[disclaimer: I'm married to the original tech/product co-founder who is no longer with the company]
For the first time, I see a HN thread on a startup I know very well from the inside, how can I resist jumping in.? :)
First, the OP is factually incorrect about one thing - True&Co doesn't have a subscription model. You get a bunch of bras in a box when you order from the site, you keep what you like. This is the same as the Warby Parker model as well as other successful startups where you need to physically experience things.
Second, I'm not sure why the OP feels such animosity towards the company or the team. There are many snide comments in there, especially around funding, which seems out of place.
Having said that, the women's intimates business has a few big incumbents and a huge addressable market. In the beginning, True&Co took a very 'software eats the world' approach and tried to use machine learning to fix a problem that a lot of women have.
I'm not sure whether they still use a algorithm or whether they focus on tech anymore but at the time, I liked the algorithm Aarthi and her team had built out - it had great results.
Just tried the website out and can't resist jumping in either. Sorry to be harsh but I really don't appreciate a long questionnaire with a forced sign up under the pretense of personalization when really, none is offered in the end. Why did I just spend 10 minutes filling out all the information only to be offered none of what I asked for?
There has to be a term for this as it happens very often: describe a common, frustrating consumer problem thereby implying that your product will solve it; follow up with a bunch of exciting and mystery-building hand waiving; finally, unveil your cheap, run-of-the-mill product identical to all the other cheap, run-of-the-mill products already on the market. At the end of the day, the website sells the same stuff that you'd find at any lower-priced mass retailer and doesn't appear to actually curate its supposedly personalized "my shop" based on my answers.
Some more impressions. One, it's rather discrediting for a "true fit" company not to offer true fit sizes such as AA for example. Two, it's rather annoying when a sales page asks for your preferences (brand, coverage, etc) and then proceeds to suggest things that are the exact opposite. Three, those impractical, showy "sexy time" bras, which seem to be 90% of the inventory, require panties to match, otherwise there is literally no point to them. Four, it's rather lame for a supposedly women-oriented website to push those fake silicone inserts as tough there is something wrong with real women's breasts.
Yes, bra fit is a big problem, and yes, it's a disruption opportunity. But I fail to see how True & Co has an interesting approach. They sell the same brands as everyone else and ignore your preferences just like those overworked, disinterested sales people. The shipping is free but if you have to return anything - which at a minimum of 5 bras per shipment is virtually guaranteed - it is easier to just go to your local mass retailer and try things on.
That's a shame. It was an interesting article about VCs not understanding consumers and backing startups that have no chance of succeeding. Nothing in it was exceptionally hard to understand, even for someone not engrossed in startup-culture like myself.
What happens to the bra's that are returned? Unlike Warby Parker, I wouldn't mind trying a used pair of glasses but I doubt woman will be OK with used underwear(bra's).
How would anyone be able to buy a bra, which is an elastic device that lifts, shifts and holds the breasts – an incredibly variable bit of anatomy – without trying it on?
This is a bit silly don't you think? Boxers and bras are not close the same thing. Clothing can be washed and I would argue that trying on a bra is more akin to trying on a shirt.
On the contrary, I've never been to a store where you couldn't try on a bra. It's what makes this service and it's appealing algorithm so interesting - most women would never consider buying a bra without having tried it on.
My understanding, perhaps incorrect, is that even after trying them on, most women still buy the wrong sizes (80-85%. Wikipedia has 4 citations to this stat, i haven't bothered to read them all, but here is one study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2275741/).
That makes this even more fascinating to me, because while women apparently want to try them on so they can test "fit", whatever they are trusting to determine that fit is apparently causing them to buy the wrong bras most of the time.
Of course, it's also not clear if this is intentional (IE they uy the wrong bra size thinking it makes them look better or whatever), or accidental.
Interestingly, reading the results of that study, it could be they don't care. The study finds that various forms of pain are not correlated with improper bra size, so it could be women just wear what they think makes them look good, and since it doesn't cause any pain, they don't realize it's not the right size.
It turns out that just because something doesn't hurt, and looks good, doesn't mean it's good for you.
My naive, non-boob-having understanding is that using the wrong size will cause your boobs to sag faster, as well as causing other medical issues, even if it doesn't cause pain.
Wearing a bra will actually make your boobs sag faster, not the other way around. It's a very common misconception among women, though, who apparently can't be bothered to look these things up before shoving "advice" down your throat that "everyone knows" is correct.
Yes, you can. In fact, it's kind of crucial, because each bra fits differently.
And I can't resist but to point out the awesome fact that you can actually wash clothes you bought. (That, and bras don't come in contact with waste products. )
When Gilly Hicks launched (subsidiary of A&F), one of their main selling points for the stores was having all of their bra sizes and styles available in the dressing rooms. Thus, you could go into the dressing room to figure out what fits, then pick out the ones you liked from the store floor.
