Last Updated on June 18, 2021 by Drew Thomas Hendricks

Jim Snediker is the Founder and CEO of Stock Mfg. Co., a company that designs custom uniforms for high-end restaurants and hotels. Jim began his career as a sales representative making cold calls at a freight company. A year and a half later, he was working with high-level clients as the Manager of Client Solutions at CareerBuilder.com. Before founding Stock Mfg. Co., Jim was the Co-founder and President of the fashion website Left of Trend.

Stock Mfg. Co. was founded in 2012 as a menswear brand but quickly found a niche designing custom uniforms. They’ve designed and manufactured uniforms for some of the best bars, restaurants, and hotels, including Ace Hotel, Soho House, Aparium Hotel Group, and more. Stock Mfg. Co. has a national reputation for its focus on innovative products and its full-service approach to design, development, and manufacturing.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Jim Snediker discusses what inspired him to start Stock Mfg. Co. and how it’s evolved over the years
• What is the process of working with Jim’s company?
• Your staff’s influence on your company: the ambassadors of your brand
• How COVID-19 impacted Stock Mfg. Co. — and the fundraiser that helped hospitality workers across Chicago
• What Jim predicts for the future of restaurants and hotels
• Jim’s advice for transitioning your staff into uniforms
• How to get 20% off your first Stock Mfg. Co. order

In this episode…

One of the most important components to building your company’s brand is your staff. Since they’re representing your business while engaging with customers, you want them to look the part. The key to doing so? Invest in custom uniforms that you, your staff, and your customers will love.

At Stock Mfg. Co., founder Jim Snediker and his team design custom workwear that combines the latest fashion trends with functionality and durability. According to Jim, it’s important to communicate with your staff and find comfortable clothing they can wear at work and off the clock. So, what steps can you take to find the right uniform for your company, and how can you get everyone on board? What kind of impact can a custom uniform make?

In this episode of Legends Behind the Craft, Drew Thomas Hendricks is joined by Jim Snediker, Founder and CEO of Stock Mfg. Co., to talk about custom uniforms for your company. Jim discusses why workwear matters, how to transition your staff into uniforms, the way custom attire can reflect your brand, and how his company helped raise money for unemployed hospitality workers during the pandemic. Plus, Jim shares a special promo code to get 20% off your Stock Mfg. Co. order. Stay tuned!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Barrels Ahead.

Barrels Ahead is a wine and craft marketing agency that propels organic growth by using a powerful combination of content development, Search Engine Optimization, and paid search.

At Barrels Ahead, we know that your business is unique. That’s why we work with you to create a one-of-a-kind marketing strategy that highlights your authenticity, tells your story, and makes your business stand out from your competitors.

Our team at Barrels Ahead helps you leverage your knowledge so you can enjoy the results and revenue your business deserves.

So, what are you waiting for? Unlock your results today!

To learn more, visit barrelsahead.com or email us at hello@barrelsahead.com to schedule a strategy call.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03  

Welcome to the Legends Behind the Craft podcast where we feature top leaders in the wine and craft beverage industry, with your host Drew Thomas Hendricks. Now let’s get started with the show.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  0:19  

Drew Thomas Hendricks here I’m the host of the Legends Behind the Craft podcast where I talk with leaders in the wine and craft beverage industry, from tech companies that help wineries operate at maximum efficiency. Today’s guest Jim Snediker, CEO of Stock Mfg. This company ensures hospitality staff remain on brand through fashion forward workwear. Past guests of Legends Behind the Craft include Megan Rounds of Rounds Design, Paul Salcedo, CEO of BottleVin, and Ashley DuBois Leonard of InnoVint. If you haven’t listened to these yet, be sure to check them out and subscribe. Today’s episode is brought to you by Barrels Ahead. At Barrels Ahead we work with you to implement a one of a kind content strategy. When the highlight your authenticity tells your story. It makes your business stand out from your competitors, Jim In short, at Barrels Ahead. we unlock your brand story to unleash your revenue. Go to barrelsahead.com today to learn more. Now, before I introduce today’s guests, I want to give a big thank you to Paul Salcedo of BottleVin. Check out last week’s show to learn about Paul’s amazing journey from growing up in rural Napa Valley to becoming a technology innovator in Silicon Valley. I’m super excited to talk with today’s guest Jim Snediker. And I want to thank Dr. Jeremy Weisz of Rise25 for introducing us. When Jeremy told me about Jim and his company, I knew I needed to have him on the show. Jim is the co founder and CEO of Stock Mfg., really strategy and business development. Now Stock was founded back in 2012 as a heritage fashion brand, but quickly developed a strong cult following among Chicago’s hospitality industry. A big turning point was when Alinea, one of the top ranked restaurants in the world approached Stock to create a custom uniform program for their staff. After that, other prominent establishments followed, including Goose Island, RPM Steak and Soho House. Today Stock is the go to outfit her for some of the best bars, restaurants and hotel brands in the world. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Jim Snediker  2:13  

