SPRING, 1999
It was the Spring of 1999, and I was working on putting together a brand new, indy Wrestling organization called, UAWF. I split my time between hitting the road setting up the venue, seeking out show sponsors and booking talent. And when I was not doing that, I was going out on a daily basis, with a lawn mower and weed eater and cutting peoples yards for them, which I would continue to do until the Fall of that same year. During this period, I had put together the Championship belt I intended on using for my organization, this belt…
I remember taking it to my parents house to show this belt to my Father. He looked at it for a moment, then he said something that would change, everything. He looked at me and said, “Son, this is really nice. You ought to see if you can start making and selling belts.” Little did I know in that moment, that these words would completely change the course of my life. GENERATION 1 So now it is the Fall of 1999, and I was wrapping up the season for cutting folks yard. The problem I had was that at that time, for whatever reason, I was unable to pull together the funds I needed to do my show, so the concept was scrapped. This left me in a bit of a pickle. I had planned on closing down the yard maintenance thing and rolling directly into running my Wrestling show. But I remembered what my Dad had said to me only a month prior. And so it was that I officially decided to create, TABC Belts. On a quick side note, my concept for a Wrestling organization would be finally realized decades later but in digital form. Check out the link for UAW for more information about that. So, I made another belt, a completely different design, and I listed it on an old AOL hotdog web site my Brother had throw together for me in like 30 minutes. At that time, backyard Wrestling, was all the craze, and so I specifically made my belts for the folks involved in that game, and I am not exaggerating, it all immediately took off. TABC stood for; The Alternative Belt Choice, and I proudly still honor that moniker to this day. And so it was, TABC Belts was born, and was the primary supplier of Championship belts at an extremely affordable price for the folks in the backyard wrestling community. To this day, there are documentaries about backyard wrestling, were you can see the belts I made back at that time on camera. It was actually a pretty cool experience for me to see them show up in a movie that I did not make. If I can find thumbnails of it, I will post them. 2002 By this time, the backyard wrestling community was pretty much gone or well into the process of being gone. I saw my sales drop off massively. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to give it all up, right then and there, telling myself, yea, I had a few good years there. But I found this concept, unacceptable, and began trying to figure out a way to get my belts moving again. GENERATION 2 In an attempt to offer something new, while streamlining the build process, I not only designed a built a few more, new plate designs, but also completely changed the way these belts were made. It was the right move, however, GEN 2 was very much lacking. I was rather quickly not at all satisfied with these belts and would once again start thinking of a way that I could improve them. GEN 2 would end up being the shortest lived version of TABC Belts, and to my knowledge, I do not even have a photo of one of these belts, though if I find one, I will ad it here. Yea, we try very hard to forget GEN 2 was ever a thing. :) GENERATION 3 Still 2002. As I said, GEN 2 was very short lived, maybe a six month run. And then I sat down again and began not only making new plate designs, but again exploring better ways to make my belts. GEN 3 would come out of this effort. GEN 3 was a massive upgrade from 1 and 2. For the first time, TABC used actual metal in our plates. GEN 3 was an embossed design, and they were very heavy belts. GEN 3 would run for a longer period of time that GEN 2 did, but it also would be relatively short lived as I was able to again find a better process for making my belts. I was a bit forced into this rework actually because I began having severe issues in getting my hands on the specific metal I was using for GEN 3, so GEN 3 ended up being scrapped. GENERATION 4 2003, GEN 4 would continue using metal for our belt plates, but rather than embossing our designs, we began etching them instead. GEN 4 would go on to be, what I would consider, our first great success since all the way back to GEN 1 with the backyard community. By this time, TABC had become a player in the actual world of professional wrestling. The smaller indy federations, similar to the one I had tried to build all those years before, were my audience at that time. And although GEN 4 was moving pretty well, I still wanted to push my belts further. I again began thinking of new ways to go about making my belts. My personal interest was starting to move towards stacked plate belts. I had not had a belt like that since GEN 1, and I felt like it was time to figure that out. GENERATION 5 2005, the process of making these belts would radically change from the processes used for GEN 4. This particular belt model would continue to use the metal plates I had been using throughout GEN 3 and 4, but I added a layer of resin over the metal. The resin had