YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Preysman

lines on the record: 109
first: 2023-11-20
most recent: 2023-11-20
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

“I think it was just we wanted to get things out the door and we had a factory and we said go and indeed Other than us talking about this today, nobody who shops on Everlain.com knows the story.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the bow tie, like the Venn diagram of hipsters and, I guess, cheap apparel and Brooklyn, I guess the middle of that is a bow tie. But it's not a big enough. There's a bow tie thing. You had people with the handlebar mustaches and leather aprons and bowties walking around. Urban areas for a while, but that wasn't a very long lasting thing. So I can't imagine like.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't have a lot of connections, and it was we would have to wait six to 12 months to be able to launch. A sweatshirt and a sweater and a button down because that's how long it would take us to find the factory, source the fabric. And our alternative was we had a guy that could make ties and bow ties in two months. And we just said, let's do that. It was always, let's try it. If it doesn't work, move on.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a very unusual you guys were about t-shirts and about direct-to-consumer and talking to all these people in the apparel industry and talking to Warby Parker, it just seems like a kind of a, just throwing a dart at a dartboard, let's do bow ties.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ties and bow ties made in a factory in the Bronx that manufactured everything for Brooks Brothers. And we sold them for $35, and we bought 1,200 ties and bow ties.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had found, and again, the idea of Everling was really a platform for going direct to consumer. And so the strangest thing you would never expect if you were to build a brand today and you start with a t-shirt, your next product might be Denim. And then you might do sweaters and then you might do button downs and build it. Merchandise a line appropriately. Our next product, because we had no contacts in the industry, was literally ties and bow ties”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you do the second run and you keep selling out shirts. And by the way, I mean, your response to attacks from people who represent retail groups is like, listen, we're an online business. And so we don't have to, there's no middleman. So at what point, and this is now you're getting into 2012. Getting a lot of attention from obviously, as people are buying these shirts, you can get immediate attention. At what point did you say, all right, we've got to make other things besides t-shirts”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there was the blog Well Spent wrote, this is, I guess, a fashion blog or consumer fashion brand. They wrote my issue with the graphic is it's a dangerous oversimplification. Essentially, Everlane is attempting to demonize any clothing company charging greater than 2.25% in manufacturing costs, and that's ludicrous. You kind of create a stir. But you guys, it seems like that was part of that, that was kind of the hope that that would happen.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and they had wholesalers and they had profit margins if you're Gucci of 30%. And we had the fortune of being small and at that time being very, very simple. And so we just sold Direct and shared our model. And yeah, they didn't like it, but that's to your point, perhaps capitalism.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you put this infographic out. Not surprisingly, it also irritated some people because the accusation was, hey, this is a total oversimplification. This is not actually accurate. I mean, one of the things, to be fair, that the infographic doesn't explain is the cost of manufacturing the shirt 670, and then the wholesaler, the factory sells it to the retailer for $15. But then there's the $15 to $50 gap involves a lot of marketing costs. I mean, you can make the case about like a pair of Gucci slippers. There are factories in Italy that can make the same slippers for $60. Why are they $900? Because you're paying for the brand. So the associated costs at that point were because these companies were building a brand and they had to pay for it.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a series of numbers, but it was very human in its own way that people felt like, oh, that's interesting. I never knew this information. And now this company is sharing it. And in a lot of ways, that's also what the internet's about, is exposing things that you didn't know before.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this was called The Making of a Designer T. I'm looking at it now. It's a wonderful infographic. It basically shows you the price that it costs to make a shirt, cotton $275, cutting at 35 cents, sewing $1.35, dying fifty cents, finishing $1.25, transport fifty cents, cost of the brand $670, sells to retailers for fifteen, sells to you for $50. So you put this infographic out there, and lots of people see this. I mean, like this definitely goes viral.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We built an infographic that showed all the costs and we put it up on our product page and we put it up on Tumblr and we said let it go and it got picked up.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today, we're so saturated with discovery that it feels a bit banal that, okay, I discovered something new. Oh, I already heard about that. But back then, it was a bit, even 10 years ago, very different pre the rise of TikTok and Instagram. And so there was one element of it that was, oh, there's something new online. And then another that was this company's promising this quality. I'm interested in that. It's not just price. There's a story behind the price. But of course, I do think you're right. We did struggle with saying, how do people understand that our $15 t-shirt is really different when we're online? And so a month in at the end of November, we actually launched what started transparent pricing, which is we said we've got nothing to lose. Why don't we tell people exactly what our costs are end-to-end?”