Building a New Online Fashion Brand: Combatant Gentlemen CEO Vishaal Melwani (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about how you bootstrapped. What were some of the components of that bootstrap phase?

Vishaal Melwani: I didn’t know too much about startups. I didn’t know anything about Silicon Valley or raising money. We just knew how to build businesses that were cash flow positive. That was our number one goal. I invested about $100,000 of my own money to get the product going. Scott built all the early site development. For a year, we all worked completely for free focusing on building a great experience online that help facilitate sales. We took $100,000 and I said, “I don’t expect to get this back. This is how we’re going to do this. We’re going to buy a minimal amount of clothing. We’re going to turn this $100,000 into to $280,000.”

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Building a New Online Fashion Brand: Combatant Gentlemen CEO Vishaal Melwani (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can we go back to the exact moment when you decided that you were going to do this business? What triggered the idea? What was going on in the industry? What are the dynamics of the founding?

Vishaal Melwani: One of the biggest things that struck me was there’s a need for this. There’s something that is missing. There’s a huge gap in this market. Between the low-end bargain bin like JC Penney and all the way to the higher-end Hugo Boss, there’s really nothing in between. There’s nothing that’s there to give our guy a spark. At that point, it was all about us creating a solution to that. It was around 2007 to 2008 when we first developed this idea. >>>

Building a New Online Fashion Brand: Combatant Gentlemen CEO Vishaal Melwani (Part 2)

Vishal Melwani: Within a year, we garnered around 180 clients that were some of the world’s top urban wear brands. We ended up selling to a large trading firm within the first year. We sold to a trading firm based in Hong Kong. I was 25 and I had an exit under my belt. I was this guy who was a highly-driven, third-generation tailor who wanted to focus on the product. I took a couple of months off and went to visit my friends who I’d graduated with. They were typical guys who graduated from business school and law school and they moved out to the east coast to get jobs at Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan. This was the height of the recession. This is around 2008 when jobs were literally just decimated. >>>

Building a New Online Fashion Brand: Combatant Gentlemen CEO Vishaal Melwani (Part 1)

I am a big believer in new, highly focused online fashion brands that can be built with a purely digital strategy. Combatant Gentlemen is a case in point. The company bootstrapped to $700K in revenue, followed it up with a $2.2 million financing round, and is on track to deliver $15 million in revenue this year. The market is large, and hence the opportunity to scale exists.

Sramana Mitra: Vishaal, let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where did you grow up and in what kind of background?

Vishaal Melwani: I am a third-generation tailor. I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, believe it or not. My dad was a second-generation tailor. My parents came to America in 1976 from Hong Kong. The goal was to basically have the American dream and focus in on what they knew. >>>

Online Fashion: A Venture Scale Opportunity That Silicon Valley Does Not Understand

Fashion is a HUGE industry. The global women’s clothing industry, just a piece of it, is expected to exceed $621 billion in 2014. How many industries do you know of that scale?

Yet, online, fashion has still relatively a small presence.

In this article, I will explain why, and how to unlock the potential of this enormous industry using the strategies and tactics of Silicon Valley.

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