Ask HN: Better Shirts – Tailored Shirts Delivered in 48 Hours | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Better Shirts – Tailored Shirts Delivered in 48 Hours

4 pointshowdythere11 comments

Hi HN,

I've had this problem for a while. I'm a tall, slim guy and it's difficult for me to find a nice, well fitting dress shirt to wear. I thought of this idea called Better Shirts a few nights ago. Let me know what you think!

Here's how the service would work:

1. User would browse our selection of shirts (various patterns and colors)

2. User would enter their shirt measurements

3. Checkout!

4. Custom tailored shirt is delivered in 48 hour to their door

Here would be the feature points:

1. Fast, 48 hour delivery.

2. Low cost, high quality clothing (costs are kept down by bulk purchasing from manufacturer)

3. No questions asked return policy and superb customer service (think Zappos)

Other notes:

1. Cuffs, collars, and buttons would all be standard and would follow current popular fashion.

2. There are other services out there that provide custom tailored shirts. But their cost per shirt is some $150+ and they use brand names.

3. I'm certainly not a fashion or textiles expert, but if it's reasonable to sell quality dress shirts at $30 or less (with shipping) that'd be awesome.

4. Interested in working with me? This is just an idea that needs to be vetted out. Email me! bettershirts@hush.com (temp email to avoid spam)

Cheers!

EDIT: Formatting.

You ought to be able to get at least $100 million for this idea. Look at how well it corresponds to your typical dot-com:

1. You have absolutely no understanding of the size of your market, the frequency with which they buy shirts, the price they're willing to pay-- or even whether anyone needs a custom-made shirt on 48 hours.

2. You're not a tailor, you apparently haven't worked in the fashion, textile or manufacturing industry and probably couldn't tell me anything about how shirts are made.

3. "Custom-tailored" means "built to fit a specific, usually unique configuration." If "cuffs, collars and buttons would all be standard", you're not custom-tailored.

Also you don't mention fabric, which is one of the most important issues.

Also, most tailors would tell you that if you're just entering measurements in whole integers, it isn't custom-tailored. Now If I can enter "18 3/16 x 37 5/8", that's closer to custom.

But a sine qua non of custom-tailoring is being measured for the garment by someone who knows how to measure.

4. I'm going to measure myself? And there is a no-questions-asked return policy? That should be fun.

5. You're planning to get product from wherever they're made to the buyer in 48 hours? You know that most of these shirts are assembled in Asia, right?

They're all minor issues, though. Hey, if Outbox-- or grocery delivery services-- can get funded, I'm sure you can too.

Fully agree. For some observations to back up your view:

A quick market analysis (aka, a Google search) finds this video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0weojd1crNQ ) which shows how manually intensive it is to make a custom dress shirt.

That comes from Deo Veritas. The cheapest shirt they offer is $50. The shirt is made in Hong Kong, and takes several weeks to deliver. The FAQ says USPS charges $15 to send a first class package to Hong Kong, so with profit I expect the shirt costs about $25 to manufacture.

Checking now, you can't make shirts in Asia and have them shipped to the US within 48 hours at that price point. FedEx International Economy (48 hour delivery) for the shirt costs $50 from Hong Kong to San Francisco.

Which means you'll need to make it in the US, or more likely Mexico. Which is why you need to get $100 million to make this idea work. You'll need to set up a maquiladora just across the border, get the building and equipment, set up a supply chain for the fabric, and plan for enough sales to be able to make the investors happy.

Minimum wage for garment workers in Mexico is about US$6/hour. Minimum wage in Hong Kong is under $4/hour. Assuming most of the $25 is in labor costs in Hong Kong, that same basic shirt would cost about $35 to make in Mexico.

This is above your price point.

More expensive shirts take more time to make. Once the labor differential between Mexico and Asia exceeds $60 (the price for FedEx international priority), your Asian competitors can undercut you.

FWIW, I have no idea if these numbers are right. I have no expertise in this field. But if you (the OP, not rufusjones) can't do this sort of back-of-the-envelope calculations, then perhaps you shouldn't enter this business.

