Speaker unverified: recommendation

Transcript context

…mer as much as possible yeah it's always better when the customers like oh this is a great product versus like the founders or the the corporate brand is you know talking down yeah I think trust is is everything when it's especially a digital product and if you're disrupting an industry if you're doing something new there's how many questions customers are going to have and the trust is that much more important that being able to hear about it from a trusted friend or a resource and ask questions is like the most impactful marketing that you could get yeah well speaking of impactful marketing I remember you got the initial launch covered by the New York Times which I don't know if I know of another startup that's done that other than like you know like Sam Alman starting a new company or Elon starting a new company how did you get the launch covered by by the New York Times yeah I have a I have the article right up on my wall here it was it was pretty wild but you know what sometimes like the greatest gift of Entrepreneurship is being somewhat naive and so we didn't even realize quite how Wild it was we were just like going for every opportunity and what happened is we had a wait list for our launch where we were kind of Dripping information that we were launching we ultimately let people sign up to join the weight list and when we had enough inventory we would let more people off the weight list and someone on the waight list had a New York Times email address and so we directly wound up emailing and reaching out and pitching the concept and it was someone who totally like a woman in our age group in demo who we knew would like really relate to the concept I mean she had signed up as a potential customer and so we were able to like invite her in talk to her connect with her about the business and then we offered them to come and take photos and we had a really cool setup at the time inside of a dry cleaner where we had a rack of dresses that we were storing in this dry cleaner and every afternoon we would go over as a team and we would fulfill orders out of the dry cleaner so we would like set up our laptop and we had our stack of boxes and we were just like getting orders done and that's where we said like come take some photos and we kind of knew it was like a pretty wild thing that if we were wearing our Rent the Runway dresses and we were up on ladders fulfilling orders that it would be a fun story especially for the technology section which is where we were featured and yeah it was like I mean it was such a gift of awareness but also of just the ability to I think be women in the technology industry and category and I think often fashion can be taken as something that's like fluffy or lighter or less serious as a business and I think saying you know what like this is something that's very meaningful and impactful and has a real opportunity in the world of technology and and e-commerce which was just starting to come online at that time was was pretty special in itself and and then I I didn't actually look this up did the article come out first or did you launch first or was it like same day kind of a ting to come online at that time was was pretty special in itself and and then I I didn't actually look this up did the article come out first or did you launch first or was it like same day kind of a thing it was like very similar within like a few days we probably had like soft launched a week before or something like that okay what happened when that went live was it was that a big impact so much traffic and demand but what we were able to do was because we had this weight list we were really able to throttle and control the amount of customers who were able to rent because we really wanted everyone to have an amazing experience and you know I often say and I worked with Mark Lori and he says this too it's like start with the ideal customer experience and work backwards and we knew that the ideal customer experience meant we needed amazing inventory so we needed to partner with Brands we needed full size runs so that you could try out different sizes we gave customers the second size for free because we wanted to alleviate the fear of bit and like if that was going to be an issue um and so we didn't want people to come on and see that we were all stocked out it's still one of my pet peeves that there's so many sites these days days where you go on and they don't have your size and it's like don't people know my size already or you know like it's 20 it's almost 2025 yeah yeah we're sending people to space like can't we just like not show me sold out items or only take me to the brands that I like and care about so I think for us we wanted to always kind of ma it's like a marketplace right so we're always matching the availability of inventory with the number of customers we're able to service and you feel like people don't do that as well nowadays like they did is it like you just have to stay on top of the demand as it's coming in and like appropriately kind of throttle and I don't know how would you approach that I mean I think it's there's so many people just gunning to acquire customers and maybe the experience that a customer has can be like de prioritized in this like race to leverage AI or the race to penetrate a market and get quick growth numbers um so I think it's like how do you build a quality experience that feels organic and unique and really high value can be discounted and however like I think a lot of marketplaces are trying to be thoughtful about aligning supply and demand and growing those two things concurrently yeah is there anything you messed up on there in the early days oh my God so much especially on the technology front we weren't Engineers unfortunately I'm still not an engineer and we assumed it's something that you could just kind of like Outsource and Fork over to an engineering team and write like a perfect requirements document and it nothing works like that like nothing in startup or in life works like that like if you take your eye off the ball like I think then there's errors there's things that are going to happen no one's going to care as much as you and so we wound up having to fire the engineering team we had hired like a month before our launch and it was really important for us to launch before g to happen no one's going to care as much as you and so we wound up having to fire the engineering team we had hired like a month before our launch and it was really important for us to launch before holidays because people have so many holiday events I mean just like this moment everyone's kind of gearing up and starting to plan and getting excited about their holiday events we wanted to capture that demand and so we had to very quickly scramble to basically start from scratch and you know find a different engineering team to build things and we were still like bug bashing technical bugs once we launched like the you know the week of launch so you know with customers it was one reason why a soft launch is a great idea we were still finding things so I think the tech build you know assuming that because we weren't Engineers ourselves we couldn't like get in there a bit more like you can you can interview people you can ask questions you can see where they're at you can have you know daily check-ins and standups as it gets close to launch days and then our branding at one point too we also like prior to launch we kind of scrapped all our initial branding we felt like it wasn't aspirational enough and given that we wanted people to feel like this was as if you're a celebrity and that aspirational feeling was so key to the feeling of empowerment when you put on a great dress we were like nope doesn't feel right like that's very important we need to to re refresh that okay so deciding like we're about to launch we're going to rebuild everything and Rebrand everything how did you get comfortable doing that like did you adjust the launch date back a little bit did you just like all right we're just GNA like wing it I mean how did you make the decision so The Branding was early enough on that it did actually feel kind of like a choice and it was a it was a big like we lost initial deposit and money it set us back timeline wise but we also started to see as we were partnering with designers because we buy all of our inventory directly from designers we partner with designers that The Branding mattered so much so I think we started to really appreciate more and more that it wasn't just important for the customers but it was also important for like getting Brands to agree to work with us and sell their inventory just because like you were the the brand you were projecting they wanted to align with yeah they wanted to make sure they could trust that experience to be a quality one and they were aligned with an aspirational brand and we so in that instance we had time so it was more you know losing you know if it was 30 or $40,000 which was very meaningful to us in the beginning but we didn't set ourselves back timeline wise this the technology build we did first push back the launch about three weeks maybe eventually four weeks but ultimately like we didn't actually have a choice because it wasn't that we were rebuilding like there was nothing built oh no okay yeah once it became clear that what we thought was being done and belt like really it wasn't like give me another week and then I'll show you it was like no we didn't have anything it…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.