I'm not sure if this is still the case, since I no longer work at A&F and don't go to Gilly Hicks, but my coworkers at the time were pretty excited, since finding well fitting bras can be very difficult.
Who said that you may not try boxers out? I do it sometimes, but saw many times others doing it. Most of good brand boxers are not paked in plastic, so you can try them out.
My girlfriend 1) buys underwear from VS (well, gets it free due to a VS credit card, some weird promotion) periodically, and would probably subscribe. She buys (new, thank god) bras from random sellers on eBay several times per year, and it's always some kind of roulette because price seems entirely uncorrelated with quality. I showed her True&Co and she likes it.
It's a little different from shoes (she also seems to buy a lot from Zappos, using the buy 3 and return 2 model, not sure how that works for them...), in that you don't show off underwear as much, but for some reason I think this model will work.
I'm constantly amazed at how imaginary or brand-specific sizing seems to be for female clothing. I love being able to just buy an L or XL and have it fit ok, or call up a tailor and say "would like 3 more shirts the same measurements as last time" (or do a fitting).
Great response and I agree that the scathing critique from this article seemed factless and tactless. True and Co. is a company I have looked at a few times and is definitely the one both my wife and I think has great potential for disruption. Seems like a good idea worth investing in and seeing if it works.
Ok, what did I miss? I ran that whole rant through my "What are they trying to say" filter twice and the best it could come up with was "Those poopie-heads won't fund my great idea."
Paragraph by paragraph here are the thesis statements:
VC's funded a bra company with an algorithm VC's didn't fund my idea/company based on things I think are important
That other, funded company, really has no idea, consumers are idiots and clueless companies benefit.
Companies I don't understand, think poorly of, and aren't me are getting more money thrown at them.
Funding is all back channels and who you know because companies that are horrible are getting funding while mine is not.
If VCs would just wake up and see what was going on I'd get funding and those crappy companies wouldn't.
I've got a great idea in a really big market, if only those stupid VCs would take their blinders off and fund it we could all be happy.
It is pretty clear that Sindhya doesn't agree with the way various VC's are investing their funds because she spends a lot of ink complaining about what she thinks they want to hear vs what is really important in her space (the whole boob algorithm concept), but skims right over the whole "they have money and you don't" market reality thing. It isn't easy but you have to ask yourself, what is going on here that I don't understand? And work through that, rather than call an industry that has been pretty damn successful creating companies over the last century a bunch of idiots.
> rather than call an industry that has been pretty damn successful creating companies over the last century a bunch of idiots.
Is this actually true? (note - I don't know) My understanding is most VC firms aren't successful. Just a few are.
I've thought about writing a post almost identical to the OP and came to your same conclusion: "At the end of the day they have the money". The other harsh reality is that VCs are no different than the enterprise companies of today's world...they are all about reducing risks at scale. One of their scariest risks is failing to instill confidence in their clients. For example, if the market dictates that the hottest thing right now is photo sharing, you better be damn sure that a VC is going to invest in a photo sharing app. The VC is going to say "Dear client, we aren't going to invest in the next big photo sharing app, even though all of the analyst say its the next big thing. Instead we're investing in 21st century pig farms!" The client will say "but what about Instagram!" No matter how risky you personally believe it is (for example - photo sharing apps have no revenues) the market still is throwing money at it (i.e. Instagram).
So, conclusion - I blame media hyperbole and people's natural biases, not VCs on the amount of funding put into "good" startups.
Oh its true that VCs come and go, its almost apocryphal the stories of some guy who joins company A and gets rich, leaves and becomes a VC and then becomes poor. (well not poor but significantly less wealthy :-) But like any market those things auto-correct. And its a small enough industry that its hard, perhaps impossible, to hide the failures. The partner who seems to always make the wrong call on companies eventually ends up not a partner any more.
So at any given time, there is a chance you'll get a brand spankin' new VC who doesn't have a clue and he'll fund anything that strokes his ego or makes him look cool, but those folks flicker in and out of existence quickly :-)
But by and large the question of whether or not its worth handing over someone else's money to make your business happen boils down to really basic things, like "Who are your customers?" "How do you find them?" "What does it cost to reach them? Capture them?" "How do they compensate you and for how much over what timespan?" and "How does that money you get feed back into the business to grow it?"
You need to know those things, and know them with certainty. Sure you can say "I have the secret knowledge of
the ancients and can make a perfect bra for any woman!"
And even if it is completely true and provable it is only one half of the picture. What if the cost to make them is $150, and their specialness fades in 3 months? Suddenly it doesn't matter that they are perfect, very few people will invest a couple thousand a year to keep a stock of perfect bras on hand. Or these bras are so well made they are indestructible! How cool is that, except if it costs $100 to 'fit' the person, and they buy one bra over their lifetime. Well that doesn't work either. So you really need to have a model for what the revenue is, what the costs are, and how you'll go from 0% market share to x% (where x represents actual profitability).
