'There are thousands of T-shirt printers. Someone has an idea and they think that'll lead to a clothing label'

TALK TIME: RICHARD DOODY and  FERGAL SWAN. The owners of streetwear label Counter Propaganda recall their early struggles

Is it true that the idea for your business came from a drunken pub conversation?

Richard: Pretty much. Fergal mentioned some guy he'd met the week before who was making a living selling T-shirts.

Fergal: He had designed a line that had just been snapped up by Pepe. I thought that was amazing. So I mentioned it to Rick and his brain started ticking away. He said "Let's do it!" And we did.

Richard: When we were in fourth class, I remembered Fergal being drafted in to help the sixth-class boys with an art competition they wanted to win. So I knew he was talented. I assumed that it was just a matter of taking his paintings, whacking them on a few T-shirts and Bob's your uncle, we'd be rich. We hadn't a clue what we were doing when we started out. In fact, we probably didn't for the first three years.

What had you both been doing prior to that?

Richard: Well, we both hated our jobs, so that definitely made things easier. I was an IT software tester. It was my job to do something, do it again slightly differently and then record the results. It was mind-numbingly boring.

Fergal: I'd done three years in NCAD and from there had gotten an internship with a firm in Dundalk. Apparently, they were one of the top three companies in the world that manufactured horse blankets.

Do you miss the glamour of that at all?

Fergal: (laughs) Well, they also made clothes for people who rode horses, so it was an active sportswear brand. But it was hard work commuting from Dublin to Dundalk every day. It was very business oriented, whereas I was coming from art college where everything was fabulous and flowery. Also I learned a lot about dealing with suppliers. So it was definitely good experience for me.

What was your initial investment?

Richard: €750. We hand-printed the T-shirts ourselves at first, so almost all of that was spent on blank T-shirts that cost about €3 a go. We sold those, took that money and started again from scratch. Down the line, we applied for our first loan of €4,500. Bank of Ireland told us they didn't think we had the capacity to repay it. But they were still giving out money to developers . . . I won't get into that rant.

It was a steep learning curve.

Richard: Absolutely. In this business, you're always smarter than you were the time before. There are thousands of T-shirt printers. They come and go. Someone has a great idea for a T-shirt and they think that'll lead to a clothing label. But they go bust quickly enough. Once you get into the business of fashion, you soon discover that there are really only two seasons.

There are two T-shirt seasons in Ireland? What are they called?

Richard: (laughs) You'd be amazed. T-shirts sell all year around. But I'm talking more generally here about denims, jackets, zip tops, hoods. There are really only two seasons the shops buy in. The first is around February, the other is in July, August. And if you don't get their budget at that stage, you can forget about it. It's gone. The shops will be meeting G-Star, they'll be meeting Diesel and Levis. So even though you learn something new every day, you only get two shots a year to put what you've learned into action. We've done 10 seasons, and the first six were definitely not what they should have been.

Any laughably amateur early mistakes?

Richard: Time management was always an issue back then. For our first ever trade show, we ended up working for 40 hours straight to get things ready. We thought everything we needed would fit into one suitcase. But there was a whole lot of things we'd forgotten about – hangers, brochures, an iron. We ended up taking two additional suitcases – weighing 14 stone – on the plane with us. We first had to give Ryanair €700 just to get the stuff to London. Then we were lugging these enormous suitcases down some very steep escalators on the Underground. It was extremely precarious. You could see people nervously looking around, because these things were enormous and we hadn't slept for two days.

You’re now a respected streetwear label, opening two stores recently even as some of your competitors go out of business. When did you first start to think that things might just work out for you?

Fergal: Probably the first time we saw someone out wearing one of our T-shirts.

Richard: Definitely. It was in the Market Bar in Dublin city centre. It was one of our early DIY T-shirts. Fergal would have bleached it and I would have ironed it, so we knew we'd both been intimately acquainted with it at some point in the previous few weeks. That was definitely a thrill.

Counter Propaganda has shops at the Stephen’s Green and Blanchardstown Shopping Centres. www.counterpropaganda.ie