By B.C. Manion
While many businesses remain frozen in place, or are continuing to cut back, ClassB, a custom T-shirt shop in Zephyrhills, is continuing to expand – and is hiring.
The company doubled its downtown space about three years ago and now operates out of roughly 10,000 square.
In coming weeks, it plans to add about 1,500 square feet of office space in Tampa, where it plans to run its marketing operations, said Gregg Hilferding, the company’s vice president.
This is yet another milestone in a company that began in 1982 with Terry Hilferding, Gregg’s mom, operating the business out of her kitchen.
Recently, ClassB was ranked as the 32nd fastest-growing company in Tampa Bay by the Tampa Bay Business Journal.
While the company does not release its actual sales figures, Gregg estimates it in the millions of dollars annually.
The company’s primary customers are Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4-H Clubs and families who are having reunions.
The business comes in from all over the country.
On a recent day, the company was filling orders from Cub Scout packs, Boy Scout troops and Girl Scout troops in Texas, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico and Tennessee; for 4-H Clubs in Ohio and Wisconsin; and for family reunions in Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas and Florida.
And those were just a few of the orders waiting for completion.
The work keeps the company’s 39 employees busy, which is why it is looking to hire more employees, Gregg says. The company expects to fill at least six positions in coming months and he encourages anyone who is interested to fill out an application. Training is provided, he said.
The name of the company stems from a slang term often used by Boy Scouts to describe the T-shirts they wear when they’re not wearing their khaki dress uniforms. The company has decided to adopt the term to describe the shirts it sells to all of its customers.
It also refers to a broader class of people who switch from formal shirts to more casual shirts for activities.
When the company was founded, it was called Shirts & Caps, and it kept that name from 1982 to 2003.
But it used ClassB as the name for its website and changed its name for consistency, as it continued to gain more customers nationwide, Hilferding said.
He credits the company’s surge into the national market to the popularity of the Internet. Before it arrived, there was no way to reach out to a national customer base, he said.
“We do a lot of online marketing,” he said, with an emphasis on search engine marketing.
The company doesn’t do direct sales, but has customer service representatives to answer questions that online customers may have about the products.
Class B receives blank T-shirts from warehouses, decorates them and sends them straight to the customer. It can screen print as many as 500 T-shirts in an hour, depending upon the design.
Terry Hilferding traces the company’s beginning back to when the family lived on Florida’s Space Coast and her oldest son wanted to go for a Boy Scout printing merit badge.
The Scout Master didn’t have someone to teach the skill, so Terry volunteered.
After the family moved to Zephyrhills, she continued volunteering to teach children how to do screen prints and that evolved into the business.
It began in the family’s kitchen but outgrew that space and moved into a carport, which they enclosed. Next, it took over the garage.
“Once Gregg started kindergarten, I got a storefront and we just ballooned from there,” Terry said.
“Our first website was in 1997 and we did get an order that year,” Gregg said. “It took quite a few years after that to take off,” he added.
Terry and her husband, Robert, decided to shift the business to their sons’ control. Eric became the president and Gregg, the vice president. Their sister, Carin Fletcher, owns the same kind of business in South Carolina.
Terry thinks it’s cool that the company’s beginnings have come to play such a major role in its success.
“We have a great deal of respect for the Boy Scouts of America program,” she said.
Gregg and Eric, who both achieved Eagle Scout, try to run the business according to the philosophy of the Boy Scout law, Gregg said.
Apparently, it’s working.
For more information about ClassB, go to www.classb.com or call (800) 851-4020.