Hey, Drew, thanks for having me.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  2:14  

Thanks for being on.

Jim Snediker  2:15  

Yeah, for sure.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  2:16  

So you got quite a story here. Tell us a little bit about yourself. And then well, I’m dying to hear about the story of Stock.

Jim Snediker  2:23  

Okay, how deep do you want me to go born in Minneapolis, February 1983? Or should we fast forward a little bit

Drew Thomas Hendricks  2:29  

touch on the highlights. When did you learn to walk?

Jim Snediker  2:34  

I heard I was about 11 months old is what my mom tells me. Yeah, no. So by background prior to Stock, which is really been the majority of my professional life at this point I was in in sales and marketing. The last real corporate job I had was at Careerbuilder actually as running there that was working out of their media at their burgeoning media department at Careerbuilder. And I worked my way up into some enterprise sales positions and quit and started my own thing, which I did for about a year and a half, which ultimately led to the beginnings of Stock in 2012.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  3:07  

What Where did the inspiration for Stock come from?

Jim Snediker  3:10  

Oh, man, I mean, the original inspiration was a vertically integrated men’s fashion brand. We actually So Mike, Tim and I founders of the of the brand founded we had a factory we were partnered with in Chicago. So we were doing all of our own manufacturing there. So we worked out of the back of this old factory in the west side of Chicago, we were designing, developing, manufacturing everything ourselves and kind of just built the business out of there. And the name Stock actually comes from the union stockyards. So we have this sort of, you know, that was the, the hub of both, you know, blue collar immigrant job creation in Chicago and the, you know, 19th and early 20th century, as well as a hub for white collar innovation, like the, you know, the the options exchange, the futures exchange came out of speculating on the hog market. So we really that just kind of, oh, Henry Ford also got the the idea for the assembly line from visiting the slaughterhouses there. So that was really like the ethos when we started the brand back then was we were going to make high end American made stuff and at an affordable price, and we were going to do it, you know, at the time, we were doing everything in Chicago, and that was really our vision for the company.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  4:13  

So Originally, it was a fashion brand that Yep, and now it’s evolved into a full hospitality work. Yeah,

Jim Snediker  4:20  

yeah. And you know, I think a testament I’m wearing like a uniform piece bars right now that I wear all the time. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think a testament to what we do is we design our uniforms to be almost a replacement for clients that are used to going retail, you know, sure plenty of people already have relationship with cintas or whatever other uniform company but the real itch we scratch from the beginning was like people were going to J crew and buying, you know, 100 shirts and you know, going somewhere else and buying vests and all this stuff, going to suit supply for suits. And we’re able to do that all ourselves in house guarantee the continuity and also like the customer service that comes with with being a b2b company. So that’s really what we’ve sort of prided ourselves on is building a uniform program, and aesthetic that is looks like it’s retail quality.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  5:06  

Which means going back to the early days, though, starting as a fashion brand, what were some of the challenges of launching a natural fashion brand in the US with us made,

