Yeah, I think he tried it with Heroin, Teenage Runaway and... somebody else I think. By the time I met James I think True Love skateboards, wheels and shirts was it.
tlc, heroin, landscape, teenage runaway, traffic, and even lowcard and roughneck at one point i think. he blew it with everyone; including his team. the whole thing was a nightmare and i still feel embarrassed to be involved with that whole thing. i also feel really bad about it too; i've apologized to lance and albunny/armin, as well as the orchard dudes for james ripping them off
anyways, the advice i got was to keep your overhead as low as possible. you can run a dist. out of your apartment if you wanted too. you can either have stuff delivered to you and send it out, or even have company "a"/woodshop "b" drop ship the order for you. you also have to pay distribution fees to carry the companies. the best way to do it would be to order a small amount of product from each company. say 100 boards, sell them all and make enough to get 200, sell the 200 to get 400, and so on. you're basically banking in off of a snowball effect