Juror2 - Exceptionally Curious T-shirts Interview

Jenifer Kirsch - Interview Juror 2 - FAQ

Whats your name and how old are you?
My name is Jenifer Kirsch, I'm 27 years old and the founder of Juror2 - Exceptionally Curious T-shirts.

How did juror 2 get started
I went to the culinary academy in San Francisco and I used to doodle in my notebooks little stick figures. One day one of my chefs walked by and saw me drawing a Chef in a cape (SUPERCHEF!) and he said, "Oh man, I would totally wear that if it was on a T-shirt."

So let me get this straight, you were doodling in school!?
Yep haha, there is a trick to it. You have to have the doodles on the left side of the page and all your notes on the right side of the page so if you are busted drawing they can't take them away because your notes are on the back

Very clever, please continue.
So yeah he was like, "I would totally wear that if it was on a T-shirt" so I was like, "Huh, I wonder how you make T-shirts."

I went online, did some research, and then purchased a video on craigslist.com on how to silk screen. I jury rigged a system together because I was poor and didn't have access to a real screen printing machine.

I've seen you at your booth and your system is very different than your average screenprinting setup-
If by different you mean Janky! Haha!

Yes, I've seen a real screen printing machine and it usually looks like a huge octopus with lots of different arms that bend down and help hold the screens in place so the image is applied to the T-shirt straight.Your system is not like that, all I see is an ironing board...?
It's an industrial strength ironing board, not like the standard ironing boards you get at Wal-Mart or anything like that. That lets you put weight on the ironing board which is crucial when printing a T-shirt. The ironing boards I use are the type you would see in the 50's, you know the real 'mom wearing an apron' sort that take a lot of punishment and are sturdy as hell.

I have my ironing board and I lashed a wooden board to it so I would have a platform to print onto. I just slide the T-shirts over the end of the ironing board and I use some rubber tipped clamps to pin the shirt together so there are no wrinkles in the fabric. This creates the shirt tension which is all you really need, then I line up the screen by eye. I'm pretty good at lining it up now so I don't screw up nearly as often as I used to, but in the past I had this massive bargain bin where all the messed up shirts would go.

I pin the screen down with one hand, hold the other corner down with my hip and then I squeegee the paint through the screen and onto the T-shirt. After that I dry the ink using a camping propane heater that just blasts hot air into my booth. I wave the shirt in front of that for 30 seconds or so, bag it up and it is ready for the customer to take it away.

So this might be a little insider information, when you silk screen something you usually have to burn the image onto the screen and this is done traditionally with a lightbox. How do you accomplish this?
When I first started I was ridiculously poor since I was a student so I had to figure out other ways to do things. When I watched that craigslist video they said, "Ok now you have a lightbox that does this and this and this.." and I'm like, "Ok, well how do I do that same thing without shelling out tons of dough for an actual lightbox."

I ended up buying a 300 watt light bulb from home depot and then I bought a cone to screw the light bulb into and shine the light down in an arc. I cut up a chunk of foam from an old futon I bought on craiglist down to the size of my screens. I would lay the screen down, put the transparency of the image I wanted on top of the screen, put a sheet of Plexiglas over the whole thing, clamp it down and then shine the light on it. You know, there was a lot of trial and error trying to figure it all out, just like when you cook. You don't just throw a bunch of stuff in a pot and mix it around until its done. There are things like time, temperature, seasoning, distance, etc... But when you mess it up enough times you start to get the formula down.

Very innovative, especially for someone that was pretty young. When did you actually start Juror 2?
Ummm.. Lets see I started experimenting 4 or 5 years ago (2004/2005)

How long have you been doing Juror2 full time?
At first I wanted to be a chef so I was also doing that for a catering company up in Castro Valley, CA. I worked that job while also working on Juror2 in my spare time. Whenever I had a day off I would see if I could sell some T-shirts at local fleamarkets. There were high school flea markets and bigger ones like the De Anza flea market in Santa Clara, CA. There was one point in the summer where the catering business was really slow so I took 3 months off of my day job and went full steam into juror2. In those 3 months I made so much more money selling T-shirts that being a chef with their horrible hours wasn't appealing at all. Why would I want to be in a stuffy kitchen when I could be out there in the sun, dressing punk rock, and selling T-shirts that I made myself?

