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.
