Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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where have you gone? ness plan that convinced his parents to take out a third mortgage on the family home and found a cubicle-sized office in a West Virginia business incubator. Four years later, Yura said his company will sell more than a quarter of a million T-shirts in 2013. SustainU has more than doubled its sales and production each year and has grown from a one-man company to a staff of roughly two dozen. Few of those employees had any experience in the apparel world before joining the company, which made for an interesting learning curve. "It's been a fun challenge," said Trey Dunham, the vice president of marketing and communications and one of SustainU's first four employees. "There were times when you really didn't know what you're doing. You've got to figure it out and make mistakes. We made a lot of dumb decisions over the years, but hopefully we made some good ones, too." Dunham and Yura went to North Carolina, where they got first-hand experience working in one of their textile factories. They helped to find the right blend of recycled cotton and polyester from old plastic bottles to make the fabric for their shirts. They went to Denver, where Dunham remembers feeling like he was in over his head at a sustainability conference. There was also a trip to western Wisconsin when Dunham and Yura found themselves scrambling to put together the figures they needed for a meeting in the lobby of the Land's End corporate headquarters. Now, the SustainU team is being invited to meetings with well-known brands such as Ralph Lauren and Kenneth Cole, who want to learn from the new guys. "Twenty years ago, hardly anybody used recycled paper, and now that's all you can get. We're really the first clothing company that is wholly manufactured in the U.S. and everything is recycled," Dunham said. "In the future, it's going to be commonplace to wear recycled clothing. We're really excited to be blazing that trail." To this point, the company has made most of its sales to colleges and other groups across the country that purchase the eco-friendly shirts and put their own designs on them for certain groups or causes. The next step, Yura said, is to expand SustainU's product line and start selling directly to consumers. Yura said his ability to adapt on the fly in business comes from having to make similar adjustments when he showed up at Notre Dame as a true freshman on the football team. A USA Today honorable mention AllAmerica pick in high school, Yura came to Notre Dame after setting a West Virginia state record with 102 touchdowns during his high school career. He had 50 in his senior season and reached the end zone in each of his last 25 games at Morgantown High School. He joined a Notre Dame roster that included two-time Doak Walker candidate Tony Fisher, Tony Driver and fellow freshman Julius Jones. "I got so much faster the first day I stepped on Notre Dame's campus," he said. "I got so much quicker because you're around that competition