\What do you get when you combine the product enthusiasm and customer loyalty of Apple, Google’s compulsive drive towards improvement and the slick, urbane look of GQ? As over 7,000 (mostly repeat) customers can attest – the best bespoke quality suit you’ve ever worn for less than $500. This is the story of Indochino.
» By Jack Busch
Indochino, the company, was born in Canada, at the University of Victoria, where two entrepreneurial students hatched the idea out of necessity and fostered it into an international phenomenon. But the spirit of Indochino’s business model has its roots in the reinvention of the tech space. Just as social media gives everyone a personalized voice, Indochino gives every man a suit that fits. And not the shabby, one-size-fits-hardly-anyone thing you’d get off the rack at Macy’s or some mall department store. Indochino’s suits are tailor made to order in record time and FedEx’ed directly to your door in two weeks.
The history of Indochino is inspiring, in spite of it only spanning about three years. There’s something populist and revolutionary about it. High quality men’s clothing, like the upper echelons of business, has long been an institution deeply rooted in tradition, exclusive to those with familial or financial legs up. After all, clothes can make a man – and a well-tailored suit is symbolic of the stately cultivation that serves as the runway to a well-connected, well-endowed launch into the corporate world. A gangly guy with the wrong knot in his tie and high-water slacks that reveal his should-have-been-brown socks, on the other hand, bears the hallmark of a neophyte. But without daddy’s tailor and checkbook, getting the right look for that critical job interview is somewhat of a crapshoot. Doing so without spending thousands of dollars is a damn near Olympian undertaking. Indochino co-founder Heikal Gani pulled it off, but it wasn’t easy.
Gani bought his first real suit when he was a psychology and political science major at UVic. A conference had come up and Gani had to look the part. Like most of us with our checking accounts close to the edge, the purchase of a suit isn’t exactly premeditated. Unfortunately, a properly fitted and tailored suit can take weeks to attain – especially if you’ve never been measured, don’t know what to buy and don’t know where to buy it. Gani did the only thing a 21st century man without a network of old boys could do – he researched it on the Internet.
Being a slimmer guy, he quickly found out that he needed something different than what was on the rack. But in a city with a population of less than half a million on the west coast of Canada, the only place that he could find (and afford) was Moore’s – the Canadian equivalent of Men’s Wearhouse. He got the suit, but wasn’t satisfied. It was boxy, generic and overpriced, considering. After dropping an additional $100 on tailoring, he looked good enough. But the frustrating experience stuck with him.
He talked over his experience with his friend and fellow UVic student, Kyle Vucko, a business major, and together, they identified that the problem lay not only in the product, but also in the process. Factory-made suits seem to call upon the man to fit the suit, rather than the reverse. It’s like something out of a dystopian novel about cubicle estrangement. Those that don’t fit inside the box are penalized with higher costs, a second-rate appearance and a notably cramped style. The notion is somewhat preposterous, once you consider how far we’ve come as a consumer society, where a house, a car and an education are attainable by the vast majority, but a decent suit is not. The need for accessible, affordable, and most of all, well-fitting and fashionable men’s suits was clearly there. The seeds for a compelling business opportunity were sown, and together, Vucko and Gani seized it.
Fast-forward to 2009, and now you can find the exact kind of business that Gani could’ve used back in college embodied in Indochino. It’s a mix between straightforward, well-produced style tips and instructions for the uninitiated and lightning-fast, responsive customer service. Here’s essentially how the process works:
Read the rest of this article at Primer Magazine.
