Working man

Anthony Sullivan is a 24-year-old Renaissance man and entrepreneur. He’s got an Internet business, a clothing line, a job, a band called Condescender—the list goes on. He got his start in business learning about heating and air conditioning from his dad. These days, Sullivan is easiest to catch up with via his Web site, www.underworlddistributing.com

Tell me something about yourself.

I work, and I play music. I work at Johnny Corino’s six days a week, pretty close to 40 hours a week. I spend probably another 60 hours doing screenprinting, photography, HTML coding, Web design, and then another six or seven hours a week practicing guitar. That’s about it.

So you have this clothing line, Rockstar. You have several lines, actually, tell me about them.

We bought our own press, and since we have the ability to print whatever, whenever, we decided to start three labels instead of just one. The others are Kila Clothing and Dark Tower Apparel. We did a guys’ line and a girls’ line and then RockStar Clothing is a unisex line.

And it’s just T-shirts? What else is it?

We have T-shirts, sweashirts and hoodies printed right now. We have a whole closet of yoga pants, shorts, underwear and tank tops.

Now you’re doing a model search?

Well, we decided we needed to get the community involved in the process. Namely, for branding our name. We thought the best way would be to do a model search. We figured if we could stick our name on something, and people would stick it on their Myspace page and then have them go out and tell people to vote for them, it’d be an awesome way to brand our own thing. We had a buddy of ours down in L.A. make this PHP site …

What’s PHP?

It’s programming for the Web. It’s a more user-friendly interface. Ours allows a person to sign up, upload their picture onto our server. They can get their name and e-mail on their Myspace link, and then we make sure their picture is appropriate, resize it, send it back, and they stick that on their page. Underneath that is a link where their friends can vote, all they have to do is click on it. It says “Thank you for voting, you can check in again in a day’s span. Try again tomorrow.” Each of these models, each day, is pushing people to vote.

What’s the benefit to winning?

The benefit is they get to be in the next catalog. Along with being promoted on our Web site. We have international orders already. There are people all over the world looking at our site.

How long is the contest going to go?

It’s 50 days from Aug. 1.

So in just a few days you’ve had 400 people sign up to be a model?

Our hits on our Web site went from 200-250 a month to 2,500 each day. We got more hits on the first day of our model search than we had the whole month before. The second day, we got more hits than we had in the history of our Web site.

How did you develop these skills?

I went to school for heating and air conditioning. Opened up my own business for five years down in Carson City. So I’ve been doing business for 15 years. I took all the money I had saved up and invested it in the screeenprinting machines, programs, books and went to learning out of books. I didn’t take any classes or anything.

Anything else we should talk about?

We’re also doing a battle of the bands on Nov. 3. We have about seven, and we want three more. To qualify, they have to sell 50 tickets. If they sell 100 tickets, we’ll print them $500 worth of merchandise.