Bombing IP
Well-Known Member
Another American that has been around 10 years making jeans doing it a little different with interesting way of keeping the price down
Gustin – Building a Better (Selvedge) Mousetrap?
Profiles Brand Profiles
Published: Apr 25, 2018 by John Bobey
I got married last fall, and as we were planning the event, we asked our invitees to respond as to whether or not they would be attending. Nothing out of the ordinary–the idea of the RSVP…”Répondez s’il vous plaît”…French for, “Hey–are you coming or what?”–is hundreds of years old.
We did this to know how many guests to expect, but more importantly to know how many pumpkin sage fritters and short rib entrees we should prepare. It didn’t make sense to simply invite as many as we wanted, have no idea what percentage would show up, and order way more food than we may need. After all, it’s not like we could plop the uneaten tureens of pumpkin soup on the restaurant’s sale rack to recoup some of our expense.
And while oversimplified, this parable pretty accurately illustrates the scattershot, wasteful model that many, many clothing brands apply in making and selling their wares. “Will people like this style, this fit, this color, this size? Hopefully! But…we better jack up the price and have those 40% Off signs ready just in case we’re wrong…”
Inefficiencies in a market–any market–are costly, and that cost is always passed on to the end consumer: you. Big fashion brands have to hedge their bets (granted, there’s some method to their madness), and that hedge means they have to charge more for all the pieces they do sell to make up for the ones they inevitably don’t (at least not at full price).
Another facet to this scenario is that, even while they do need to pad their prices, the great majority of brands also know they need to keep prices somewhat reasonable, so they manufacturer their clothing for as little as possible, and that means by foreign workers in foreign lands (where safety and human dignity regulations are often far more lax), and out of lower quality materials. So we pay more for inferior things made by people who earn less and in likely unwonderful conditions. In the words of Mad magazine, Blech! Thankfully, not not everyone follows suit.
We’ve written about the Gustin brand here in the past, and not always in the most glowing terms. They are but one of the many companies that used Kickstarter (and other similar sites) to launch their crowd-sourced approach to getting into the jeans game, promising premium denim at non-premium prices (their pitch, specifically, was $81 instead of $205). Some of these companies didn’t deliver–literally–and others that did fell short of their promises.
It’s also easy for the more curmudgeonly amongst us (present company included) to feel hesitant when we feel that something we hold precious is being co-opted by those kids and their new-fangled technology, or is being done so by those trying to game the system. In 2013, our own Managing Editor David Shuck talked about the idea like this:
In order to test drive the Gustin process as authentically as possible, I participated in it like anyone else would. I went to their site, saw what models (jeans, chinos, tees, shorts, bags, sneakers–they’ve grown beyond a denim brand) were being offered, “Backed” four pieces (saying that, if that style got sufficiently “Funded” I was committed to paying for the size and fit I selected), and waited. Everything I wanted did get funded, and about eight weeks later they arrived at my door.
OK, the eight weeks part begs discussion. Since the bedrock principle of Gustin’s approach is that they don’t make anything until they know how many and of what size and fit they’ve sold, it takes a while to take delivery. Even on the relatively small scale on which Gustin does this, it takes time, and this is an example where time is money, money you get to keep.
Before I get into a review of each style I received, here’s a bit of a conversation I had with Ren Sanchez. “I’ve had a lot of titles here at Gustin,” he said, “but I guess you could now say I’m the Product Development Manager. Basically trying to get more products on the ground and help continue expanding what Josh and Stephen have started.” (Gustin was co-founded by Josh Gustin and Stephen Powell.)
Gustin – Building a Better (Selvedge) Mousetrap?
Profiles Brand Profiles
Published: Apr 25, 2018 by John Bobey
I got married last fall, and as we were planning the event, we asked our invitees to respond as to whether or not they would be attending. Nothing out of the ordinary–the idea of the RSVP…”Répondez s’il vous plaît”…French for, “Hey–are you coming or what?”–is hundreds of years old.
We did this to know how many guests to expect, but more importantly to know how many pumpkin sage fritters and short rib entrees we should prepare. It didn’t make sense to simply invite as many as we wanted, have no idea what percentage would show up, and order way more food than we may need. After all, it’s not like we could plop the uneaten tureens of pumpkin soup on the restaurant’s sale rack to recoup some of our expense.
