Soul Buddha Clothing goes Online
UK based surfing, boarding and club wear design collective, Soul Buddha, has created an online store at the award winning online retail site CafePress.
The store retails t-shirts, hoodies, sweatshirts and accessories featuring the distinctive Soul Buddha designs aimed at extreme sports enthusiasts and clubbers / ravers looking for distinctive outfits. Spokesperson Alex di Savoia, commented: “We did extensive research into creating an online presence to sell our clothing lines. Did we want to create and maintain our own branded website? How would we handle the manufacturing side of operations? Did we really want to jump through numerous hoops to set up merchant accounts and deal with tariffs for export? We are surfers and explorers on the go. We didn’t want to be tied down by excessive administration.
“CafePress offered an ingenious solution. They handle the operational side of things which covers manufacturing, distribution, shipping, ordering and payments. The quality of their textiles is excellent - even covering organic materials. All of these are important factors for us. It’s a flexible service and it certainly answered many quality control and business issues we had raised amongst ourselves. Our end of the bargain is to sit on a beach or a mountain slope or the middle of a jungle and upload our designs with our laptops. ”
The Cafepress site is US based but offers very reasonable international shipping rates allowing designs to be purchased all over the world. The store also allows wholesale b2b purchases. di Savoia continued, “We can offer retailers discounts through a voucher system. ”
Soul Buddha happened when four life-long mates left a tiny seaside town for an adventure. Their travels took them to London, where two became rising young guns in the worlds of PR and advertising. The third started down the road of becoming a very promising music journalist and the fourth a very talented young merchant banker. They partied and life in the capital was good. But the bright lights and the big city couldn’t quell the desire for something different. The four set forth from London to travel far and wide; surfing, snowboarding and trekking in some of the most awe inspiring parts of the world.
A few years down the road and a wisely managed nest egg was considerably less than it had been in the beginning. The foursome came upon a simple and ingenious plan…to produce clothing designs - inspired by the places and sights they had seen - and sell them informally in the places they visited. With beaches and mountains for offices, it was an inspired solution. And they enjoyed quiet success, slowly building a name for themselves by word of mouth. And all without a brand name or a logo. It was just cool to see sk8ers, snowboarders, surfers and ravers wearing their kit.