Show HN: The Warby Parker of Men’s Jeans
mottandbow.com
mottandbow.com
Alejandro - I was wondering if you could share what you think about the future of jeans in 5 years. You obviously have deep knowledge with Mott & Bow, so where do you think jeans and denim is going? Will everyone be wearing different colors of denim in 5 years? Will fit be more customizable and tailored? Will Levis always be the dominant brand?
Those are great questions. The traditional denim colors will always move the majority of the volume, but I do think taste is evolving, and with that you see new colors being added each season. Take a look at our latest addition, the Waverly's (http://www.mottandbow.com/straight-waverly-2-month.html). These are a deep blue indigo color, a bit non traditional but always clean.
I think Levis has done a great job (they have reached ubiquity in denim). The cool part of our proposition is that we are offering designer denim (usually offered at +$200 because of the superior material and handcraft that goes into it) at half the price by going direct to consumer instead of the traditional model (where prices reach 8x what they cost to make).
Would be cool to do something like Jack Threads does. Put the model specs with the jeans. (Height / Weight)
Also, maybe some pics with models with different body types as well. Helps someone figure out how the jeans will look like on their body type.
We just started out a few months ago so we purposefully limited the SKU count, but will be adding 30 inseam for some of the styles that come out next year.
They also do the whole home-try on thing for men's clothing.
1- We are bringing the denim from one of the top denim mills in the world. 2- Our home try-on is for sizing on the same item (you get two different sizes of the same style), not trying to cross sell items.
The only style we currently have a size 27 is this one http://www.mottandbow.com/skinny/skinny-bleecker-resin-rinse...
I would love to offer more sizes but we have to find the demand for those. Any clue how we can reach that smaller waist size demographic?
It's kind of a tough problem; I can tell you that my demand for jeans is pretty low, in large part because buying jeans is such a miserable experience. In the best case scenario, I get to go to an outlet mall and search through racks and racks of jeans; in the likely event that I can't find my size, I have to be a 26 year old man asking a salesperson where they have "Boys size 14" jeans. This has never failed to be humiliating, and I hate having to do it. As a result, I buy jeans four or five pairs at a time and wear them until they all fall apart; this means I never have to shop for jeans more than every four or five years, and it minimizes the amount of time I'm forced to engage in what has never failed to be a totally shitty experience [1].
As a result, I'll occasionally come across services like yours that advertise a revolution in jeans buying, and I'll think "oh hey, that sounds great! I hate buying jeans, maybe these guys have made it better" and invariable I discover that oh wait, they actually don't solve my problem. And then I figure, "Well, I've got another three years of jeans-time left before I need to worry about it, so whatever" and I forget about the service, because I don't have space in my brain to keep a record of all the companies that might, at some point in the vague, undetermined future, sell something that interests me.
It's something of an assumption, but I'm guessing that most of the 'Petite Adult Male' demographic is probably roughly like me; they've discovered that it's really un-fun to have to ask where the kid's clothes are when they shop, and so they minimize the number of times they have to shop. That minimizes the window of time for which they actually demand jeans, and that means it's very challenging for you to offer jeans for sale during the time in which they're attempting to buy them; you basically get one chance and if you don't have what they're looking for, they're lost as a customer forever.
I don't really have a solution for you; 27 inch waists are basically a weird edge case that I happen to fall into, and it appears to be entirely possible to flourish as a jeans company without selling them, so it's not like this is dooming your company to failure. You likely know more about the selling and marketing of clothes than I do, so maybe if I can give you some additional context into why that demographic is challenging to reach, you'll have some ideas?
[1]: One time, I tried to order 27x27 jeans online from the Levi's store. This was a horrible mistake that led to me having to send back no less than three different pairs of jeans that were random sizes with no relation to what I ordered, and each time it meant almost an hour on the telephone trying to make somebody understand that what I had ordered was 27x27 jeans and yet what I had received was 32x35 or 29x30 or 30x30, regardless of what their records indicated or what guarantees the previous phone call had left me with. It took literally a month and at the end of it I ended up having to buy the damn jeans in a store anyways.