CreateMyTee owner Josh Fales launched his online clothing company in 2008 and has since seen "explosive growth" in sales.

Lizzy Alfs | AnnArbor.com

Three Ann Arbor residents recently launched an online environmentally friendly clothing sales website, Envolve Clothing — and they're now looking to expand the brand into brick-and-mortar stores in the Ann Arbor area.

Meanwhile, an Ann Arbor-based custom apparel company, CreateMyTee, reports that its profits have tripled over the last two years, as the company has been able to establish a nationwide presence.

CreateMyTee, launched in 2008 by owner Josh Fales, sells custom screen-printed apparel on various garments, with 75 to 85 percent of sales coming from T-shirts.

The company has nine employees who work out of a 1,300-square-foot office on Concourse Drive in Pittsfield Township.

However, due to the “explosive growth” of the company during the last few years, Fales said he plans on hiring about seven employees in 2011 and 10 in 2012. He is also looking to expand into a 7,500-square-foot office space on Venture Drive in Ann Arbor.

Although Fales acknowledged that there is competition in the Ann Arbor custom T-shirt market, he said CreateMyTee has the “total package.”

Among the brick-and-mortar competitors are Elmo's Mainstreet Custom T-shirts in downtown Ann Arbor and the Ann Arbor T-shirt Company, which recently signed a lease to become the first retailer to move into the former Campus Drugs building on the edge of the Eastern Michigan University campus in Ypsilanti.

“The market is somewhat saturated with screen printers, but our belief is that there are not very many doing it well,” Fales said. “We have a fast turnaround and every customer gets to work one-on-one with a professional artist to create their shirts.”

Fales said CreateMyTee has a strong business base in Michigan, accounting for 10 to 15 percent of sales. But by hiring campus representatives that promote the CreateMyTee brand across the country, the company has been able to target student organizations on college campuses nationwide.

Fales said his next step is to diversify the company’s market base.

“Next, we want to target more community based things like schools, churches and recreation leagues,” he said.

Fales said that he thinks there is a market shift towards online clothing companies due to the convenience factor of purchasing on the Internet.

“You don’t need to go down to the store anymore,” he said. “You can get a better experience by working online. Companies are going to start doing this more and more.”

Meanwhile, Envolve Clothing, launched in May by three Ann Arbor entrepreneurs, is selling eco-friendly T-shirts made out of cotton, bamboo and hemp materials, said co-owner David Saltsman.

Envolve Clothing also donates 20 percent of its revenues to a local nonprofit, Project Envolution, a non-profit that helps finance and develop environmental service projects.

The website launched on May 1 and now the owners are looking into partnering with Ann Arbor stores to carry their brand.

“We’re looking to really start to work with Ann Arbor businesses and surrounding businesses to partner on some things,” Saltsman said.

The T-shirts are priced between 30 and 41 dollars, Saltsman said.

“We wanted to do things the right way,” Saltsman said. “There’s a little bit of a premium when you do things organically, but we felt that if we were going to do this it was the only thing that made sense.”

And although co-owner Patrick Hayes said starting the company was a “big time investment,” he said that their business is not solely about clothing sales.

Part of the website features an “Envolvment” page, where visitors can find a list of nonprofit organizations by state.

“This just goes along with our whole idea about giving back,” Saltsman said. “I think sometimes people don’t know where to look for local nonprofits and we’d like to provide a starting point for them.”

When deciding on a business location, Hayes said Ann Arbor seemed like the perfect place to launch an environmentally-friendly clothing company.

“The Ann Arbor community as a whole is a very green and conscious thinking community,” Hayes said. “It incubated our efforts because it’s just the right place at the right time.”

Lizzy Alfs is a business reporter for AnnArbor.com. Reach her at 734-623-2584 or email her at lizzyalfs@annarbor.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lizzyalfs.