Something I'm fond of is the quote "All startup ideas are risky but funded ones are not random." There is very little randomness in the initial funding of a company, it has a strategy to take an investment and turn it into a large return in 3 - 5 years. It may not succeed in doing that, and there may several alternate paths that don't work, but the paths are there.
VCs that funded True&Co. just say that the founder is a friend when asked why they invested. Nothing more. If it had a compelling business model, they would say that. They didn't. In fact, no one even have would ask. Being a friend wouldn't matter. Clear #VCCronyFunding. It's sad.
I think your boobs can use an algorithm. I am without them myself, but, I have heard complaints about bra sizing forever, and am aware of the (now common?) knowledge that most women are wearing non-ideal bras.
It doesn't matter if "most women" don't buy bras every month, if 1% of them do, and True & Co captures 10% of that market then that 2M seed funding will be a great investment.
Your boobs don't need an algorithm that doesn't work, of course. But if some smart people are able to ask you three minutes worth of questions, and then provide you with support that will make your life significantly better.. who cares?
I think the idea is that they are trying to turn a product that 'needs to be felt' into something that doesn't, because "it just works". Anything "that just works" is good, and VC money will chase after it.
Wanted to more or less say the same thing. For whatever reason I've run into the issue of bra sizing numerous times over the last 6 months without doing/reading anything that would promote the discussion. Personally I think part of it is that there is a general increase in the open chatter of women on the web due to sites like Pinterest.
I don't know if there is a technological solution to fix it, but if there is it seems like a very real way to improve life for a large amount of the populous. Whomever can make a significant dent in it seems poised to profit in a big way.
A more technical solution would probably do wonders for this problem - both in initial measurement and custom solutions thereafter. Even going in for a fitting won't yield you the right results, and a lot of women are just too self-conscious for one to begin with.
Human fitters are trained differently at various locations, and VS in particular doesn't seem to adequately train their employees (or maybe because most locations are in malls, working in intimates isn't exactly her career choice so she's are more lenient/awkward about it). I was grossly misfitted at a VS like many others I've met, and the girl was pretty careless about the whole thing (didn't take her time, was 100% sure she'd done it right despite telling her I wasn't quite sure - ironically citing the fact that most women are wearing the wrong size to begin with). Additionally, well-made bras that last easily run into the $60-100+ range, so a lot of women pick up the cutesy bargain-bin ones that aren't shaped well to begin with.
And depending, it can end up being a lot like jeans where sizing will vary with different brands and styles even though it shouldn't.
I can think up ways to approach the problem, but I don't see any of them being adopted.
The best technical idea that comes to mind is using a kinetic or similar device as they become more widespread to just scan the person's form and return a result.
But, I can only compare the experience to that of a man as that is my gender, I can't see myself posing nude in front of such a device to get the perfectly fitting jock strap (or male bikini, etc). I just can't imagine doing it. I have no clue if the comparison is valid, it's just as close as I can imagine personally and I just can't see myself doing it.
I don't think the pose-topless-for-a-scanner thing is ridiculous at all. You could even imagine the device being video-based, something you run on your laptop (which obviously doesn't actually upload or even record pictures of you). If you can stand topless in front of a fitter, you can stand topless in front of a device.
A less intense approach, though, would be doing a better job of statistical modeling women's breast shapes and how well different kinds of bras fit them. If you sell bras for a while and different women return different ones, you can start to build a sense of what customers' ideal fits are and refine what bra shapes and styles get sent to them. Whether that data can be accumulated fast enough to make the service useful is an open question, but it at least doesn't sound crazy.
Am I the only one on this thread who was tried it. I used the True & Co. service to try to avoid shopping for bras, a chore that I dread. Unfortunately they were way way off on my sizing. Way way off. The sizing, the construction fitting to my shoulder shape, color (they send you some bras that they chose for you, which were colors that are not versatile to wear under normal clothing)... pretty much everything.
I tried another bra quiz service, Herroom's Know Your Breasts Bra Finder, which gave me a lot more insight into my sizing and why certain bras didn't fit right- particularly the way my breasts naturally hang and the way my shoulders are shaped. Unfortunately it gives you around five different characteristics of your ideal bra and no way to find bras that share several of them since they don't have faceted search or anything like that.
I ended up going to Nordstroms, where they were really unhelpful despite advertising having a "bra fitter" and I bought a bra that sort of fits and ended up buying a second shoulder strap for it on Amazon to gerryrig it not to slip all the time.
But it sounds like you agree that it's a real problem to be solved, right? That True & Co aren't very good at it means that more companies should be jumping in with novel solutions, getting funding, and trying to make it work. In other words, your boobs totally need an algorithm, they just need a way better one.
I think you raise a valid point overall, which is that a lot of VC money gets invested very quickly into businesses with unproven models. That, in and of itself, is a real problem. Ralph Lauren started his multibillion-dollar clothing empire as a door to door tie salesman. He built his business one store sale at a time. Why can't today's entrepreneurs in the clothing space start small and grow organically? Is a startup in the bra market really in need of tens of millions of dollars in order to hit necessary traction? Is rapid, overnight growth really the best way to build a clothing brand? All very reasonable inquiries.