It sounds like your T-shirts were a big hit right from the beginning. Have you ever had any negative reactions to your T-shirts? Did you sell a lot of shirts right away?
Well in the beginning there were some pricing issues. At first I was charging like $15 bucks for a T-shirt because that's how much other shirts were selling for in stores, but then I realized "Hey you have a card table at a flea market, you need to adjust the prices!" I still made more money than I did at the catering job, but I wouldn't consider myself a huge hit. If I sold 10 shirts in a day I would be livid with excitement like it was the greatest day ever. Now I sell a higher average because I have a consistent customer base among other things.

Do you have any advice for fellow entrepreneurs that want to start their own business? Whether it be T-shirts or something else?
Yeah I can't put enough emphasis on BABY STEPS. In my family we are big proponents of not burning your bridges as well as why would you 'hope' for success when you can guarantee success with your business. You know, don't quit your day job and be like, "I"m going to be an artist!" and rush out onto the street and start selling your paintings. You can't do that and expect to be successful the first day.

I highly recommend taking a marketing class above everything else. If you can't get people to buy what you want them to buy then it doesn't matter how awesome you think it is, or how awesome your best friend thinks it is. You have to get something that appeals enough to the general public that you can support yourself doing it. You have to be like, "OK I really enjoy making this, how can I adjust it so people will buy it."

So you are located Currently in the California Bay area. Do you think that has helped juror2's success? Could you have been just as successful in Iowa, Mississippi, or Quebec?
I'm not going to lie, we have kind of a hippy/artsy community in this area and that helps. I also live in a palo alto specific area that I grew up in; You know the dot commers and what not. Lots of people want to support local artists, and they really love supporting female local artists! That helps a lot. The weather helps because it is sunny here which makes selling T-shirts outside a lot easier. There are a lot of other places where I think I could do fairly well though. My internet base clearly shows that there are people all over the world that are buying my shirts. I think I could do pretty well in a lot of other places at this point now that I have built up enough of a base.

You sell Juror2 shirts online as well as fleamarkets, do you sell all over the world or just in the US?
Well on the internet I ship world wide and if people show up to a fleamarket and want me to mail something 'back home' that's fine and I can do that too. Primarily I just travel around to the local markets in the area, mainly farmers markets actually. I kind upgraded to farmers markets from fleamarkets a few years ago. I mainly do farmers markets and misc craft fairs. I do holiday fairs at school, oh man, I love schools. I have a couple stick figures that people object to though, especially at schools.

I have a handful of really grisly looking stick figures of like a guy shooting his face off, or a guy ripping his own arm off. You take something like that to an elementary school where there are a bunch of 9 year old little boys and they FREAK OUT. They are like "Oh my god this guy is cutting his hand off! Oh my god he is CUTTING HIS HAND OFF! I am so scandalized I have to get all my friends and bring them over to the booth and we will secretly look at this one shirt with the cartoon chef cutting his hand off."

That's pretty good advertising but its never so scandalous that the parents are like, "You are traumatizing my children!". For the most part people get a kick out of them and the kids are sooooooo thrilled that they got a bloody t-shirt to show off to their friends.

Is your main demographic teenager or young adults..?
I have sort of a scewed demographic. The main people that buy my shirts are moms that see the emotions in the T-shirt and think, "This T-shirt reminds me of my kid, or my husband, or my friend...". The moms buy them the most, but the ones that wear them the most are the kids and teenagers as well as the occasionally cool/geeky college kid that wants something a little outside the norm to wear.

So where do you see juror2 going in a years time?
I recently hired an employee, The Amazing Stan. I'm trying to incorporate him more into the business so eventually we will be able to hit more fairs than we are hitting now. He'll be able to go to some, I'll be able to go to some. I also recently co-wrote a childrens book so we are going to try and expand on that and really push that at the fairs. Hopefully we'll be able to do some book readings and book signings and things of that nature. Ultimately I would like the business to be self contained enough so I could eventually hire a couple more employees and they can do all the printing and all I have to do is the drawing.

Tell me about your partner in crime The Amazing Stan. What makes him so amazing?
Well he is QUITE amazing. Not only does he do magic, but he is also a very masterful Rubik's-cuber. Last night he beat his own record by solving the cube in 34 seconds!

