Transcript - Seph Skerritt
Season 3, Episode 5
Conversation with Seph Skerritt, Founder, Proper Cloth
Joshua Williams: Retail Revolution, a unique podcast that features in-depth conversations with guest experts in omnichannel retailing, with myriad perspectives, technology, consumer engagement, data analytics, merchandising, and more. We pay special attention to current sociopolitical issues and challenges and their implications on fashion retail, as well as opportunities to innovate and rethink retail's future.
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Retail Revolution is produced by Joshua Williams and hosted by Christopher Lacy, both are Assistant Professors in the Fashion Management graduate program at Parsons School of Design.
Christopher Lacy: He has gone from engineer to retail, innovator and entrepreneur, as the founder and CEO of Proper Cloth established in 2008, he has grown the business to be the leading brand for men's custom dress shirts. It is my pleasure to welcome Seph Skerritt to Retail Revolution.
How are you Seph?
Seph Skerritt: I'm good. How are you, Chris?
Christopher Lacy: I'm doing great. Thank you so much for making time today to chat with us.
Seph Skerritt: Yeah, my pleasure, thanks for having me.
Christopher Lacy: So Seph, you have such an interesting career arc. And in my head, when I, think about your story, I'm like, wow, frustration obviously brings about innovation. But could you tell our listeners about how Proper Cloth came about and really how you started on this path from being an engineer?
Seph Skerritt: Yeah, sure. Let's see, like you said, I studied engineering in undergraduate, electrical engineering. I worked for a few years after college as an engineer at a big company; found that I liked the engineering side of things but hated the big company art of it. Didn't really know what to do so I applied to business school and ended up going to grad school for two years to get an MBA. And while I was in business school, I was really on this sort of hunt for an idea, a business that I could start. And did an internship in Shanghai that summer as part of the program and sort of stumbled upon custom clothing, when I was out there really as a tourist. I hadn't really been into fashion or clothing in a major way before that.
My previous experience buying men's dress clothing or business clothing was to go to Nordstrom's or something and tell him my neck size and he'd pull the shirt off the rack and I'd try it on, and it wouldn't fit very well at all. But well, that's what you got. So, take it and leave. And so, I remember being frustrated by that, but also like okay, I guess that's just how it's going to be. But then when I had my first custom clothing experience, it was just like, wow, that was so cool. I basically got exactly what I asked for, in a size that fit me exactly the way I wanted. And that kind of got the wheels turning about how come this isn't more accessible in the US. And at the same time e-commerce was really starting to take off, had been taking off for a while, but people are still skeptical in 2008 that people would buy clothing online, especially premium clothing. So, there was a lot of skepticism, but it seemed like e-com was heading in the right direction. And, so that's sort of where this idea was born to merge custom clothing and e-commerce and see if we could start a brand that would be able to stand on its own.
Christopher Lacy: For our listeners that may not have had the pleasure of engaging with Proper Cloth, you talked about e-commerce, and you're right at that time in 2008, e-commerce was pretty much full swing, but there was this kind of concept where not everything from the luxury space was present on e-commerce.
And certainly in 2008, we weren't as innovative with some of the technologies as we are now. So, you were really the trendsetter for this. So, how does Proper Cloth do what it does.
Seph Skerritt: So, when we started, we said, you know, there was this problem of, alright, how do you translate the custom clothing experience to some digital version of that? How do you create an e-com version of that? And there was a lot of ideas and things that we tried. But the kind of core of it was there was going to be some user interface for the customer to design their own shirt or choose options for their shirts, select fabrics, buttons, collar styles, cuffs, styles, things like that. And there was going to be some method for them to create a custom size. And so those are the two initial problems that I was focused on from a user experience standpoint. And we had like a very early, tool, where you could change a fabric and you'd see a version of the shirt change.
It was, I think Nike ID might've existed back then for sneakers, so we weren't at the very first version of this, but there wasn't a lot of these. But we made it look, for the time, really cool. If you saw it today, you'd say, wow, that looks pretty basic. But, for the time it was a pretty big deal.
