For customers, he's dyeing to tie one on.

• Author: Rauch, Joe
• Position: PEOPLE - Erik Chumley

Erik Chumley will tell you with something approaching pride that he's never done much of anything in "the rat race." Such disdain is not surprising from someone whose resume includes carnival work, horse-trailer assembly and just about anything else to keep the wolf from the door. Chumley, 38, is the owner and operator of The American Tie-Dye Co. in Taylorsville. Customers include Wal-Mart, and his shirts have been featured on the Survivor television show.

The company makes tie-dyed shirts for wholesalers and markets them primarily through a Web site. Sales doubled from about $50,000 in 2003 to more than $100,000 last year, when Chumley sold more than 25,000 shirts.

He and his wife, Dawn, are the only full-time employees. During his busy season, March through May, he hires as many as five temps. "I sell to a lot of schools and youth organizations, sports teams." An average order is 250 shirts.

Early on, Chumley dyed shirts in his kitchen sink. Now shirts are dyed in and shipped from a 3,000-square-foot building that he leases. "The orders just kept getting bigger. Beginning of last year, we got a huge order--2,400 shirts--and they needed them in 10 days. Man, we jumped to supersonic speed overnight."

A plain white T-shirt is bound and folded before specific areas of the shirt are hand-sprayed with dye to create a design. The dye must set for 24 hours. Chumley's most basic shirt costs $5 wholesale, with a minimum order of two dozen. "The more basic designs, I can train our temporary workers to produce those at a pretty good rate--usually a couple hundred or so a day. The toughest ones, though, only I can do them and usually only about 20 a day. And that's pushing it."

Tie-dye became popular in the 1960s and remains the...