The Perfect Tailor - The competitors

http://www.civali.com/
There are two differences between Civali and The Perfect Tailor. First, Civali wants to make custom jeans given the usual two measurements: waist and inseam. I think that doesn’t go far enough and that only a full scan can lead to the perfect pair of jeans. Second, they will operate online and will require about a week to get a pair of jeans to the customer, whereas The Perfect Tailor would aim to get it done in only a day. Lastly, they wouldn’t be able to show what the jeans would look like on the customer, which TPT could potentially do.

The Perfect Tailor - The pitch

No two peoples’ bodies are the same, so why wear the same jeans? The perfect tailor makes jeans that are designed to perfectly fit you. In less than a day, your new jeans will be ready to wear.

The Perfect Tailor - The fun part

Making the booth to get the Kinect or Leap Motion sensor to make the accurate 3d point cloud sounds like fun. Also, making the software to figure out how to make the cuts of jean material given a style and a 3d model will be a challenge.  There are a number of interesting technical hurdles to overcome with this project as well as some more practical ones.

The Perfect Tailor - The growth potential

As stated above, with 100 storefronts TPT would have $12 million in profit. For comparison, The Gap has about 2,500 stores in the US. So, if this grew to The Gap’s size, it would have 300 million in profit.

The Perfect Tailor - The monetization

The Perfect Tailor would have basically the same business model that other clothing stores do. The biggest differences are that TPT wouldn’t use semi-slave labor in developing countries, it would use local labor. Second, it wouldn’t need the complex supply chain. The only inputs are denim material and thread. The only waste is excess denim, which could be minimized using clever cutting patterns. Like some of my other startup ideas, profit here will come from minimizing the amount of human labor. The fabric isn’t nearly as expensive as several hours of wages. According to indeed.com, the average seemstress salary is $25,000 per year, or around $13/hour. In the Bay Area, I expect it would be at least $15 to maybe $20 an hour. Ideally, the labor time could be kept to about two hours per pair of jeans. I would aim to sell the jeans at $90 dollars per pair. That may look like a lot of profit (30 dollars in labor and probably about 10 in materials), but there is also the cost of running the store. Thankfully, the store wouldn’t need a large footprint, because it only needs to have a few booths for scanning and a back room for sewing (or sewing could be done off-site), or about 300 square feet. In silicon valley, I was able to find some locations with roughly that amount of square footage for $25 to $30 per sq.ft. per year, or a rent of around $750 per month for the space.

The last major cost would be that for customer service in the store. One annoyance with staffing a retail store is that most of the employees are idle, or not fully utilized, a large fraction of the time. It’s only during peak hours at night and on the weekends, when most people do their shopping, that you actually get your money’s worth out of the labor.

If some of the sewing machines are in the back of the store, TPT doesn’t have to eat all those costs. The store would be staffed mostly by tailors who also do customer service, when there are customers. When the store is idle, then they go back to sewing. If window shoppers don’t require much interaction, then a sales rate of 25% when the tailor interacts with the customer could be reasonable. I expect that it would take around ten or fifteen minutes of interaction to complete the sale (not walltime just interaction time). With those numbers we need to add on one hour worth of sales cost to each pair of jeans, or 15 dollars.

The retail front rent cost per pair of jeans depends on how many jeans TPT can sell per month. I think weekday sales could be about five or ten pairs. Over the weekends I expect 25 to 50 sales per day. The would sum to 300 to 600 pairs per month. The rent cost is then at most $2.50 per pair.

Putting it all together, I find that the total cost of the jeans is $40 (to make the jeans) plus $18 (to sell them). If each pair is sold for $90, then the profit is about $30 per pair, or $10,000 per storefront per month.

If this eventually grew to have 100 storefronts, TPT would have $12 million in profit per year.

The Perfect Tailor - The idea

Jeans almost never fit right, especially if you are a women. It’s not just that there are many different styles of jeans, it’s that jeans need to be fitted really well to look their best and people are so different that if you gathered a hundred women only a few of them would be able to swap jeans and look just as good as the original owner. People have many different shapes, so tailored jeans are the only way to guarantee a fit.

Imagine walking into a department store, browsing to find the cut and color you want in your jeans, stepping into a booth to get scanned, and coming back a few hours later or the next day to pick up your new pair of custom fitted jeans.

The hardware to do this sort of scanning is already available with Microsoft’s Kinect, and Leap Motions hardware, which should be out sometime this year, is even better. What would be required is to make a booth where one or several 3d scanners can sweep over the customer’s body to collect the 3d point cloud which will later be turned into the model of legs.

Next, the fabric patterns that need to be cut are calculated using the model and the desired style.
These patterns are then cut out of the jean material, by a CNC-like machine, and given to the tailor to sew together into the final product.

Another feature made possible by this setup is letting customers see what they would look like wearing the jeans before they are even made. After the 3d scan is complete, a computer-generated pair of jeans could be placed on the image of the customer, or even shown in real time if there is a screen in the room. I’ve seen hacky examples of this already done with Kinect.

Also, the store would have about a hundred sample pairs of jeans. They wouldn’t fit perfectly, but the would give a good idea of how it would look overall and of the quality of the material.

The Perfect Tailor - The motivation

Lean manufacturing is a radically different way to approach making products. Instead of keeping around large warehouses full of intermediate parts, lean manufacturing suggests making as much of the final product in one place as possible and to only request more supplies as they are needed. It’s almost exactly the opposite of how normal manufacturing has worked for over a century. The end goal is to create the final product that the customer wants with the least waste.  

My goal with The Perfect Tailor is to apply those principles to jeans.