YouSaid · the spoken record

Fokke de Jong

lines on the record: 92
first: 2023-05-01
most recent: 2023-05-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, you know, we got these Amsterdam stunned where Mr. Oger sort of bites. So let's see if we can stir up trouble. Nothing You”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got you. We have like 100 or 1,000 alarm clocks hung up on there, and they're all going to ring at the same time. We bring the press.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we were trying to get locations, but we were getting, yeah, but you guys are not traditional English. So we went, took a side street. And open the store there, and then my PR brainstorming about PR and such things. We're going to bolt you on the location, on a bed, and you're going to sleep in there. And we have all these alarm clocks, and then we bring in the press, and we're going to wake up several row, right? We're going to be this old new kid on the block.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you're basically going to London Yeah, so I wanted to open a store on Saville Row. And the funny thing with Saville Row was actually that store was designed, a designated by the Crown of London that could only have traditional English tailors there.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, you know, that was one of the things I think I waited for a little too long. I think 2008-09, I started with the first door in Belgium. And then in London. And London was an interesting example because”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I still have to thank him for it because. Know it gave us a lot of momentum and a lot of publicity. So that store, you know, took a huge, huge jump.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they were like, I don't know, what's the equivalent demos premium luxury store in Holland? And at that time, we opened a second store. We opened a store in Amsterdam, in the city. But it was sort of in that area, but not in the main on Main Street, around the corner, a little bit, et cetera. And then we had an ad that says, For a beautiful suit you go to Auger and then you admit it take a left and a right, basically just a route to go to our store. Yeah. And it was sort of a little bit of a pawn over joke. And I said, it was a little tongue in cheek. And he went for it. He started suing us on that. He is ocean.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the phrase was like that. He was constantly trashing, or we're trashing our business a little bit. Yeah, is it brass ogre?”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's more or less it. Yeah. They talk about it. It becomes part of the conversation. That is the most important advertising you can get. If you don't have that, forget about it. You're never going to be able to buy against that.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Outskirts or whatever inside the town, but then not on Maine on Maine. My customers were coming for the quality of the product, the fact that it was an attainable price point, and they were getting a great service. So why would I now then go by the standard playbook of how everybody was building a fashion brand, even though the guys that put some money in would say, no, no, no, you have to go there and there. And this is how you build a brand. I was like, no, not really because... You know, I can build a brand based on quality of product, based on quality of service, and just figure out to be more efficient so I can actually maintain that proposition.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that's the moment when, you know, the obvious wing was to expand and open more stores. Didn't have still a lot of cash, so I really went from this crazy location into other cities, but still doing the same thing almost and finding spots that were interesting that I could create some kind of an experience in, and it was easy for customers to go to, but still keeping our occupancy cost low.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or 60 days? No, they were not giving me that credit yet. And the thing is, you buy your fabrics, then you have to send them to your factories. They have to produce it, then they have to send it to your stores. I mean, that whole process has your cash tied up before you way longer than if you were just a business that buys wholesale.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Margins were thin and you needed the two, 300,000, I don't know the exact number here anymore, right? But we summoned that ballpark. Plus, it was a credit line, right? My business was growing at the time, but I still had to pre-finance all the fabrics. It's a paper.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fun at the time it was gonna be beneficial for us to be part of a bigger business and that was public and you know we could learn something there but it also the other side was that that I didn't give away any governance right so it was still you know fully in control Basically, their incentive was they needed to affiliate them with something that was online so that they could tell the markets, hey guys, we have a strategy of online and we're also looking at online and this is the business that we've invested some money in at the end of the day we are not part of that business but sort of next to or you know could tap into some of the resources. I don't know if that was really that helpful to be honest”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wanted to get rid of the problem, right? They had complaining people were probably sympathetic of what we were doing, but they just needed an argument of getting rid of the problem. I didn't know how to solve this problem other than that. And I never heard anything of them ever since.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so then I thought, okay, I took a pen, I practiced as long as I could to have almost the same handwriting as the unit where it was store written in. And I just penciled store in my unit. And then I went back to the municipality and said, because what do you mean on these blueprints? It says store Oh, okay Oh, we didn't know”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I should have known. Well, I mean, how could I have known that? Because next to me, there were two units, right? I was also like, I can't believe this. This is actually true, right? Because it was so obvious that it should have been zoned for retail. And I went to the municipality and I just wanted to see the plans. I wanted to see the blueprints. And I got to say, well, you can go there, just wait for you in this little room, and we'll bring you the blueprints. And then you can sit in that room and went over these big pile of blueprints. And then I saw that one of my building and it said exactly that unit next to us said with pencil it was written in there. It said store and my unit said nothing.