It seems like everywhere you look in Boulder, there’s an entrepreneur honing their business acumen. Not all of these start-ups succeed, but for the ones that do it can be life changing. It certainly was life changing for Chris White and Jens Nicolaysen, who started the fashion company Shinesty in 2014 while students at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The company specializes in what some may see as novelty clothing, for example their party suits, but for Chris, Jens, and the Shinesty team, their clothes are far from novelties – they’re a lifestyle. By luck, chance, or perseverance, that lifestyle found its way into the closet of a Los Angeles production company executive. Curiosity struck the California-based production company, and after arranging a meeting, they decided unanimously that the people behind such unique apparel might be interesting subjects for a TV show.
Fast-forward to July 2017 and Shinesty officially premiered on MTV2 as a “comedic doc series about the young entrepreneurs behind Shinesty, a Boulder-based apparel company that made $5 million in sales last year”, a description from MTV reads.
The idea for Shinesty came when Chris and Jens were looking through their old boxes of college party-themed attire and couldn’t bring themselves to part with it. They figured there must be others who wouldn’t want to leave some of their college-appropriate party clothes behind when they graduated, either. They were right. Since the company was founded in 2014, sales have doubled each year, staff has grown from two to over twenty, and now they have their very own reality show on MTV2.
“The Shinesty team lives a wild, zero-(expletive)s-given lifestyle that is every bit as over-the-top as the apparel they create,” MTV News notes. If you ever wondered about how millennials run a multimillion-dollar business, this show is the perfect place to start – after all, the oldest employee is only 33 years young. On the other hand, Shinesty and its day-to-day operations (or antics) are unique both in the cutthroat world of fashion, as well as the ever-crowded space of courting investors (of which the company has 37). At any rate, the show will take you on a whirlwind tour of a millennial business that does business the only way they care to – their way. Though the company is young, their strategy seems to be working so far.
Hoping to attract more investors, Shinesty’s new TV spot could hurt the team depending on how “fun and inappropriate” they appear. Conversely, that type of behavior and the brand voice Shinesty has cultivated the past three years is exactly what has driven their sales past $5 million. The press of a reality show of this nature – one that arguably hasn’t been done before – may attract the audience Shinesty hopes to pull in: millennials who grew up with strip mall fashion such as Abercrombie & Fitch, but now want to leave behind their old uniforms for something more attention grabbing. If their intended audience responds well, Shinesty may see sales explode and help them secure additional funding from investors.
You can watch the business acumen and debauchery of Shinesty unfold every Thursday at 6:00 p.m. MST on MTV2. You may even see yourself on screen as the film crew follows the Shinesty team around Boulder.