Fashionable pants from a fashionable startup
How CEO of Bonobos helped shifted the way men buy clothes
NEW YORK — Andy Dunn didn’t start out with an interest in fashion. But he ended up co-founding an online menswear company that targets customers like him: male shoppers who want a wardrobe of nice-fitting clothes but need help.
The company called Bonobos started out in 2007 with a line of men’s pants — a curved waist band with a flattering fit. They were different from what was out there and were designed by his good friend and now business partner Brian Spaly.
Bonobos now has expanded into an array of other products including shirts, ties, belts and jackets. It’s also opening showrooms called Guideshops, where customers try on the clothes with the help of stylists. But there’s no inventory so customers order online at the store and have their clothes delivered to their homes or office a few days later.
It now operates more than 30 stores scattered around such key cities as Chicago, New York and Atlanta. It plans a total of 100 stores by 2020.
Dunn spoke about the first moment when he fell in love with a pair of pants designed by Spaly and what’s he learned.
I’m kind of the least likely person that you could imagine to be a CEO of a fashion company, and yet at the same time I think it’s almost perfect, because Bonobos is really built to make it easier for guys to get great clothes, and so, in a way I feel like it’s that bad hair commercial. Not only am I the founder, but I’m also a customer. We built the brand not only for guys who have great fashion sense, but for guys who need a little bit of help. Everything from our customer service ninjas to our Guideshops is built around the idea that it’s not always easy for men to buy clothes.
Well, the reality is, it was a hard thing to see. It was 2007. A lot of people were saying that most folks wouldn’t be buying clothes online. We still were in an era where it was assumed that Amazon would never sell clothes, so the idea not only that you could sell clothes online, but you could actually build a better brand from the ground up starting with the Internet, was kind of a crazy idea. Lo and behold, five years later not only do we have that experience on the Internet, but we’ve invented a store model with our Guideshops.
It actually came on a driveway in Atherton, Calif. We were playing games in the driveway, which is a typical graduate school behaviour, having fun, and my cofounder had these amazing turquoise pants that he brought out. I put them on for the first time and I just remember this sense of joy. It was just fun and I had never really thought of wearing pants as fun. It was always something that I did because you’re not allowed to walk outside without pants, but all of a sudden pants were fun.
We actually got it wrong at first, which is equally helpful in life to getting it right, because you learn acutely and quickly through pain. It tells you what to avoid. What we did was we went from pants into swimsuits. We told ourselves that our joie de vivre in the print energy of the brand was the thing, because we had these really cool prints that we did in the pocket liners. And part of us believed that the design ethos was the most important thing. Our swimsuits bombed. It’s not that we didn’t sell any, but we just sold very few. In fact, for half a decade we had a cave called the swim cave in our offices where we kept the excess inventory of the swimsuits because we didn’t have the courage to liquidate it. So we learned that actually design matters, but the design is most important when it runs through a great fit to begin with.
— The Associated Press