been poured into a mold that created the shape and details of the belt plate. It looked pretty good, and folks really seemed to like them. Unlike the stack for GEN 1, the stack for GEN 5 was all, one piece. However, as time went on, my personal interest began to turn towards the concept of, shinny, and so it was that I would again begin thinking of a new process to make this happen. GENERATION 6 It is now 2007, and the process for creating GEN 6 would change massively again. No longer where molds being used to create these belts. They looked amazing. But, there was a flaw. This process still heavily used plastics to create the plate details. The metal in the plate was again, pushed into the background. It was still there, but now only serving as, the backbone of the belt plate. That being said, these belts were beautiful and fairly popular. If standing 3 feet away from one, you’d swear it was solid metal. But the market was changing. People no longer wanted anything to do with a championship belt if it was mostly plastic. GEN 6 was a wildly popular design and sold like hotcakes, until it didn’t, and once again, it was time, for a reinvention. GENERATION 7 2010, The golden age of TABC would begin with GEN 7. Molds and plastics would no longer be used in the production of these belts. We went back to the GEN 3 concept as far as the plates themselves were concerned, but the process of making the details was very different. GEN 7 would go on to become the most popular, best selling belt format of TABC, and it is still the format we primarily offer, to this day. There really is not a lot more that could be done to create these belts any better. They were practical, beautiful, and considered real belts by very discerning belt connoisseurs. The age of “toy belts” at TABC, had conclusively come to an end. 2015 The beginning of the end? 2015 was an interesting year, for TABC, and by interesting, I mean it totally sucked ass!!! There was something that felt, very different about this year, something terrible had happened, I just had no clue what exactly that thing was. It would actually be many years before I would finally learn exactly what had happened. There were actually 5 things that unfolded between 2015 and 2020 that almost destroyed my passion for belt making. The first of these catastrophes was, the hosting and web page building company I had been with for a decade, made some changes in their code. What they were thinking, I will never know, but whatever they did, made it impossible for TABC Belts to be listed on google. In 2012, for example, you could do a google search for championship belts, TABC would show up on the first page. A year later, we had even managed to push it up in the goggle algorithm to third place, right behind top rope belts and one other company. But in 2015, whatever they did to change their software, TABC ended up being complete de-listed from google. At that time, you would have had to have done a specific search for TABC Belts to find us, and that is not a good thing for TABC. It was also in this same year that I inevitably but unknowingly contributed to my own problems. I wanted to be able to offer the belt style you would see in a WWE type organization, however, I did not own, nor have to the money to invest in the equipment to create that style of belt. One day, I had received an unsolicited message from a fellow who was capable of building this style of belt, so I entered into what I thought was a partnership with this guy and his company. I even listed this new style as, the X BELT. But, what I did not realize at that time, was that I had lost the plot. The entire point of TABC was ALWAYS, to offer, something different. But now, I was capable of providing, the exact same thing that everyone else could offer. I consider this period, a dark stain on TABC Belts. Worse yet, the company I was working with, ended up being overseas, were a completely different catastrophe in the belt industry was beginning to unfold. CRAPIONSHIP BELTS
This leads neatly into the next huge blow TABC took between the years of 2015 and 2020. The absolute shit show that is, the foreign, knock off and illegal by the way, belt makers that began to spring up like kudzu in Pakistan and China, or, as I like to call them: CRAPIONSHIP BELTS. It unfortunately leads to a lot of IP theft. And worst of all, they committed intellectual property theft to do it. Now, there were like, 25,000 different places you could get the “big gold” Belt Rick Flair once held. No licensing agreements appear to have been made with the designers and owners of these designs. They were now just being made for as absolutely cheaply as possible by criminals overseas, and there was no legal recourse these design owner could peruse because...reasons. Now, in 2025, I am just hoping that this criminal fever dream is over. Today, the term “X BELT” refers to the triple X Belt design I came up with. You will not be able to purchase one of these other style belts at TABC, one, because I do not own any of the designs for those belts, and I am NOT a criminal, but those belts miss the point of TABC to begin with. You CAN NOT purchase a replica of the big gold, or any other belt deign that is not offered by TABC. We certainly can do a design that you personally came up with beyond our stock plates, but that is as far as I’ll go at TABC. While this issue, Crapionship Belts, was the big time contributing factor to the dark times, it was by no means the last one. EBAY
