulting. People say consulting is very demanding mentally. Yet consulting never once posed me the intellectual challenge with supply chain timing or any of the other matters I just mentioned before. 

But what makes it worth it is having the deep locus of control: we make every decision – the good ones and the bad. We pick the colors. We design the features. We decided to keep manufacturing in Portugal. We chose to release with four products instead of two or twelve, to spend two years in development instead of one, etc. No one is telling us to work to their schedule for profit. Nobody is pressing us for a cheaper supply chain, a quicker launch, or a wider customer base. The price of this independence is that there’s no backup, no safety net, no one else to handle the 1 a.m. accounting, barcode issues and ISBN number mismatches, or the shipping quotes that need replying to first thing.

The other cost (and the one I feel honestly feel the most when solo traveling for work) is personal. For example, as of the time of writing this article, I'm 31 & single, and I should be spending more time dating, but sometimes you have supply chain matters or finance matters to take care of at midnight on a Saturday evening. And as I type out this sentence, I'm on another trip to Porto to sort of some product development matters with the latest iteration of our White Sands hooded henleys. 

But what keeps me grounded are the close and meaningful friendships from college and grad school, and a wonderful church community in New York. None of these relationships are based on what people can get from each other. Nobody is networking. Nobody is trying to get a favor. They just care, and they’d care just the same whether Terlingua Threads is successful or ends up not working out (let’s hope not, don’t want to jinx this). To have people whom you love deeply and know are deeply loved is what makes the challenges from bootstrapping bearable.

Yeah, there’s no neat little bow for this flow of thought. The barcodes are now sorted. The Penrose and The Fancy Kook are waiting back in the UES, and I’ll probably be at one of them next week with my laptop and notebook, working on something that might seem mundane or minute to anyone but me.

That’s what a bootstrapped apparel startup is. It’s not sexy, it's not glamorous. And it's not VC or PE-backed. But it’s ours. And we love it.