Fans of ultimate fighting, mixed martial arts and extreme sports have been good to clothing maker Silver Star Casting Co.
The San Clemente-based company makes T-shirts, hats and accessories, many with in-your-face gothic, tattoo-style designs.
Silver Star has outgrown its 12,000-square-foot San Clemente offices and warehouse and will be making a big jump to a 97,000-square-foot Irvine building.
“We got a great deal that wouldn’t be there in better times,” founder and Chief Executive Luke Burrett said.
The company plans to add about 20 people to its 75 person workforce this year.
Silver Star’s T-shirts, hats, hoodies, jeans, jewelry and accessories are sold at Macy’s, Champs Sports, Dillard’s, Foot Locker, Pacific Sunwear, Ross and Buckle.
The company expects to do about $20 million in sales this year. Silver Star has grown an average of 150% a year for the past four years, due mainly to the booming popularity of Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Growth for the company rests largely on the athletes it endorses, according to Burrett.
Silver Star’s Web site got more hits than it could handle after ultimate fighter Georges St.-Pierre won a key fight.
“People tapering back on marketing right now are making the wrong move,” Burrett said. “If you don’t (advertise), you could be going out of business.”
Burrett, who grew up in Laguna Beach, started the company in 1993 to sell his jewelry designs.
The business took off when rocker Tommy Lee of M & #246;tley Cr & #252;e became a customer.
He owns and runs the company with his wife Charis Burrett, Playboy magazine’s Ms. February in 2003, who does a lot of Silver Star’s modeling and helps with nearly every other aspect of the business.
“Luke and Charis are both key to all of the decisions made,” said Vince Petronzio, chief financial officer.
Clothing makes up the majority of his sales, with accessories at about 20% and jewelry about 3%, he said.
About three-quarters of Silver Star’s manufacturing is done in Los Angeles. The rest is done in Asia.
Silver Star competes with Seal Beach-based Affliction Inc., Grand Terrace-based TapOut LLC and Ontario-based Famous Stars & Straps Inc.
Yoogli
Newport Beach’s Yoogli Inc. thinks its search engine has something on the big boys.
An early version that uses a special algorithm for Internet searches will be released this month.
The startup’s technology allows searchers to use entire documents for criteria, retrieving similar documents based on the way the text is formed in sentences and paragraphs.
Most search engines, such as that of Google Inc., allow users a limited number of key words, according to Yoogli.
The company’s technology, called semantic searches, is something the industry long has talked about, but still is untested with broad audiences, according to cofounder and President Joe Kerwin.
People searching for bears,the animal,rather than the Chicago Bears football team would find what they are looking for, according to Kerwin.
Yoogli users will also be able to connect with each other in a social networking environment.
So far, Yoogli is only scratching the surface of the Web. It searches 5 million web pages,a fraction of the 20 billion pages searched by Google.
“It’s an ongoing work in progress,” Kerwin said. “Right now, we’re focused on news, sports, health and pop culture.”
Kerwin, a former vice president of sales for Framingham, Mass.-based technology information publisher IDG Communications Inc., started the company in 1999 with $1.2 million of mostly his own money as well as investments from friends and family.
Ultimately, Kerwin said he wants to sell his product, but not before growing bigger.
Yoogli has about a dozen people working for it, many of them independent contractors.
In 2004 it launched a music site to help make its brand known. Yoogli Music allows users to search for bands based upon similarities to music they already like.
The site creates playlists for users while featuring new bands under the radar of mainstream sites.
Yoogli Music has more than 400,000 artists, many not attached to record labels.
Travel Tracking
Travel agency Uniglobe South Coast Travel Inc. in Irvine is letting customers track the carbon emissions of their flights.
The service came about to meet the demands of its more environmentally conscious customers.
Targus Group International Inc. in Anaheim, a maker of bags for laptops, requested the capability to help it be more environmentally responsible.
“We can now more easily determine the amount of carbon emissions generated by the use of air travel, hotel stays and rental car use,” said Kelly Reeves, a spokeswoman for Targus.
Uniglobe books more than 100,000 flights a year and does about $6 million in sales. Business this year has been down about 20% from the prior year as travelers cut back.
