» Million-dollar-collar:
Milwaukee native’s invention stiffens unbuttoned placket
Rob Kessler, entrepreneur and son of Milwaukee-area diamond retailer Richard Kessler, has developed a gadget to help shirt collars stand crisp. Now all he has to do is figure out how to market it.
Rob Kessler figures American men have maybe 400 million dress shirts hanging in their closets.
And the great majority of those garments are beset by what he sees as a vexing problem: Wear them with the top button or two undone, and they often sag at the neckline like a flag on windless day.
Happily for those who want their shirts to stand crisp around the collar, Kessler is here to help.
The 38-year-old entrepreneur, son of Milwaukee-area diamond retailer Richard Kessler, has an invention — recently patented — that he thinks can put an end to drooping shirt fronts.
But the fledgling business has a tough runway to negotiate before it can take off, let alone soar.
“The potential is there,” Kessler said. “It’s just we have one product and we need to find a hundred different ways to sell it.”
Despite its name, Million Dollar Collar, as Kessler has dubbed his one-man firm, only peripherally involves the collar. Kessler’s device actually stiffens a shirt’s placket, the multilayered strip of fabric that runs down the middle of the front and holds the buttons.
Pictures on his website, including one photo of him looking like a crestfallen reject on “The Bachelorette” as his openat-the-neck white shirt flops limply, illustrate the problem.
They also promote his solution, which in December was granted U.S. patent No. 9,204,671, for a “Placket stiffener arrangement for a garment such as a shirt.”
But while the Patent Office requires specificity, business names such as “Million Dollar Placket” or “Perfect Placket” weren’t going to fly. Aside from tailors and shirt makers, very few people, Kessler said, know what a placket is. Having to explain it in marketing materials only would have added to his business challenges.
Kessler said he had long been frustrated with collar flop. An unbuttoned kind of guy, he would put in long stints at the ironing board before a night out, trying in vain to firm up his shirt fronts sufficiently.
“And my wife — well, girlfriend at that time — was like, ‘Dude, what’s taking you so long?’ ”
The final straw, he said, was when he saw his sagging shirt in his wedding pictures.
“And I’m like, ‘All right that’s it, I’ve got to do something about this,’ ” he said.
He didn’t think collar stays addressed the problem. Starch didn’t last long enough.
He started experimenting with cutting open shirt plackets and inserting strips of various material — milk cartons, mini blinds, cardboard.
“I worked with every kind of plastic there is, but dry cleaning hits well over 400 degrees, and most plastics will warp or melt at 200, 250,” Kessler said. “So I ruined a lot of dress shirts trying to figure this out.”
Ultimately, he settled on a three-layer “plastic type material” with a melting point over 700 degrees. Shaped and cut by a Milwaukee-area company into narrow strips about eight inches long, the stays come in pairs that fit between the layers of the placket, one on the button side and one on the buttonhole side.
Which gets to one of the problems Kessler faces: Installation is a bit involved. A shirt must be cut open at the top of the placket, then resewn after the devices are in place.
Typically, that will be done by a tailor or a dry cleaner. It’s a simple job for a professional, Kessler said, but adds a hurdle in marketing the product. Customers — Kessler has shipped more than 3,500 pairs of stays in roughly three months in active business — typically have to take their shirts somewhere to have them retrofitted.
So Kessler has been trying to get dry cleaners and tailors to carry the Million Dollar Collar in their shops. That would give him bulk customers and put the devices in places where consumers already are bringing their shirts.
Calling on those shops, however, is a daunting task. There are more than 35,000 dry cleaners in the United States, and most are one- or two-location operations, Kessler said.
“That’s definitely a challenge that we’re trying to overcome,” he said.
He’s working on this from Los Angeles, where he and his wife, Linda, relocated in October from Milwaukee, where Kessler was raised. To get a fashion-oriented business going, he said, it was either New
York or L.A.
The Million Dollar Collar costs $2 to $3 a pair, depending on how many are ordered. The $25 pack of 10 has been the most popular, Kessler said.
He said a tailor or dry cleaner typically charges $10 for installation.
Sven Raphael Schneider, founder of the Gentleman’s Gazette fashion blog, panned the Million Dollar Collar. Opening up a shirt to put in the device “means you have to destroy a seam, which is handsewn on an expensive shirt and you cannot fix it neatly anymore,” Schneider said by email.
“I would not wear this product and recommend not to wear it,” he said.
But fellow fashion blogger Antonio Centeno, who, unlike Schneider, has actually used the product, is a big fan.
“I have the Million Dollar Collar installed on 3 of my shirts,” Centeno wrote on his blog, Real Men Real Style. “I’ve tested it and LOVE this innovation.”
Besides selling online and trying to recruit dry cleaners, Kessler said he has been talking to clothing companies about making shirts with his invention built in.
Actors Jeremy Piven (“Mr. Selfridge”) and Justin Baldoni (“Jane the Virgin”) have been photographed wearing shirts with the
Before Million Dollar Collar. Kessler is hiring a Los Angelesarea public relations firm to help with product placement and access to celebrities.
His estimate of 400 million dress shirts is a guess, extrapolated from a consulting group’s report that $2.9
With the stay billion worth of new shirts were sold in 2013. But in any event, it’s clear that men collectively own a huge number shirts that, potentially at least, are targets for the Million Dollar Collar.
“If I can get to 10% of that market, I’m a pretty happy guy,” Kessler said.