This demographic is going to be won over by marketing, and you didn't have the correct marketing play in hand when you ran this survey. I'm going to give you an example:
If you ask people: "When shopping for clothes on the web, would you submit your email address if...?"
Most people would probably say no. "Submitting your email address" sounds like you're about to "submit to" a bunch of junk email!
However, if you ask them if they want a perfect fit (you'll probably need a better way of saying this than you have right now--you'll want to do demographic research to find out how high-income women actually would articulate this), you can find a demographic that will say "yes". As a bonus, you'll have the lingo they use and be more easily able to sell to them because you are speaking their language.
tl;dr: Given the word choices and copy you could have used, "submit your body measurements" was almost guaranteed to bust, but it doesn't mean you have the wrong idea. It just means you have the wrong way of saying that idea in a way that appeals to your market.
They don't necessarily wear high end fashion (heels, skirts, whatever) because it "fits". They wear it because they like how it looks, how it makes them feel, etc.
My wife is an independent high end fashion designer. Working on fit is incredibly hard and specialized, from a product and marketing perspective. Good patterns are the fashion equivalent of good software. They take a long time to get right and require a lot of work. They also don't necessarily translate to an online experience that well, for several reasons.
Any business in this space needs to overcome them:
High end designers usually target particular body types, and then market specifically to that group.
I worked on a project for Levi's in the 90s for getting the perfect fit for jeans. We had laser cutters, 3D body scanners, and more.
It failed. Getting the right fit wasn't a just a matter of measurements. It was a manufacturing issue too.
Even two garments that have the same measurements may not fit exactly the same because of manufacturing issues, fabric tolerances, even customer perception.
When a customer tries a garment on, it can stretch, alter or rip. So if they don't purchase it, the second person trying it on may not have the same experience.
A garment that "fits" someone may not actually look good, depending on their body type.
High end customers also have expectations of being able to return anything, for any reason (think of how Nordstrom's handles this for example) These things can really hurt margins.
Doesn't this kind of thing happen anymore?
D
This assumes we don't go through another 90's-era fashion trend where very baggy clothes were extremely popular. Who cares if something is a perfect fit if it's going to be parachuting all over the place? Currently, trim fits are very much in style and require more precise sizing, but that's not guaranteed to remain the trend.
With some clothes, suits for example, you could argue that a custom fit will always be in style, but I'm not sure if that's enough evidence to support a blanket statement that the future of online fashion retail is custom sizing.
(Warning, I'm coming entirely from a male-perspective and do realize that women's fashion tends to require more precise sizing and is also a substantially larger market.)
If it really was only 17 responses that's the equivalent of asking five people on the street if they like hot dogs and then deciding based on their answers to open up a laundromat in Brooklyn.
Using Clopper-Pearson at95% confidence tells us that between 23.3% and 70.8% would answer yes to this question. I do agree that is probably still too broad to decide to kill a business, but if you know you wanted a 60%+ (for example) positive response from this audience to hen that sample is enough to cause some serious worry.
http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/view?survey=b...
There were only 2 responses from women earning $100-150k. A suburban woman answered 'No', an urban woman answered 'Yes'. The vast majority of the remaining surveys were filled in by women earning $25-49k, which isn't OP's target audience. However, most women earning <$75k answered 'Yes', so the market might be large enough after all. Maybe not for haute couture, but for reasonably good prêt-à-porter, sure.
We found Survata, an Y Combinator company, they helped us a lot and overdelivered :) - our project is still on standby / awaiting money, but the results Survata gave us were top notch and gave us several insights. We were looking for a much better confidence interval, so we had a screening question.
We also thought of using Mechanical Turk, but it's the wrong place for Rewire Attire.
I've toyed with some notions for better fits :) , mostly based around getting measurements through photos (android, webcams, whatever), and systems for that appear every so often on the news :) .
Edit: I'm not related to Survata in any way, just a happy customer.
