The Proper Blog

2009 was a blast, and I’m excited to share that we’re ending the year with our biggest month yet.

We had a lot of help in 2009… so here are a few thanks.

Most obviously, thanks to our software team, tailors and graphic artists for being so damn talented.

Thanks to our very first customers, who miraculously found our website in the first couple months we were open.  Our site was confusing and buggy, but you were determined enough to figure things out and complete a sale.  Furthermore, you were understanding if we messed up your orders.  Like Ryan, whose “hurricane ready” shirt was 8″ too long or Gaetan whose cuff accents were inside out.  We had many kinks to work out and you patiently worked through these issues with us.

Thanks to all the friends who purchased shirts, even if you didn’t need a shirt or would otherwise never consider buying a $100 dress shirt, without a discount, without me even asking you to do so, simply to show support.

Thanks to the friends and customers who helped spread the word about Proper Cloth.  Your emails to co-workers, posts on twitter and facebook, and invitations to friends was the advertising we could not afford.

Thanks to our summer intern who spent her summer working here and even now, while she finishes her MBA at Wharton, continues to kick ass selling dress shirts.

Thanks to the other volunteers, who took a personal interest in Proper Cloth and spent real hours putting in work.  Whether it was writing emails to bloggers, starring in informational video’s, lending your photography expertise, recruiting your own networks to help, editing blog posts, or just being a sounding board for new ideas, you’ve been a huge help.

Thanks to our investor who had the guts to bet on Proper Cloth.  Thanks for being polite, understanding and fair.  Thanks for being up-front and honest.  Thanks for providing informed advice.  Thanks for providing access to your network and business.  Thanks for knowing how to get involved without trying to take over.

Thanks to all the bloggers that wrote about us, purely because you thought we were interesting.  You helped customers find us when we were too small to get the attention of larger press and too poor to advertise.  Thanks also to the traditional publications that covered us and added legitimacy to our name.  Thanks to the print magazines that included us in their gift guides.

Thanks to all the members of forums who discussed us.  You helped spread the word, helped answer other people’s questions and provided us with excellent recommendations and ideas to improve.

Thanks to all the customers that provide us real, thoughtful feedback.  You took the time to write up software bugs and carefully describe what you wanted us to add.  Your suggestions provided ideas we would not have thought of otherwise and helped us prioritize our development.  Thanks also for telling us what you like.  For a startup there’s nothing more rewarding than hearing success stories – and knowing that all our hard work is actually making someone’s life better in some way.

Thanks to all my advisors, formal and informal, for listening to my questions and making suggestions.  You kept the bigger picture in mind and helped me make sure my strategy was reasonable.

Thanks to the other entrepreneurs.  You were open about your own businesses and full of good ideas and recommendations.  You met up for lunch, answered the phone, responded promptly to emails, or met up for a mid-week beer.  You were able to relate to the stress of running a startup in a way that no one else could.  When things felt dismal you reminded me of the potential.  When things went well you helped celebrate.

Finally – and personally – thanks to my close friends and family for your love and emotional support.   When everything felt like it was falling apart, you provided perspective and helped me stay sane.  Knowing you are there means the world.

Well, they say time flies when you’re having fun… so, this must be fun.  Can hardly believe it’s been a full month since the last blog post.  You, like my mother, may be wondering – what the heck are you doing with your life? (No, mom: I have not found a nice girl and “settled down”.  Sorry.  I will try harder.)

However, Proper Cloth has been making some great progress that we’re ready to share.

New Website Look

So – I’ve been working on the design for this website for almost a year now – and well – I guess I’ve learned a few things along the way.  So – if you check out http://propercloth.com, the first thing you’ll notice is that the site has a new (and we hope improved) look and feel to it.  It also should load a bit faster.  Please let us know what you think.

New Shirt Images

The simulated dress shirt images we had before were pretty cool.  However, even we could admit that they were kind of cartoony.  That might have been good enough, but we wanted to do better.  So, with our new shirt images you’ll see a new level of realism and a higher resolution zoom image.  We want to make designing your clothes online as easy as possible, leaving as little as possible to the imagination. With this update, we think we’re getting pretty close to that goal.

