Entrepreneurial Empire is a blog series dedicated to documenting the business development process at Empire Attire, Inc.

We at Empire believe in transparency, community, and networked development. Inasmuch, the purpose of this blog series is to share with the world our feats and failures as young entrepreneurs.

Staying tuned in the future you might catch stories about lessons learned in social media development (we’ll let you know whether or not this blog series is successful, for example) what its like working closely with professional athletes / entrepreneurs, how you deal with last minute manufacturing dilemmas and how to find the right work / party balance (this is crucial).

We offer this blog series to the world of aspiring and active entrepreneurs, to our friends, fans and shareholders, and to anyone who appreciates the drama intrinsic in a young enterprise. So without further ado, our first installment:

The Evolution of Empire Attire

by: Otto Hanson, Empire Attire COO

It would be unfair to begin this series without explaining how Empire Attire evolved into what it is today. And so, for the first installment of our business development series, we offer the reader a brief history of Empire Attire.

In late 2007, Freeski icon Simon Dumont realized that no one was making a ski glove that fit with the styles and trends in the sport and lived up to the rigorous quality standards expected of an athlete who spends more days on the slopes than off. He enlisted the support of friends and family within the industry to found Empire Attire, and together they began building gloves that would eventually grow to become a benchmark of style and quality within the freeski world.

Between 2007 and 2011 Simon grew exponentially as an entrepreneur along with the support of Jake Largess, Tim Russell, Steele Spence, Michael Spencer, Empire’s loyal athletes, their sponsors, and many other friends and family. The company had many successes and, as one might expect of any bold entrepreneurial endeavor, many failures. The team at Empire progressively became better and better versed in the arts of glove design, marketing, sales, and yes finance and accounting. Simon looks back and remembers at one point thinking: “This is a lot harder AND a lot more fun than I had expected.”

Towards the beginning of 2011, the founding team at Empire Attire decided they had sufficiently brought the company to life and given it a support system that was stable enough to bring on additional team members to explore other opportunities within the company. Today, Empire has three new full time employees along with most of the original team, and we are going harder and stronger than ever before. The new management team, combined with the original team, is actively exploring all kinds of wild possibilities like changing the company’s name and logo, branching out into other actions sports, and entering into other product categories. These are some of the big decisions we plan to write about in this series and we hope to get your feedback regularly so please stay tuned and don’t be bashful.

Lastly, we wanted to mention that none of this would be possible without the generous support of Simon’s and our other athlete’s sponsors over the years, namely: Red Bull, Toyota, Oakley, Target, Nike 6.0, Salomon, Giro, Rockwell, Kicker, and Sunday River. We at Empire Attire only hope that we can grow to be large enough to give back to the sports communities like these great companies have.