Looking at all 444 women regardless of income, 56% said yes, and their income chart is far more even. And in the next income range, $75-$99k, 59%, or 13 of 22, said they WOULD give their measurements. Fun tool to play with however :)
I do agree though if you're right, that is incredibly insignificant data.
Whenever I read "target audience" and "with enough money" in the same sentence, I run the other way.
My experience with prospects "with enough money":
- there are far less of them than everyone else
- many of them didn't earn it themselves, so...
- they really don't really understand the concept of "value"
- they don't understand investing vs. consuming
- they think they are actually the source of their own gifts, so...
- they think they're better than others, so...
- they will treat you like shit, not like a trusted business partner
- they will second guess you
- they will override you
- they'll blame you for the bad things
- they'll take credit for the good things
- they won't pay you on time
- they will protest their bills
- they'll make you hate them and wonder why you're doing this
Edit: Like OP, I'm referring to B2C, not enterprise.
Edit 2: Normally when I see a bunch of bizarre replies to a post of mine that begins with "My experience...", I just close my browser and go back to work. But I guess I'm in a strange mood, so in order to avoid cluttering up this thread (and in the spirit of good clean fun without malice), here goes:
diego, you say "One data point is not generalizable..." and then introduce your own data point. It was never my intent to "generalize", just to share my experience.
chc, I'd prefer to read about what you did over of what you hear. If I'm going to listen to someone else's antecdote, I'd rather do it over beers.
PaulHoule, nice story, but what's the point?
larrys, My list does not directly contradict the success of just about all luxury brands that have been successful. They would probably agree. They've just chosen to thrive in such an environment. I don't.
Samuel_Michon. I believe you. Thanks for sharing your experience.
fredsted, it pretty much does not differ from everybody else? I'd rather have 100 difficult customers with 1% of my ass than 1 difficult customer with 100% of my ass. That's all.
(Sorry if the tone seems negative. I'd love to learn how to better communicate in writing on-line without being misunderstood... It's a work in progress.)
I know a woman who makes hand-knit sweaters for about $250. She makes them out of acrylic yarn, which shocks me. If I'm going to spend a lot for clothes I'm going to want a nice material, like wool. Particularly when you consider the cost of the labor, the extra cost of the wool is nothing.
She told me she did sell a wool sweater to somebody who went home and washed in hot, it shrank, and then heard no ends of complaints about it, so she resolved to never sell wool sweaters unless they are specially commissioned.
Some luxury retailers provide a great experience, like the ones around Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Other ones make it really clear they hate you. I know of one retailer in the UK where if you buy something with a credit card you'll get fraudulent charges from the UK just a day or two after your order.
Nasty.
> she did sell a wool sweater to somebody who went home and washed in hot, it shrank, and then heard no ends of complaints about it
If she still can sell all the sweaters she knit, her customers clearly don't care about the material. Using a matrial that doesn't shrink increases the percieved quality of her product and gives her less trouble.
Seems reasonable to me.
n=1 there then, right? Perhaps she was a bit to hasty based on that single data point?
One of the things luxury brands do is bake into their costs margin to account for customers like this. Or to account for unreasonable people.
I disagree strongly with your conclusion. If anything, save yourself some agony by building something for a market that you know well, and are interested in.
- many of them didn't earn it themselves, so...
- they really don't really understand the concept of "value"
- they don't understand investing vs. consuming
A bigger issues with targeting rich spendthrift consumers is that most people considering a startup don't know any and don't understand them. I expect that irrespective of any issues with sharing their body size, wealthy women who buy fitted designer clothes really enjoy the experience of visiting high end stores to touch the material and be complimented on the fit by a helpful attendant, are prepared to pay the resulting premiums and wouldn't replace the experience with a super-efficient website even if they already do all their grocery shopping and flight-booking online. (But then that's a hypothesis too as none of my female friends qualify as rich yet)
Personally I live the Howard Hughes lifestyle and don't travel a lot and being able to get fancy stuff without going anywhere.
Try actually replying to people! Repeatedly editing your posts to add "presponses" subverts the format of a forum.
