I spent thousands on blank t-shirts. Then someone told me what they actually cost.

For years I bought the same thing over and over. Plain, well-made basics from luxury labels. No logos, no graphics, nothing to announce. Just good cotton, cut properly, in colours that didn't try too hard.

I wasn't buying a brand. I was buying the feeling of putting on a shirt that fits right. I just happened to be paying seventy, ninety, sometimes more for it, and I never really questioned why.

Then a friend who works in manufacturing walked me through the math. The shirt hanging in my closet, the one I'd paid ninety dollars for, was a twenty-five dollar shirt. Not a lookalike. Not a lesser version. The same shirt.

He went through where the other sixty-five went. A few dollars for the athlete on the billboard. A few more for the campaign that put him there. A few for the offices, the salaries, the retail lease. Then the freight - factory to port, port to warehouse, warehouse to distribution centre, distribution centre to store. Every leg of that journey, another dollar or two.

None of it touched the fabric. All of it stacked.

Once you see the breakdown you can't unsee it, and it leads somewhere obvious. What if you simply didn't do any of it?

No sponsorships. No flagship stores. No campaign budget with a famous face attached. Make the clothes in the same kind of facilities the good brands use, ship them from the manufacturer to the person wearing them, and keep the team small enough that it stays that way.

That's the whole idea behind FightNectar. Every layer you take out is a layer that never gets priced into the shirt. We still ship, pack and handle every order ourselves - we just don't stack five other businesses' margins on top of yours.