That said -- and I say this as respectfully as possible -- you're applying 20/20 hindsight in many of your examples. Fact: many women in this country, perhaps even a majority, have bras that don't fit correctly. Fact: women's boobs are highly variable, and do not actually fit into the standard cup size / chest size system that we've been using for the last 50 years. (An algorithm may be an over-engineered way to approach this problem, but the current model is far from perfect). Fact: men's razors are ridiculously expensive, and the razor & blades model is ripe for disruption. Theory (perhaps more viable than you might think): curated boxes of goods may, indeed, drive lead-generation and discovery, opening up new markets for apparel and home furnishings businesses.
I don't think it's remotely fair to look at the present-day struggles of companies like Dollar Shave Club or Trunk Club and declare, ipso facto, that their business models are fundamentally unsound. Perhaps their business operations are unsound. Perhaps their business strategies are unsound. Perhaps even wildly so. But the addressable markets seem reasonable in both cases.
Finally, I think you're cherry picking some examples and using them to draw a larger condemnation of the whole system. If we're going to declare that the system is rotten, then we need to begin with a macro-level evaluation of the system.
It does seem that VCs have a bias towards funding business models that are popular in the valley, even if they haven't been proven yet. The subscription box o' crap is a model being used by dozens of startups, but I can't think of any that is really successful.
I don't disagree that VCs are susceptible to fads and trends. A few years back, it was "We're X, but social." Then it was "We're X, but with geolocation." And who could forget the wave of "We're X, but with gamification," or "We're the Groupon of X?" And right now, the "subscription box of crap" model is still pretty trendy.
That said, the real question we should be asking ourselves isn't "Does the subscription box model work," but rather, "In which markets does it actually address a big problem?" Trends can be useful, but we need to read them with better common sense than we do.
Well, the subscription box model is working out okay for the likes of Tonx (coffee - http://tonx.org - and delicious coffee at that) but I'm not aware that they're trying to go the Silicon Valley venture-capital startup route at all.
Tonx really does provide a product that is passion driven though. Most people are not passionate about new razors or underwear or toilet paper. You're glad to have it but you have little emotional attachment in the way of something like coffee.
Birchbox and ipsy appear to be doing quite well, in terms of sheer scale. But yes, it seems like 2012 was the Year of the Subscription, and most are floundering, gone, or have switch business models (I am actively watching the space). Just pointing out, there are some budding successes.
Bordering off topic, but the smart people realize that you don't need to throw away your blades every time they get dull; that model is only successful because people don't realize you can restore a set of blades to service with a few minutes and some jeans.
So, you could say I've already disrupted it just in my own life, and the wider dissemination of that knowledge would just disrupt it further.
A pack of high-quality razor blades costs $0.25 per blade on Amazon[1]. Is it really worth learning to properly strop a blade to save twenty five cents once a week or so?
I hope you're kidding, because the only person that sees me shave on average is me, and then what's your alternative? Touring your bathroom for guests to show off your straight razors?
I'd rather have ~1-2 more minutes in the shower with nice hot water in the morning, vs. spending my first minutes after waking up standing in a cold bathroom in front of a sink with a serious blade. Dropping $3 on a Fusion Power ProGlide Mega Absurd N-Blade Extreme Hairkiller cartridge every week or so (when purchased in bulk at costco or amazon S&S) is worth it to me for that.
This is partly why I didn't "get" Dollar Shave Club. I buy a pack of 52 disposable razors from Costco, really decent ones: http://www2.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11093041&#... and it's $30 for basically one razor per week for a year. I don't really see any room to improve on this.
They don't look really decent. They look like crap. I've tried those type of razors and they're horrible, can't even do one shave if I've left it a week.
If you're an intermittent shaver like me or someone with thick hair I bet they suck.
But this is your opinion. I love the one he linked to and did not know about that they are so cheap at Costco.
What he and you prove as a point is that to him Costco deal is perfect while your "thick hair" it too thick to save money with Costco. So the Dollar Shave Club will be perfect for you (to save money) and useless to him. Therefore, the DSC will never scale well enough because people like me or OP will never have a thick hair :)
I went to see how the site was, found it more or less friendly and designed well enough to keep me on the page. Wanted to know how much the bras cost - they won't tell you until you login. Easy, quick login not requiring email confirmation so they kept me hooked. I was provided with some well drawn pictures of women's shapes and asked to choose - I clicked through a few questions and felt they understood my exact problems and concerns when buying bras (I usually go to an expensive professional fitter so the questions were welcome and relevant). Along the way they kept telling me I was normal and gave some comforting stats about women. Made me feel like I was in the right place to keep buying. Finally got to the buy page, prices are good compared to the high-end shops though they don't have the really good hand-made items I look for, nor the higher-end makers like La Perla (surprised at that).