Could you therefore clarify what you mean by 'prospects "with enough money"'
I say this because most of your complaints (besides the first complaint, obviously) either apply to consumers in general or are based on nothing more than your opinion. And it appears to be a poisoned opinion.
If I have a net worth of $10B or -$100K, paying $250 or more for a pair of jeans is going to make me far more critical of sub par performance from the vendor.
Do you think rich people go raise a fuss at Walmart when they get poor service or a poor quality product? Of course not. There's no expectation of a great experience at Walmart. Paying extra for a high end experience makes critics out of everyone. And if you start the experience with a vendetta against people who have more money than you it's not going to turn out well.
It’s the ‘I Built This!’ mentality.
But your first sentence said 'My experience with prospects "with enough money"' where is the evidence (even anecdotal) to indicate that luxury brands would agree?
While luxury brands certainly have customers that fit all the points that you make I find it very hard to believe (from my anecdotal experience) that what you are saying is ubiquitous among luxury brands and that they would agree.
> Edit: Like OP, I'm referring to B2C, not enterprise.
?
> - they will treat you like shit, not like a trusted business partner > - they will override you > - they'll take credit for the good things > - they won't pay you on time
None of these are relevant to a pay-then-goods b2c scenario. And somehow plenty of companies have managed to make money off of rich people, so maybe you were doing it wrong?
Replying to people instead of editing your post helps.
Disclaimer: I co-founded Everlane (http://everlane.com), although I left to start Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com) last January. I'm just speaking for myself.
First, look at the error bars. 100.0% (+0.0/-79.3) Saying "the sample size is too small" doesn't even do it justice. Looking at numbers like this will put you in a mindset where you make silly decisions because, hey, they're numbers! They're objective!
Second, this is not how fashion works. As a rule I don't trust survey results early on in a product life cycle -- customer's don't have sufficient context, so you're learning more about their predispositions and biases than their actual attitudes about your (potential) product.
Talking "scientifically," there's a huge uncontrolled variable here: brand. Would women share their measurements with Hermès if it meant proper sizing? How many women who shop for high-end clothes employ something like a personal shopper? What about stores that sell more intimate products, like lingerie? How about wedding gowns? Of course a woman would share he measurements to get fitted for a high-end wedding gown.
I have yet to commit any capital or conduct any surveys and already I feel like I have a decent framework for approaching these issues. If there are high-end retailers with whom women are comfortable sharing their measurements, what is it about those retailers that makes them comfortable?
Why would a woman be willing to share her measurements with Hermés but not Ross Dress for Less?
IMO that's a 1000x better starting point than the one asked in the survey.
This survey is neither reliable nor valid.
There was one thing I neglected to mention in the blog post, that I should mention now. We ran a contest (prior to the survey) that required contestants to submit their body measurements. We wanted shoppers to see the power of submitting their measurements. We threw quite a bit of money and traffic and the contest and we saw almost no engagment. My thinking was, if we can't get shoppers to submit their measurements for a chance to win a free high end fashion design, we might have a problem (let's do a survey!)
As @lmm suggested the demographic for high fashion is mostly women. Also, we struggled to find high end men's fashion designers interested in our offering.
@ericabiz - We played around with the language on our site, however, admittedly, I'm not a marketer, so there was definitely room for improvement here. Which is why I've signed up for CoFoundersLab (http://www.cofounderslab.com) so I can find a compatible partner before jumping into my next start up.
Gaining market share or customers via free X promos is a doomed strategy. I have my theories, but the main thrust is some mumbo jumbo about perceived value. I've sat in interviews with more than one company that said with a not-ironic face that suffering now will cause explosive results in the long term. I pipe up and explain why this isn't so. Why I offer this advice for free is beyond me.
I can't find the article, but it may be this group:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/bulletin/2005/summer/classno...
Also see:
http://www.fordham.edu/images/undergraduate/economics/facult...
