Brennan Mulligan, founder and CEO of Skyou Inc. (asi/87637), has been in the mass customization space since the turn of the century, when he took Timbuk2, the custom messenger bag company he headed at the time, online and encouraged shoppers to design their own products.

Mulligan went on to consult for several major shoe brands, setting up and managing mass customization programs for Nike, Timberland, Reebok and Keds, among others.

With his latest company, Mulligan wanted to take that deep knowledge of custom, on-demand production and “bring big-brand quality to anybody,” says Ryan Kearns, vice president of marketing for Skyou.

“We’ve been doing this for a very long time for some of the biggest brands in the world, and we’re really good at it,” says Kearns, who worked as an executive for online customization powerhouse CafePress for a decade before joining Skyou.

Skyou has been doing manufacturing on demand for small and medium-sized brands and running the online merch stores for a slew of YouTube celebrities. Skyou recently decided to branch out into the broader promotional products arena after noticing how often the companies it worked with would make purchases for its own employees. “We know there’s a market there because we’ve been getting these orders off-hand,” Kearns says.

Skyou offers full cut-and-sew customization in small batches; the company even built its own factory in China to handle orders of that size. “If your customer wants 100 pieces of a special all-over print sweatshirt or backpack, we’re allowing that,” Kearns says.

All-over printing has been available in the promotional industry for a while, of course, thanks to dye sublimation on polyester and other synthetic fabrics. However, Skyou is able to print on 100% cotton. Kearns says it’s similar to how T-shirt mills dip their fabric into vats of reactive dye, steam them to chemically bond the color, then wash them to remove the excess. “We’re doing the same process, but instead of dipping the garment into a vat, we have a highly refined process, printing the dye through an inkjet head directly onto fabric,” Kearns says.

After custom-printing on a roll of cotton fabric, workers laser-cut the patterns and sew them together. The items are finished with a garment wash to ensure they are “butter soft,” Kearns explains. The reactive dyes have a broad and vibrant color gamut, never wash out and result in a decoration with “no hand,” he adds.

Skyou also has an intuitive browser-based 3-D design tool that allows creators to position, size, rotate and layer artwork onto a virtual blank. “You can create these really intricate, interesting designs, and you don’t have to lay out any of the artwork,” Kearns says. “The software is smart. It will take the artwork you lay out, push it across all sizes and generate the 2-D files we cut and sew together. It all happens automatically.”

Skyou offers a wide array of basic garments, from T-shirts to hoodies. It also can create custom items like backpacks, lunch bags and pencil cases. “We’re not decorating on top of something cheap and pre-made,” Kearns says. “It’s retail-quality product – not from the bargain bin.”

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