Navigate Apparel

We love to make things for people to use! Navigate Apparel started as Navigate Skimboards back in 2003 when Brendan Singbeil and Bryan Sommer combined hobbies of skimboarding and woodworking (Brendan's father was the local high-school Woodshop teacher) to start making skimboards for friends and family in White Rock and Vancouver. The boards were a hit (the secret, for all you DIY people is to use low pressure laminate bottom!) and soon we'd turned Brendan's carport into a small, but fully functioning skimboard factory to keep up with demand. After some trial and error and sourcing headaches, we figured out how to print our own t-shirts, this time appropriating Brendan's basement/roomates living room for a production facility. As with the boards, the t-shirts were a hit, so when summer and skimboard season ended, we kept at the t-shirt game, refining designs and combing through catalogues online and visiting and vetting local printers. This kept on for 2 years as Navigate Skimboards transitioned to Navigate Apparel, a locally printed, branded clothing line with hats, hoodies and t-shirts. In 2008 Brian Hutchison joined the team to help out with the ever expanding tasklist. Throughout this time we moved back and forth from outsourced and in-house or more aptly, "in-apartment" printing (my roommate loved the living room turning into a production floor every weekend). Printing our own line was an amazing experience, the amount we learned about screen exposure, curing and drying inks, different print styles and fabrics was invaluable to their future business efforts. So too were our experiences sourcing our printing and garment needs, endless trips to new printers to do quality checks and talk about the design options different printing styles created a vetting system for printers while as tracking down suppliers for different brands and working out delivery logistics created a delivery model for how we run today. We'd also begun printing for other groups and as part of our involvement in the local rugby scene, it was only natural that we began helping out with merchandising at our home club Bayside RFC. This also proved to be a invaluable lesson as the hands on involvement in sourcing gear, taking orders, and personally delivering gear to people who missed the pickup dates created a desire to come up with a better system. In printing for other groups, we realized that the problems we had experienced; sourcing garments, printers and working out logistical issues were the same for everyone trying to get clothing made. As such. in 2011 we made a change from producing our own clothing line to focusing on helping other people work through the design, sourcing, production and delivery stages. Today we use a network of personally vetted local wholesale printers and embroiderers along with wholesale garment distributors to provide the highest quality service and product to our clients. You can rest assured that we've done the homework on local suppliers to ensure you'll always get a great finished product. Also, since we don't operate in a large manufacturing space, we pass on the savings of our wholesale partnerships with high quality vendors and suppliers to you. We still love to make things for people like we did back in 2003, just now in addition to great products, we also love creating systems for people and groups to use selling, or designing those products as well! Thanks for reading! We look forward to talking to you soon! Search