And so that helped us make this way for the customer to design their own shirt and kind of see what it would look like as they chose different options. And then on the size side of things, there was a lot of different ideas. And so, our approach was to kind of do them all. So, we made it so that a customer could select just a standard size option, a collar size, the sleeve length, and a type of fit.
We made it so that a customer could measure their own shirt at home and enter in the dimensions of their shirt at home. We made it so that customer could measure their own body at home and enter their body dimensions. And then we'd calculate a size for them based on that. And those are actually the first size methods we had.
And, what we found was that there were customers out there that had been buying custom clothing before, that were familiar with buying custom shirts. And were happy to go through all that trouble of taking a measuring tape out and measuring their shirt, or kind of figuring something out that was kind of hard.
And that helped us get, you know, probably our first thousand customers. But as we started to really try and keep growing the business, we found that a lot of more, say average guys, were not confident to measure their own shirt or measure their body and, or go through this kind of trouble or just didn't care enough.
And so that's when we created what we call smart sizes, which is a questionnaire that customers answer, 12 or 10 questions about how tall they are, how much they weigh, what size t-shirts they wear? What size waist their pants size is? How they like their shirts to fit? Do they wear their shirts tucked or untucked? And various questions like that.
The idea was the questions would be easy for an average guy to answer. He didn't have to be an expert on buying custom clothing to answer these questions. And the initial version of this algorithm was fairly simple, kind of common sense driven, to calculate a shirt size based on those answers.
And then as we started to have more and more customers answer those questions and our dataset grew, we were able to, over time, turn that into a very sophisticated, algorithm that, was very, very accurate. So, that was how we ultimately solved the size challenge and the initial version of the shopping interface.
Christopher Lacy: So, what you, were able to do is a perfect example of why there always needs to be this inter-industry collaboration, right?
Seph Skerritt: Yeah.
Christopher Lacy: A lot of great ideas come from someone else who's outside of the industry that you're in. And I say this about the fashion industry. I think this exists with every industry on the planet is that conversations need to happen because there's somebody who is standing outside out of what you normally do and can change what that fashion system looks like.
You did this and, it's brilliantly executed. But because you came from outside of the industry, I want to ask you, what was the most difficult part of understanding retail for you? Because retail is a crazy game.
Seph Skerritt: Yeah, I mean, to some degree, I approached the business initially more as a tech startup and an engineering problem, than as a retail brand. Which worked in the beginning and for the large part, that was the challenge that we had to figure out. But as we kind of got past that initial work and we had, you might almost say like the infrastructure of technology that made it so that customers could create their own sizes and they could design their own shirts and all these other things. And then we were trying to do take the company to the next level. That's when we had to really start to develop an understanding of brand, pricing, promotions, marketing, tempos, marketing strategies and things like that. And I approached it from kind of a mix of common sense and what would I like to see? Or what would I want to get. That plus, you know, just talking to your peers and friends and gathering feedback, and then luckily as we were sort of a small company. So, we made lots of mistakes that was fine you just kept trying different stuff and eventually found that, oh, this works kind of well, and you focus more on that area and learn about that; and get better at that thing. Like email marketing, for instance, there's a whole competency there to be-come an expert on or, running digital ad campaigns on either Google or Facebook or Instagram or something like that, a whole competency there of how to execute those well. How to follow up with your customers after they've placed an order and make sure they're happy with their experience. How to provide great customer service in general and not just to do it a few at a time, but to do it really at scale with hundreds of customers, hundreds of interactions every day. Tons of challenges and things to learn there. So again, I think it was just kind of common sense approaching each of these things as they came and trying to learn and get better every day.
Christopher Lacy: Let's talk about experiencing and navigating these things as they change. Something that a lot of our listeners might not remember, but I certainly remember it, 2008 was the beginning of what would be a recession. Right? So, you had 2009, which was just a terrible year in retail. And here you were in 2008, launching a startup based in technology, based in a whole customization process. So, what was your mental state like? I just, I have to know because, you know, I was in the thick of running a business for Gucci at the time. And so that was an established business and I know I was going through it. So, for you, what was it like going okay, what's happening? What am I going to do?
Seph Skerritt: Yeah, really 2009 and 2010 were tough years for me. One of the unique things about the Proper Cloth story is that we never raised any serious venture capital money.
