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 about the future of apparel being customization and personalization and doing it quickly. We invested a lot in building relationships. A lot of it was trying to convince someone of its future and potential and to invest in that. That combined with thoughtful relationship building over time. The big piece though was being on the ground in China. I personally lived there for two and a half years. My co-founder is still based there.

We actually setup an office in Shanghai. We would talk every day. When the time to move to a factory came, we met the owners in person. We developed processes over time. They then built into manufacturing our custom clothing over time. We also refined the process over time. It was very iterative and very personal, which actually applies to this day. A chunk of our company is still out of Shanghai. We’re still working closely with the factories that built this process. We’re creating a process.

Sramana Mitra: At what volume did you make the shift from multiple tailors to a dedicated factory?

Kyle Vucko: We were probably doing 10 plus garments a day.

Sramana Mitra: That’s actually not huge. You made that switch pretty early on.

Kyle Vucko: Yes, it was also because of the scale that was coming.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major milestone? You made the switch to dedicated factory. You lived there and built a bunch of processes. What are the other milestones in whatever strategic dimension?

Kyle Vucko: We started to invest in marketing. That was coming back to Canada and starting to hire a North American team for sales and customer service. We hired our first three or four staff in North America. That was a big piece for us. That was me moving back to Canada. We developed our PR strategy, marketing strategy, and customer service. We added procedures and processes there. It’s also scaling beyond my co-founder and I. We actually raised our first big round in 2010.

Sramana Mitra: How much was that and from whom?

Kyle Vucko: We raised $4 million from Madrona Venture Fund out of Seattle.

Sramana Mitra: Madrona alone?

Kyle Vucko: No, our experience has been that the existing investors participate.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Mass Customization in Online Fashion E-Commerce: Indochino CEO Kyle Vucko
1 2 3 4 5 6 7