Blank Label does custom dress shirts, then why the hell doesn't my shirt fit perfectly! We have not done a good enough job communicating to people visiting our site that we are not custom in fit, we are co-created in design. As I wrote in a recent piece We Don't Do Custom Dress Shirts, we're trying to redefine the term "custom dress shirts" and in turn redefine our dress shirts are delivered to consumers. When we think of custom, we think of custom 2.0, what we instead choose to call co-created. So if you asked anyone on the Blank Label team what we call our shirts, you'd hear the response "co-created dress shirts". To us co-created is about the emotional connection you have with your dress shirt, and amazingly, somehow, the more you design it, the more you'll love it. Why? Because it's something you've really had a hand in creating -> hence co-creation.

But back to why you've co-created with us and you've received something that doesn't fit. Unfortunately we're not really alone in this area. Although clothing is the largest segment in e-commerce, it's also the most difficult. Fitted clothing in e-commerce has an industry 40% return rate. Holy crap! Thankfully ours is a lot lower. If you think about what information you put in our Sizing Page, you should notice that it isn't that different to when you buy any other clothes online. We ask for your standard size, height and weight, slim or classic fit, and body type. Everything you know off the top of your head. We don't ask you get to watch 12 instructional videos on how to measure between this bone and that joint, after you self-consciously ask around for a measuring tape. Instead our master tailors try to build a custom sizing profile based off information you already know.

We've even made a really clearly conscious effort to not include any measuring instructions anywhere on our site just because we don't believe that co-creation is about that. We aim to make well fitted shirts, and because they're individually-made, we can tweak the fit each time to get closer to perfect. We're also always taking advice from customers on how we can better display our sizing page (you'll see some interesting changes here soon), and looking at new innovations like the great technology our friends at Fits.me is building. Check out their awesome robotic sizing demo below.

So what happens when your individually-stitched shirt doesn't quite fit to your expectation. We re-make it completely free. There are a heap of times people have clearly chosen the wrong size, they're 6ft and 200lbs and they choose small, we'll re-make that for free too. All we ask is for you to send the shirt back, not to sell on the custom dress shirt secondary market, but to give to local charities we work with.

Everything in the article after the part where she calls Danny and I "embarrassingly young" was actually pretty awesome ;)

And as always great to see some of our co-creation partners on there too. Below is the text from the article.

MEN’S DRESS SHIRTS: Blank Label (blank-label.com). Starts at $45, shipping $6–$20.
What it is: Started by two embarrassingly young friends in 2009 (cofounders Danny Wong and Fan Bi are 19 and 22, respectively), Blank Label offers men the chance to “cocreate” a dress shirt to their exact specifications—everything from the fabric to the monogram is up to the consumer. Shirts are sewn in Shanghai and shipped to the customer within three weeks.
How it works: First, you choose a style from a variety of patterns and types of fabric, like poplin and broadcloth. Next, you pick out the finer details: Different types of cuffs (French versus standard), pockets, and even shirt closures (snaps or regular buttons) are all options, as is your choice of monogram and what the tag—which is stitched right into the shirt—says. A few body measurements are necessary (including neck size, height and body type) to complete the order—the whole process takes about 15 minutes. 
The results: Once my husband’s shirt arrived, it fit him perfectly, and the fabric he chose-—a black checked poplin—feels and looks much more appealing than many of the mass-market options available. 
Worth it? Basic shirts begin at just $45, so designing your own stylish top barely costs more than a button-up you can buy at Macy’s, and the results are more stylish—even my polo-wearing husband says he would definitely cocreate again.

Half a year ago we posted here - Difference Between Custom and Co-Created Dress Shirts. We thought we knew what we meant, but we really didn't. There was a vision, but not fully articulated. After all we had only been online for a two months and had less than 100 customers.

Half a year on, with a few thousand customers and a lot of feedback, we're having another go at this. This topic has caused a lot amount of debate internally, let me first set up a framework:

- People have a perception of what a "custom dress shirt" is, something you go to a tailor for, you get a bit of choice on the design, but it's really about the fit

- Fit is hard to do online, for anything, different brands have different sizes, there are no universal rules

- Given all our shirts are individually-made and stitched from scratch, we can't just 'replace' wrong sizes with inventory

- The vision has always being about 'Designed by You' - the graphics on the site, the experience through the Dress Shirt App has always been very heavily geared toward design, far more than fit 

- But what do we call our product if not custom dress shirts

We don't do custom dress shirts as the term is usually associated. We are not about custom fit. We are not about custom fit. We are not about custom fit. If you want custom fit, you should really go to a tailor. Old school, but it works.

To us, the term custom dress shirt means something that is co-created. It's new school for the new male. It's about the individual. It's about expression. It's about emotional value of wearing something designed for yourself.

So for ease of communication, we say we do custom dress shirts, just to get people on court. To really get in the game, and for the players in the know, we're all about co-creation.

Thanks Georgina Safe for the interview and nice article. Disappointed we didn't make it higher up the paper with what happened with the Socceroos and a new Prime Minister ;)

The four people who read our blog on a regular basis has informed us that the Comments section on our blog isn't working, i.e. that when you try to submit a comment, it simply won't let you. If you know anyone who has worked with .NET BlogEngine (our blog client) and enjoy fixing problems, we'd be super appreciative.

The thing we do know with internships is that they've either been crazily successful for us or been complete flops. I'll give the example where it's been completely awesome. Our graphic designer, Alec. He started as an intern last summer. He had just graduated and was in this office gig which he absolutely hated. He's a bit of a free spirit. He moonlighted for us, got caught up in the vision and now he's the master of all UI on www.blank-label.com. Our Lead Artist. He's got equity in the company and is currently in Shanghai working with Danny, our Lead Evangelist, and I over the summer. 

In the cases it hasn't worked, it's because what the person ends up doing is fairly different to what we thought they'd be doing at the start. And a lot of people can't handle this. When Alec first came on board, he thought he'd purely been working in AI and PSD (Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop), he didn't think he'd be learning JavaScript, he didn't think he'd be project managing free-lance coders, he definitely didn't expect to be working out of Shanghai. It takes a certain type of person to understand that start-ups move quickly, they pivot, and you need to roll with the punches. 

 Not quite the view that Alec, Danny and I wake up to every morning but you get the idea. Image by Ya Ya

So who is our Community Outreach Intern. At the core, there is Blogosphere and Social Media. That's pretty much all we know. Everything else is a detail and will be figured out along the way. As the title suggests, it's Outreach, so we're looking to get reach to the community we care about, the New Male (more on that in a later post) and engage with them through the Blogosphere and Social Media. You'll probably get some nice tips from Danny, our buzz-generating rock star who got us in New York Times, MSNBC, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, The Next Web all whilst still at school full-time (he's now with us full-time). 

We also know we're looking for a Community Ambassador full-time to the core team in the fall. We don't do trials without the hope of successes and we don't let awesome people get away. If you've been following us for a while or you've spent quite a bit of time on the site, and you get the vision and you like the way we've been progressing, shoot us an email at learn@blank-label.com with i) what you're working on right now, why you'd make the switch to us, ii) your favorite e-commerce experience, iii) the last book you read and the most recent movie you've seen, iv) your blog or twitter handle.

Enjoy! 

This is a fairly niche post that is mainly for the small start-up community that follows us (sometimes people forget that we are still very much a start-up, having only launched online October 31 last year), so if you're out there, you might find our recent experience useful.

The last six weeks have been quite honestly a bit of a nightmare for us. From the very start, let's say August last year, we've been pretty dedicated to a Lean Startup philosophy. For those unfamiliar with it, basically it means instead of building something you and your team have been working on for years and shipping it out when you've tested and tested and surveyed and surveyed, you launch something that is good but from from great and definitely not perfect. You're testing the waters before fully diving in. And not because you're scared, or because you're not committed, but you want to get feedback along the way, you want to build something for your customers, with your customers. You could say, you want to co-create your company with your customers.

 Dip a Toe? Image by Zed Bee

The great thing with being lean is you're always improving and you're always building something close enough to what your customers really want. The challenge is you kind of have to temper growth. Or at least that's what we've found. We were growing nicely up, building out the features of our site regularly, always working on the web backend, and dedicated to having a reliable shirt supply chain. We were getting more and more customers, but most of them were what Geoffrey Moore would describe as innovators or early adopters. The people who are okay with working with a less than perfect website, can deal with product delays and willing to give you a bucket-load of feedback, and order again just to see if you've taken the feedback. 

May 17 was a turning point in the history of Blank Label. It was a great day, and a terrible day all the same. We had a half page feature in the New York Times and our focus on innovators and early adopters, and being lean, were blown completely out of the water. There were some early signs of things going wrong. By 10am that Sunday morning, our site had pretty much stopped functioning. We migrated servers midday, it took about 4 hours. We were getting phone calls asking us how they could order via the phone because they didn't understand this "web stuff". Yikes! And by 6pm, we had collected more orders on the day than we had from October 31 last year to the previous day. Chaos!

Sometimes lean means being fast and regularly improving, but sometimes it also means you're not very good at defending above your weight. Image by fernandoleon

Recently I chatted with a start-up peer, launching a really cool internet company. He's a big buyer of the lean start-up mentality, and with his site still in its early days, he was talking to me about how excited he was about conversations with CNN and other major press outlets. I warned him that being lean is great, we would've taken forever second guessing if we hadn't launched early and listened to the advice of our customers. But being lean is also more effective when you're targeting an audience who can appreciate a lean product and get value from the larger vision. If you're product is lean but your customer shifts from early adopter to larger majority, your customer expectations jump up a big notch. Just make sure you're ready for that.