From page 4:
Obviously, the whole point of providing condoms is that they be used for sexual activities...They are not meant to be used, for example, for water storage. However, if they are free, then there are a large number of possible uses for condoms that generate positive utility even though the benefits do not cover the costs and they do nothing to prevent the spread of HIV. For example, Epstein (2007, p271) reports that when the CSM run by PSI in Zimbabwe tried to distribute free female condoms, the officials found that people were removing the plastic rings and selling them as jewelry.
I'm also a woman who's been known to drop some serious coin on clothes, and finally, I've previously stated publicly that I believe the future of clothing/fashion is getting exact fit/measurements (which sparked quite a heated debate when I published those thoughts to my audience on Facebook.)
You don't necessarily need a "marketing co-founder"--you can learn much of what you need simply by reading some books by famous copywriters. Start with John Carlton's "Kick-Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel" and branch out from there. Read some classic "ad men" books--John Caples and the like. Dig up all of Eugene Schwartz's old ads. Put aside your gag reflex and cringe factor and delve in deep. You'll learn a lot about people and copywriting that way.
I also have some great free resources on my blog and I am launching my own sales course soon as well. See my latest post: http://www.erica.biz/2013/macklemore-effect/ for more details.
You’re a new website with zero brand recognition. If you had promised a free Cadillac in exchange for someone’s home address, you probably would have seen the same level of engagement. That doesn’t mean people don’t want to receive free luxury vehicles, they just don’t trust you with their data.
Force the high end designers to measure everything thigh hips, waist, shoulder width, etc.
Then let people sort down based on drop down settings
THEN suggest others that fit the settings they used.
Don't actually ASK for their measurements.
"The target audience for Rewire Attire, the high end fashion marketplace, was women with enough money to afford high end fashion and that are young enough"
Not so fast. Forgetting even the small sample size and methodology I'm wondering whether the OP did any other research at all? And "sharing measurements" is only 1 factor in making this business a success.
Additionally no reason that they couldn't have forked/morphed/pivoted the model built to some other group (say the men who buy custom made suits for thousands - not saying that would or would not work but even if OP is correct about the market info (and I don't think enough research was done to prove out the point anyway) it could work in another group.)
As http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html says, you want to work on an idea that a few people really want. Then you want to go out and find some of those people. Talk to them. And make what they want.
Concrete case in point. I remember reading an example of how an early focus group mostly panned a particular automobile, but 1/3 of people REALLY LOVED IT. On a survey it would have looked bad, but went on to be one of the most successful vehicles on the road. (I think it might have been the Ford Bronco, but don't quote me on that.) You don't care how many won't buy, you want something that you can find sufficient enthusiastic customers for.
When a woman finds something perfect, she likes to tell her friends about it. Suppose that your friend is standing in front of you in great clothing talking about how good the clothing from ____ is, you just sent them your measurements, browse the clothing, and they will send them to you tailored to fit, then you're likely sold. You've got to get those women started.
To do that you've got to do like Zappos did. You've got to have a generous return policy. Furthermore when you get returns, you need to try to get information about why it is returned. Because one of the reasons why stuff will get returned is fit, and the descriptions you get back are going to help you learn more about how to customize clothing to that women to give her a better fit next time. This is essential.
There is a lot to learn to make this work. And if you want it to work, it is absolutely necessary that you've got to get it right before trying to get popular.
Two of them said NO, and one said YES, making the results 66% negative and 33% positive.
Just not enough "on target" data to surmise anything.
A 10% positive response is often enough to ignore the other 90%. It's something we're all working on.
I'm a man and possibly missing something, but it seems to me that women's clothing is deliberately inaccurate.
When I buy pants (in America), the measurements are expressed in inches. I rarely even try them on.
Women's sizes vary by brand and seem engineered to flatter rather than describe. A woman buying a "size 0" has not expressed her desire for a predictable, sensible sizing system.
http://www.3sixteen.com/collections/homepage/products/st100x...
http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/view?survey=b...
However, that tendency holds at higher age groups which do have more data. I noticed the charts also have what I believe are standard deviation bars, which show that the results are not even close to being statistically significant.