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I get this guy from the municipality coming in, and we're helping customers. Yes, well, sorry, you're having retail here. You cannot have that. You need to close down. I'm like, shit. I put ten thousand bucks I had 15,000 bucks I put everything in that store and these guys were seriously coming to me with a letter that we were not zoned for retail and we had to close down”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Competitors, yeah. And what they did, they said to the municipality these guys are in somewhere where you cannot have retail. This is not zone for retail, it's guerrilla retail.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but at the time it made sense because it was we were direct to consumer very disrupting the market and it was sort of a name that went well with that time moment. We were seen as the new solution to everything, which was also, by the way, imposed an immediate problem. Because these local retailers that were around us were looking at us with a little bit of an envy, I think.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. We had a gas station, you had a store where they were selling magazines, cigarettes, and all that kind of stuff. And I ran out of space next to it. And that was basically it.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instead, I'm on a fancy street. I think the newspapers were writing about this crazy store that was selling high-end soothing next to the highway online, but now opening stores. This was going to revolutionize retail. Know all the high end streets in the middle of the cities were going to disappear and this was all going to happen, right? People, when new changes are happening, they're very hyperbolic. And so what happened was, you know, I opened this store, which was completely logical in my mind. I mean, I was not really attached to this playbook. I just wanted to have a store somewhere where it was the most easiest place where I fought my customers would be. You know, I was surprised with it, but the effect of our business was is suddenly people were queuing up because we had so much PR.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's where the business commuters were going. Which was, of course, insane in the eyes of the whole industry. Insane that it was.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened Is an I think that was really the breakthrough because you know now I'm having this online business, an online store and it went pretty okay, even pretty well. You know, people were buying stuff. But with this product, people wanted to have, you know, a place where they can do their alterations, fitting, see the product. That's still the case, actually, with fashion, that people want to have some physical presence. So then I was thinking, okay, because I didn't have a lot of money to open a whole store on an expensive location. And I was thinking, okay, where if I'm looking at my customers, where are they? Most customers were driving and commuting back and forth from offices and appointments between the two biggest cities in Holland, Rotterdam and Amsterdam, big highway. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to make this whole little experience center and pick up point and tailoring and where can people pick up their”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what I also learned is that, you know, these people are also running businesses, right? And if you're able to show that you're actually, you know, you're legit, you're doing business, you can convince them of doing business with you. It took me some time. For the first years they wouldn't even talk to me, right? Yeah. And then you get a few ones on board and see how that was especially when we went into online and they saw that we were maybe potentially. The new thing that was going to happen in the business stuff started opening up and now our business is by far the biggest customer of all these mills. In”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, these were the mills like Vidala Barbier Zena, all these kind of guys. They were also really protective for their, you know, they didn't suddenly want their high-end fabrics and then sold for a price that they could have never imagined the product was being sold for.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Around Lake Como. And, you know, it's there because. Ready for a few hundred years because the water coming from the mountain is extremely soft and it's great to wash wool in and that's where the best fabrics in the world come from. And I wanted to have the best fabrics. And the only way to do that is to put orders in trade shows that they would have, you know, they would have this every season, this convention on the Lake Como, very fancy. But I was not able to get invited there. You know, you have to be very... Legit to get in there You know, I had to do that through somebody else that was already a customer of some of these mills to be able to buy fabric.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's a good question, but I was buying already some of the leftover stuff, right? So I had a relationship with him. Yeah. And I was actually paying. You know, I was a legit customer, I was paying them cash. And I came back. And I got more, and I paid it. So, you know, getting it sued together was not the hardest thing this factory. What was the hardest thing was actually getting fabric. The fabric business was in Como in the north of Italy.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nah, I don't think so Know what are you going to learn in an organization like that? Is first of all 50-60% of the effort in an organization like that goes to the political process, right? Positioning yourself well and all that kind of stuff. It's not just doing stuff, right? There's a whole other thing that goes along with it. And there's also a risk, right? Comfortably, you know, you might think, okay, this is great and make some money, et cetera. And are you actually then going to make the jump five years from now when you're beginning your 30s and make this nice salary, you bought this house, you met your first wife or a friend? Or, you know, are you then going to make the jump? And the question is how relevant are those experiences of being in a big company, right? They're probably very irrelevant at some point if you have your own company that's really big. But at the beginning, they're not, I don't think they're relevant.