SunFrog employs about 350, is hiring four a week and its army of printing machines fills 100,000 square feet of space in a sprawling building in an industrial park near the Gaylord airport, south of downtown. Construction is underway on a 10,000-square-foot expansion.
“There are problems that come with growth like that,” said Kent, the company’s 37-year-old president and CEO. “You don’t have enough people. You don’t have enough equipment.”
Early on, Kent and his wife would rent a truck and travel the country buying used machines wherever they could find them.
Half of SunFrog’s factory space is filled with those older screen-printing machines. The other half is filled with newer machines known as DTG printers, also known as digital direct to garment printers, which are descendants of desktop inkjet printers. The blank shirts come from suppliers around the world. “Literally every continent,” said Kent.
SunFrog also makes shirts for other retailers, including up to $5 million of shirts a year for M22, the Glen Arbor-based company that sells items branded after the scenic state road that runs around the Leelanau Peninsula. SunFrog also supplies The Mitten State, a seller of Michigan-themed apparel in Grand Rapids.
Beyond shirts, SunFrog sells 2,000 coffee cups a day and a variety of caps, with plans to broaden the product mix to include custom-designed dog tags, necklaces and cell phone covers.
The company marketed a line of coffee cups for Father’s Day, designed for people whose fathers live in different states. The cups showed outlines of the two states where father and offspring lived — Texas and Kentucky, for example — with the outline of a heart in each state connected by a line. The caption read: “The love between father and daughter knows no distance.”
Kent said that as an experienced web-site developer, he was confident in 2013 that he could build a compelling retail web site for his next business venture. But why T-shirts?
“There was a fun factor to it. For some reason T-shirts excited a passion. They float my boat,” he said. And floated others’ boats, as well. Kent said about 25,000 people — SunFrog calls them “affiliates” — have designed and sold shirts through SunFrog.
And why the name SunFrog? He said he held brainstorming sessions with friends early on. Everyone agreed they liked the Geico Insurance gecko and a cool frog seemed like the next best thing.
Recognition and accolades came almost as quickly as new orders.
In 2015, SunFrog was named as one of 50 companies to watch in the state by the Michigan Small Business Development Center.
In August 2016, Kent was one of three entrepreneurs featured in an article in Inc. on how to disrupt an industry.
In September 2016, Kent was named by Entrepreneur magazine as one of 25 entrepreneurs under 40 who are creating the next big thing.
And in October 2016, Kent delivered the keynote address at the e-commerce Shopify Summit in San Diego.