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this is where, you know, I don't know. I believe that people are different than that for two reasons. One, it was a time and place. There were so few brands being launched online. Now it's a dime a dozen all over the place. I think Instagram and TikTok have become the shopping malls of America, discovering small brands all the time. Instagram had just launched. In fact, we actually sat next to Mikey and Kevin when they launched Instagram because they were in Dog Batch Labs. But no one thought it was for shopping at the time.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First run sold down, I mean, it was 1,500 t shirts times. It sold out in a day or two. I mean, quickly And we did everything we did with cotton. And for a certain group of people, that's just supima cotton, all what we call garment dyed. It was a higher quality product, without a doubt.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we send an email that says we have 80,000 people but can't let you all in. So you're now on a wait list to be let into Everlane.com. And we put Everlane.com behind a wall. And so we launch with 1,500 t-shirts and let 5,000 or 10,000 people in. But fortunately, we knew we could create another 5,000 t-shirts and then let the next tranche of people in. And so that really became the way we built a bit of the business and the momentum for the first year.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't even tell people we were offering t shirts. So I was freaked out. I mean, we were all freaked out because we said they think we're selling luxury goods for eight times what they cost to make. Let's see what happens. And so we had these 80,000 people, and it felt really exciting, but it also felt very overwhelming. And we go, uh-oh, we have way more demand than we have supply. And we don't even know if these people are going to be pissed off because actually what we're just selling is a t-shirt.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's where that first 5,000 to 10,000 email list came in. So we emailed those five to 10,000 people with a really nice email and said, here it is. And you can sign up. And then we posted it on Twitter at the time in a couple other places. And next thing you know, I kid you not, this thing blows up. And we have 80,000 people sign up. 80,000”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Free shipping for life was if you invited 50 people, if you invited five people, you got early access to the wait list. If you invited 10 people, you got free shipping on your first order. So it was like different tiers and you could track where you were. And it became a bit of a staple of Everlane over time, which is building waitlists. But that was our first one. And it was a really simple concept. It said you're luxury goods seller eight times what they cost to make, not at Everlink. Launching November 1st at midnight. Sign up.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$15 And we said, let's create a viral campaign if we can. Wouldn't that be great? We sign up. I mean, it's sort of a dream, but how many people can we sign up before launch? So we. Built a little landing page, and the landing page had a series of awards, rewards you could get based on the number of people you invite.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had moved from dog patch labs because we overdid our stay there to a place in the financial district in San Francisco. So it was about 1,400 square feet.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, just a placeholder. Everlane, Jesse was building a lot of the technology in the back end. And we had had a community, a small community that we had built through the different channels on Tumblr. And so you could call it, we had 5,000 to 10,000 people on an email list that we knew we could reach out to when ready.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of 2011 So, alright, so the idea was let's get these shirts made, and then we're going to figure out how to sell them. You hadn't launched the company yet, right? There was nothing Everlane.com was just a placeholder at that point.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh boy, yeah. The first run was 1,500 t shirts. That's it And we're probably call this, we're in October now with a plan to launch November 1st.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To me, that was the secret of the whole industry. You're making the fabric might have been, I think, call it a buck 50 to $2, the cutting 45 cents. The James Purcey costs $6, $7 to make too. And they were selling that for a four to six X markup. And the basic principle of Everlane in the early days was two to two and a half X markup. That's it And so, yeah, ours was a little bit cheaper out of the gate because we managed all the different steps ourselves. But eventually, a few months in, we contract manufactured with one vendor who actually managed all the processes for us.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Los Angeles end to end, we made them by sourcing the fabric. We used out of the gate Supima, which is the highest quality American cotton. Than finding people. I remember driving an hour with fabric and taking it to a grater who would grade it from extra small to large and then getting it cut. And then we would actually take it from the cutter to the sewer to the dyer to the finisher and then package it all up.