Now did I sign up for the 5 bras they'll send me to try, and free to send back what I don't want? No, because a) I'm not in the U.S. and b) I'm spoilt with my personal fitter who has my card on file and knows my fit really well. But that's because I have access to her shop, in a huge city where they can afford this luxury. If I was living in a smaller city, definitely would sign up, no questions. It's Zappos for bras, and I don't see why they can't easily apply this model to other clothing types like shoes and shirts (also hard to fit).
I wish them luck, great service in my opinion.
>Where are the panties in True & Co.’s business model?
You can't ship and return these items safely.
Further: I went back to see what happened on checkout. They do something clever here: you choose 3 bras and they choose 2. This is another reason I go to a store: I ask the expert to choose me something from the rack that she thinks will work well on me, after learning about my tastes. I badly want to order those 5 bras now just to find out what the other 2 are, and they just take a deposit of $45. I think they have some quite brilliant ideas here that will work very well on their target market.
>>Where are the panties in True & Co.’s business model?
>You can't ship and return these items safely.
Also it's not as though panties are as difficult as bras to purchase. T&C is trying to do the hard work; doing relatively unrelated easy work alongside that might be a distraction.
TFA is a woman and all, but it's still tempting to consider her one of those 'old boy' industry stalwarts who are so afraid of disruption from outside that they can't imagine what it would look like. If she can find one, she should ask a travel agent what he thinks of "algorithms".
> Also it's not as though panties are as difficult as bras to purchase. T&C is trying to do the hard work; doing relatively unrelated easy work alongside that might be a distraction.
We call that "add-on sales", and it's a good thing. If there were a way to do it on the site they'd probably 4x their profit instantly.
Where are the panties in True & Co.’s business model? True & Co. launched in May yet they are still not selling any panties to go with the bras they sell. For every bra a woman buys, she probably buys at least 5 pairs of panties. Also, panties have much better margins than bras. This is basic business strategy that has evaded the founders of True & Co. as well as the VCs who backed them.
I wonder if this sort of thing isn't a symptom of the way the VC sphere is playing in places outside the players' experience. By any reasonable measure True & Co. is a retail business, not a tech business. (An online questionnaire does not a tech business make.) Neither of its founders are retail people, though -- one was a Bain Capital accountant, the other a program manager at Microsoft (http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/04/smallbusiness/true-bra-lam.f...). And their experience in the lingerie business appears to be limited to spending two months chatting up existing Bay Area lingerie vendors (http://mashable.com/2012/05/30/true-and-co/).
If someone told me they were about to Revolutionize An Industry other than their own based on two months of research and a web form, I would be highly skeptical. It sounds too much like the most ridiculous dot-bombs of the 1990s. But these issues don't appear to have hurt their funding any -- probably because it's not like the VCs came out of retail either. To them it's just another Industry To Be Disrupted (insert details here).
Not only can an algorithm provide you with a better fit, but it almost certainly already does. Bra designers already use sophisticated algorithmic models on breast shape and movement when designing bras:
It's not unreasonable to think that it's feasible to design an algorithm that can result in better bra fitting. Most bra fitting at the moment is done incredibly badly, many women are too embarrassed to get professionally fitted so often use adhoc methods when it comes to bra fitting. That's what an algorithm has to beat.
The exact same arguments that that article makes about shape, touch, etc. were long applied to the clothing market as whole. People argued "who would want to buy shoes online ?" - then Zappos came along. People argued "who would want to buy glasses online ?" - then Warby Parker came along.
The online share of the bra market ($5-$7bn/year in the US) is almost certainly going to increase. The question isn't whether people are going to buy bras online, the question is who they're going to buy them from.
I think the OP is making the mistake of thinking "I wouldn't use this service so no-one will".
While I agree that the proliferation of subscription based consumer product services looks crazy, I think this post includes too many assumptions about how and why VC's are funding consumer startups.
You also seem to have a fairly negative attitude towards the teams behind these startups but I can't seem to see why this is justified.
Far from being without product innovation or branding, dollarshaveclub.com are changing the way we purchase razors and the price we pay. That video is their brand statement.
The fact that dollarshaveclub.com hasn't released a new product since receiving funding, or had another big viral video, doesn't mean all that much in itself. Perhaps they're selling so many razors that they're still fulfilling that market. Or perhaps they're working on a new launch with a longer product cycle.
This has to win the linkbait title of the week award. Very nicely done. (Not that it's not a good article. I'm simply commenting on word choice in the title. A less brave soul might have been more boorish or more prudish.)
Building a technology business means deciding whether you're a service businesses or a product businesses. Here's a product that traditionally has a service model -- and it looks like a high-touch service -- trying to be sold as a product. Kind of has that feel of something a bunch of guy nerds would think would fly but actually not so much. So I can buy the thesis of the essay.
