321 | Making Your Brand Easy to Reach | with Aman Advani

Aman Advani

One-to-one, custom bespoke, personalized journeys and products. Everything has to be a big part of our plan. 

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Chase Clymer

Alright. On location, first episode, we are recording here at Etail West in Palm Springs. Gotta shout them out. They set up this location. We're gonna have a lot of fun noise. Definitely some traffic passing by.

But we're just going to get into it here. Today, I'm welcoming to the show, my first guest of the eTail trip. I'm with the CEO and co-founder over at the Ministry of Supply. They're a Boston-based clothing brand focused on engineering the most comfortable clothing on and for the planet. Welcome to the show. 

Aman Advani

Hey, thanks so much for having me. This is exciting. It's very exciting. Lots of things are happening. 

Chase Clymer

So take me back in time. Where did the idea for the Ministry of Supply come from? What was that differentiator? What were you looking to solve in the market? 

Aman Advani

Yeah, so zooming back way too far now, but first job out of college. I'm consulting every Monday morning. I'm on a plane, every Thursday night on a plane. I'm hacking the hotel iron, every Sunday I'm going to the dry cleaner, I've got pit stains, shirts half untucked, wrinkled by four o'clock in the afternoon.

And so, I just loved the job and despised the club and I truly despised getting up and wearing head to toe Brooks Brothers. And so, I started quietly hacking little pieces of my clothing which I started with my socks. I took out the soles of my socks, scissors like literally cut and then cut out the soles of a pair of cushy Nike running socks, sewed them in, hand sewing, nothing wild. 

And created my own little Frankensock which was my established dress code of how you should look. And this is my way of being a little secretly incredible and having a little edge and I felt more comfortable. Fast forward, I go to business school. I'm the only one on MIT's campus talking about fashion. 

I happened to meet my co-founder, the only other one, who was cutting out the center back panel, my partner, Gihon, of his dress shirts and sewing in the center back panel of his running shirts. Gihon's a world-class runner and made a dress shirt so that he could stretch it.

And so both of us had this pain of like, man, we just don't want to put on stiff stuff, you dress clothes, and we know we got to look nice. What's the way to solve it? We're engineers by background. Let's just do it ourselves. 

Chase Clymer

Well, how long was it from meeting your co-founder to where you guys, this is an idea that we're going to take seriously and explore? 

Aman Advani

Yeah, it was probably instant. I mean, both of us met. When we felt like this was something we really wanted to put our hearts into. We felt like the world needed this. I was on leave from consulting, so I had a safe spot for two years at business school where I could just play, see if the world cares, let's launch a Kickstarter and figure out if there's a market here. 

But from the time we met, October until we launched your Kickstarter, six months, 12 prototypes. Once every two weeks, we were turning out a new sample. 

Chase Clymer

You're taking all my questions from me. All right. So you guys are launching this Kickstarter. Did you even see a sample before you went? The Kickstarter, were you trying to see if there was an appetite for these types of items in the market beforehand? 

Aman Advani

Yeah. So we did this really great thing. In hindsight, I would encourage a lot more people to do it. We did these little table reads, let's say, where we would get a sample from our factory in New York. 

We would bring it back to business school or on campus where we'd have enough friends and family that would give us some mildly honest feedback. We would test it ourselves and then we would go run another sample. And so we did this something like 14 times over maybe more like seven months. I remember number 14 was the one we shot the video for a Kickstarter campaign. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. So, walk me through the Kickstarter. Did you have wild aspirations? Did you hit your goal then some? Like, how'd that happen? 

Aman Advani

I was 26 in college, not sure what we're doing. We've never done anything like this before. Neither of us come from fashion and we're terrified. So, we set a goal of $30,000. If we can sell $30,000 in a month, there's a business here. There's something here. And it turned out we sold $430,000, which sounds great. But when you have a supply chain built for 30, you can imagine that caused some trouble. 

Chase Clymer

So the Kickstarter did for 30? 

Aman Advani

In that 30-day period, Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Obviously, it shows that there's some appetite for these products on the market. How did you switch the model from what arguably is a pre-sale drop model through Kickstarter to talking about supply chain, building up the product lines? It's like you have a successful Kickstarter. Now you have to make the product. Now you have to fulfill all these things. Walk me through that. 