This was operation more or less bootstrapped with some small loans from friends and family. And so, we didn't have super high expectations at the very beginning. And on the other hand, we didn't have much of a team. So, for the first two years, it was just myself running the business. No employees. So, to some degree, Proper Cloth was just too small to fail; that you couldn't put that company out of business because it was just me with a laptop trying to make things happen. And we didn't have like a history of sales that was collapsing either. So, we weren't feeling it maybe in the same way that you would have been feeling at Gucci. But instead we were, you know, we were kind of growing throughout that, but growing from a very small number. So, it was definitely stressful. It was, you know, bootstrapping a startup is, I like to say it's really fantastic if it works, because you end up with more control over the company in the end. But certainly, going through that process of getting off the ground, you're constantly about to run out of money. You're doing everything yourself. You're spread very thin. You're answering customer emails all day and then trying to email some press to get some PR going in the afternoon. And then you're coordinating with some offshore developers until late at night. And then the next morning your factory calls and they've got a problem and you've got to deal with that.
And so you're just, you're just kind of bouncing all over the place, doing all sorts of different tasks, wearing many hats. And sort of alternating between, you know, "Hey, GQ is going to feature us in this article, like, wow, we've made it. This is amazing," to "oh, so-and-so called and says, ah, we actually owe them $10,000" and mind you, you only have $4,000 in your checking account, so that's not good. So, you're kind of alternating between these highs and lows. But I think that's true of any bootstrap startup or any startup really. So, 2008, 2009, they magnified that probably for us, but perhaps they helped us focus on, we didn't have easy success then. There wasn't like a ton of people just sort of happy to buy custom business clothing just casually. So, it forced me just to work hard for it, I think. Really focus on making the product great; really focused on building systems that would automate many parts of the business so that we could run really efficiently instead of just hiring a bunch of people to do stuff that would have been kind of boring, trivial, repetitive tasks. So, I think we had, ultimately, we were stronger because of it, but yeah, it was a tough couple of years.
Christopher Lacy: Now, as you look back and you go those last 12 years now, this is where I am. We're successful. people know about Proper Cloth. They know about you. You now have a team of people. And to your point, you automated quite a bit of what you do. So, that means your team is very streamlined and focused. But you were also in another time of uncertainty, which is for the fashion industry, for everyone in fashion and in retail, we're quite used to uncertain times.
Seph Skerritt: Hmhm.
Christopher Lacy: As you said, that beginning for you, it was just you. And it's really easy, kind of, to manage you. If you have that mindset, managing yourself is easy, because if you've got it you can do it. But now you're in a different mindset, right? You have a team and there's now uncertainty again. So, what are your thoughts now? Like how are you navigating this new space of uncertainty with a full team to think about as well?
Seph Skerritt: Yeah, a few things. one is really having your eyes open and having a clear sense of the data. Data is so important and luckily, kind of before COVID, we had already built a great internal data analytics team and systems that helped us understand what was going on in different parts of the business. And so that's probably the first part, is just having really open eyes, clear vision on, what's going on? What's selling? What isn't? How does it compare? How was at today? How was it last week? How was it last month? And so that's a big part of it, is keeping your eyes open.
The other part has been communication. To be honest, we weren't great at full company communication. I think we had an all-hands meeting, every 18 months, maybe before COVID . Now we have an all hands meeting every morning at 10:30 in the morning. So, tons of communication. "Here's where we're at today. This is what we're launching. This is what's happening. Things are going well here. Things are struggling here. So, that's been a big part of it: transparency, communication, managing expectations is kind of built into that. And then staying positive, I think is key too; recognizing that when things get “shooken” up like this, you'll see big reductions in certain areas, but it also creates big opportunities in other areas. And we've been really focused on trying to not just wait for things to go back to normal, so to speak, but to pivot, to adapt and to figure out what the customer wants today and provide the customer that product. So, for us, I mean, we made a big transition into face masks, early in the pandemic and that's proven to be a big new business for us. And, through launching that we've found ways to leverage most of our employees. We did a small layoff early in the pandemic, but we've been able to retain most of our team thanks to that. And, in the process, you know, learn new skills and get ready for a new version of Proper Cloth.