The interesting thing is that there is a market here. What I'd love to know is how they're finding the subset of women that are comfortable using the web to buy undergarments. Are they running ads on specific sites? Leveraging social networks like Pinterest?
Instead of the "works for me" versus "I hate it" conversation, I'd be much more interested in how the company actually found their MVP and proved it out -- and more critically the size of each segment. Much more informative than blanket generalizations.
(I realize my comment was loaded with puns. They were not intentional)
Bra sales are only high-touch at the high-end, and even then only partially. Buying undergarments with a service model is socially awkward whatever gender you are.
I'm 100% certain that online bra sales have a future.
Why ? - the largest lingerie retailer in the US is Victoria's Secret. I'm guessing your brain automatically inserts the word "catalog" after their name. The biggest lingerie retailer built their business around a mail order catalog (although they obviously have stores now too).
The women who buy bras online are the same as women who buy other clothes online.
[Posting on HN since comments on the original post are closed.]
Hello Sindhya-
I'm Michelle, CEO/Co-Founder of True&Co. I started the company to create a great personal shopping experience for women because for most women, bra shopping sucks - going to a store, spending hours in a fitting room, still not finding a bra that flatters you.
Women told us a great shopping experience is about delivering your personal bra shop to your house. We give women 5 bras to try at home, risk-free. Pay for what you keep, return the rest. All returns go through a 65-point inspection to make sure the bra hasn't been worn.
The algorithm determines which bras we suggest for you - the best bra for you may not be the best bra for me. So far, over 100,000 women have taken the True&Co quiz, We keep getting smarter on what works for each of our 2000 individual body types. Once you tell us which bra you’ve kept, we offer matching panties in your personal shop.
A great shopping experience is NOT about contractually obligating customers to buy every month so no, we are not a subscription service. Our customers return to us over and over again because they've discovered a better way to shop for all kinds of intimate apparel.
Sindya, I hope you try our service and give online bra fitting a chance! Please email me at hello@trueandco.com or visit https://trueandco.com/.
Dollar Shave Club got ~$10M of their ~$11M funding two months ago[1]. This makes the argument that they've done nothing with their funding a bit silly. It also indicates that there might be plans they have that we haven't seen yet, but are worth funding.
Overall, this sounds like venting about how other companies in your industry are getting funding when you presumably aren't.
Other than their video, Dollar shave club has nothing proprietary. Not a single product person on their team, not a single industry person on the core team, no real pipeline of innovation. the branding isn't globally appealing. No way you can turn it into a lifestyle brand with that brand name. The irony: Dubin said "too many other co's are primarily interested in the subscription model b/c of recurring revenue, w/out really thinking through the problem that they’re solving for users." I'm not sure what Dollar Shave has thought through other than their videos. Great metrics and a video don't make a consumer brand a success. Without question, I totally agree @tomreynolds. It's a ridiculous valuation -> Yes, we're in a bubble.
The funding was closed well before the posting of that article. Also, $1M is more than enough to launch more than a 3 "stock" razors bought from China which what Dollar Shave is doing.
They absolutely do! If you have watched even a single episode of What Not to Wear you'd have known that most women, especially ones with breast sizes a couple of sigmas away from the mean, have no easy way to buy a well-fitted bra. They either have to go to a fancy store to do personal fitting (may be expensive) or go to a place like VS and hope for the best.
A suitable algorithm, based on Kinect 3D models, say, would totally take this market by surprise and make a huge splash.
Well, maybe. The "wrong size" problem is only part of the story. Another is that many bras are generally poorly constructed, lose their shape after continued use, and sizing is not the only issue (fabric tolerance, flop etc).
But more than anything else, the problem is price. A "good" workhorse bra (workwear, not lingerie fantasy stuff) will set you back on average, oh, say about $65 ($100 is not uncommon). You probably need half a dozen. I have no idea what the economics are and why they are so expensive, but I can't imagine what price a "Kinect 3D" custom bra would come in at.
And the other aspect of "a good bra is hard to find" is that once you find one, there's a huge lock-in factor. Women will re-order the same model for years.
So yeah, while there is certainly a non-zero market for something like this, it's probably not huge. Witness the fact that it is quite easy and even not too pricey to get custom jeans made to measure, and yet the majority of the population doesn't.
Now there is a disruption possibility in that market if someone took the time to do actual biometric and customer search and some innovation in production methods.
I had discussed a Kinect idea with some fellow employees when I worked at VS and they scoffed at the idea.
I think the issue is that breasts are more complex than just external shape with internal density and natural placement being just the tip of the iceberg. All the factors involved rule out a cheap modeling method such as Kinect or webcams and in the end, make visiting a store, to be measured properly and try for fit, the more economic choice.
I don't think you can get by the trust issue, but a redboxish booth to be placed at stores might work. I know I would really like to order jeans / pants customized to fit. Not sure if I wound stand there in a booth in my skivvies to get scanned. Imagine being topless for a girl would require a fair bit of trust.
