Need a good Texas inspired laugh while returning back to work after the holidays? Jay and Priscilla Sauceda’s online t-shirt fulfillment company, Texas Humor, does just that! Whether it’s their “Ain’t Texas” shirt that shows the state of Texas taking over the entire country or a picture of a Bluebell ice cream half-gallon container being buckled up in a car on their social media pages, Texas Humor is sure to bring you a good laugh. With over 442,000 followers on Twitter and more than 175,000 Instagram followers, the Sauceda’s have evolved Texas Humor into a large and popular brand.
What started with a twitter name in 2011 has grown exponentially since. Jay Sauceda elaborates saying, “I started toying around with [the name], just as fun and it was available. I kick myself about the name because it’s just so stupid, like hit you over the head dumb.” Before Mr. Sauceda knew it, the twitter account started to explode and brought in some profit. “It was just like, ‘this is funny, holy crap I have 50,000 followers and I’ve only had this account for a couple of months, this is pretty wild.”
The fun “Ain’t Texas” t-shirt shows how Jay Sauceda feels about Texas compared to the rest of the nation. Richard Lopez from River City Sportswear reached out to the Sauceda’s to print their t-shirt designs. “I designed the ‘Ain’t Texas’ design that we have that’s super popular. I drew it out, posted it on Instagram, and it just blew up. Richard had always been like, ‘hey man, whenever you’re ready to sell real shirts or real products, let me know’ and I called him back. We launched the new shirts on November 11th, 2013.”
The Sauceda’s were shipping their Texas Humor shirts out of their office in their rent house. Jay Sauceda remembers, “I probably ordered 150 to 170 shirts and we sold out of those shirts in two days. At the time all the shirts retailed for the same price, $24.99 for long or short sleeve. I really rushed to get that store up.” All through Christmas Jay and Priscilla were in their garage. Priscilla Sauceda explains, “I was still working my full time job, so it was really all him. Then when I would get home in the evenings we would make dinner and then make a cocktail, put on the sweatshirts and go out in the garage and fill t-shirt orders and pack everything. There’s some commercial on TV now that shows all these businesses that started in somebody’s garage, and it resonates well with us because that’s exactly how we started.”
One of Jay Sauceda’s favorite memories of starting Texas Humor was his hands on experience with all the shipping and packaging. “The garage was like our office and I had five boxes of shirts and was bagging them. I was signing people’s invoices, drawing pictures on their bags; it was a really fun experience and one of my favorite memories of starting this because of the response we got back from people. We weren’t this small store; we were this big brand of several hundreds of followers. So to the people, they didn’t know the store had just launched or that it was just my wife and I, to them it was a big deal to receive this package and that we were physically interacting with them and that it wasn’t just coming from some warehouse.”
The Sauceda’s holiday season of shipping orders allowed them to figure out how to improve their fulfillment process and if they needed additional help. Mr. Sauceda explains, “We decided, let’s just do the fulfillment ourselves. So we were in the office and then moved to the garage and then in the garage until early January. In January we moved to my office down at Public School (insert link). In August we moved into a big warehouse in South Austin and in March of last year we hired our first employee. Our warehouse manager moved from being an intern, to social media expert, to someone that probably knows the business better than anybody else because he’s had his hands in every aspect of it.”
Texas Humor now has 14 employees. Jay Sauceda elaborates saying, “The Texas Humor business only really needs two or three employees, but our goal was to find the fulfillment company that helped people who were in the position that we were in. It’s all about seeing potential in a brand and realizing that they’re going to be successful. They just need a place; they need somebody to help them get started. We didn’t have that opportunity presented to us, so we like to be that person for other businesses who are just trying to get off the ground.”
The Texas Humor store has grown to become so popular, they could easily compete with those on Shark Tank. “We see people who watch Shark Tank religiously and people come on there like, ‘we did X amount of dollars last year,’ and Robert and all those guys are like, ‘wow, that’s amazing!’ We’re like, give me a break! It’s awesome seeing that, but we would get teary-eyed watching that show when we were first taking off. Nothing against those people when I say that. It’s like whoa, we thought we were just in this growth period, but we’re blowing these people out of the water and these billionaires are applauding them. It’s a great feeling that we’re doing this right.”
Texas Humor has done several cross promotions with other companies such as Bacardi vodka and Trudy’s restaurant. Mr. Sauceda elaborates, “If there’s money involved, occasionally we’ll do it. We don’t want to cheapen the brand to the point that we’ll take anybody’s money.” Priscilla Sauceda jumps in adding, “There are brands that just get a lot of free promotion like Whataburger!” Jay Sauceda continues, “[Whataburger] gets promotion because we just like them. Ford is a cool relationship because of Becky. She’s the woman that runs the Ford media fleet and has been following our account for a while and has all these trucks. She sends them to bloggers and car enthusiasts, but was like, ‘what if we send them to this guy and just tell him to post about them.’ So they’re technically test drives, and I can say whatever I want positively or negatively.” Bacardi paid Texas Humor last year to give away ACL wristbands. “We talked about Bacardi and had people submit Bacardi artwork and stuff. Obviously the money was great, but it was also just cool because now we have this relationship with them.”
Jay Sauceda started out drawing all the Texas Humor designs on his own, and now his wife Priscilla collaborates with him. “There are a bunch of designs that are on the store that were provided by friends of ours and other designers,” explains Mr. Sauceda. “But the majority of them are still in house designs. Around 70% is in house, and then 30% is designed by people we know.”
As if Mr. Sauceda isn’t busy enough already, he’s also writing a book entitled “Y’all Need This Book: The Definitive Guide to Being a Texan” that will be out in April of 2016. “It’s taking a lot of the themes and things we talk about on our feeds and then boiling them down for print. I didn’t really want to [photograph] much, but I’m shooting some of the food stuff. Randall Ford has this great shot of the Capital he did several years ago and I’ve helped him try to launch an e commerce business. I asked him if I could use that image and he said I could probably just have it. For the most part it’s going to be illustrations. The cover is killer and it’s meant to be silly and over the top, not at all like a real reference piece. The history section has a timeline that’s like the world was created and then Texas was created. I’m a big Texas history buff so I leaned heavily on that knowledge to write the history section.”
Jay and Priscilla Sauceda use their large Texas Humor following to help out with non-profit organizations. Mrs. Sauceda elaborates, “The most recent organization that we were fortunate enough to be able to work with and donate to is the Red Cross. When all the floods happened back in May, we were actually out of town. We were both on our phones checking updates constantly and seeing Lamar flooded like crazy and wanted to be able to help out in anyways we could. We were actually at Disney World. Jay was like, ‘why don’t we run a sale starting right now saying a certain amount of the proceeds would go towards people who needed it and were affected by the flood.’ That day, we posted the sale at five in the afternoon on our Facebook page, Twitter and Instagram. Between five and midnight we did almost as many sales as we did on the entire black Friday the year before. We had probably 800 or 900 orders come in on black Friday. We were able to donate $10,000 to the Red Cross. We just wanted to cover our expenses for operating the business and then we just took the rest and donated it.”
To learn more about Texas Humor and to see all of their products, visit txhumor.com
Photography by John Pesina
