Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 3)

Kyle Vucko: A smaller handful of my mentors got very engaged with the business planning process, providing feedback every few weeks. After being unsuccessful in getting the money in the business plan competitions, I went back and told one of them that we want to raise money and take this to the next level. He agreed immediately and offered some terms. I also talked to some other people and put together a mini-angel. Within a month of that first meeting, we had raised $40,000 to get the idea from concept to reality, build a website, and prove that we could sell a single suit over the web through customer measurements. That’s how it happened. The actual process of raising money in my case was very easy, but it was actually the result of months of relationship building.

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Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s stay in the 2006 to 2007 timeframe. I’m assuming that you’re talking about a period when you hadn’t yet started the business because all of these things had to be in place to launch a custom tailoring shop, right?

Kyle Vucko: Right.

Sramana Mitra: So you identified one or two tailors in China and then you launched this site?

Kyle Vucko: We had to track down a couple of tailors. We had to learn how they measured.

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Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 1)

Mass customization has been the holy grail of fashion e-commerce for the longest time. Meet Kyle Vucko, CEO of Indochino, a men’s fashion company that has cracked the code.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Kyle Vucko: I grew up in Victoria. It’s a smaller town on the west coast of Canada. I ended up going to the University of Victoria where I met my good friend Heikal Gani, who is my co-founder. >>>

Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19 Million: Wrist-Band.com CEO Azim Makanojiya (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The competition for keywords has gone up in the course of this, right?

Azim Makanojiya: Significantly. What we used to pay 20 cents for, we now pay $6 to $7.

Sramana Mitra: How has that impacted the business?

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Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19 Million: Wrist-Band.com CEO Azim Makanojiya (Part 6)

Azim Makanojiya: The other company then told them that they can still service us. They got their orders for three weeks but didn’t pay the factory. In the meantime, they built their own factory in China and started doing orders. They left the factory with unpaid bill of about $175,000.

We’re now basically the sole company that sources from them. We started with one factory over there and he [Chandler] has built up to 20 factories that he sources our orders from. He personally owns about five factories and he sources the surplus orders from about 15 other factories.

Sramana Mitra: So you have a good supply chain established at China at this point.

Azim Makanojiya: Sourcing was probably one of the biggest hurdles that we came across. Then, there was shipping. >>>

Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is it the same team that you had in Sydney that got Bigcommerce off the ground?

Mitch Harper: Not really. As I had mentioned, I used to be an engineer and built the first version along with Chris who was one of our early employees from that initial team. He’s still with us today leading a team here in Sydney.

Sramana Mitra: Was Eddie also involved in Bigcommerce? What was his progression in this story?

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Web 3.0 and Online Fashion

Excerpt from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0.

In 1999, long before fashion on the Internet actually took off, I started a company called Uuma. It was a traditional venture-backed personalized fashion startup that received an acquisition offer from Ralph Lauren before the company was caught in the first dotcom crash.

I am going to articulate the vision behind Uuma, particularly because that vision still remains unrealized. I hope that some entrepreneur, somewhere, will execute on it.

As you know, I define Web 3.0 as a verticalized, personalized user experience. The web is still utterly fragmented. You have to go to different places to find information about the same context. I have long had the vision of a personalized Saks Fifth Avenue. I want my store — my personal store — that carries merchandise that applies to me; that suits my hair color, eye color, skin tone, body shape and personal style. I want it to stock my favorite designers and more like those. And I want to see articles and community discussions that are specific to my interests.
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Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19 Million: Wrist-Band.com CEO Azim Makanojiya (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: $110,000 to $6.9 million! Explain to me how that happened? What were the strategic levers?

Azim Makanojiya: We were all new to this industry. We didn’t know what was going on. The only reason that this could happen at a very fast pace, from my point of view, was because we had the drive. We were working full-time at this business. The second and probably the most important thing is, if you really understand the AdWords engine, it translates into instant traffic. We were going really aggressive at this and probably marketing at the first to second spot constantly in a majority of the keywords.

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