Case Study: Alial Fital launches American-made apparel brand and lands PGA sponsorship with Shopify

Alial Fital - Customer Case Study

Alial Fital is an American-made apparel brand started by a former NFL player who taught himself patternmaking and sewing to create a unique "dress polo" — a woven dress shirt collar on a knit polo — because he couldn’t find the product in stores. The main challenge was turning a handmade, bootstrapped product into a visible, scalable e-commerce business with limited resources.

The founder built the store on Shopify, learned HTML/CSS, and drove initial sales by emailing friends and family and including a handwritten note in every order, which helped produce a 43% customer retention rate. Growth accelerated after PGA golfer Bo Van Pelt requested sponsorship, giving the brand national TV exposure in 2012; production is done in Los Angeles, fulfillment in Seattle, and tools like ShipStation, Super Reviews, Optimizely, Curebit, RetentionGrid, and Luminary support operations and targeted marketing, allowing the company to expand its American-made apparel line successfully.

Alial Fital