I had the opportunity to talk Monday with Danny Wong, one of the co-founders of the startup Blank Label which allows customers to create custom men’s dress shirts. Users can pick fabrics, collar styles, cuff styles, size and fit options, as well as embroider custom monograms.
The company is the brainchild of Wong’s partner, Fan Bi, who developed the idea during an exchange program between the Boston area’s Babson College (a school we’ve mentioned before for it’s entrepreneurship programs) and his school in his home of Australia.
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Bi and Wong initially hired locally, bringing a Boston-based graphic designer on board, but eventually they were forced to look beyond the east coast for a programmer. After hiring their lead developer in Orange County, California, Bi’s exchange program ended, forcing him back to Australia, and splitting the Blank Label team across three distant locations, but the fledgling company has still managed to grow. Bi now lives in Shanghai where he can run the company’s supply chain with their manufacturer, while the rest of the team works virtually in California and Massachusetts.
Wong and Blank Label are an excellent example for startups in smaller communities that need to hire employees outside of their location. Here are some excerpts from my interview with Wong on the pros and cons of working with a split team in a startup as well as some insights into how they’ve managed to get off the ground and continue to grow.
What lead Blank Label to become a split team?
We couldn’t find someone local. We dug really deep, we tried to leverage our secondary network. All three of us were in the Boston, Massachusetts area at the time, and we were trying to find this fourth partner who could do programming and who could make something really amazing for us without us having to outsource. We’ve had a tremendous amount of terrible stories with outsourcing, we even had an article written about us on Forbes.com about how we decided to bring someone onboard as opposed to outsourcing because we had so many issues with outsourcing. But the fact of the matter was, on the east coast, we couldn’t find anyone that was good. Theres definitely an abundance of software talent on the west coast and getting an awesome, passionate technical co-founder even at a distance who believed in the vision, who had thought about the idea space a few years previous was a bigger advantage than the disadvantage of not having him local.
So you were looking for someone who could program but also had the entrepreneurial mindset?
Yes.
And that was hard to find on the east coast? Because I’m sure there’s plenty of programmers coming out of the colleges out in Boston.
Some of them have the entrepreneurial spirit as well, but part of the problem was that a lot of them didn’t believe in us because we were an unproven concept. We had an idea, and our team didn’t have the best credentials, but we had an idea and we were incredibly motivated. Naturally, people will be skeptical.
That’s interesting because that’s kind of how ventural capital goes too, east coast to west coast. You won’t get as much funding on the east coast for something that’s not as proven a model as you would in Silicon Valley where they’re more likely to invest in something more risky.
Yeah, well there’s also a cultural difference. We’re more conservative on the east coast, just as a culture. On the west coast they’re incredibly liberal, they’re not averse to risk taking. They’re not averse to change. That’s why you see all of these disruptive startups coming out of the west coast. There are some people pushing it on the east coast, but certainly not as many in proportion or in volume compared to the west coast.
So you eventually found your fourth partner?
So we found a co-founder, we found him through the web…We’ve just had an interesting relationship since. A few more details about the team dynamic: we’ve never met Zeeshan.
And he’s the programmer from California?
Yeah he’s out there. Alec, our graphic designer, and I are now in Boston… Towards the end of 2009 Fan was finishing his exchange program at Babson, I attend Bentley, Alec graduated in June from Roger Williams. Alec and I barely see each other, but we go out now and then on the weekends. Fan’s visa soon expired because he finished his exchange program at Babson in December… Immediately after new years he flew out to Australia, spent some time with his family, and now he’s moved to Shanghai for the business…We decided to move Fan out there because it was the best solution for the company. Now he’s working with our supplier directly, and we have a new supplier, we have better quality control, we can source more fabrics, we have transparency with the supplier, we know more about our raw costs, the time it takes to produce a product, and then we’ve figured out better shipping options to get the product to the consumer faster.
So how do you collaborate over such long distances?
We use web-based document sharing, we use Dropbox and Google Docs. We use video conferencing, we use ooVoo instead of Skype because ooVoo allows us to do multiple-person video conferencing. We also use a couple project management tools, Acunote specifically to set goals and sprints for our web-based projects.
What’s it like to set up a manufacturing partnership with a company in China? That’s got to be a daunting thing to look at.
Yeah. When Fan was living in Australia he used to go over to Shanghai every summer because that’s where his [extended] family was. He would get his products custom made and that’s how he came up with this idea…He decided to go snooping around and he found a manufacturer and they had direct contact at the beginning…He set up the supply chain. We were working through an agency which put us through to a manufacturer so that was a little sloppy. The manufacturer itself was talking directly with us so we couldn’t tell them exactly what we wanted. There were too many steps in the process because we would talk to the agency who would talk to the manufacturer, and the agency was pretty much a middle man, and the problem there was our costs were higher, and sometimes the message gets mixed up. It was complicated, it definitely was, and there was also a time delay because we have to talk to the middle-man and the middle-man has to find time to talk to the manufacturers.
Not to mention the time-zone differences.
Yeah… Our original manufacturer, their main business was suits, and they just happened to do shirts too, and we pushed them to do things a little different, and they said “Oh, what are you doing? No one ever does this?…You’re putting to much pressure on us, you’re asking for a quick turn-around, we don’t have time for this…For us to make one of your shirts, we could have made 4 other shirts that were mass produced.” So our interests weren’t really aligned, and they’re expertise weren’t there. Our tailors now work specifically with creating dress shirts every day, so we just told them to do things a little different and they’ve done very well.