For many years, literal half of all belts I made and sold at TABC came from our various ebay listings. I don’t need to say a whole lot here, we all know what happened with ebay Like the company I had worked with for my original website, ebay made a lot of policy changes, none of which benefited the sellers or the buyers. It only benefited ebay, but not really. They lost a huge portion of the people who where trying to buy things online to Amazon and others. Ebay, had effectively committee suicide, and to this day, is no longer a viable option for TABC. 2019
A fate far worse was about to unfold, and none of us saw it coming. At this stage, my website was complete de-listed from google. Ebay sales had dropped to almost literal zero, the market was flooded with a bunch of cheap trash illegal belts, but the worst was about to unfold. COVID-19 hit late 2019. This is why it was called, COVID-19. I immediately ran into a huge supply chain problem with the metal I had been using for years, but in 2020, the breaking point finally happened. When all the lock downs and all that nonsense started, TABC held 5 annual contracts that accounted for 30% of all our business at the time. Ebay was maybe 10% by this time and direct sales made up the rest. However due to the above mentioned problems and issues, one by one, thee avenues closed, but, we still had our 5 annual contracts, until 2020. We lost, every single one of them. TABC was now seeing maybe 5% of the business we’d had. I will not lie, this might have been the hardest time in my entire life, and it very nearly ended me. Yes, my very life came within a blink of being, over. I lost all my purpose and drive. Had it not been for the family I have, I certainly probably would have fallen during this dark time, I had literally lost everything I had spent decades building. 2025 But, all things must come to an end, and I am hopeful that the fever dream of crappy Pakistani and Chinese Crapionship Belt has wound down. I did not expect that I would ever re-open TABC, but here we are. The reason is, I had 5 years between 2020 and 2025 to remind me of why I started TABC to begin with. It was unavoidable that TABC would eventually return, because it gives me purpose in life. That, and some super positive support from my buddy Tim, Danny and my wife Liz. I appreciate you guys. So here we are, and that is our history. Thanks for taking the time to read it, if you are reading this in 2026 or beyond, I guess it all worked out.
I remember taking it to my parents house to show this belt to my Father. He looked at it for a moment, then he said something that would change, everything. He looked at me and said, “Son, this is really nice. You ought to see if you can start making and selling belts.” Little did I know in that moment, that these words would completely change the course of my life. GENERATION 1 So now it is the Fall of 1999, and I was wrapping up the season for cutting folks yard. The problem I had was that at that time, for whatever reason, I was unable to pull together the funds I needed to do my show, so the concept was scrapped. This left me in a bit of a pickle. I had planned on closing down the yard maintenance thing and rolling directly into running my Wrestling show. But I remembered what my Dad had said to me only a month prior. And so it was that I officially decided to create, TABC Belts. On a quick side note, my concept for a Wrestling organization would be finally realized decades later but in digital form. Check out the link for UAW for more information about that. So, I made another belt, a completely different design, and I listed it on an old AOL hotdog web site my Brother had throw together for me in like 30 minutes. At that time, backyard Wrestling, was all the craze, and so I specifically made my belts for the folks involved in that game, and I am not exaggerating, it all immediately took off. TABC stood for; The Alternative Belt Choice, and I proudly still honor that moniker to this day. And so it was, TABC Belts was born, and was the primary supplier of Championship belts at an extremely affordable price for the folks in the backyard wrestling community. To this day, there are documentaries about backyard wrestling, were you can see the belts I made back at that time on camera. It was actually a pretty cool experience for me to see them show up in a movie that I did not make. If I can find thumbnails of it, I will post them. 2002 By this time, the backyard wrestling community was pretty much gone or well into the process of being gone. I saw my sales drop off massively. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to give it all up, right then and there, telling myself, yea, I had a few good years there. But I found this concept, unacceptable, and began trying to figure out a way to get my belts moving again. GENERATION 2 In an attempt to offer something new, while streamlining the build process, I not only designed a built a few more, new plate designs, but also completely changed the way these belts were made. It was the right move, however, GEN 2 was very much lacking. I was rather quickly not at all satisfied with these belts and would once again start thinking of a way that I could improve them. GEN 2 would end up being the shortest lived version of TABC Belts, and to my knowledge, I do not even have a photo of one of these belts, though if I find one, I will ad it here. Yea, we try very hard to forget GEN 2 was ever a thing. :) GENERATION 3 Still 2002. As I said, GEN 2 was very short lived, maybe a six month run. And then I sat down again and began not only making new plate designs, but again exploring better ways to make my belts. GEN 3 would come out of this effort. GEN 3 was a massive upgrade from 1 and 2. For the first time, TABC used actual metal in our plates. GEN 3 was an embossed design, and they were very heavy belts. GEN 3 would run for a longer period of time that GEN 2 did, but it also would be relatively short lived as I was able to again find a better process for making my belts. I was a bit forced into this rework actually because I began having severe issues in getting my hands on the specific metal I was using for GEN 3, so GEN 3 ended up being scrapped. GENERATION 4 2003, GEN 4 would continue using metal for our belt plates, but rather than embossing our designs, we began etching them instead. GEN 4 would go on to be, what I would consider, our first great success since all the way back to GEN 1 with the backyard community. By this time, TABC had become a player in the actual world of professional wrestling. The smaller indy federations, similar to the one I had tried to build all those years before, were my audience at that time. And although GEN 4 was moving pretty well, I still wanted to push my belts further. I again began thinking of new ways to go about making my belts. My personal interest was starting to move towards stacked plate belts. I had not had a belt like that since GEN 1, and I felt like it was time to figure that out. GENERATION 5 2005, the process of making these belts would radically change from the processes used for GEN 4. This particular belt model would continue to use the metal plates I had been using throughout GEN 3 and 4, but I added a layer of resin over the metal. The resin had been poured into a mold that created the shape and details of the belt plate. It looked pretty good, and folks really seemed to like them. Unlike the stack for GEN 1, the stack for GEN 5 was all, one piece. However, as time went on, my personal interest began to turn towards the concept of, shinny, and so it was that I would again begin thinking of a new process to make this happen. GENERATION 6 It is now 2007, and the process for creating GEN 6 would change massively again. No longer where molds being used to create these belts. They looked amazing. But, there was a flaw. This process still heavily used plastics to create the plate details. The metal in the plate was again, pushed into the background. It was still there, but now only serving as, the backbone of the belt plate. That being said, these belts were beautiful and fairly popular. If standing 3 feet away from one, you’d swear it was solid metal. But the market was changing. People no longer wanted anything to do with a championship belt if it was mostly plastic. GEN 6 was a wildly popular design and sold like hotcakes, until it didn’t, and once again, it was time, for a reinvention. GENERATION 7 2010, The golden age of TABC would begin with GEN 7. Molds and plastics would no longer be used in the production of these belts. We went back to the GEN 3 concept as far as the plates themselves were concerned, but the process of making the details was very different. GEN 7 would go on to become the most popular, best selling belt format of TABC, and it is still the format we primarily offer, to this day. There really is not a lot more that could be done to create these belts any better. They were practical, beautiful, and considered real belts by very discerning belt connoisseurs. The age of “toy belts” at TABC, had conclusively come to an end. 2015 The beginning of the end? 2015 was an interesting year, for TABC, and by interesting, I mean it totally sucked ass!!! There was something that felt, very different about this year, something terrible had happened, I just had no clue what exactly that thing was. It would actually be many years before I would finally learn exactly what had happened. There were actually 5 things that unfolded between 2015 and 2020 that almost destroyed my passion for belt making. The first of these catastrophes was, the hosting and web page building company I had been with for a decade, made some changes in their code. What they were thinking, I will never know, but whatever they did, made it impossible for TABC Belts to be listed on google. In 2012, for example, you could do a google search for championship belts, TABC would show up on the first page. A year later, we had even managed to push it up in the goggle algorithm to third place, right behind top rope belts and one other company. But in 2015, whatever they did to change their software, TABC ended up being complete de-listed from google. At that time, you would have had to have done a specific search for TABC Belts to find us, and that is not a good thing for TABC. It was also in this same year that I inevitably but unknowingly contributed to my own problems. I wanted to be able to offer the belt style you would see in a WWE type organization, however, I did not own, nor have to the money to invest in the equipment to create that style of belt. One day, I had received an unsolicited message from a fellow who was capable of building this style of belt, so I entered into what I thought was a partnership with this guy and his company. I even listed this new style as, the X BELT. But, what I did not realize at that time, was that I had lost the plot. The entire point of TABC was ALWAYS, to offer, something different. But now, I was capable of providing, the exact same thing that everyone else could offer. I consider this period, a dark stain on TABC Belts. Worse yet, the company I was working with, ended up being overseas, were a completely different catastrophe in the belt industry was beginning to unfold. CRAPIONSHIP BELTS
This leads neatly into the next huge blow TABC took between the years of 2015 and 2020. The absolute shit show that is, the foreign, knock off and illegal by the way, belt makers that began to spring up like kudzu in Pakistan and China, or, as I like to call them: CRAPIONSHIP BELTS. It unfortunately leads to a lot of IP theft. And worst of all, they committed intellectual property theft to do it. Now, there were like, 25,000 different places you could get the “big gold” Belt Rick Flair once held. No licensing agreements appear to have been made with the designers and owners of these designs. They were now just being made for as absolutely cheaply as possible by criminals overseas, and there was no legal recourse these design owner could peruse because...reasons. Now, in 2025, I am just hoping that this criminal fever dream is over. Today, the term “X BELT” refers to the triple X Belt design I came up with. You will not be able to purchase one of these other style belts at TABC, one, because I do not own any of the designs for those belts, and I am NOT a criminal, but those belts miss the point of TABC to begin with. You CAN NOT purchase a replica of the big gold, or any other belt deign that is not offered by TABC. We certainly can do a design that you personally came up with beyond our stock plates, but that is as far as I’ll go at TABC. While this issue, Crapionship Belts, was the big time contributing factor to the dark times, it was by no means the last one. EBAY
For many years, literal half of all belts I made and sold at TABC came from our various ebay listings. I don’t need to say a whole lot here, we all know what happened with ebay Like the company I had worked with for my original website, ebay made a lot of policy changes, none of which benefited the sellers or the buyers. It only benefited ebay, but not really. They lost a huge portion of the people who where trying to buy things online to Amazon and others. Ebay, had effectively committee suicide, and to this day, is no longer a viable option for TABC. 2019
A fate far worse was about to unfold, and none of us saw it coming. At this stage, my website was complete de-listed from google. Ebay sales had dropped to almost literal zero, the market was flooded with a bunch of cheap trash illegal belts, but the worst was about to unfold. COVID-19 hit late 2019. This is why it was called, COVID-19. I immediately ran into a huge supply chain problem with the metal I had been using for years, but in 2020, the breaking point finally happened. When all the lock downs and all that nonsense started, TABC held 5 annual contracts that accounted for 30% of all our business at the time. Ebay was maybe 10% by this time and direct sales made up the rest. However due to the above mentioned problems and issues, one by one, thee avenues closed, but, we still had our 5 annual contracts, until 2020. We lost, every single one of them. TABC was now seeing maybe 5% of the business we’d had. I will not lie, this might have been the hardest time in my entire life, and it very nearly ended me. Yes, my very life came within a blink of being, over. I lost all my purpose and drive. Had it not been for the family I have, I certainly probably would have fallen during this dark time, I had literally lost everything I had spent decades building. 2025 But, all things must come to an end, and I am hopeful that the fever dream of crappy Pakistani and Chinese Crapionship Belt has wound down. I did not expect that I would ever re-open TABC, but here we are. The reason is, I had 5 years between 2020 and 2025 to remind me of why I started TABC to begin with. It was unavoidable that TABC would eventually return, because it gives me purpose in life. That, and some super positive support from my buddy Tim, Danny and my wife Liz. I appreciate you guys. So here we are, and that is our history. Thanks for taking the time to read it, if you are reading this in 2026 or beyond, I guess it all worked out.
Please don’t hesitate, to contact me with any questions. tabcbelts@yahoo.com
Championship Belts are the new trophy or award to be given in whatever circumstances. Whether it be a beer pong Championship belt, fantasy football Championship belt, karate Championship belt, wrestling Championship belt, boxing Championship belt, or just a general award in the form of a title belt, TABC Belts is your source. ALL IMAGES CONTAINED WITHIN THIS WEB SITE ARE THE COPYRIGHTED PROPERTY OF JAMES T CLEMENT. NO UNAUTHORIZED REPRODUCTION IS ALLOWED BY LAW. TABC AND JAMES T CLEMENT RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE AT OUR DISCRETION. ALL SALES ARE FINAL.