Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 3)

Jacob Cooke: What Alibaba has done is take that a step further and acted as the mediator between the transactions. Owner Jack Ma is one of the richest and most trusted people in the country, just the way Steve Jobs or Bill Gates are perceived in the West. What he’s done is add a level of guarantee. To be in the Tmall platform, for example, you have to accept the fact that anybody can return any product within seven days with no questions asked or in thirty days if there is a product defect. Consumers in China had no real worries about losing their credit card information or getting ripped off. They know it’s very safe.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, Baidu controls all the search traffic in China and this traffic gets routed largely to servers hosted in China. So websites have to be hosted in China to be ranked for the Chinese consumers. That’s the reason why you have to have a strategy for China to do e-commerce. Is that the point?

Jacob Cooke: That’s correct. There are two main concerns. One is, we need to be inside the country to get a proper listing at Baidu. Number two, is your site may not be open-able and is not enough to go through the firewall, the user experience can be sub-par and not optimal in terms of converting the user.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 1)

The dynamics of e-commerce in China are very different from the US. Let’s dig in!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to your company and yourself. Tell us what you do and your background. We’ll take it from there.

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Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that San Francisco and New York are your two major customer bases?

Kyle Vucko: Not exactly. They’re part of our top 10. Because we are still looking for shorter term real estate, we’re looking simultaneously at 10 cities. Once we find the location that’s the right price, we’ll move in. We’re taking any place that comes up first. New York, San Francisco, and Toronto are very much bigger markets for us. San Francisco is very much as well.

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Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In 2010, you have $4 million more capital. What does the competitive landscape look like at this point? Are you starting to see competitors?

Kyle Vucko: Not really. We did see some smaller competitors who came and went. The competition landscape was pretty bare.

Sramana Mitra: As a result, does that mean that your PPC keywords were still pretty cheap?

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Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you go about doing that? Is this your own factory or a third-party that you built a relationship with? That is the cornerstone piece of the delivery part of this business, right?

Kyle Vucko: There’re so many other pieces that go into delivering.

Sramana Mitra: Acquisition and all that is regular e-commerce. It’s the manufacturing fulfillment part that is the nightmare.

Kyle Vucko: We always had a very clear and strong vision >>>

Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What did that allow you to accomplish next?

Kyle Vucko: That allowed us to hire a couple of people to really figure out some of the paid acquisition side and continue to refine our processes and scale.

Sramana Mitra: Paid advertising kind of stuff?

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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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