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I say the do right or others do wrong, all of that came out over a period of time in a way that we really became students of the industry. In a way that put the customer first, what would that look like? So pricing transparency was one customer experience. The customer experience we really focused on, the communication, the community, really having an open dialogue with the consumer, which felt the opposite of what you actually experienced oftentimes in retail, where you would go in and somebody might talk to you, somebody might not, getting help was challenging, knowing how to return things was challenging. So customer experience and customer service was always a big, big part of what we hung our hat on.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the idea that it was everlasting and at the same time rooted to a physical place because we were digital, but people get really worked up about names. I think brands and people live into their names. The name becomes them. I'm less, I'm usually not that concerned. I don't think names matter that much. And a big part of what we were trying to do was to do right where others do wrong. And that's where the storytelling really came full front.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jesse and I were sitting in a room one day on instant domainsearch.com and we were just for three hours typing in names, names, names. And I had a whole bunch of scratch and I always, you know, we liked the names that were simple and clear. And all of a sudden typed in Everlane.com and it was available for $17. And we bought it”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It should have been the idea, but the idea was we're going to source all the material and control the entire supply chain and then sell directly to the consumer. And what I mean by that is the difference is in one case you go to a manufacturer, you say, can you make me t-shirts? And what are you going to charge me? And I'll get the final product. And then the other one, we met a number of people down in Los Angeles and we bought the fabric. We learned how to do the patterns for the fabric. We had those patterns, what we call grading, so it can go from small to extra large. I mean, we learned every step of the process because there was this theory that if you're going to become a great chef, what you need to do is go to cooking school. And so we kind of, we believed we had to go through, call it apparel school 101.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you mentioned that when you found out that your $45 t-shirt costs $7, right, did you think that, okay, we're just going to source those t-shirts from the same factories and sell them for less? Was that the idea?”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I remember this moment where I draft up this long email about what the new plan is. We're going to shut all this stuff down and we're going to launch a brand and it's launching on this date. And I sat on this email and sat on this email and finally sent it to all of our investors expecting a bunch of people to say, what the hell are you doing? And for the first hour to crickets, and then three emails come in of the 30 so investors we have that say, great, sounds good. There again was that entrepreneurial spirit of whatever you need, just go do it.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We thought about it as a platform to launch product, not as much as a fashion brand. That came later. And this was a big point of one of those critical moments in the evolution of the company because we had raised our million dollars maybe spent at this point, 100,000 of it. And we had signed up all these investors on the idea that we're going to build a retailer on top of Tumblr. And the belief was let's ditch the retail platform. Let's ditch all this technology and let's go launch a brand And in my head, I had this immense fear that our investors were going to say, this is not what I signed up for.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did eventually have a pocket for sure, but yeah, in the early days, it was plain t shirts, good old plain, high quality supima cotton t-shirts.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's the idealism I had in the early 20s. Yeah, now you could say in the 30s, that's capitalism. Good for you. And then you could say our version of capitalism was great, we're going to sell it for less and tell our story. But in the early days, it felt more than that, and it felt like there was an opportunity to reshape the industry. And we said, if the basic T-shirt can be marked up seven times, let's build a brand around that concept because the t-shirt is the most basic part of a wardrobe.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It inspired me and us in an immense amount. And what it was when we, I remember these iPhone cases, we realized the markups were so high and we said, okay, well, we're not going to start a company around iPhone cases. But what if we start a brand and for whatever reason it was, we realized that the basic t-shirt, you know, I remember loving a brand called James Purse that sold t-shirts at the time, $45. Now they're probably $80. And I found out those t-shirts cost $7, $6 to make And that seemed borderline unethical, that a $7 t-shirt was marked up to $45 and the consumer had no idea.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, obviously what Wardby Parker did was they realized that glasses were being marked up extraordinarily high and that most glasses most people wore were controlled by one company, most brands. And so that model of producing or owning sort of the means of production and then lowering costs, that was their model. And so clearly I imagine that inspired you to some extent.