The Londoner Collar

We heard your requests for wider spread collars, so we’re really excited to now offer the Londoner collar as a standard option.  It’s wider than the English Spread Collar.  I’ve already made several shirts for myself with this collar and have to say – it is my favorite to wear without a tie.

Customer Reviews

We strive to be as authentic and transparent as possible – and we think unbiased customer reviews are critical to achieving that.  So, we built a customer review interface that we’re really excited about.  Basically, it allows customers to post feedback on their Proper Cloth shirts directly to our site.  Unfiltered and uncensored.  We’re excited to hear more from our customers and find ways to further improve our service.  We also think this information will be useful to other prospective customers looking for tailored dress shirts online.

Fixes, Repairs, Overhauls, Patches

In our defense, Proper Cloth was originally bootstrapped by a debt-laden MBA student – and as such, there were a few parts of the site that were let’s just say – less than perfect.  Luckily, we’ve been able to attract some additional investors, and finally address these issues.  There were little things that caused us headaches in the past.  For example, our gift certificate purchasing system was a serious cudgel.  I don’t even know what a “cudgel” is, but I feel like it is the right word.  Our shopping cart, back end analytics and order management systems also received a good upgrade.

So – What’s Next?

Well, we’re not stopping now.  We have lots of new features that will be coming out in the next few weeks/months that will make it easier for you to get exactly the custom dress shirt you are looking for.  We can’t say exactly what they are, but I promise you will like them.  What we can say is that we will be growing our fabric selection significantly in just the next few days – so be sure to check back for that.

Today, at Proper Cloth we are beginning to open our service to the first members.  We’ve done everything we can to make shopping for dress clothes online fun and interesting and in the process we’ve come up with some pretty interesting technology that I’d like to introduce.

One of the things we’re particularly proud of are the hyper-realistic product previews (oh, you thought those were photographs?) that we generate in real time as a member designs their product.  For one thing, this helps us keep our costs low because we didn’t need to physically manufacture a million different products and take a million pictures.  Another benefit is that it makes designing your clothing fun – showing you instantly the effects of combining different fabrics and design elements.  Because the product preview is so real, you know with certainty that you’ll like what you’ve created. Shopping on the internet is hard enough since you can’t inspect a product physically, but showing high resolution images sure helps a lot.

Another cool thing we’ve done is give users the ability to specify a shirt size based on any off-the-rack brand and size.  Have you ever gone shopping and thought: this shirt fits great, except it’s too loose in the waist, or the sleeves are too short, or the collar is too tight?  Or maybe it’s happened to you where you say: wow this shirt fits great, but it’s such an ugly color!  Well that sort of thing happened to us all the time, so we designed our system to solve this problem directly.  It took quite a bit of time and effort to measure all those shirts (and weirded out a bunch of changing room clerks) but we think it was worth it because it makes getting a shirt that fits so much easier and intuitive for our members.

Of course there’s a lot more to Proper Cloth than 3D product previews and a huge database of shirt sizes to choose from, but for now, we’ll leave that to our members to explore.

It’s been a long journey turning Proper Cloth from an idea into reality, but we’re almost there.  Guess I’ll start with a bit of a personal introduction and an explanation of how all this got started:

After sampling a variety of careers, I went to business school, which included internships in Shanghai and Bangalore, and that’s where I got my first custom dress shirts.  The fabric was nothing special, the construction was mediocre and the negotiation on price was um… interesting, but generally speaking, the shirts fit pretty good.  So, the basic idea behind Proper Cloth was to improve on this experience: Offer custom fit dress clothing that doesn’t require someone to (a) go to China or India for the summer, (b) sacrifice on quality, and (c) spend over $200 per shirt?  Sounded intriguing…  After a lot of market research it became apparent that there wasn’t a great (as they say in business school) solution to the problem – so Proper Cloth began.

With Proper Cloth, we hope you’ll find it easy to design a dress shirt online.  We also have some innovative techniques to custom fit your shirt without requiring awkward body measurements.  Finally, be assured that all our dress shirts are made here in the states – basically we got hooked up with another designer brand’s custom dress shirt factory – so our quality really is the best you’ll find on (or off) the internet.

So, thanks for checking us out.  We hope you like our website and we know you’ll like our dress shirts.