Compromising Your Brand
We have had many advisors suggest we maximize revenue and profit by creating new streams of revenue.
Since we make the best damn individually made custom dress shirt, advisors have said, why don’t you do B2B2C? Why not sell your dress shirts to other businesses that want a quality dress shirt without having to deal with managing the supply chain? As much as that was interesting, we had to decline, especially when we have had business owners approach us saying they want 100 – 1000 piece orders, which wouldn’t be too hard for us to fulfill, but would add another level of stress on us that we wouldn’t be too excited about, and the other parts of our business might suffer. This idea was good for revenue purposes but awful because it went against everything we stood for because we hate mass-production.
The other idea was, when we allowed returns of our custom made dress shirts (we stopped that after quite a bit of abuse in the system), to resell our returned tailored dress shirts. First, this was just an awful idea because that really compromised our brand since our shirts are all personally stitched and for us to resell someone a shirt that someone else co-created would be very counter to what we were trying to do. Second, this was an awful idea because we didn’t have too many returned shirts that that revenue would matter much to us, especially when we would have to expense more resources into actually reselling those shirts (probably via eBay).