ST. LOUIS — Twelve years ago, Mike Golomb couldn't find an ugly Christmas sweater to save his life. Now, he's got 5,000 of them.
Golomb's UglySweaterStore.com, an online retail shop he started in 2008, offers nearly every kind of ugly Christmas sweater imaginable. Nude Santa? Check. White Castle? Check. The store even sells trophies for ugly sweater contests.
Golomb has always been entrepreneurial — in 2010, he started a business called AeronSale that sells Aeron desk chairs and parts. Last year, he took over a Kentucky-based bourbon maple syrup company called Always Maple. And in April, he quit his job as a property manager to focus on his businesses full time.
Still, Ugly Sweater Store has special meaning for Golomb — maybe because it’s a family affair. Golomb’s wife and mother help him sort new merchandise, and his mom recently sewed an ugly Christmas sweater wedding dress as a promotion. We asked Golomb to tell us more about his passion for ugly sweaters.
How did the Ugly Sweater Store come about? About 12 years ago, I got invited to an ugly Christmas sweater party. I ran everywhere from Goodwill to Dillard’s to Macy’s trying to find a sweater for this party, and I couldn’t find one. I’m like, well, this really stinks. So I didn’t end up going. Then that next year in April, my mom was a kindergarten teacher and was buying clothing for her kids to wear while they were painting. She called me, and she’s like, “I found the mother lode. I found 40 Christmas sweaters. How many do you want?” And I said, “Well, how much are they?” She’s like, “Two bucks apiece.” I said, “Buy ‘em all.” ‘Cause if I had this hard of a time trying to find these sweaters, then I guarantee there’s other people that are having the same problem.
What happened next? I kept a couple of them for myself and threw the rest on eBay, and sold them all within a month. So I said, OK, there’s something here. I started buying anything I could the next year on eBay, under 10 bucks, and then resold them again. I got up to like 300 sweaters. Then I found out where the production flow went for when people don’t buy things at Goodwill. So I started buying 1,000-pound bales of sweaters, and then kind of took it from there.
How has the company changed over time? We started doing a lot more wholesale than anything else. Once the “Shark Tank” episode came out with the guys doing ugly Christmas sweaters (in 2013), it became something where Walmart and Target said, “Oh, there’s a business here.” So they started selling them, which really killed the retail market. But the wholesale side is still keeping it going because we can get them so inexpensively, versus manufacturing — which we do. We manufacture a couple of sweaters that hold a beer.
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