Christopher Lacy: You've mentioned a couple of times, the customer experience. And as you've talked about that, and then thinking about your internal customer and the changes you made, one of which being communication, and to be fair there are organizations that have been around for years and years and years. And, if you were to ask most of that employee population, they would say that communication is lacking. So, I think if communication was something you can fix, that's great because there's a lot of places that haven't fixed that problem to this day. But then from the service standpoint, for the external customer, how do you define what good customer experience looks like?
Seph Skerritt: So many things! So many things for digital or kind of e-com customer experience. And it's not rocket science either. It's the basics. Like product is good. The fabric's a nice quality, the craftsmanship there, the product fits right. if there's problem, the customer service team is there to help and respond quickly. And then have some form of proactive outreach to the customer to help check in, in case they didn't have a great experience, but maybe at the same time, didn't have the energy to complain about it.
We have done a lot of things, created a lot of systems that we're proud of that I think have helped us deliver a great experience. One of the big ones was about collecting feedback aggressively. And so, we built custom systems that would email a customer after their shirt arrived or whatever product they bought arrived at their house and asked them, how was your experience? And rate us on the website, experience the fabric itself, the craftsmanship of the product, the fit of the product, the customer service and the shipping. And then, do you have any comments to leave and what's your net promoter score and things like that. And then we would aggressively monitor those metrics and, one proactively reach out to customers that had a bad experience and try and make it right. But two, like identify systemic problems like. Hey, our lowest rating is consistently, I don't know, say its construction. Like, okay, what's the problem? Well, we have this buttonhole tear happening. Okay. We gotta figure out what's causing that buttonhole and you gotta like put all your energy into solving that buttonhole tear, because that is consistently hurting your customer experience. And then you solve the buttonhole problem and then you kind of find, okay, what's the next biggest problem that people are upset about? And you zero in on that and you put all your energy into improving that part of the experience slightly. And over the course of years, it's been really rewarding for us to see these average ratings slowly rise over time. So, you know, that you really are making a difference. And the fabric rating used to be on average 4.5 and then it's gone up to 4.6 and then it starts to get into the 4.7s. And you know, you really have improved the fabrics, for instance. That's been a big part of it for us.
Christopher Lacy: It's great when you get the customer feedback right? it's been even said on this podcast many times through my peers in the industry who VPs or directors of customer experience, like really just ask the customer. That's the easiest thing to do. They'll tell you. And I remember for me, one of the things that would worry me, because you know that when people respond, you get the great feedback and then you get the really negative feedback. But I always got worried about the people who were in between who would be like, eh, it was okay. You know, and I was like, wait, what? It makes you nervous a little bit. Cause you're kind of like, I need you to be either hot or cold. I don't know what to do with, "Eh, okay."
Seph Skerritt: Right, right.
Christopher Lacy: You're like I don't know where to go. That's the group that I had this thing about really wanting to target that group. Cause people who had a terrible experience, I knew that we can write this because the negative experience, is an anomaly because we never want that to happen. But I was really worried about those people who just kind of were like, "Yeah, I mean, you weren't great. You weren't awful either. So, I could come back." And you're like, what?
Seph Skerritt: Yeah.
Christopher Lacy: So that's always kind of this weird moment, but for you, you've been able to really leverage technology in all aspects of what you do from production, the supply chain to customer experience.
Seph Skerritt: Right.
Christopher Lacy: And so, as you look out at the landscape and you go, okay, I still have to be on top of my game for technology.
Seph Skerritt: Hmhm.
Christopher Lacy: What do you think technology will shape in the future of retail? Especially when it comes to things like customer experience, just that retail engagement.
Seph Skerritt: Yeah what will come in the future?
Christopher Lacy: You can also be like…Chris, I'm not the Amazing Kreskin, I don't know. Leave me alone.
