&Collar is an apparel brand founded in Utah in 2017. It is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.
By Ben Perkins's account, a soccer cleat review site paid for &Collar's first purchase order. The site, soccerreviews.com, drew offers of $250,000 to $300,000 when he was in 10th grade. He passed, and later sold it for about $20,000, which bought the first shirts for a company now based in Salt Lake City. "I should have taken the money and run," he has said.
The shirt idea is as old as the website. At 13, in Hong Kong, he wanted a dress shirt cut from soccer jersey fabric and called it Wicka-Sweat. Chinese factories wanted a 5,000-shirt minimum, which his allowance did not cover. Two years in the Philippines in a dress shirt revived it, and in August 2017 he formed &Collar with his sister Lizzi and three of her friends.
The fabric is recycled plastic, 15 bottles per shirt by the company's count, and Perkins says it costs 15 to 20 percent more, which customers don't pay. When an Ogden mother needed 10 shirts for a son leaving for Colombia in two days, Perkins drove them up himself.
He still owns it and told the Deseret News, "The whole reason this company exists is because I hate dress shirts."
When a factory shipped &Collar 2,000 cream shirts instead of white, it explained, "We hear cream is very popular in the U.S.," and the mistake became the company's fastest seller.
Comfortable shirts that look clean with everything. They keep putting out great new stuff too.
Alex
