THE BUSINESS
AKIL KURJI
“THE QUALITY OF LIFE IS THE QUALITY OF YOUR RELATIONSHIPS.” I N T E R V I E W
B Y
Tell us more about your entrepreneurial path. How did you land in e-commerce and start Scalable Brands? My entrepreneurial path started in middle school in 7th grade where I would buy candy from my dad’s gas station and resell it to my friends at school. When I got to high school I discovered eBay and Amazon. I would stay up all night and buy the new Jordan shoes and then resell them on eBay for a profit. This led to other products such as silicone wristbands and any product I could resell on eBay I would sell. In my college years I would go around to fraternities and sororities and sell custom t-shirts. After graduating college I moved back to my parents home. I came across an opportunity in 2010 where I had the ability to Sell 4g Internet. This became my first venture called Free Wire Communications. We became a national master dealer with Clearwire which was owned by Sprint. We ended up opening 20 locations nationwide in strip centers and malls and created 150 jobs and
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200 independent contractors in 12 months. The company ended up growing too quickly and due to the early stages of WiMAX technology we ended up going out of business due to the network being unstable and everyone adapting LTE. In 2011, I partnered with a friend of mine and launched a Halloween and lingerie website called Spurst.com. This is where I learned how to build a large scale e-commerce company. I ended up walking away from the partnership a year later. I failed once again. In 2012. I bought a small laser engraver and some blank silicone wristbands from China and started to engrave custom messages on them. I launched a brand called PMGOA and started to wholesale custom wristbands, custom buttons, custom temporary tattoos to online retailers and marketing agencies. In 2013, I created my first e-commerce website called BrandNex.com and sold
ENTREPRENEUR MINDSET FALL 2020
our products online. In 2015 I moved out from my parents garage into my first 6,000 square foot facility. In 2016 our company made the inc 500/5000 list. For the next five years we made the INC 500/5000 list and grew year-over-year. We ended up moving into a 20,000 square-foot building in 2018 and ran into some legal issues which we had to scale back. Due to the legal issues we ended up subcontracting most of our orders and ran a lean company and got out of manufacturing and focused on sales. We had a huge warehouse with machines and a limited staff. I ended up pivoting back to my old college days where I was selling custom t-shirts. This is when I pivoted into print on demand and became a contract printer for apparel. From April of 2020 to September of this year We grew from 25-180 people. I created Scalable Brands to enable other entrepreneurs to leverage my infrastructure to help them scale their businesses rapidly online by bootstrapping.
