Following the age-old business principle, “Find a need and fill it,” Charles Ma saw a need in the retail industry and filled it ““ with neon bro-tanks.Â
A fourth-year civil engineering student and former Daily Bruin illustrator, Ma, along with three friends from high school, started Brotankery this past summer, selling neon bro-tanks through their website, brotankery.com.
Ma’s Brotankery partners include Jay Dhuldhoya, Jonathan Eng and Alex Hoang, who attend Columbia University, Yale University and USC, respectively.
Bro-tanks are loose-fitting tank tops, more commonly known as muscle tanks. While colored tanks are often worn, Ma and his friends noticed a lack of true neon bro-tanks in the retail market when they could not find any to wear to the Electric Daisy Carnival, an annual electronic dance festival that takes place in June.
“Alex thought that a neon-colored bro-tank would seem ideal to wear, so we were looking around, and stores just don’t sell them,” Ma said. “We thought that there was definitely a market for this since there is basically no supply.”
Brotankery offers neon bro-tanks in three colors: yellow, salmon and green. Each bro-tank begins as a white American Apparel men’s tank top that is then dyed by a dye house specializing in neon coloring and embroidered with the Brotankery tank logo.
The bro-tanks fluoresce under a black light ““ yellow fluoresces green, salmon fluoresces pink, and green fluoresces blue. Each bro-tank sells for $14.99 on the Brotankery website.
“They’re a unique product that no one else has, and they are super comfortable,” said Vanessa Szeto, a third-year communication studies student. “I haven’t really encountered any other tanks that are quite like them, especially for the price.”
Szeto owns a Brotankery tank and said that she plans on buying a lot more.
The original idea was to purchase neon tanks from wholesalers in the L.A. Fashion District and resell them, Ma said, but they soon found that wholesalers did not carry them. The only seller they found was American Apparel, which only sold the tanks on a very limited basis.
Ma and his friends then decided to make their own neon bro-tanks and set up Brotankery in the week after their trip to the L.A. Fashion District.
“That week where we set this company up was the most hectic week,” he said. “It was a lot of work, but if we were going to do this, we had to do it right.”
Doing it correctly included registering with the Internal Revenue Service, establishing a business bank account and obtaining a California seller’s permit. Brotankery then had to decide how to dye the white tanks, Ma said.
“The original plan was to dye them by hand in Alex’s backyard, but that would have taken forever and been terrible,” he said.
“Luckily, we found a dye house that does them for cheap.”
After a concentrated effort to promote the company’s product through a Brotankery Facebook group, handing out fliers at concerts and advertising through Google AdWords, Brotankery is now making a profit, selling a tank or two every day, Ma said.
“As of two weeks ago, we are in the black,” he said.
Brotankery also stands to gain a large customer base among members of Greek life since at least half of the shirts that fraternities and sororities order for their members are tank tops, said Scott Cutrow, a fourth-year anthropology student and a member of Pi Kappa Phi.
“We make shirts for everything that we do, and we’re always looking for the most cost-efficient way,” Cutrow said.
“Brotankery is on campus, and their tanks are cheaper than you can get from buying wholesale.”
While plans for expanding the company have been put on hold since school started, Brotankery aims to add to its product line next summer to include more colors and custom screen-printing, which would allow student organizations to design their own bro-tanks, Ma said.
“We have a lot of ideas,” Ma said. “Brotankery is supposed to be kind of ironic, having a picture of a tank on a tank, and it’s supposed to be fun.”