Answers From the Liquor Store

When we started Coed Naked in 1990 cash flow was tight.  I mean really tight.  In fact, we tightened our belt so tight, that we were unwilling to buy anything that was not essential to getting product out the door.  If we needed a desk or chairs, we brought them in from our parent’s home. Lamps, all office materials, paper and pens were all pilfered from our own apartments.   We were in typical small business startup mode.  

The greatest example of our conservative approach to preserving our cash flow (aka our cheapness) was the dilemma we faced when we found ourselves without boxes to ship our product in. I am not sure who came up with the idea first, but it was brilliant. (At least for a small startup owned by a couple of 23-year-old college grads with very little cash flow.)  

The answer was the liquor store.  Everyone who has ever been into a New Hampshire liquor store knows that at the front of each store there are stacks of liquor boxes, to be used for customers to pack their booze purchases.  But the liquor stores amass so many extra boxes, that many are simply thrown away.  So, to the liquor store I went in my red Malibu sedan.  

The store clerks were always amicable when we asked if we could take their boxes, so we would dig through them to find the most stable ones and discard the boxes that were in the worst shape.  Bacardi and Captain Morgan and often the wine boxes were consistently the best finds.  I would load up my car, bring them back to the shop and alas we had our shipping boxes for the day.  

We often wondered what our customers thought when UPS showed up with a Captain Morgan box.  We hoped they would open that box first (thinking it was booze) and be thrilled to find their Coed Naked order delivered on time. 

This ritual of driving to the liquor store for boxes lasted for the entire first year and a half that we were in business.  Early in the year we were making one trip a week but as the summer season approached, we found ourselves going daily.  By late August it was not unusual for us to take multiple trips to multiple liquor stores to scoop up as many boxes as we could.  We would even have contests to see how many boxes we could fit in our cars.  I believe if my memory serves me correctly my high total was 32 boxes.  

Sometime in 1992, it became apparent that our t-shirt sales had exceeded the NH drinking capacity, because the liquor stores could not supply us with enough boxes to cover our orders.  Thankfully by that time our cash flow improved, and the cost and time wasted associated with running around to liquor stores became apparent. At last, it was time to purchase our own boxes.  

Stay tuned for more stories from the book “The Coed Naked Truth” being published later this summer.

Mark Lane

Owner 

Coed Naked