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 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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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. >>>

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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Men’s Fashion e-Commerce Entrepreneurs Thriving

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

Most major retailers are latching on to the e-commerce trend but there is also a growing number of online men’s fashion upstarts like Combatant Gentlemen and JackThreads that are using social media channels to understand the consumer and sell effectively under their own retail brands.

Combatant Gentlemen’s strength lies in creating a brand that produces high quality clothing at an affordable cost and then effectively selling it to their target customer of young, aspiring professionals through Facebook. CEO Vishaal Melwani says, “One of the big reasons that we still, to this day, take away clients [from competitors like Men’s Warehouse] is because their messaging is incorrect. They don’t understand the pains and the trials and tribulations that our guy goes through on a daily basis.”
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New Book – From eCommerce to Web 3.0

Excerpt from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0: How To Leverage The Evolution Of The Internet.

Back in 2007, even before the iPhone was launched, giving us a powerful computer in our pockets or handbags, I started outlining a vision for Web 3.0.

There are numerous definitions of Web 3.0 floating around. Tim Berners-Lee, a father of the World Wide Web, talks about the “Semantic Web,” a way that computers employ the meaning of words – not just pattern matching – along with logical rules to connect independent nuggets of data and so create more context for information. The formula that makes the most sense to me is this: Web 3.0 results from combining content, commerce, community and context, with personalization and vertical search. Or, to put it in a handy phrase: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

Here’s what it means.
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