A Journey into Personalized Luxury Fashion: Editorialist YX CEO Rafael Ortiz (Part 1)

As you know, I have a passion for personalized luxury fashion and ventured into that market early on in 1999 when the market wasn’t quite ready for it yet. Rafael is building a wonderful luxury fashion venture with unique personalization details.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Rafael Ortiz: I was born in Stanford Hospital and was initially raised in Mexico. Spanish is my first language. My father is Mexican. He was a tech employee himself. He worked for Motorola, Fairchild, and Intel. We moved back to the United States and grew up as the son of an engineer. I got exposed to entrepreneurship.

I was quite lazy and I liked reading. I was interested in being successful. It’s hard to be successful if you’re lazy. One day, my mom said, “I just read an article about a young man who traveled the whole world who didn’t do much and now he’s running this amazing computer company.” It was a profile on Steve Jobs. I read that and thought that’s what I want to do. It was in business school that I got really serious.

Sramana Mitra: This was at Stanford?

Rafael Ortiz: Yes. I worked on startup ideas. With a classmate of mine, we then started NexTag two years after business school. Since that point, that’s all I’ve ever done.

Sramana Mitra: I remember NexTag, but I don’t remember what year it started. Since we’re doing your entrepreneurial journey, let’s go into a little bit of the NexTag story. Before we do that, I’m going to tell you a story about Steve Jobs. My husband ran Next for Steve Jobs. He actually was instrumental in selling Next to Apple. They were spending a lot of time together. One of the things that Steve told him was, “I want to go back to India. You should come with me. I want to go sleep on riverbeds.” My husband didn’t want to go back to India and sleep on riverbeds at all.

Rafael Ortiz: Here’s my story about him. When we were in business school, we went to Next to interview Steve. It was a very good interview. He said a lot of juicy things. He ended up trashing Gil Amelio and Apple in that interview. We gave him a preview copy.

He must have realized that he said way more than he should have. In a span of three hours, he called my co-author and threatened him, “You delete all this, or I’m going to do this and this.” My co-founder, without consulting me, went ahead and made the changes and legally agreed to it. A day later, he told me what he had done. I was like, “What have you done? We had this amazing material for this book.”

Sramana Mitra: All this interviewing that you were doing was when you were at Stanford?

Rafael Ortiz: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: And you published this as a book?

Rafael Ortiz: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Rafael Ortiz: I graduated in 1996. The book came out in 1997.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that?

Rafael Ortiz: Right after school, I went to work as a product manager at a startup that failed. After it failed, I then reached out to my classmate. We were going to work on something. We don’t know what it is, but we’re not going to go get jobs.

This segment is part 1 in the series : A Journey into Personalized Luxury Fashion: Editorialist YX CEO Rafael Ortiz
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