Jim Snediker  5:15  

I don’t know that we have enough time for me to talk about all the challenges. I’ll put it this way we gave, and there’s people doing it really well still manufacturing in the US. And we gave, without going into the whole story, every single dollar and piece of effort we had to building and maintaining manufacturing in Chicago, and especially with the way our business evolved there, just from a supply chain standpoint, from a cost standpoint, there were just no way for us to keep the all of these operations in Chicago. So we’re doing the majority of our stuff in Turkey these days, although we still do make aprons and a lot of face masks this past year in Chicago. But the challenges are myriad. It’s, it’s you know, there’s stuff we would make where we cut it at one guy’s house and go pick the cut pieces up and drive it over another factory to sew it. And then hey, we got to put snaps on these but the guy who does the kick press isn’t at the factory today. So Tim, my partner got the drive over the factory and manually put snaps on the kick press and now it’s just we’ve got really dialed in, you know, we’re bigger, and we’re doing bigger runs and things that we used to but you know, we’ve got operations that are much more dialled in, and a lot of that like midstream work, is that fall on us the way it needs to? Sure. It

Drew Thomas Hendricks  6:23  

sounds like you bootstrapped it from the start there.

Jim Snediker  6:25  

Yeah, we did. You know, we were fortunate to wrangle a little bit of investment money, like, you know, in the grand scheme of things, a very, very small amount spread out over a significant amount of time. But yeah, we were super scrappy. I mean, when we were getting the brand off the ground, like we were literally pulling old deadstock fabric off the racks, the factory, cutting it up into shirts, and ties and stuff and go into like street fairs and markets and selling there. As we were, you know, using every dollar, we had to build a custom website at the time, which seems insane. Now, nine years later, with Shopify being as good as it is, but yeah, we were doing that and just super scrappy. And then, as we got this, the website established and started building a bit of a presence, we got a little clever about how we market ourselves, because I mean, when I say we had no money, we had no money, like, you know, I think we did 200 grand in revenue our first year with a lot of mouths to feed. So what we did is back then Tumblr was the big kind of influencer platform and, and we, we would dig up people that whose aesthetic we liked on Tumblr, or who were an influencer in like the fashion world in some way. And we would pitch them like, hey, co design a collection with us, you know, you will make the stuff that you’re dreaming about. And you help us market it and we’ll pay you a commission on the sales. And that’s really how we got our first big rush of like, social media following and customers and exposure to places outside of Chicago was by leveraging relationships with bigger and bigger sort of influences which turned into brands. And that’s that was really the genesis of how we kind of built the business up with no marketing budget.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  7:58  

That’s amazing. When was the day or what was the time when you move towards the hospitality. And that was Alinea with Grant Achatz?

Jim Snediker  8:06  

Yeah, so we haven’t had a ton of one on one interaction with Grant. But he was involved in the very, very beginning of decision making on the uniforms. But it was honestly it’s pretty lucky to look back on Dave Beran, who is the executive chef at Next back then. He knew Tim my partner, I can’t even remember how I think like he might have known his sister in college, something like that. But Dave liked our stuff and asked if we would want to take a crack at doing new uniforms for next and Alinea because they weren’t thrilled with the current vendor they had. So we went all out on this. I mean, we were meeting with servers meeting with grant meeting with David meeting with gms getting feedback on the design on the functionality. And we made these just like, perfect, we don’t make anything like it’s still it’s so it’s so unique to next and Alinea, but we made the server jackets and they still use them to this day. And they just were exactly what they wanted. And word travels fast in this industry. So that was like the early 2013 I think. Yeah, yeah. It was like very, like beginning of our second year in business, I think is what it happened. And our whole thing was like, hey, we’ve built this collaborative platform for our brand, like why not do it with the best restaurant in the world? And then yeah, then Goose Island reached out because they were fairly recently coming off their acquisition by ABN Bev, and they want to like solidify their Chicago routes. So we did some merchants some uniform stuff, they didn’t have a taproom back then. So it was just merch. And they filmed the video at the factory. And we you know, did the whole ride in the green line from their brewery to our factory and yada yada yada. It was it was really cool, really well done. And they’re also still customer and we’ve got some pretty good friends out of Goose Island as well. Yeah. And then it just kind of started growing from there. And the big inflection point is 2015 when Soho House opened in Chicago, that was the big like, sort of come to Jesus moment where I mean we did this and we still get inbound traffic from the blog entry we made about the The uniforms we did for sell five years ago, you know, like that’s still driving SEO traffic.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  10:06  

Isn’t that amazing for us. Some like post, we see that all the time there’s a there’s a post that is really, that just seems that search engines latched on to it and it’s your golden gas,