Thanks for filling in some details. I don't have any expertise in the apparel business either, but general principles indicated how badly thought out this was.

Really, a functioning brain stem is all you need. If this were a workable business model, you could get them at Walmart, because they can get stuff made cheaper than anyone else thanks to their selling clout.

Incredibly brutal but probably dead on.

A printed t-shirt generally costs $5+, much more if it's a one-off. I don't think it's possible to approach $30 for a custom dress shirt.

It is if you use underpants gnomes, eg:

1. Order shirt online 2. ? 3. $30 dress shirt in 48 hours with profit!

I'd been thinking of generating fitted sewing patterns once, and did a very basic search of what existing software already does that. Based on the (bad) reviews of existing products, I suspect the problem of making clothes fit is harder than it looks. http://wildginger.com/ is one company to look at.

Of course, on the supply side, the best way to validate this is talk to some tailors about what their job entails, and learn how mass-produced clothing is made. I suspect that making this work would require finding a way to hire tailors very cheaply, in a location that's within 48 hour shipping distance.

I'd consider buying from a company like this, if I were confident that it actually would fit well, and the style I wanted was available in a lot of different colors. (Some parts of fit are personal preference - like the tradeoff between freedom of movement in the arms vs. clean-looking sleeve caps.) Also, as a woman who'se been shopping with other women, this should also work for womens' office clothing if it works for men. Differences in bust sizes add an extra variable to finding things that fit, and in certain styles (like fitted shirts and dresses that don't stretch), it can make things hard.

A few thoughts:

- The cost of tailoring a shirt here in Beijing can be as low as 15 USD _excluding fabric_. Your labour costs will be higher than this if you want to make things locally.

- You will need 1.8 to 2.0 metres of fabric per shirt, so your fabric cost will be a _minimum_ of 8 USD per shirt

- You will have shirts returned because they don't fit right, and need to factor those in to your costs, as you won't be able to resell them

You might want to go online and buy 5 tailored shirts from different supplies, so you can understand the customer experience. Start at ravistailor.com.

I will be amazed if you can offer quality custom shirts in 48 hours for 30USD all-in. You could have custom shirts tailored in China for ~25USD if you are willing to limit the quality and selection of fabrics, but that doesn't leave you much for margin, fulfillment or overheads.

Quite a few guys I know in nyc get their shirts custom at 50 a pop, if I recall. It's quite popular. I also think the secondary concern is fabric, ie wrinkle free. I would also say eliminate the hassle of measurements, ie have them take a picture with a standard object, ie credit card, and you do the measurements. Take a look at Europe, there are plenty of companies doing what you want to do.

As others have pointed out, the feature point of "bulk purchasing from manufacturer" is incompatible with "Custom tailored shirt". You can certainly get a dress shirt for $30 or less at stores like Target, JC Penney, Walmart, etc. but doing real custom shirts require skills and at least an hour or two of work. I watched my mom sew growing up and she's a professional sample maker at a fashion company in Los Angeles and here's the steps I can think of off the top of my head to make a custom shirt: 1) Get your measurements 2) Draw a pattern that conforms to those measurements 3) Cut cloth to pattern 4) Sew pieces together 5) Insert the collar structure 6) Sew buttons 7) Use appropriate buttonhole stitching 8) Sew labels on 9) Iron and press shirt.

He probably imagines that they can 3D-print the shirts.

If I remember right from talking to a tailor, collars, cuffs and buttons are almost all of the construction effort. If the idea behind "standard" configurations was "We can make these up in bulk in advance and then just add them to the shirt", this guy has even less clue about how to make a shirt than I thought.

It's kinda the point of "custom"-- it doesn't get thrown together from pieces and parts.

I'm in your market. 6'3", 160 lbs. I was all set to explain why I don't think your idea will work for marketing reasons (short version: A few larger diversified companies get close enough to the mark that they'll take your core business, and you'll need to be able to survive off seasonal variations, which won't work.) Then I found this today: http://www.moderntailor.com/ Maybe I'm wrong.

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