Seph Skerritt: I mean, my guess is that, and you've sort of seen this already happen, but I think it'll continue to happen. When we started in 2008, Shopify didn't exist, we built our own custom e-commerce platform. And when we wanted to get feedback from customers a good off the shelf, tech solution didn't exist. So, we built our own custom feedback system. A size prediction algorithm didn't exist. So, we built our own size prediction algorithm. And I think what you've seen in the last 10 years is a lot of these sort of vertical type parts of the customer experience have been really productized and developed, and the markets had some decent competition, so that you start to get pretty good versions of these available without having to build it yourself.
Another one that came to mind is the scheduling app. Like we have a way for customer to book an appointment, to come into our showroom. Again, we built that custom. Now, if you want that, you go pay someone else a small fee to use their tool. I guess my point is, as more of these be-come available, I do think it be-comes easier for new brands to kind of get into the game. I think that's really cool because you end up with a lot more small brands. And I think small brands are really special and really interesting. And big brands, I think the days of there being five big brands like Brooks Brothers and J Crew and I don’t' know, pick a couple others that everyone shops at are gone. And now you have a time where there's a thousand unique, smaller brands. And everyone gravitates towards one or the other, for whatever reasons that suit their unique personality, or fit, or shape or whatnot. And I think that's really cool. And I think technology is what is making that possible. And that's going to have a big effect, or it has already, but we'll have more.
Christopher Lacy: So, when you, think of all those changes and how you see it evolving, and if you can say, how do you feel Proper Cloth will continue to evolve as we see this change?
Seph Skerritt: Yeah, I mean we will continue to do what we do. You know? I do think that these off the shelf tech solutions are great to kind of get started quickly, like get your Shopify sites set up, do some plugin to accept foreign currency, do another plugin to collect feedback from customers. That works, but I do think that our approach of building our own fully custom, fully integrated tools, I do think we tend to get slightly better end result; even though it is more work for us up front. I do think we get slightly better end results. So, we can continue to really thrive with just that approach of making our tools better, making our systems better, listening to the customer, making what they want. And continuing to try and give the customer what they ask for.
Christopher Lacy: Awesome. Seph for you what brings you your inspiration? If we were to talk to someone who is a fashion designer, the things that brings them their inspiration, it could be art, it could be architecture. For you, you're a tech startup in the fashion retail space. So, I'm interested in knowing from what your background was, what kind of inspires you to continue to do this and, to create something new?
Seph Skerritt: Gotcha.
Christopher Lacy: Every day.
Seph Skerritt: Yeah. We, personally, and as a brand, we really liked the idea of achieving your potential. And I think it’s sort of a very high-level value, but this idea of just striving for excellence, trying to achieve the maximum you can achieve. That's something thing that drives me and drives our team internally in a big way and is a big value for us. That's a big part of it, like this desire to understand how things work better, this desire to make things as good as they can be, is just a fundamental driver on both the shopping experience, technology user interface side, as well as the, how are you going to sew something so that it last longer and looks better and whatever it is on the product side. It's just this desire to be the best you can be in each of these things. I think that's really the main, that's really the main thing for us. And for Proper Cloth, we still feel that Proper Cloth hasn't reached its true potential, that there's still tons of folks out there that aren't aware of what we're doing; haven't had the experience of a custom shirt or custom jacket, that if they did, they would love it and it would make their lives better in some way. And we need to continue to push, to fulfill our potential and make that happen.
So, that's, really what's going on in our minds.
Christopher Lacy: Awesome. So Seph, how can our listeners keep up to date with what's going on at Proper Cloth, or keep up to date with what you're doing?
Yeah, sure. So, I mean, you can find us on social media @propercloth for Instagram Twitter. Mine is just @sephskerritt. Same as my name. If you really want to know what's going on at Propercloth If you create an account on our site, you, can get onto our email list. And we, have lots of new products launching every week. So, lots of cool stuff there see.
Fantastic. Seph, I appreciate your time today. This was a great conversation. Looking to more conversations with you in the future.
Seph Skerritt: Thanks so much, Chris.
Christopher Lacy: Thank you. Take care.
Joshua Williams: Thank you for listening to this episode of Retail Revolution. A very special thank you to everyone who has helped to make this podcast possible.
If you'd like to support the work we're doing, please visit our show page at retailrevolutionpodcast.com and click on the donate link. Our theme music was composed by Spencer Powell.
Be well and stay tuned for our next episode!