He sounds a little bit like a savant.
Haha, I don't know if I would say that. He's a really quick learner and is very meticulous, he's also hilarious. It also helps that he has a Mohawk because Mohawks SELL t-shirts. I'm not going to lie, he looks awesome. He's also my instructor for this Philipino martial arts system I am taking called Inayan Eskrima. He teaches me that, yells at me all day, and then at night he comes to work for me and I yell at him all night. It's quite a symbiotic relationship.

You mentioned he has a Mohawk, I notice that you also dress a little eclectically. Would you say that help sells T-shirts or do you just do that for fun?
It may seem like I do stuff on a whim, but I am a big fan of cost/plus analysis reports. I actually did a little test run for a while where I wore just T-shirt and jeans at my markets. I then dressed how I like to dress which is sort of punk rock, not too scandalous, more bright and fun and upbeat. I found that I sold almost a third more T-shirts if I attracted attention to the booth by dressing up and acting a little crazier. Parents would walk by and be like, "OHhhh my kid so wants to dress like that, maybe they would like one of her T-shirts."

Some of your sticks can be pretty crazy. Where do you get the ideas for the sticks that you draw?
Everywhere. Oh my god everywhere. When I went to culinary school I used to ride the train every day so a lot of my earlier stick figures would be based on the billboards I saw on the way to school. Sometimes my roommate would be like, "Ohhhhhhhhhhh draw this!" so I would. You know, friends and family give me a lot of ideas for sticks. They are also based on moods, if you notice Little Axe Girl is a very angry little girl with an axe. Well, that was me when I was at the supermarket one day and the women in front of me was arguing with the teller about 29 cent roll of toilet paper and I wanted to kill her! I thought to myself, "I want to go sophomoric on her ass!" Haha, sophomoric was a cool vocab word I picked up in highschool. It means immature and overconfident so that's sort of what I ended up drawing.

Your sticks have been compared to The Nightmare Before Christmas, or the Don Heartsfeld 'Rejected' cartoons. What do you think when people mention that to you?
There is something I always say to people, "Big head, skinny arms, stick figures all kind of look the same." That's essentially true, there is really only so far you can go with the stick figure look. Stick figures are stick figures. I try and make mine stand out by relaying an expression or emotion so when you look at them you immediately get a feeling, like "Ohhhhh that's the type of mood I'm in today," or "My friend is in THAT kind of mood."

I want people to be able to connect to my shirts through the moods and emotions and not necessarily how they are depicted in the stick figure format.

What can people do if they want to help support juror2?
I can always use extra people working at the booth and ample foot rubs. I loooooooooooove foot rubs haha.

Do you take stick figure requests? Like I really want to see a stick figure of a Dragon riding a Griffin.
Well those are animals, and I really suck at drawing animals. Let me get that right out of the way, people always want to see me draw a cat or a dog, but stick figures aren't really conducive to animal forms. That's what I'm good at, I'm not good at drawing muscles or depth, or really anything like that. If people want a really custom stick you can get one made for $50 bucks. If someone wants a guy abducted by aliens I can draw that, but if they want a stick figure of themselves, dancing with a puppy... I'm like , "Uhhhhh its not going to look like you, its going to look like a stick figure, I'll do the best I can." Hahah.

For the most part though if you want to put in an idle request I have a facebook group ( http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2537654607&ref=ts ) setup for jurro2 t-shirts. You can go and put a request on the wall and every once and a while I scribble of a stick based on some of those suggestions.

A serious question. People are really worried about the economy these days, has the economy affected juror2 at all?
Of course it affects everybody. It affects impulse buying and that's what a lot of my shirts are. There are a lot of other craft vendors that I see out there all the time and I think it has affected the jewelers more than anybody. While it has affected me, there are certain things you can justify buying and some that you can't. Clothing you need eventually and you have to have. $15 dollars for a t-shirt is not a lot of money and people can justify getting it as a gift a lot of times. People would rather spend 15 dollars on a unique creative gift than $30 or $40 dollars on something from a larger store.

If people want to get a hold of you how can they do that?
You can go to juror2.com since it is the easiest way to contact me. There is a contact page on there with my e-mail address, fax, phone number. Phone calls are nice, e-mails are better. I love e-mail, it's like a little present whenever I get a new message in my inbox.

I also have a myspace page, facebook page, deviantart account, twitter etc... You can basically look up the words, "Juror2" on Google and you will find a whole slew of places that I am signed up for. Whatever your poison is look it up and I am probably on there.

Thank you very much for this interview! I wish you luck with all of your future endeavors.
Thank you :)