In the last decade, alum Steven Schone has led a business that started as a lone specialty T-shirt kiosk in Salt Lake’s Fashion Place Mall into an operation of fifty stores throughout North America.
In 1991, Schone graduated from BYU with a BS in political science. He managed Bill Orton’s political campaign and consequently worked as a legislative assistant for a few years while going through BYU’s EMBA program. Schone graduated from the program in 1994 and began working with friend Jeff Liechty, who printed T-shirts that changed color when exposed to UV rays. With the help of BYU graduate chemistry students, Schone and Liechty improved the products and prepared to start a business.
In 1994, Del Sol launched a kiosk in Fashion Place Mall with five T-shirt designs. Interest for the products grew, and within two years there were one hundred Del Sol kiosks in malls across the country. In 1997, Del Sol opened its first full-fledged store in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, with Schone’s mother, Susan, in charge. Within a few months the store made ten times the amount a kiosk did.
A little more than a year after the first store opened, doctors told Susan she had a tumor; she died one month later. “My mother gave her whole heart and soul to helping the store do well. I owe a lot of my success to her,” Schone says. “If that store wasn’t successful, Del Sol wouldn’t have been successful.”
As the St. Thomas store flourished, Schone and Robert Pedersen, Schone’s business partner, recognized that cruise ships were key. About one thousand came through St. Thomas each year and most of Del Sol’s business came from those visitors. The company looked at ports of call when deciding where to build new stores. It also struck an advertising deal where the cruise director demonstrates Del Sol products and encourages the travelers to visit the stores.
Del Sol carved a niche in the tourism industry—it has stores from Aruba to Alaska to the Alamo. “I remember flying home from a kiosk convention and envisioning a store with all our products in it. I would look at other companies and think, ‘We’ll never be like that,’ but now we are much bigger than they are,” Schone says. “Not only is Del Sol a fun company with great products, but it’s profitable as well. This has been a team effort, and I’ve been fortunate to work with a very talented group of people.”
In August 2003 Schone sold the company, but he still manages two Del Sol stores in Key West, Florida, and in Juneau, Alaska. He recently moved his family to Hawaii, where he plans on working on new entrepreneurial ideas. “I decided to sell the company so I could have more family time. I didn’t want to regret seventy to eighty hour workweeks,” Schone says. “The business was a great experience, but I wanted to see what more life could offer.”
For more information on Del Sol, visit www.delsol.com.