Aman Advani

Yeah. I mean, it was effectively the way to think of it as a one-year timeout. I mean, we had to hit pause and do nothing for a year other than fulfill 8,000 shirts. We were positioned for something like 300 a month.

So we had to build up an entirely new supply chain. It would have taken us something like four years to get all the shirts out with the existing supply chain. And even then, it would have changed a lot. So it was for us just an absolute. It went from the highest of the high to, oh shit, we have no chance. How do we fix this? 

Chase Clymer

Are you solving these supply chain problems, these growth problems? Are you trying to get new customers or are you just trying to take care of the ones that are already sold?

Aman Advani

Nothing. We are just trying to get shirts on bodies. I mean, our only goal at this point is to not have these 2,798 backers pissed. We want to empower them, excite them and make them feel like they are our only goal, right? 

There were horror stories on Kickstarter of projects delayed two years. Meanwhile, the company is shipping to new wholesale partners and we were just not going to be that. So, we put our heads down. Probably the toughest year of the business, maybe save COVID and just drilled on making these shirts. 

Now, I will also tell you as a spoiler, they ended up being terrible shirts. And I can tell you that story too. But we got them all out in a not unreasonable amount of time, which itself was a bit of a feat. 

Chase Clymer

What's not unreasonable for the amount of orders for what you prefer? Did you get them all out in a year? 

Aman Advani

Yeah. So I think the campaign ended in July. We promised October they were all out by January. So maybe max or three months late, but some on time. So not terrible, but not perfect. 

Chase Clymer

And then you learn about customer service and reviews. 

Aman Advani

That's right. At the time, it was still kind of what we think of today in the review ecosystem. It was a little harder to blast a company, but we didn't need to be hard to reach. We made ourselves very easy to reach. We wanted feedback. We wanted to understand that from an engineering standpoint, these things were absolute monsters. 

They could handle anything, any wash cycle. They're still around today. They were tanks of shirts. These were a dress shirt made with NASA technology. They were impenetrable. But they didn't look that great. The fit was a little bit off. The drape was a little off. 

So, maybe exposing more of your body's shape than you intended. And we learned a quick lesson about technology. If the car doesn't look great, no one cares what's under the hood. 

Chase Clymer

Talk to me about now moving into solving those problems with the flagship product but expanding the product line and you're not launching again on Kickstarter. I'm assuming you now have a dot com. 

Aman Advani

That's right. So we move right into the web world again. This is still at this point. Maybe not quite pre-Shopify but very early days of Shopify. You didn't just have plug and play websites, right? You had to build a lot of this from scratch. You had to code a lot of this from scratch, which seems wild, but not more than 10 years ago. 

But our first instinct was still, in hindsight, correct, which is service and excite these 2,798 people. And we did so through making sure that they were satisfied with what they got for what they were promised. 

If they weren't replacing, refunding relentlessly and doing whatever we needed to make sure that they felt like it. They had been delivered to and then showing them the journey of creating a version two and being really cautious and careful involving them in that process. Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

Gotta love recording this on location and scaring people from walking by but that's what we want to do here because it's how we want to have this cut. So trying to just keep these 2,950 customers, is that right? 

Aman Advani

2,798. 

Chase Clymer

I had them backwards. Trying to keep these customers happy. Are we adding to the product line? Are we just revamping the product? What were we doing? If we could do it again, or what did we do? Two different questions.

Aman Advani

I'll tell you what we did. We raced for version two. But simultaneously, if anyone's been in a product dev cycle, there's downtime. You're waiting. And you're building other things, but still as a small team with not much to show.

We get antsy, we want pants, right? We don't want to be coupling our amazing dress shirt with a pair of really stiff stuffy dress pants. We want undershirts, right? The amplifying impact if you're going to wear an undershirt, make sure it's ours. 

Breathability through the armpit shouldn't be stopped by a cotton undershirt hitting a beautifully breathable dress shirt. And so, we kind of split off in those directions pretty quickly. If I could do it again, I would spend just a touch more time perfecting the flagship before diversifying the portfolio. But we didn't know.

