MTailor, a company that develops an app to sell shirts that fit well without trying them on, has raised a little more than $2 million in venture capital financing. It isn’t the first online-focused retail brand, but the technology behind it is quite different.
BuzzFeed / Matthew Lynley
On a Friday morning in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood, the team for MTailor is frantically packing shirts into boxes and shipping them off. A pile of more than a hundred branded boxes sit in front of the company's tiny corner office space, rented from another San Francisco-based startup called OrderAhead.
It's for a good reason: MTailor, an application that scans a user's body using an iPhone camera and sells them fitted shirts, is growing so quickly it's hard to keep up with all its inbound orders. To try and catch up, the company has raised more than $2 million in venture capital led by Khosla Ventures.
MTailor is far from the first digital-only fashion business, but it's one of the first to work on technology for a virtual fitting room, chipping away at one of the major remaining advantages of brick-and-mortar clothing stores. That's the focus of the company, CEO and founder Miles Penn told BuzzFeed News in an interview, and the next step is branching into other articles of clothing.
"We wanted to make the perfect shirt, not a pretty good shirt," he said. "We thought expanding into too many categories at once, you would be pretty good. But we want the perfect shirt. We didn't think we had the bandwidth to do a second product. Now that we have money, it's something we're definitely really thinking about, what is the next product."
BuzzFeed News / Matthew Lynley
MTailor is part of a new guard of retail startups that have started with online stores as the central focus of the experience, and a big part of that is ensuring that customers aren't just satisfied, but find the experience better than a store. Penn and his co-founder and chief technology officer, Rafi Witten, spend much of their day frantically responding to customer emails.
That obsession with the customer experience is becoming a trademark of online-centric retailers. "We thought, 'let's build this bundle of great clothes with great customer service,'" said Andy Dunn, the founder and CEO of Bonobos, a startup that began selling pants built around an online service. "We think brands can be built digitally, like the one of that Zappos created. If we built the brand with the Internet at the core of how we create the brand, that we can deliver great clothing with great customer service. You're gonna get fast, empathetic customer service. Combine that with free shipping, 365 day returns, and the ability to reach the country from day one when we opened the store, we had a huge advantage of building the brand digitally."
Bonobos, too, has managed to build a strong brand to the point that it is expanding its footprint to the real world. It has opened 10 retail locations that it calls "guideshops," where the company's customers can try on pants with a clothing expert's help before they order them online. Warby Parker, a startup that centers around buying glasses online, also opened retail outlets.
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