Everbody wants clothes that fit.
I don't know the first thing about fashion, and my wardrobe is anything but high-end.
However, I'm well-paid and ready to be a lifetime customer for anyone who can sell me slacks that simultaneously fit a >36" inseam, <38" waist and thighs which are no stranger to squats.
Humans are strange beasts. There are so many seemingly simple things we could do that would vastly improve our lives, yet we refuse to do them.
Apologies for name-dropping a colleague's project, but you might want to look at http://validate.io for a more comprehensive, scientific analysis that's actually done by someone who knows how to design surveys and analyze data (they have a PhD design and run a survey for you, it's pretty sweet). A little more than $100 but worth it to have good data on your market. You might still avoid wasting $40k going the wrong direction, but you might be able to trust it more.
1. What looks flattering varies drastically from one woman to the next, and the determining factor of what looks good on you isn't body measurements. It's body shape. Designers tend to target a specific body type, and women who shop for designer clothing need to identify which type they are. This is where style is hard, and where women could use help.
2. Body measurements help determine type, but it's not that straight forward. Petite women with have smaller differences in measurements to indicate type. Shape of certain body features (especially bust) isn't fully indicated by measurements.
3. Type is important not for fit but to determine what styles you should wear. If a user's measurements indicate narrow shoulders, you should not be displaying halter tops, even if the bust, waist and hips sizes are correct.
4. Women with enough money to buy designer clothes and care about fit also have enough money to pay a tailor. They are much more concerned about style and quality, and will pay someone else to make it fit them.
Mr. Borden, if you're still interested in the idea I have a few suggestions for your next iteration. Target women with enough money for nice clothes, but don't know how to shop for them.
Use either body measurements or some sort of questionnaire to determine a few important body characteristics- type, bust-size, petite, plus, tall, broad shoulders, ect- you could even ask what part of their body they like most/don't like. Market your platform to women as a way to discover their own personal style, to feel more confident in the body they have (self-image is a huge source of shame for many women). Hire some personal shoppers to help write blog posts on style, body type, confidence.
Then display clothing based on what would look good on that woman. Not size, style. So if she has a large bust, don't display turtlenecks. This is where you provide value.
You could take this a lot further- a user clicks on a top, show pictures of skirts or belts or shoes that would go with it, or even generate outfits that will flatter her.
Search is another way to provide value here. It would be awesome to say, I want to look at dresses with this or that neckline, or shirts that match this color.
However, I'd never have invested so much before knowing the audience.
And he had this HUGE problem of having invested his ego on a (probably very cool) solution, which is one of the toughest challenges for us tech types.
http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/view?survey=b...
http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/view?survey=b...
n about 450 each
What I can't get my head around is why anyone would choose to get clothes that don't fit when they could have ones that do? It seems like going to a restaurant and refusing to tell the waiter what you'd like to eat and instead hoping that what they'll bring is something you like.
Well I can imagine some scenarios, perhaps a spendthrift likes to get roomy clothes and so doesn't want a "perfect fit" because they can't afford to grow out of them after Sunday lunch. Or, maybe a "perfect fit" is interpreted as "skin tight"?
People are strange.
It's a problem because ~no 3 year old is an iOS developer, and most developers are 15-40 year old men, so it's less likely you'll find good products for 3 year olds vs. developer tools, but it does avoid this particular problem.
I had a friend drop $20,000 on a new supplement and training business, built out an app for trainers the way he saw thought it should be, and recruited trainers. Lots. Showed them the app, and got a lot of feedback, but by then it was too late. He was out of money and no dev wanted a piece of the pie.
He should have done his market research first. The OP too, no?
These people are trying to solve this problem. They have also taken a very interesting route and built a robotic mannequin which can change it's shape.
In any case I don't think I will ever be able to give a better overview than the site itself.
If you want to look better than average, the first thing to pay attention to is how your clothes fit.
Pick it up and be more careful next time.