EP #211 - Roy Bernheim: The Community-Led Clothing Brand
Timestamps:
5:43 - Traveling for 4 months to think
9:34 - Building a highly-scalable business
21:20 - Sustainability and pricing
35:37 - A new way of experiencing online shopping
42:56 - Selling tokenized shares
About Roy Bernheim
Roy Bernheim is the co-founder of the men's underwear brand T-Bô, the first clothing brand to be community driven. His background is in European Social and Political studies, and after university he went on to work in private equity and brand management.
Roy and his co-founder Allan Perrottet built T-Bô in 2017. They were interested in creating a highly scalable business with a large target audience, and soon discovered that men's underwear was an interesting category from this point of view, because:
- Online businesses with a physical component need a basket size that is not too big (because then people wouldn't convert, or would take too long to) nor too small (because then it's difficult to compensate for the acquisition cost). Men's underwear had a happy medium;
- It had an interesting customer acquisition cost;
- Even if you don't establish a subscription model, men's underwear is a product people will buy more of if they like it;
- You can ship it inside an envelope up to three pieces of underwear, which is highly cost effective from a logistics standpoint.
T-Bô menswear is Direct By Consumer, meaning that the products are co-created together with the T-Bô community — they're not personalized, but they are highly subject to democratic changes based on feedback. This demand-driven production means the returns are very few and they don't have to factor in wastage into their margin structure, which allows them to have competitive prices while still maintaining a very nice margin.
Memorable Quotes:
"The clothing brands of the future will be built in a collaborative and open way."
Resources Mentioned:
Exponential Organizations, by Salim Ismail, Michael Malone & Yuri van Geest
If you would like to listen to more conversations on sustainable clothing brands, check out our episode with Nicholas Hänny.
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