Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 2)

Adam Schwartz: While all this was happening, the woman I was working with had some interaction with that PR agency. After exhanging ideas, we came upon the pain point of being a sustainable fashion designer. There was a sustainable fashion movement. A lot of people in fashion wanted to make sustainable choices, but everything that came after making those choices was difficult, specifically, sourcing the actual textiles sustainably. If we can be a resource to fashion designers and brands around how to and where to source the textiles that they need to create their stuff, that would be an interesting business. That would reduce some of the friction to helping the fashion industry become more sustainable. We started that company together. It was called Source4Style. It was a B2B platform where fashion designers could source and actually purchase textiles from suppliers around the world in varying degrees of sustainability.

We were bootstrapping and trying to piece it together. We ended up bringing on another co-founder and cobbled together a website. We started selling, both suppliers and designers, on the proposition of the site.

Sramana Mitra: You were bootstrapping the sourcing site. It’s a two-sided marketplace. How did you bring the two sides together?

Adam Schwartz: The end result of the product is if you’re a fashion designer, it’s an e-commerce experience for you. You could go and say, “I want to source organic cotton from India. I’m looking for this texture.” We would have swatches of fabric that we had photographed and uploaded like they are products on the site. You can order sample swatches directly through the e-commerce platform and then, if you want to order actual yardage volume, that could also happen through the website.

We would broker that deal between you and the supplier. The first thing we had to do was get the textiles on the website. We started cold-calling textile suppliers and trying to round out a nice collection and selling these pretty old school folks on the idea that this is an inevitability that there has to be online resources to connect to this very offline world. It’s a very relationship-based business. That was a hard thing to break.

It was interesting for me because my whole family is from the textile world. My grandfathers were in it selling textiles here in New York in the 50’s. On a personal level, it was a funny circle that I had fallen back to. It was relatively low risk for everybody involved. We weren’t charging them, at that time, to be on the platform. We just wanted to create the supply system. It was more an operational challenge. It gets complicated when certain suppliers are in the right wheelhouse for certain size of buyers. We also had a web product. I spent a large portion of my time managing the dev team and building out the functionality from a product standpoint.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get people transacting on this website?

Adam Schwartz: People were transacting in the first month itself. That was encouraging. We were able to get together designers who wanted stuff and suppliers who had the stuff. I look back at that now and see a lot of mistakes that we made. One of the things that I think we did a decent job with was we talked to a ton of designers before we talked to the suppliers, and we figured out what they wanted.

By the time we brought the textiles in, we already knew that this is going to work for this type of designers, or these colors are going to be big this season. We looked at what was going on in fashion and tried to do our best to have the right stuff for them. We got transactions going right away. It helped with the cash flow.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have any insights on how people were finding you?

Adam Schwartz: In terms of the designers, we were also, individually, going out to designers and saying, “You should use this for your sourcing needs.” In addition to that, we were doing press. We were going to trade shows where designers were looking for fabrics. We were going to Fashion Week. At that time we said, “If we can get a couple of hundred fashion designers on here, that will be okay for now.”

Sramana Mitra: You organically built up that base. How about the suppliers?

Adam Schwartz: We built out a sales process – cold calling to build a leads list. It was a numbers game. If I call a hundred suppliers, I’m going to get 15 to pick up the phone and five are going to come on the site. It was just hustle. The supplier at the trade shows were pretty good. We went booth to booth.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz
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