We weren't, and that was a huge lesson for us. A crippling one. A humbling one. People were expecting similar customer service to the famed call centers of Zappos, when we were still manning customer service with our small team doing everything else. Customers were expecting fully-baked e-commerce features like Amazon when we were thinking about building them three months down the track. The good thing is we're going to survive, and the learning curve just got that much steeper, which is always great because we're more aware of the needs of a wider customer base. In the last six weeks we've become a lot stronger, more robust and ever more determined. And we've now got a new focus on how lean we build up and how large a target demographic we try to go after.

We have been trained well by Mr Miyagi and thank him for making us stronger than ever. Image by knaakle

If you've been following our blog, you'll notice some serious self-deprecation from the last three posts. In an effort to remain honest and transparent, we've decided to open up about why we've been so incredibly slow in getting your shirts to you. As we mentioned in our last post, we define our product as our entire Customer Experience, and the product is seriously lacking when delivery is not met at expectation. 

There's a pretty simple reason behind this. When we launched, we had a really small production facility in Shanghai, literally the other side of the world from where most of our customers are. Why Shanghai? There's no doubt production in China is more inexpensive than Europe, U.S. or Australia, i.e. where 96% of our customers are, but to really drive our mission of Co-Creation, we believed in individually-made at off-the-rack prices. 

Back to the production facility in October last year. So we have a small setup with 2 tailors, things are pretty chill. Around March and April, we start noticing some serious growth, we're featured in a few prominent publications, our tailors need more help. We move into a larger space, we hire another tailor, seamstress, and fabrics+packing+QA person. Cool, the team can produce 25 shirts a day. And remember, everything is created from scratch, with all the intricacies of individual sizes and individual designs.

Then New York Times happens. All of a sudden, we need to start producing 100 shirts a day. But we just moved into a new facility, we just bought new machines. And really quality talented tailors aren't the easies to find. We've tried to be as transparent as possible. My co-founder, Danny, sent personal emails to all the individuals who we thought we couldn't deliver to on time, immediately after purchase, and then put up a large banner on our homepage and an annoying pop up in the application to warn people that there shirts would be two weeks late at the very latest. 

We're trying to stay on top of this the best we can, we don't want to compromise quality, we're investing in infrastructure where we think it's important and the right people where needed. We're more passionate about pursuing the mission of the Co-Creation Custom Revolution than ever, and we know we will get through this. We just wanted to let you know what was going on and thank you for your patience.

That's actually terribly unfair to the team here, especially our customer service reps. It's really more a case of recent media coverage = traffic > greater than a four person team can handle. To say the least, things have been a little crazy at the Blank Label mothership. Our traffic has spiked and many visitors have turned into prospective customers and Blank Label loyalists, and that’s an amazing feeling for a startup that is only six months old. 

Let's just take a moment, we're four young guys who have never done anything like this before, just following a vision. Two of us have dropped out of school to pursue this, we've slowly been building a site which we pushed live at a very clunky, early, pre-beta stage, and a few months later (let's just take the month of May), we get featured in Mashable (twice), Businessweek, MSNBC and NYTimes. 

The demand for our product and inquiries about our offering has been overwhelmingly positive. We’re growing and we’re looking for some additional support. We’re a scrappy startup that started with a $257 idea and the vision to change the way men shop.

We're still working on order tracking infrastructure, we don't have Create Account functionality, we've had to bring on a freelance customer support help person. We have hundreds of emails a day, we want to be able to talk to customers by phone, we want to learn by talking to customers on IM on our site. This is essentially how we think about customer service here.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE is the product. It's not just the shirt you wear and feel great about because you designed it yourself. It's about the story your friend told you about their shirt that got you to check out the site, it's your impression after 5 seconds of logging onto blank-label.com, the fun conversation you have with one of us on our IM application, your growing anticipation after you order, and of course the feeling you get wearing a shirt you designed yourself.  

 Jon Langager probably never suspected when he took this photo of a carpark that someone would use it one day as a job posting =)

Customer Service is obviously an integral part of CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, and we're looking for a Champion to help us achieve our goals. We are looking for a Customer Service Champion to lead the customer support team to help push the co-creation movement and continue evangelizing our customers. The ideal candidate is emotional, startup-oriented, empathetic, personable, and SMART (a general, but loaded quality, something which will be very subjective in the interviews we conduct).

Our Customer Service Champion will be responsible for the following:

Please send in 300 words of why you'd be awesome --> learn@blank-label.com before Monday June 7. Don't include a resume, do include a phone number, extra points for including blog, twitter and/or linked profile.

Never did we expect this ...

To do this to our website and our server ...

And instead of doing this ...

We took some of this ...

We can happy say we're back up and running!

We're really sorry for everyone who had problems with the site yesterday. We want to especially thank those who fought through the slowness and glitches to co-create with us.