And while oversimplified, this parable pretty accurately illustrates the scattershot, wasteful model that many, many clothing brands apply in making and selling their wares. “Will people like this style, this fit, this color, this size? Hopefully! But…we better jack up the price and have those 40% Off signs ready just in case we’re wrong…”
Inefficiencies in a market–any market–are costly, and that cost is always passed on to the end consumer: you. Big fashion brands have to hedge their bets (granted, there’s some method to their madness), and that hedge means they have to charge more for all the pieces they do sell to make up for the ones they inevitably don’t (at least not at full price).
Another facet to this scenario is that, even while they do need to pad their prices, the great majority of brands also know they need to keep prices somewhat reasonable, so they manufacturer their clothing for as little as possible, and that means by foreign workers in foreign lands (where safety and human dignity regulations are often far more lax), and out of lower quality materials. So we pay more for inferior things made by people who earn less and in likely unwonderful conditions. In the words of Mad magazine, Blech! Thankfully, not not everyone follows suit.
We’ve written about the Gustin brand here in the past, and not always in the most glowing terms. They are but one of the many companies that used Kickstarter (and other similar sites) to launch their crowd-sourced approach to getting into the jeans game, promising premium denim at non-premium prices (their pitch, specifically, was $81 instead of $205). Some of these companies didn’t deliver–literally–and others that did fell short of their promises.
It’s also easy for the more curmudgeonly amongst us (present company included) to feel hesitant when we feel that something we hold precious is being co-opted by those kids and their new-fangled technology, or is being done so by those trying to game the system. In 2013, our own Managing Editor David Shuck talked about the idea like this:
David was not wrong. But that was five years ago, and at that point Gustin had already been in business for six years. That means they’ve managed to stay afloat now for 11 years–a long time in this incredibly competitive denim world. I believe it’s time to say that Gustin has broken from the pack, transcended their Kickstarter beginnings, and delivers on their promise of higher-grade offerings at entry-level prices. They’ve built a working mousetrap, and it’s full of denim heads just like me.Selling direct to consumer on Kickstarter may make it easier for an aspiring designer to get some attention, but the flipside of removing the middlemen — the standing arbiters of taste — is that it’s nearly impossible to tell the signal from the noise. Without that filter, many Kickstarter hucksters are just modern snake-oil salesmen, stringing together as many generic menswear tropes as possible in two minutes or less and you have to decide — product unseen and unmade — if they deserve your money. On the rare chance that a Kickstarter brand actually has an interesting product or story to share, it’s often overshadowed by swipes at overseas manufacturing or half-baked brand ideology.
In an arena where failure has almost no consequence, designers shouldn’t be so generic, safe, and boring. Almost every brand is making (or promising to make) omnipresent staples like jeans, sweatshirts, oxford cloth button downs, and t-shirts — and the pitches all follow a similar semi-jingoistic script. That’s the problem, these companies aren’t trying to make clothes, they’re trying to build brands around a two minute video regardless of whatever product they happen to be hocking.
In order to test drive the Gustin process as authentically as possible, I participated in it like anyone else would. I went to their site, saw what models (jeans, chinos, tees, shorts, bags, sneakers–they’ve grown beyond a denim brand) were being offered, “Backed” four pieces (saying that, if that style got sufficiently “Funded” I was committed to paying for the size and fit I selected), and waited. Everything I wanted did get funded, and about eight weeks later they arrived at my door.
OK, the eight weeks part begs discussion. Since the bedrock principle of Gustin’s approach is that they don’t make anything until they know how many and of what size and fit they’ve sold, it takes a while to take delivery. Even on the relatively small scale on which Gustin does this, it takes time, and this is an example where time is money, money you get to keep.
Before I get into a review of each style I received, here’s a bit of a conversation I had with Ren Sanchez. “I’ve had a lot of titles here at Gustin,” he said, “but I guess you could now say I’m the Product Development Manager. Basically trying to get more products on the ground and help continue expanding what Josh and Stephen have started.” (Gustin was co-founded by Josh Gustin and Stephen Powell.)