Jim Snediker  10:15  

I think it got picked up, I think there’s a decent amount of Pinterest traffic from it, too is getting pinned a lot. Like they’re just really cool. I think to this day, it’s probably in my top two or three, like just top to bottom holistically perfect uniforms we’ve done for like, the space to the style to everything. And they were awesome to work with. And it was really fun. And, you know, there’s just a lot of eyeballs on that project. So it’s a big deal when it opened in Chicago was a huge deal. And it really just accelerated from there and about 20 God, I feel like I lost a year of my life. So I’m like rewinding how many years everything’s been they got 2018 we made the decision like wine the brand down that year and just fully focus on uniform and workwear stuff beginning in 2019. Hmm. So that’s we did and instead of investing into men’s wear stuff, while making a bunch of custom uniform stuff as well, we just started investing in like perfect core uniform pieces and built out that kind of core uniform collection over time, which now you can look on our website. It’s pretty robust, just our, our core in stock offerings. And then of course, we still do all the custom stuff for the client that wanted as well.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  11:21  

Yeah, what percentage do you think’s between your core core offerings and your custom work?

Jim Snediker  11:24  

That’s a good question, I should probably look at the financials, they’re pretty much every project, we do not have at least one element of our of our core items, what we call our in stock items in it. And a lot of the custom stuff now is a little bit like before we were we were like custom sourcing everything we did so like shirt fabrics, were going through the mill in Japan and looking to swatch cards and sampling and this and it’s just like it adds lead time and adds, you know, as I’m sure you know, anytime there’s another variable introduced, there’s another thing that can go wrong. So we now a lot of the customers that we do like will still do custom aprons, custom dresses, stuff like that. But the majority of the custom things we’re doing now are enamel pins, baseball caps, knit caps, aprons, things that are aren’t as size specific and are a little bit easier for us to just upload the artwork and have the factory make as opposed to like testing out a new shirt fabric to see how it washes like we’ve got our our core fabrics and stuff pretty dialed in.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  12:21  

And of course style is all Yeah, good there. I know I love your styles. Now for you. What’s the process like should have like sort of winery taster and want to like, bring all their staff on brand? And yeah, give them an apron? Give them a?

Jim Snediker  12:36  

Yeah, totally. So we’re actually just finalized an order with a new distillery in Illinois the other day. And she’s pretty much getting all of our stuff up our website like our in stock website stuff, I don’t even know that we’re I don’t think we’re even doing any, like custom embroidery or anything. It’s literally like get your sizes from your from your staff and send it to us. And we’ll put together an order and an invoice and we’ll ship it to you. If it’s all in stock stuff. It usually goes out in a day.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  13:01  

Yeah, that’s, that’s amazing. And that’s something I see a lot in a lot of the winery tasting rooms we visit, there’s not there’s, there’s almost a disconnect between the night and I don’t want to bash any tasting rooms, but there’s oftentimes a disconnect between the perception of the brand. And then the people standing behind the counter. And yeah, not this, everybody needs to have a full uniform, but something on point, whether it’s an apron, whether it’s a shirt really helps unify that.

Jim Snediker  13:26  

Yeah, cohesive element for sure. Yeah. And, you know, it could just be that the ecosystem of wine tasting rooms is a little bit newer than that of hotels and restaurants. You know, I know breweries like we’ve, we’ve done stuff for a handful of breweries, and those are generally a bit more casual, like, you know, it’s t shirt and maybe an apron, then obviously, like the lobby bar to hotel. But you know, the way we always talk about is like you’re opening a new place, right? Whether it’s a new tasting room, or a new 300 room hotel or a 25 table restaurant, nowadays, you’re putting, there’s so much that goes into building, it’s not just like, hey, let’s make good food and make sure our staff is well trained. It’s you’ve got an interior design for making sure it’s aesthetically on trend and onpoint you’ve got oftentimes you’re hiring graphic designers to do your, the fonts and the menus and the and the brand assets. And you know, you’re getting a sound design guy to make sure that the ambience of the sound is hitting every table perfectly. Like at the end of the day. You want that first impression when you walk in, but the biggest thing that gets the impression of your of your restaurant across, aside from the food is your staff, right? Like you will remember if you had a really good or really bad server, or you know, the bartender was knowledgeable and friendly, and the the staff is able to get that point across and be like an ambassador of the brand. If they look like they’re on, you know, kind of an extension of the brand in their appearance as well. So that’s where I think the uniform side of what we do is really important is that it’s always very thoughtful with the color scheme. The aesthetic and the the vibe that the place is trying to get across, you know? Absolutely. 