"VCs think my boobs need an algorithm. My boobs don’t need an algorithm."
Horrible link-bait introduction. Algorithm is being used as a dirty word. Algorithms are not soft, caring, touchable, feminine, according to the imagery in the piece.
In the real world though, boobs and lives are saved daily by algorithms. I want my family's boob cancer screening images reconstructed from tiny, noisy signals by the most hardcore medical imaging algorithms available, thanks.
But "VCs Think My Bra Fitting Need A Questionnaire" wouldn't be getting those views.
Couldn't agree more. It seems like "algorithm" is starting to be used among the non-tech world to refer to the computerization of everything in a negative way. Really, an algorithm is a mathematical formulation of how to solve a problem, albeit usually ran on computers. If True & Co. want to apply a little machine learning to an old problem, fine. If people think that machines can't learn, then we're going to have these sort of issues.
The worst part of this problem is again that many non-crony, first-time entrepreneurs, regardless of how compelling their business model is, how great their margins are and how great their team is, still get a hard time and struggle to get funding.
Who cares? I think the real issue is that there seems to be a large number of entrepreneurs whose primary goal is to secure funding. If you can't find an investor, make a plan. Change your business so you don't need external funding (it should start out like that anyway), network, look overseas, work harder so that your business is more appealing etc. If your business is so great, you will find an investor. There is no need to play the victim and claim that "VCs" only fund their friends and fundamentally flawed businesses. Even if, by some wild stretch of the imagination, that is the case, who cares?
WRT Dollar Shave Club - "What are they up to now? Sucking"
Does anyone have any evidence of this? I'm curious about how they're doing, I haven't seen anything online about them delivering bad news. Just because they aren't offering new products (less than a year after launch!) doesn't mean that they're failing...
It's very often that investors get wrapped up in the hot business method rather than taking the time to think about how that might actually apply to the specific industry. They've seen how subscriptions and algorithms are going gangbusters for companies like Amazon, why not expand to an industry they know nothing about?
Most of these VCs are likely not coming from the garment industry, so they might know absolutely nothing about manufacturing or consumer experience. They try to pick based on things they know, and what companies they think might be similar. Much of the time, that's a very poor model for investment and they would be better of sticking to what they understand. At the same time, how many original investors actually understood what Facebook or Google were all about?
Off the core topic, but the author seems to misunderstand what the Series A crunch is.
The Series A crunch isn't anything to do with crappy companies raising huge series As. Rather the crunch is caused by the huge growth in the number of companies successfully raising angel rounds (both through accelerators and the explosion of angels created by the IPOs of Google, Facebook, etc.).
While the number of Series A rounds done by VCs is going up, it's been growing nowhere near as fast as seed funding so naturally the number of angel funded companies who fail to raise Series As is going to go up. Hence the term Series A crunch.
I read the piece and I don't understand how it relates to the article title. As best I can tell, it is just a rant that some other company got funded. I see no mention of what her company is, why it presumably did not get funded, what value she thinks a company should be measured by, etc. Thus, the title strikes me as pretty gratuitous, like "I think I will stick boobs in the title cuz sex sells, then bitch about whatever the heck I feel like". So my thought: Maybe she can't get VC money because she sucks at effective communication.
I hear this kind of sentiment a lot and it usually comes from a position of subjective analysis, rather than actual knowledge. I'd be able to support an argument that was based on first-hand knowledge about the product and the reasons for investment. This is simply personal opinion, based on the author's own context. VCs and the founders don't think your boobs need an algorithm. They think there's a market that do want one. Are they right? I don't know and neither does the author.
Please refer to the correction at the bottom of the article. I have no problem admitting when I'm wrong. True&Co. doesn't not have a subscription. But isn't the Warby of the bra world and they have not proven that their algorithm works. 1) True does NOT make the process of bra shopping easier. That's what Warby does best while offering a great product at a very affordable price. Warby has great branding. In fact, True takes a traditionally feminine and sexy product and makes shopping for it a BORING and painful experience. 3 minutes of questioning was boring. 2)There is no animosity towards the team. My post is no different than an article on Pando - actually it's no where as snarky some of the articles I've seen. Pando can be really, really snarky. Check out this article: http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/21/dominatefund-badly-misses-t.... 3) If True's algorithm works, they should really show proof. Have they done any claims testing? That's what consumer brands do when they have $ and they are trying to prove that their tech works. Otherwise, it's flimsy, BS marketing ==> No true fit, no true fitting algorithm. 4) Where are the panties? I could not find them after 10 minutes. It's worse that True says they sell them, but I couldn't find them after 10 minutes. The founders don't understand basic business, marketing or branding. That's key for a consumer goods business like a lingerie brand. 5)It's a shame because I do know several other BETTER lingerie startups that should have gotten funding which presented at DecodedFashion Lingerie Startup Showcase. One founder is in serious debt trying to get funding. Unfortunately she isn't a former VC, so fundraising is a lot harder for her.
