BreakingT President JAMIE MOTTRAM, who joined the T-shirt company last year, likes to focus on “micromoments” when coming up with ideas. BreakingT has made a name for itself with unique shirt designs that are often inspired by viral sports moments. “We don’t really discriminate between moments big or small, we’re just looking for these moments that people are going to care about and remember fondly.” With a company uniquely set up to react to any given day’s viral sports moment, Mottram spoke with THE DAILY about one of his typically atypical days.
7:00-8:00am: I have three kids under the age of 10, ELLY, MILES and CHARLIE, and one of them is going to wake me up before I’m ready to be up. It’s usually in that kind of dawn timeframe, and the first thing I would do is look at my phone. Just see what I missed, see what’s in my inbox, my notifications, Slack, how sales are doing overnight. Most days I’m working from home in Wilmington, and that means waking up with the kids, getting them ready. Depending on if I skip that kids routine, if I hand that over to my wife CHRISTINE, I might use that hour to go surfing.
8:00-11:00am: I like to get out of the house, even though I work from home. I’ll usually bike over to a coffee shop near my house, Port City Java, and set up my little work station there, which is pretty much a MacBook and an iPhone and coffee. I’ll do some mix of taking calls, either scheduled or impromptu and kind of like cycling through various things to see what’s happening or to delegate tasks to our team. We have a lot of different media partners, so checking in with them. We’re currently licensed by the players’ associations for MLB, NBA, WNBA, U.S. Women’s National Team. We’re licensed for some colleges through IMG.
Mottram (r) and breakingT created "Strikeouts Are Sexy" shirts after Max Scherzer fanned 20 batters in a gameRoderick Carmody
11:00am-12:00pm: We have our daily design call. This is the one meeting that has to be had every day at BreakingT, which is looking at the moments that we have in motion, and the designs, the ideas for those designs and the sketches. It’s always three people. It’s me, our Design Dir NICK TORRES and our Head of Marketing DOMINIC BONVISSUTO. This is, “here’s the moments that matter, and here’s how we’re going to celebrate those moments in design form."
12:00-1:00pm: For lunch I'll just try not to stare at a screen for some portion of time. Maybe I’ll ride back home either on my bike or in my car, maybe I’ll pull a tomato out of the garden and make a BLT or something. Even if I only take 10 minutes to do that, I just need a break. Every day could just be: “check email, check twitter, check slack. Check email, check twitter, check slack.” That’s very real some days.
1:00-2:00pm: There will inevitably be at least a couple of meetings with somebody. Whether that’s an agent, someone at a media brand, someone internal, I could have a check in with our Head of Operations APRIL CROWLEY. Every day we make a decision typically in the afternoon about how many shirts we’re going to print that day, and for which style. Sometimes it's kind of a micromoment, where “OK, star player made a pitching appearance, that’s really cool and people care about it for a day.” You want to to get that product in the market while enthusiasm is still really high. We did a shirt for ANTHONY RIZZO making a pitching appearance. We made a shirt for TONY KEMP and EVAN GATTIS of the Astros, who do a big bear hug after home runs, so we did “Hugs for Homers.” Just on that we worked with Kemp’s agency, we worked with the Astros, MLBPA and media partners.
2:00-5:00pm: This afternoon I’ve had a call already with an agent that we’re working on with a product with. I’ve got a call with a media executive that might want to partner with us going forward, and I have a call with a former team executive who’s advising us on the best ways for us to add value to professional sports franchisees from both a retail and a marketing perspective. That's three meetings today that are real life examples of our pretty much normal day to day stuff.
5:00-8:00pm: I’m usually unwinding. Go play some sports, go watch some sports. I take the kids to some basketball or some swimming, or some sort of school event happening in the evening. I’m definitely invested in dad life, coinciding with BreakingT life. I would say we’re probably eating around 6:30-7:00pm. Typically with the family and trying to get them down and in bed by something like 8:00.
8:00-11:00pm: I typically go straight to the couch. During the MLB or NBA playoffs or March Madness, I am watching those events and following along with our team on Slack and springing into action as moments arise. With sports, nights and weekends are pretty fertile ground for the biggest moments that fans are going to care about. On non-sports nights, I’m badgering my wife into watching whatever Netflix series I really want to watch. Right now it’s “GLOW,” thankfully she likes that one.
11:00-11:30pm: Recently I converted to not looking at screens at bed time, and actually reading books, and I’m now on my fourth book of the summer. I honestly feel better physically and mentally from just trading my iPad for books as the go-to bedtime reading source. I am just finishing “TWILIGHT OF THE GODS” by STEVEN HYDEN, which is about classic rock. But the book that got me off of my not-book-reading slump was “UNDERGROUND RAILROAD” by COLSON WHITEHEAD.
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