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Chase Clymer

Hey, well, there are people listening now that might be in a similar boat. And that's exactly what they needed to hear. So taking a quick shift on the conversation, if we're going to zoom out 20, 50, 100 years, what about the business is going to survive? 

Aman Advani

Yeah. So we try to think a lot about this, not just from a fashion standpoint. What does timeless look like? Anything black, simple, easy silhouettes. So there's a fashionable answer to that question. But that will pass. There's still trends even if they're macro, right? So, we will see these shifts, we will see them through, we will still push through them. But what won't change. Well, one way to the future is to knit, which is kind of a wild and silly thing to say. For those that aren't aware, knits are t-shirts, sweatpants, hoodies, right? Woves tend to be your suiting dress shirts, stuff like this. So, everything that I'm wearing at any point is knit even if it looks like it is woven. 

Most importantly is that comfort is timeless and knit tends to equate nicely to comfort at a very basic level. So one we think of this pervasive nature of how do you stay comfortable while still looking sharp will be a graceful marriage that we will continue to perfect for the next hundred years. That will never go away. What we think will be introduced is a much more advanced perspective on wearable technology. 

Everyone immediately thinks of the Apple Watch, right? It's literally wearing technology, taking a small iPhone and strapping it onto your arm. It's not really wearable technology. It's just strapping technology onto your arm. But we have, for instance, created a heated jacket with a small computer under the lapel that would adjust heat output, depending on a number of factors. That, to us, is a step in the right direction of wearable technology, creating personal thermostats, creating personal environments we think is the future of clothing.

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Now I'm going to just completely switch gears because the coffee is kicking in. You mentioned this was pre Shopify, pre plug and play. I'm an internet history guru. Was the first website iteration 100% custom? Are you still on a custom stack? Talk to me through the right choices and wrong choices you made in building this website and this business.

Aman Advani

So I'll say as a quick plug, we're very pro Shopify. The first website was on Shopify, but it was a custom front end. We then went to Shopify native, we went to Magento, we then went to Shopify headless. And now as of six months ago, we're back on Shopify, Shopify plus native and have no intent to leave in the next decade. 

So maybe to tell you what it looks like 100 years from now, we're still on Shopify plus. Maybe they've negotiated our fees a little bit. But otherwise, we're sticking around. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. At one point, you had to expand your customer base from the roughly 3000 that backed you on Kickstarter. How did engineers that were into fashion tackle marketing? 

Aman Advani

Yeah. So you have to remember too, again, if we talk about the history of the internet from 2013 to 2017, there was no playbook, right? Marketing was the Wild Wild West. It was largely to find your customer and tailor a solution to get to them. So whether that be magazines.

Direct mail was certainly still a thing again.

Chase Clymer

It's coming back. It's a thing again. 

Aman Advani

It's always been coming back but it never really went away. But Facebook, click-based advertising was still in its infancy. And so we were doing a lot of direct buys, a lot of guerrilla marketing, a lot of getting out into the market, a lot of product seeding, a very wide net of marketing with very little attribution. 

Chase Clymer

So why do you say product seeding? Because people think that's a groundbreaking idea these days, which I think is maybe the best way is to break a brand new brand these days. But that's a whole different topic. Foundation. 

And you talked about direct mail. A lot of these things are still around and they're still extremely useful in building a brand. And it's just like the strategy might alter a little bit because the technology is a little bit newer. But in the end, it's the same strategy. 

Aman Advani

It is. And with one major advantage, especially if you think about these analog strategies like seeding, physical product, direct mail. The big shift is that our ability to track them has increased dramatically. You weren't just throwing money at a hole and hoping that you got it right. 

You're all of a sudden now able to say, no, I can look and say my direct mail has a linear incremental robust of X. Now I can actually optimize my strategy and fine tune it to invest with whatever works. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now, let's talk about being in this industry for almost a decade now. My business partner comes from an apparel background. And I think that one of the advantages to young entrepreneurs of getting into the apparel space is it's easy. 

Aman Advani

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

But maybe that's also a disadvantage too, because what's the differentiator if there isn't much of a hill to climb there? So how would you describe what makes a brand good or what makes apparel worthwhile to explore?