Drew Thomas Hendricks  15:08  

Now, with most of the restaurants being closed across the country the past year, how did that impact your guys’s business? Did you have to pivot at all?

Jim Snediker  15:12  

Well, one big thing is we did a lot more business in Florida in Texas than we had in previous years, which is awesome. You know, we’ve got a pretty sizable customer base all of a sudden in like the greater Austin area, which I mean, Austin’s blowing up in general, but the biggest sort of pivot we made not I’m so hesitant use that word, because it’s such like a, I think it was such a techie buzzy word these days. But yeah, I mean, at this time, last year, I was frantically filling out PPP paperwork, hoping we could get enough money that, you know, we had some cash in the bank. And when that was gone, I wanted to make sure we stayed paid for the couple months that this pandemic was going to keep everyone shut down. fortuitously, we, a friend of ours, that owns a couple bars reached out to us, like right at the beginning of March. And he was like, Hey, you know, my staffs get crushed, no one’s gonna be going to bars for a couple of weeks, like, let’s try to you guys want to whip together a tee design. And we’ll just we’ll do a fundraiser and see if we can offset some of the tips. They’re going to this is how we were thinking at the beginning of March last year, like let’s offset some of the tips we’re going to lose over the next few weeks. So it wasn’t like a, you know, a fundamental bloodletting of an entire industry for a year. But then we put together these t designs, and we had a friend of ours, who runs Slow Down Co. PR company here in Chicago. And she was like, Hey, I got a couple other restaurants that would want to get involved in this fundraiser, you know, to help amplify the voice and we can get their staff some money. We said, Yeah, sure. Great. We put these tees up for pre sale. And it was like, insane. It got picked up everywhere. We had over 100 bars and restaurants signed up, we had to cut off signups because, you know, we didn’t want to spread it too thin. And we did at all that the exact number is gonna escape me now. But we did some like $40,000 in sales and like the first two days, and then we had Cody Hudson, who’s a good friend of ours. He’s a partner in land and sea department, which owns some of the coolest and best places in Chicago. He’s also a very well known artist, and he reached out to Hey, I’d like to do some designs to keep this fundraiser going, because this thing is getting worse and worse. So we did that. And we had another local artist named Laura Berger, who does like really rad graphic artwork mission of making a blanket with some of her art that she donated. And all told we ran the fundraiser for about six weeks and raised about $275,000 for out of work. I mean, obviously we had cost of goods sold and shipping and stuff, but we didn’t take a penny of it didn’t take a penny of profit out of that. And we were able to donate something like 60 or 60 or 70% of the gross sales to out of work hospitality workers.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  17:32  

That’s awesome.

Jim Snediker  17:33  

So we got a couple $1,000 to each restaurant that signed up we, you know, felt like a lot at the time. It felt pretty insignificant by the time September rolled around and everyone was still shut down. But the fortuitous part of that is my partner Tim was like, Hey, we got to roll out facemasks, people are doing it, you know, it’s something maybe we could sell a few we can make. And we have the fabric in house, we rolled out face masks right at the end of that fundraiser. And within 12 hours. Blue chambray and grey chambray face masks are the two best selling items we’ve ever sold.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  18:02  

Really. I’m not surprised

Jim Snediker  18:03  

we and that just went. We had I think we were back or like two months on the first run of face masks. And then we had people come to us because they saw ours and they were good. And they said would you make some for for me I’d like to resell them or I want them for my group or whatever. And we ended up doing our just our facemask revenue last year was I won’t give exact numbers but it’s pretty close to our total revenue from 2019.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  18:26  

Oh, man, where do you see that? Oh, now as we’re coming out of the pandemic, You think face masks are gonna be around for a while.

Jim Snediker  18:32  

Now our our sales have trickled off. And they we still sell some per week. But we’ve that that faucet has been turned off.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  18:40  

That was it?