Great title, terrible post. What a giant muddle of critiquing everything from one company to a whole industry to a variety of tangential companies in the space...without data. No one except for dollar shave club and their investors knows how many subs they have. They may have very few. They may have a lot. But trashing the for running a promotion in a month and for having a lot of money? Thanks but no thanks.
Maybe I am misunderstanding but it seems like this post is critiquing the investments of a specific set of VCs.
Firstly, who cares? If VCs want to blow money on ideas that go nowhere, that's their business. In fact, it's a business that they know and do well, they cast a wide net of high-risk high-yield investments and deal with the average.
And if OP is attacking the validity of the product, great. That's your opinion, but honestly who are you to say which ideas will succeed which will fail. The true test is if the company succeeds. A company's primary goal is to make money, they don't really give a damn about fitting bras. If they can make money, even if their service is factually crappy and unreliable, they've succeeded; probably in their own minds and the minds of their investors.
My personal opinion is that the idea is dumb but if they succeed good for them, they were blessed with a vision that I lack.
The problem I see with this article is that it trashes one particular company and the VC backing of that company and attempts to use that to make a larger point about vc-backed e-commerce companies in general.
So OK, maybe that company isn't great. Maybe the VC's made a mistake with that particular investment. Or maybe the founders and VC's know something that you don't. Either way, one's observations about a company should be limited to that company and not be generalized to the entire space the company is in, unless of course there is sufficient compelling data.
I love this post and it underlines a common problem I see being repeated from the early dotcom days; people investing in things they find exciting rather than things that actually make sense.
What is the point? You don't like this company's business model so don't buy from them. Either you're right and nobody will buy from them and they'll fade into obscurity or you're wrong and some customers do like this model. Are you upset that VCs are being stupid? I hate to break it to you but the world is full of stupid people and some of them are VCs. This isn't news. #downvote
"For every bra a woman buys, she probably buys at least 5 pairs of panties."
I beg to differ. I'm a man, and have never bought either bra or panties for my wife, but I have watched at least 100 hours of QVC and HSN (competitor home shopping networks).
I have seen MANY presentations of various bras, and virtually none for panties. I'm quite certain that's no accident.
(I'm a woman) Bras are usually worn multiple times before washing. Good ones are expensive ($60-100 a pop), and the less wear and tear on them the longer they last, and the longer the fit that you bought them for is preserved.
Panties are changed every day, and are cheap in comparison to bras. You can get a 6-pack of cotton Hanes at Walmart for less than $10. Individual panties from a department store might cost $5-15 a pair. You can compromise on panty quality in a way you can't with bras. Cheap panties just fall apart a little faster. Cheap bras are daily torture.
I'd wager the average women most definitely owns 5 if not more pairs of panties for every bra she owns.
Edit to add: I would say the issue (with not seeing panties advertised as heavily on shopping networks) is more that panty quality is not so much of an issue. That 6-pack of Hanes will do you just fine and there's no constant need to find a better panty like there is to find a better bra. Bras suck, unless you've got small boobs. The balance of comfort, fit, and support is delicate. It's easy to try to market the New! Improved! bra. There's not really anything to improve about the panty.
Socks/panties are easy to buy. You can get 6 pair, of decent but not exceptional quality, for 10 bucks. They're generally a bit stretchy and pretty tolerant of significant size variations. There's no reason to run an infomercial for these.
Shoes/bras need to be the right size and shape, or you'll be uncomfortable. Decent quality is going to run you $40 at a minimum. You might have to try on a dozen or more before you find something that feels right. If you're an unusual size, you may need to get something customized.
There's a reason Rigby and Pellor can charge £100 for bras. They don't have an algorithm. They have well known name; great (apparently, I've obviously never tried it) fitting; etc.
PS: If the blog owner is reading please consider better contrast (off white background and darker text) and larger font size.
Sindhya raises some very valid points that help illustrate that a large portion of the investment community simply can't tell the difference between startups that are truly innovative and those simply clothed in the accouterments of innovation. Tacking on the terms algorithm, social, mobile, patentable, etc. seems to fool quite a few people.
For the first time, I see a HN thread on a startup I know very well from the inside, how can I resist jumping in.? :)
First, the OP is factually incorrect about one thing - True&Co doesn't have a subscription model. You get a bunch of bras in a box when you order from the site, you keep what you like. This is the same as the Warby Parker model as well as other successful startups where you need to physically experience things.
Second, I'm not sure why the OP feels such animosity towards the company or the team. There are many snide comments in there, especially around funding, which seems out of place.
Having said that, the women's intimates business has a few big incumbents and a huge addressable market. In the beginning, True&Co took a very 'software eats the world' approach and tried to use machine learning to fix a problem that a lot of women have.
I'm not sure whether they still use a algorithm or whether they focus on tech anymore but at the time, I liked the algorithm Aarthi and her team had built out - it had great results.