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. Dave was particularly helpful because, indeed, he had launched in 2010, I believe, or, oh, February 2010. So they were about a year and a half in. And I had, you know, we had just launched our iPhone cases and we said, wait a second, Warby selling direct. Why can't we sell direct and build a brand around that? And Dave was just immensely helpful in just helping us think through the early days of what we were building. And I was learning what mattered from Dave. And then I remember in the early days also just learning how to manufacture because we decided we were going to be the manufacturer.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I read that while you are kind of searching around for ideas and what might work And I know one of them was Dave Gilboa, who started Warby Parker because you probably loved that brand and they were a hot brand. Tell me what you just reached out to him cold.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was you know we had we just had a good network? We were surrounded by people doing other interesting work. And so quickly people introduced us to the right people. And it was the famous SV Angel Ron Conway. It was Kleiner Perkins put in a little bit of money. It was a whole host of different people that just said, hey, this sounds cool. Tumblr, shopping. These guys seem smart. We'll give them a shot. And when I go back to thinking about why I moved to California versus New York, that was the reason. The belief in California has always been, give it a shot, let's see what happens.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know how we made this assumption, but we made the assumption that they probably cost two or three dollars to make. And that we're only making $10 but generating all the demand. And this custom iPhone case company is making a ton of money off of us. And that was this aha moment that said, Wait, the markups in retail are actually pretty massive. And why don't we just become the manufacturer and sell direct to the consumer? And at the time that we were building this iPhone K store, I do want to say that we had gone out and raised a small amount of money.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cases were designed by a group of five or six different graphic freelancers we found. We would have people design very cool graphics of different sorts. some culturally related, some beautiful, whatever. And we would post them on Tumblr and say, if this gets X number of likes, we'll make it and sell it. And then based on that, it would link to a store. That we had where people could buy things. And indeed, people would like certain things, would put them up and they would sell, and it was sort of the beginning of creating this buzz and wait list. But we were buying all of these iPhone cases from some site. I don't know, call it custom iPhoneCases.com. And we would pay 20 bucks and sell them for 30. So the margin wasn't very good. We were making $10. And then we realized these $20 iPhone cases.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we start building tools on top of Tumblr. So, one of the thoughts for us was can we build curation and can we create so much buzz around products that we can drive people to find the products they love, buy them, and then we would get an affiliate fee of some sort. And the concept was an iPhone case store. Would design iPhone cases based on the number of likes they got on Tumblr, we would actually put them into production and sell them.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“End of 2010 might be early 2011. We are trying different things. So, I'll give you an example one of Jesse's big beliefs was building on top of audiences. And in the early days, we said, okay, let's see how we can rethink shopping. And we were looking at all kinds of different platforms. Etsy is an example. And we built a tool on top of Etsy that basically turned your Etsy shopping into feeds and you could follow different shops and then you would get updates on their newest items And it worked and it was very cool. And a lot of people loved it. And then we realized very quickly that building a business on top of Etsy was a losing proposition. And so then we went from Etsy to Tumblr, which was a big platform at the time. And we said, why don't we see, can we build shopping on top of Tumblr”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I can tell you there were a whole ton. So the question for us was how can we rethink online shopping? What does that mean, and what can it look like? And we each put down, open up a bank account and each committed and said, let's just put down $10,000.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, it was going to be digital based. And in the early days, it wasn't retail necessarily. Jesse and I were in explore mode, to be honest. We ended up at a place called Dog Patch Labs, which has a really storied history to it, but we ended up working there. For a number of months just iterating through ideas.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you knew that whatever it is you were going to start, you had this sort of, you could handle the finance or maybe the business side, but you needed somebody who could handle the technical side because obviously this was going to be a digital based business”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's more than just, yeah, he's a technical product leader, but very technical and able to write code and, you know, did development end-to-end.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had the idea for me was really critical I wasn't technical. Even though I study computer engineering, I didn't code, which is strange. I don't know. It just never really sang to me. And so I was really set on finding a co-founder and I happened to link up with a really great guy, Jesse Farmer.”
2023-11-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Everlane: Michael Preysman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT