Something we've opened up, closed down, and opened up again, a public place for you to share comments, ideas and feedback --> thoughts.blank-label.com. 

We opened it up because we thought it'd be a good way to communicate with you on what was important, and as we co-create this start-up with you, for you to help us on what was important. Then came the deluge as recently published in ReadWriteWeb. Things just became chaotic. 

We're working hard and are back listening to old school gangsta rap, but more importantly your feedback. You have thoughts, share them. We're listening. 

If you've been to our site, you may have spoken to someone on the team via our IM tool. I guess through the late 90s and even early 00s so many people have had negative e-commerce IM experiences with robots, that the first question is "are you a real person?" Happily, I can respond that if you speak to someone on our site, you'll always be speaking to a real person. I'm personally on IM several hours a day, and I really enjoy it. I learn a ton from speaking with first-time users of our site, and returning customers and I think it's a great way to develop relationships with people. Everyone on the team spends time on IM, it's important that everyone thinks about what questions and needs our customers have, and for that always to be on our minds. So yes, you are talking to real people, not just there to help, also their to listen and learn. 

 You can see that when someone starts an IM, someone on our team gets a IM in their gchat and away we go. 

We should state that we didn't build our IM client internally. It's a product of the awesome start-up team at Snap a Bug and we're really thankful they built it so we didn't have to as we probably have enough requests to keep us busy for a while ;)

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.

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. 

We recently invited some folk in to do a photoshoot to show off some new fabrics and just to freshen up the website. Now these guys aren't professional models, they're just guys who love their BL shirts. Here's a short video of the afternoon ...