Aman Advani

Yeah, I love this question. I love the barrier to entry becoming lower. I love the tech stack becoming more ubiquitous. We're all on Shopify plus. We're all using Klaviyo. We're all using the same tools. 

And by doing so, I think it creates a much more level playing field that allows for great products to be elevated. Right? And so ultimately, our goal and vision is to continue pouring all of our investment back into the products. We're not a D2C brand. 

None of the great products. And the more that the playing field becomes even, the more great products are able to stay with us. So yes, you can enter more easily. You also get kicked out a lot more easily. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. You can light money on fire a lot more quickly. 

Aman Advani

That's right. And that graveyard, we see the retail apocalypse graveyard, the online graveyard is 10 times deeper. We just don't see it. Right. So quick in, but also quick out. 

Chase Clymer

You kind of hinted at a little golden egg there. The easiest way to build a great business is to have a great product. We say not every great product wins, but only great products win. And if the system is working properly, that should hold true. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now, we covered the gamut from you guys getting your start on Kickstarter selling way too much. Just getting thrown in the deep end, figuring all that out up to now. What's going on? Your ideas about the brand? Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience? 

Aman Advani

I think your audience will appreciate the power of inventory. And it's something like the old is new again. And for years, inventory and supply chain in turns were in the name of the game. And then we started shifting all of our conversations to tech stacks, CPCs, ROAs, incrementality, all of this kind of became the focus of what made a brand grow. 

And now again, as that playing field re-levels, re-stabilizes, we realized that the original value of

high stocking rate, low inventory on hand, high turns, high margins, is actually the differentiator. 

So I got a great product, I got a great marketing stack. Now I need to turn it. Now I need to have it in stock. Now I need to have it in the right place in the right channel at the right time. And so I think there's this wonderful resurgence of the COO holding the power once again, and being an incredibly important player in getting it right. 

Chase Clymer

No, and I think just to dumb it down and be a layman in that conversation, it's any inventory you have on hand is just cash that's unrealized sitting there. 

Aman Advani

That's it. 

Chase Clymer

And if you plan wrong or over. We saw this a lot on the back end of COVID where people had too much stock. 

Aman Advani

Absolutely. The bullwhip. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. So, has technology made it easier or is it still half art, half science? 

Aman Advani

Yeah. It was all art for a long time. There was very little science to merchandising and all this. I would say now we've advanced to half art, half science, right?I still do think there's a fundamental choice that brands have to make on timeless versus timed. 

And saying, is it a quick turn? Are we replenishing once a month? Are we always on the supply chain? Is it seasonal? Is it biannual? And making these fundamental decisions of how you structure your supply chain, how you structure your supply chain team, how much you invest in that can be as critical as the growth marketer you hired to build a brand. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And I've even seen some younger brands out there in the ecosystem that are taking print on demand a step further to custom manufactured on demand. And the technology is not too far off where that could be a viable model. 

Aman Advani

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

And it's just interesting to watch how technology kind of changes apparel, which is one of the oldest industries out there. 

Aman Advani

And but most susceptible as a result to change and whatever comes next. So I think absolutely one-to-one custom, bespoke, personalized journeys, products, everything has to be a big part of our plan. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now, you've talked so much about how invested the company is in making a great product. If I'm listening to this and I want to check out the product, where should I go? What should I do? 

Aman Advani

Oh, good. You give me a little plug here. I like it. 

Chase Clymer

Dude, I'm a professional. 

Aman Advani

And I'll say I'm not supposed to play favorites, but this seems like a safe space. I'm today wearing our Kinetic platform, which is just a tried and true test. I think we launched it originally in 2015.

Every year we tweak it, we make it better. But it's similar to Lululemon's ABC fabric, although we did it first. And think soft stretchy machine washable, but can be worn with a t-shirt dressed up with a suit jacket, anything in between. So if you want to give it a shot, ministryspy.com, search Kinetic or just poke around and see what fits you. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome, Aman. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these insights. 

Aman Advani

Thanks for having me. This was great.

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestecommerce.co to get each episode delivered right to your inbox. 

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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.

Until next time!