If you didn’t know, Glassjaw’s guitarist Justin Beck owns the large merchandise company, MerchDirect. Newsday.com has printed an article about MerchDirect.

Click here to read or read it below here…

Selling T-shirts of rock bands on the Internet didn’t sound promising to music industry veterans, who dismissed Lee Tepper and Justin Beck’s idea in the late 1990s. Yet, the two high school and college buddies knew very quickly after launching their enterprise that they were on to something.

“It was the end of 1999, and this thing called the Internet was starting,” recalled Tepper, who with Beck graduated from John F. Kennedy High School in Bellmore and attended Hofstra University. “We said, ‘You know what? We’ll sell T-shirts online, and … we’ll sell directly to the fans.’ The first night we set up the store, we sold 30 T-shirts.”

The momentum hasn’t waned. Since then, MerchDirect, Tepper and Beck’s company, has gone from a single storefront on Merrick Road in Bellmore to a 40,000-square-foot building in Bay Shore housing a screen printing and embroidery factory as well as the design and distribution operations for all its merchandise.

MerchDirect can produce 2,000 T- shirts an hour, and on any given night those shirts and other accessories are being sold at 12 to 15 concerts. The company is the official merchandiser of artists as diverse as Joss Stone, Blue Oyster Cult, Sean Kingston, Taking Back Sunday and now ODB - the rapper and founding member of Wu-Tang Clan, who died in 2004.

Tepper, who once aspired to be a rock star, said he and Beck, who plays in the veteran Long Island band Glassjaw, were able to establish themselves at a time when most bands were focused on the record company, and merchandising was an afterthought. But, he noted, the record industry imploded with the growth of music downloading.

“So there’s been a major shift in band thinking and mentality, and now they’re all saying we need to concentrate on merchandising and live shows to make money,” Tepper said.

Unlike the rest of the apparel industry, MerchDirect designs, manufactures and handles the distribution of all its products in-house. The company doesn’t outsource its work overseas, largely because the window to turn around merchandise requests is small. Bands are notorious for requesting merchandise at the last minute, Tepper said, so the company often has to produce items in four to six days instead of four to six months. Additionally, the products, particularly concert items, command a premium, which means they bring in a profit without outsourcing any part of production overseas, Tepper said.

Keeping everything local also allows the company to have complete control of the quality of the products and services, he said.

Last month, the company signed an agreement with Icelene Jones, ODB’s widow and administrator of his estate, securing the rights to produce clothing, posters and other accessories using ODB’s image. MerchDirect will begin releasing this product line in January and February, timed to coincide with the expected release of ODB’s last record.

“We feel that ODB appeals to Taking Back Sunday’s fans but also appeals to a Joss Stone fan or the white suburban kids who totally love it and get it, and it’s authentic hip-hop that real hip-hop guys are going to go for,” Tepper said. “He [ODB] is definitely an artist that crosses boundaries of genres, and he not only appeals to all genres, but he’s respected, and everyone can relate to his wackiness in a way.”

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