This is a weekly post on the Co-Creation Blog from Chief Evangelist, Fan Bi, who founded Blank Label in the Summer of 2008, and has been trying to change the way men buy clothes ever since.
As we move closer and closer to launch day for our custom men's dress shirts, the air feels a little thiner, the hours in the evenings don't quite seem long enough, and the discussions of who we are start becoming that little more intense. When you launch a website, whether it's a social networking site, or a content base, or a product platform like us, you'll know what I mean by the importance of being lean and just getting out there. It's like wanting to go up to a girl you like. It's better to have stumbled and stuttered, than have thought about exactly to the word what you want to say, only for her to be swept up by some other dude. We just really wanted to keep our promise to our fans that we would be live on October 31.
Instead we've spent some good thinking time deciding what we exactly what we want to be good at, and put everything non-essential to getting there on the back-burner. Our ideas list is long, and there are some gems in there, but if they don't fit into what we essentially want to be really excellent in, then we'll work on them later.
For us, that's a few things that I'll do my best to articulate here.
FUN - It's important for us to have fun, because it'll come out in what we do. You'll be able to see it in what we do, what our website looks like, in the products we make, it's all a lot of fun. Essentially we think that if we're having fun, then you'll have fun.
INDEPENDENT - We are young guys who want to do it our way. We are anti-establishment, we hate doing it the old way, and we love young guys doing cool shit. In fact, if you're a young guy doing cool shit, we'll probably want to give you your own individually-made men's dress shirt made individually for you just because we love you so much.
CONFIDENT - We also know that we're taking on larger companies who want to crush startups like us. But we remain confident that if we stay committed to the customer who we love we can make this work. We do this by having an online men's dress shirt design platform that allows the fun, independent individual to be self-expressive and confident in what they wear.
