
Lessons Learned After Shutting My Startup, Following a Six-Year Struggle - rmason
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/lessons-learned-shutting-startup/
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danieltillett
This is a great article and kudos to Yaakov for being brave enough to share
his experience with us. This is a classic example of a talented and dedicated
people working on a bad idea and hoping that they can pivot their way to a
good idea.

As they rightly noted in the end people don’t want to make their own clothes
online. They want clothes that make them look good and project the image to
the world that reflects how they want to be seen. No matter how well executed,
this idea can’t work except for the tiniest niche.

I have often thought about how to make this market (the “consumer co-creation”
category) work and I have yet to figure out a way. The best idea I have had is
to out Zara Zara. The Zara model it to keep the supply chains short (with a
resulting high labor cost) and the stock turn over rapid so if something
proves popular they can make more of it quickly (no ordering for summer in the
middle of winter). It might be possible with better physical tracking and
identification of the key influencers to be able to get a jump on what will
prove popular with enough lead time that you can lengthen the supply chain to
be able to take advantage of low cost labor, but I have not explored this
idea.

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franze
i do a 1h free for startups, this means i talk a lot with startups of all
kinds.

sometimes i talk with early stage founders - very, very clever and very
passionate people - who have figured everything out. they know what product
they will build, what their website will look like, what they URLs will look
like, what their marketing campaign will look like, how they will get
investment, what their customers will be like.

i call this a "perfect start-up"

perfect start-ups fail. always. sometimes fast, usually it takes them a long,
hard, crappy time.

sometimes i talk with early stage founders - very, very clever and very
passionate people - who have an idea. they don't know what their product will
look like, don't know what their website will look like, don't know what their
marketing campaign will look like, don't know how they will get investment,
don't know what their customers will be like. they don't even know if their
idea is great or shit.

i call these "interesting people"

they are clever, passionate, willing to listen, willing to work hard ... and
sometimes, only sometimes, they succeed.

~~~
d--b
Here though it is clear that they were in the second category. They said they
pivoted several times, changed their customer targets, tried many things and
it didn't work out. It's not like they started with a "know-it-all" attitude,
it's just that they tried, failed, iterated and failed again until they could
not do it anymore. I say congrats for trying.

~~~
jnbiche
> It's not like they started with a "know-it-all" attitude,

Well, they hired a (presumably competent) web design firm and then told them
to implement a truly horrific site wireframe design, replete with a font in
the same family as comic sans. It takes a certain amount of hubris - or
ignorance - to think you can design an effective, attractive website for a
growing business (and in the fashion industry, to boot!) with zero training or
background in web development or graphic design.

~~~
czbond
To be fair, i am guessing the design was in 2009'ish, when they started,
rather than in the last few years.

~~~
yaakovkarda
Wireframes we drawn were meant to be a design guide, they never made it to
production of course ;—)

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hoodoof
Wow you guys just hit that thing pretty hard - no experience, no tech
knowledge, raise cash, throw it at an agency that takes a year and $100K to
build the software then grind out your unproven new concepts for six years.

You've got stamina I'll grant that. (or you HAD stamina?)

Not my cup of tea. I prefer my to do my failing writing my own code and these
days I try to avoid spending any money so that when I fail I feel less bad
about it than I used to when I spent lots of money to get to failure.

~~~
x1024
To me it sounds more like "We had no skills, no experience and no worthy
advice. But we DID have $100K burning a hole in our pockets".

Literally "Rule number 1" of being a startup is "Do an MVP and then test if
it's worth it to do more". $100K is one hell of an MVP.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

~~~
Kequc
Hi, I'm interested in your perspective on this. Could you elaborate as to how
much is an acceptable amount to spend on an MVP and testing? $100k certainly
sounds high but not altogether unreasonable considering there is a physical
product and distribution.

~~~
x1024
You are not wrong about the "physical product and distribution" part, but the
article says they paid $100K for web development alone.

~~~
yaakovkarda
Didn't elaborate well — $100K were total expenses by the time of launch, but
tech took more than production.

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jakejake
I hate to see a good idea go to waste. I think the assumption that people want
to design their own clothes is false. But if a celebrity designed a pair of
jeans, people would want that.

It probably isn't realistic to get Kanye West for a non-ridiculous sum of
money. But a lot of fairly popular indie musicians or fashion bloggers would
surely endorse a pair of "custom" jeans with their name on the label. I know a
lot of musicians would do it simply to get a bunch of free pairs of their own
custom jeans.

~~~
danieltillett
This is just another celebrity fashion brand. These are popular for a short
while, but it is really hard to build a sustainable model on this.

Fashion is incredibly competitive - really, really competitive. Us techies
underestimate how cut throat the fashion industry is. It is not a bunch of
idiots air kissing each other - it is in the main run by really canny people
who know what they are doing.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
Apart from Victoria Beckham I don't see any celebrity fashion brands lasting.

~~~
magic_beans
Uhh... Just because you're not aware of celebrity fashion brands doesn't mean
they don't exist:

Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen - The Row

Jessica Simpson - eponymous

Gwen Stefani - LAMB

Jay Z - Rocawear

Beyonce - House of Dereon

P Diddy - Sean John

Kanye West

And these are just a FEW.

Celebrities selling clothes is pretty lucrative.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
I meant lasting in the sense that Chanel, Dior, Boss, are

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fersab
I'm wondering, and forgive me if I missed this somewhere in the article, but
did the founders wanted this type of product for themselves in the first
place?

If there was a solution like that before they started, would they go and
design their own jeans instantly, cause they really really wanted to do so?

Sounds to me like one of these "that would be cool if, I think"-type of
ideas... I may be wrong though?

~~~
csydas
They did address this and acknowledged it should have been a red-flag for
them.

Really what it comes down to is the old saying how people "...don't know what
they want until they see it." Bespoke items are great, but, at least with
pants, I would assume the purpose would be to get the best fitting pair, not
necessarily to give a pair of pants flair. The end result of telling people
"your pants can look however you want!" is a bunch of people scratching their
heads going "I want...them to fit?"

~~~
timje1
I guess that's the difference between this and say, threadless. Threadless has
amateur custom designs submitted and voted on, and the top designs float up to
the front page. Because most people simply aren't very good designers...

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rmason
I am a little puzzled that they they didn't try to sell companies instead.
Every company has shirts with the company brand but I'd think you'd really
stand out if say your food delivery people were wearing company branded jeans.
I did a quick check and none of the corporate apparel vendors offered jeans or
pants.

~~~
yabatopia
Probably because the brand recognition on a pair of jeans is too low to even
bother. A logo on a shirt is instantly recognizable: it's right in front of
you.

Putting the company name on a jeans only works for short names. Even a
relatively short name like Facebook is challenging to keep it readable from a
short distance, let alone from a few meters.

Similar for logos, with the additional challenge of logo placement. Where will
you put the logo on a jeans? On the back? That will cause a lot of
uncomfortable situations. On the front? Now you have to look down in front of
the person wearing the trousers, making it even more uncomfortable.

Maybe jeans in the exact company color could work, but you need a lot of
different sizes. People are very picky about the fitting of a jeans, so you'll
end up with a huge number of sizing combinations. Shirts a far more easy: from
XS to XL and you're done.

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austenallred
We are trying an experiment with the a new product my company is launching.

We started out by writing down all of our assumptions, of which there are
many. I'm not sure you can ever build any product or service without them, no
can you successfully "validate" all of them (people's actions don't always
line up with their words).

It's actually really refreshing to be able to look and see, "OK, there's all
of the stuff that we don't really know, and our job is to invalidate any lore
in there as quickly as possible."

------
known
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man." \--George Bernard Shaw

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travelhead
As a die hard tester, my first question would be, "what price points did you
test?"

$299, $399, $499?

For example, you said you have a 0.6% conversion rate and $99 price point
point. Perhaps your conversion rate at $499 would drop to 0.3% but even so you
just dramatically increased your profit

Often times mispricing (either too high or too low) is why startups fail.

~~~
yaakovkarda
We started with $150, as far as I can remeber than went down. The higher the
price, the more important is the brand component OR bespoke experience in the
luxury offline environment. We did work with ateliers that sold our jeans for
$300, but a) the volume was still low and b) we were only getting our $99 out
of the each pair. Besides, when you go for real bespoke, people tend to be
much more picky → more returns and alterations as a result.

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underwater
I'm surprised they decided to just focus on jeans. I can't imagine buying
pants without trying them on. Even if I get the size right I might not like
how they feel. Hoodies and shirts seem much more forgiving, and there are a
bunch of companies who seem to be successful in that space.

~~~
kristianc
There are lots of companies popping up that focus on doing one thing well -
Casper's, Harry's etc. It sounds like they'd have had far lower margins on
hoodies and shirts.

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d--b
I see all these comments saying it was a bad idea in the first place. That is
quite not true. The market for custom jeans is simply overcrowded! I mean why
wasn't getwear on this article at all:
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487038050045756065...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703805004575606533495860918)

I think that - as the article points out - the execution wasn't great for a
number of reason, but don't blame the idea.

~~~
rgbrenner
if anything.. that's confirmation they're right. 2 of the 3 custom jean makers
in that article are gone:

here's a blank page for one: [http://thimbler.com/](http://thimbler.com/)

And indiedenim is now Indie Internet Marketers:
[http://www.indidenim.com/](http://www.indidenim.com/)

The 4th mentioned in the article was a site that ranked premade jeans from
major manufacturers based on a questionaire.. so i'm not counting that one.

~~~
magic_beans
Whoaaaa... Indie Denim's website is HORRIBLE.

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squozzer
After all that, the idea still has merit, but as the author pointed out, jeans
(and clothing in general) are rather tricky products.

I recently purchased a sofa from a site that used a similar tack - though in
hindsight it had a more limited set of options than a typical furniture store.
But that's still OK, at least I didn't have to make chatter with a furniture
sales rep - who aren't bad people, I'm just not very social.

------
agentgt
A couple of things I don't like about clothing startups is that they don't go
after my demographic that has a problem, the cost of the products are way too
high and they have an assumption that people have fashion sense.

For example my problem is that I have not-so-lovely male gyno and I produce
sweat stains on my T-shirts at a particularly high rate (such that when I find
a shirt that fits and looks right its ruined in a couple of months). Thus I
like the idea of customizing a piece of clothing but I just can't see how you
could make it cost effective given I want to use different materials and cuts.
Not to mention I want you to pick a good fashion for my body type.

If the company went after a particular niche.. like shirts for ugly dudes to
make ugly dudes look better instead of rich good looking young hipsters.. I
might be interested :)

~~~
danieltillett
I have always been fascinated why fashion labels make equal numbers of each
size (XS, S, M, L, XL) when this does not fit the distrubution of sizes of the
population. It is even worse with pants where 36" & 38" sell out instantly,
but there is always a 24" in the sale bin.

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pacaro
I use buildyourownjeans.com for this.

They are somewhat spammy, quality control is dodgy (I've gotten a zipper when
I ordered buttons), the website is a joke, but...

The price is right ~$75

They offer things I cant easily get elsewhere that matter to me, 14oz fabric,
raw denim, and customized cut

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manigandham
This idea is not revolutionary and already has plenty of market research. A
single day talking to people who work in fashion/apparel/denim industry
would've told them this was not viable.

------
butwhy
$100k and a year to launch something?

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aioprisan
They have their VK vs Facebook numbers completely wrong: “Russia’s mighty
Facebook rival, VK — which has more than twice as many total users and
probably many times more active users — didn’t work for us. It seems that
folks there are too preoccupied with cats and funny images to bother about
custom jeans.” Facebook has 1.55 billion monthly active users, not the 24
million claimed there – even with 2014 numbers, Facebook went over 1 billion
monthly active users in 2012.
([http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-
monthly-...](http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-
active-facebook-users-worldwide/) [http://newsroom.fb.com/company-
info/](http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/)).

~~~
skav
The article numbers are obviously only for Russia.