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think at some point that was the point that I sort of quit Procter& Gamble, I thought, you know, this is something I have in my hands now. You know, let me focus on building something around this.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it was at the time that Europe was becoming one market, but also one currency. And then it also coincided with the moment that e-commerce started to happen. I think that was the biggest change at the time. I made a website and I was at this whole idea of selling high quality suiting shirts and what goes with it online.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I didn't have this whole big overhead. I didn't have occupancy costs and I didn't have expensive stories. That was, you know, remember that was in 2000, right? It was not the direct to consumer market. Not really invented yet. I was basically able to reinvent the whole business model from scratch.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Independent stores again. And if you then add it all up, because I sort of knew how much this suit cost, right? And how much I could sell it for, which was a fourth of the price it was at a luxury store. It was the same product. So didn't you start figuring out why is that? How is that possible? And who is making all the money here? And then you find out that it's a lot of inefficiency of how the whole business was structured that price ends up to be the price at some point. And my distribution was very different. I didn't have to deal with all these people in between. Well,”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And what I sort of, you know, I was new to this business. I had no idea how it worked, right? It's not like I was in my 20s and wanted to be the next Tom Ford or something. I just, you know, it was. It sort of started as a side hustle. And then I found out a little bit because I had to go through the motions of how inefficient that whole business worked, because this factory, they made a beautiful product. But then if you look at how it was sold, they made a product for a brand and then this brand goes into a trade show. And this trade show, Customers, and there's agents bringing in these customers or agents selling it to”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just said I need more suits. And then I sort of found out what the whole business model was and why it was constrained. And they said, well, we can give you more, but then you have to buy your own fabric.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a quarter of the price. And then what happened, of course, I was selling more and I was telling the guy, so can't you give me more? And even have more because this excess fabric, they ran out. Then I said, okay, but let me then talk to your source to see if I can work something out with them because I have, I think I have a bigger market.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something like that. Yeah, the problem was what actually happened was his business model and he made his sort of deal where the factory in Italy was producing suits for some of the bigger brands And they would tell these brands, yeah, well, you give me this cloth to make you a product, and we need 3.1 meter to make this product. But in reality, when they were really efficient, they only needed 3 meters or 2.9. So, you know, they always kept over and they left over a little bit of fabric.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I sort of at some point my business got a little bigger, right? And this guy that was giving me stuff was running to its limits, right?”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not that. You sort of have to talk to them a little bit. And, you know, it's that we did these events there and there. It's maybe something for you guys. I mean, do you think the guys are dressing well here? And I said, no, they could use some help. They would always say they could use some help. And that was sort of the hook in.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And he was giving me a discount if I bought some more and then I was basically a little distributor and folding up my bed in my dorm room when some of my buddies came in to come and fit. And then the problem was with student business, it was only a few times a year, right? When there were graduations or when there were. Parties, right? So. It was not consistent. So when these events were not there, I was like, okay, where else can I sell them? And that's how I ended up ringing doorbells”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When my grandfather died at a very old age for his funeral, I needed a suit and a nice suit. I want to have a nice suit. And then somebody knew a guy that knew a guy that was selling suits straight out of Italy from a factory. And, you know, I met this guy, bought a suit, and then I thought, okay, he was using this connection to buy leftover fabrics that were produced into suits. And it was a very nice product. I was still studying. I needed a sort of a, you know, some ways of actually making a little money to get by. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to sell suits to my fellow students for their interviews, graduation parties, and all that kind of stuff.”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a peace in the Wall Street Journal that did a blind test on soothing. And our website blew up and I'm like, okay, we got to capture this momentum. I mean, this is a dream. We're doing an opening. We have all kinds of press coming. You know, I think six, seven hundred people on the guest list. This was the moment. And two days or before opening, I get a call from this landlord and say, heard you're going to open tomorrow. I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're all done. I mean, big opening. Yeah, you're still, I don't have your permit closed out, so that's not going to happen. I'm like,”
2023-05-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Suitsupply: Fokke de Jong · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT