Thinking About How the World Has Changed
Pre-launch, Summer of ’09 – Fan Bi and Danny Wong collaborate to build a custom tailor venture, to personally sell suits and dress shirts to local clientèle.
Late Summer of ’09 – things start to break down. We can’t find enough sales people to represent us in enough local markets. We can’t figure out proper scale. We try to build out a neat suit and custom dress shirt configurator online, but our tech team wasn’t up to par, and we ended up scrapping the whole project. But we were determined to do something big, still. Maybe it wasn’t going to be with suits and bespoke shirts.
Fall of ’09 – We get this crazy idea for what we now call the co-created dress shirt. It was the dress shirt you designed yourself with all the styling options you loved, from that white collar and matching white cuffs to a French placket and awesome buttons on your dress shirt.
A few weeks later – We recruit the best team we could only on equity and high spirits, and work towards making men’s dress shirts far more interesting for the new male.
Oct 31, 2009 – Our whole world changes. We launch, after a week of slaving, and our first week begins.
Eight months later.. – We’re growing at an awesome rate and are doing whatever we can to change the way men shop through co-creation.
We are sticking to our beliefs that mass-produced dress shirts are awful and that there are inefficiencies with mass-production, especially the fact that there is always a limited and rare quantity of quality men’s dress shirts out there that are slim fitted dress shirts. So, we are limiting the friction in adopting the co-created way, by providing just the best affordable dress shirts out there.
While our core values have stayed the same, a lot of things have changed, and I’ll be following up with another post shortly.