Jim Snediker  18:42  

Yeah, I’m fine with it. Because I’ve been vigilant about wearing my mask. And I think everyone else should be as well. I’m very excited to not have to wear them at some point in the near future. So I’m I’m okay with losing that revenue stream if it means that I you know, everyone can see each other’s faces and we can start putting this thing behind this hopefully in the semi near future.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  19:01  

Oh, absolutely. Have you started to see an uptick in uniform sales? And

Jim Snediker  19:04  

then yeah, yeah, the big thing is, you know, a lot of hotels is, as I’m sure you’re aware of the lifecycle of hotels, there’s the fundraising, there’s the construction, there’s the build out and everything. So a lot of the 2020 hotels got pushed into 2021 but all the 2021 hotels are still still opening in 2021. So we’ve got a lot of projects that we’re working on right now. And you know, we’re getting a lot of we’re selling out of our in Stock uniform pieces, because people are like, Oh shit, we’re open in a week. Like what do you have for us? You know, cuz everything’s just happening so quick. Yeah, it’s been good. I’m optimistic about the future for sure.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  19:38  

I am, too. I we’re based here in Southern California and Carlsbad area in that big hotel just opened up here, right on the coast and about three new restaurants are about to open, including Matsu from William x. New new venture Matsu.

Jim Snediker  19:52  

Oh, cool. Very nice.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  19:54  

It’s good to see that energy of things opening again.

Jim Snediker  19:57  

Yeah, totally. It was, you know, being in Texas. I, we were in like rural Texas for the last month with my family. And so we didn’t do a lot of going out. But I did go up to Austin a couple times for work. And, you know, people were very, very respectful still at the face masks on walking around and at their table in the server approach, but places were full, and people were sitting outside and people were eating, and it’s a little scary, you know, it’s feels weird kind of jumping back into this. But I, you know, I don’t know what it’s like out there. But in Chicago, we’re almost at the point where, like, if you want to get vaccinated, you’re able to get it at this point. So a lot of people I know have gotten them. And a lot of people in the industry now getting them. So it’s starting to feel a little bit safer that like you’re not putting yourself at risk to go out. And also the people that are serving, you are now able to kind of pull themselves out of that risk as well.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  20:45  

And that’s important, too. Yeah, my wife just my wife just got her vaccine. I’m, I’m a little younger, I think they’re not gonna let me get up for another month or so. But we’ll see. Well, yeah, no, we’re the restaurants here have opened up. I mean, we ate out last week. And it was nice. It was nice to be inside again.

Jim Snediker  21:01  

Yeah, yeah. My wife and I had a, we went to a one of the client, one of our clients had a new restaurant opening on the other day, and we and my wife and I went and ate inside is very comfortable and fine.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  21:12  

That’s great. Well, what advice would you give a new restaurant or even a winery who’s got their tasting room? And they’re trying to implement some sort of a uniform policy? How do you? How do you convince How do you talk to the staff about that they’ve gone from just a where whatever you want to now this is what you want to wear? Yeah, I

Jim Snediker  21:29  

think it’s important, especially if you’ve got an existing staff that you’re trying to switch over from no uniforms, that uniforms, give them some feedback, and some some a seat at the table for that decision making process. Because we’ve seen plenty times we were like, oh, we’re gonna switch over to uniforms, and then they’re uncomfortable, or they don’t like it, and they like it the way it was before. So get them excited about it. Like, that’s one of the big things that I feel like our brand kind of gets across now that we don’t i don’t talk about as much. But early on, that was a big talking point of like, Hey, we’re gonna put your staff in a uniform that like when they’re off their shift, they can walk down to the bar to have a shift D at the end of the day, and like on untuck their shirt and roll their sleeves up. And they’re gonna look and feel comfortable, not like they’re in like a server uniform. And everyone’s staring at them, you know. So that’s where I think just making sure that they’re comfortable with what they’re wearing. And you’re not trying to put a round peg into a square hole.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  22:17  

You hit that nail right on the head, your clothing looks like something it is something you would wear outside of work. It doesn’t look like your your your stock uniform that well get the name.

Jim Snediker  22:28  

Right. Yeah, it’s an ironic look

Drew Thomas Hendricks  22:30  

like your generic uniform that you’re assigned. When you’re on your first day of work. It actually looks like something you would have chosen to wear to that place of work.

Jim Snediker  22:36  

Yes, it’s a lot better than the server uniform I wore when I was 22. And it was like a mandarin collar 100% polyester Maroon shirt with an enormous embroidery and like black baggy slacks and black shoes.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  22:50  

I remember my first job at SeaWorld was we were assigned those polyester uniforms. And you had to wash it about 200 times before.

Jim Snediker  22:58  

Yeah, got soft, nothing like 100% poly uniform working outside in California to

Drew Thomas Hendricks  23:03  

Oh, yeah, no. So that that is a good tip, though, to bring the staff into that conversation. So that it is something that looks like it’s just being foisted upon them. It’s a group decision. And if it’s a if the style is there, which you have the staff would embrace it.

Jim Snediker  23:18  

Yep. And then I would say, conversely, if you’re opening a new place, and you’re looking to institute a uniform program, have as few people as possible involved in that decision making, because we’ve also seen a lot of projects where we have something going and it’s looking good. And then there’s actually this person has an opinion, this person’s opinion, you know, designed by committee is never, never The best way to a successful ending. I don’t think

Drew Thomas Hendricks  23:40  

and what do they say? No, it’s probably bad if you like camels, but a camel is a horse designed by a committee.

Jim Snediker  23:47  

That’s, that’s it? Yep.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  23:48  

No, I get it. Yeah. Don’t bring too many people in to going into 2021 What advice can you give the hospitality industry?

Jim Snediker  23:55  

I don’t know that I am in any position to give the hospitality industry any advice? I would tell people you know, the thing that I’m observing is I think people are really ready to get out and back and doing things and I think the only advice would be like, if you if you manage to stick it out for the last year be excited. I think it’s gonna be a good fun year. And I think it’s gonna bleed into 2022 quite a bit as well. Because it’s, it’s Yeah, it’s gonna take a little while but the wheels are turning and I think everyone’s stuck tight for for this whole entire hellish stretch and now’s the time to reap the rewards. I think I agree.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  24:31  

I had a conversation the other day with someone that we were talking about the Spanish Flu back in 1918

Jim Snediker  24:37  

years that’s a topic of conversation con.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  24:39  

Yeah, consistently is the people from the Spanish Flu came out of it. That’s what gave way to the roaring 20s. And that year, those years of just jubilation

Jim Snediker  24:47  

Yeah, we just got to it now we just got to avoid the Great Depression afterwards. And World War Two,

Drew Thomas Hendricks  24:57  

point by point but, you know, looks like we’re going towards it. So when you’re not selling clothes and designing clothes, what do you like to do for fun?

Jim Snediker  25:04  

You know, I’m with my kids a ton. And they are Luckily, a lot of fun. I’ve got a nearly six year old and nearly four year old. So we spend a lot of time together and, you know, obviously with my wife as well. And then Aside from that, I tend to like hobbies that I’m terrible at. So I play guitar a lot, and I’ve been golfing a lot more and I am moderately better at guitar than I am a golf but I’m pretty bad at both. So that’s generally My hobby is, is doing things that I suck at and trying to get reasonably decent at them.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  25:33  

That’s that’s it’s as long as you’re having fun. Yeah, I know. I love golf. But yeah, probably love the idea of golf.

Jim Snediker  25:41  

I like going golfing. Yeah, exactly. I don’t like every single drive I had. But other than that, I’m

Drew Thomas Hendricks  25:46  

good. That’s fine. So Jim, when we’re talking before the show, you said you proud a discount code for someone?

Jim Snediker  25:52  

Oh, yeah, that’s right. So let me make sure I jotted it down and make sure I don’t give them the wrong code. But we’re gonna do 20% off your first order for any customers that use the code BARRELS20 that’s all caps. BARRELS20. BARRELS20. Yep. And that’s 20% off your first order anything on the site? And websites stockmfgco.com. And all our social handles the same at Stock Mfg. Co.

Drew Thomas Hendricks  26:19  

Oh, that’s very generous. Thank you. Yeah, you got it. Anyways, Jim, thank you so much for talking with us. And please be sure to use this coupon BARRELS20 to get 20% off of your first order. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Jim Snediker  26:33  

Thank you. Appreciate you having me.

Outro  26:42

Thanks for listening to the Legends Behind the Craft podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.