 20050720 Right Hand Bands
 My friends Bill and Patrick, who are interning with us this Summer, are two of the most hyper-entrepreneurial people I know. Last Winter, if you recall, they launched Stuffed Robot, a venture that assembles and sells handmade stuffed robots. They have since become a cottage industry and rely on sewers who work from home to make their robots by the dozens. Over the past few weeks, for pleasure, they illustrated, silk-screened, and sewed together a bunch of wristbands (15 different designs in all) and crafted a nice site in Flash to sell them online. They call them Right Hand Bands, and can be seen here. Ramen Noodles is my favorite, although their 'personality test' found that I best match with Dueling Revolvers. 9
Comments:
Melissa said... Overall their stuff is great, and their service is unreal. Plus, they even turned the box my robots came in into a piece of art with drawings all over it. I kept it and can't see ever throwing it away. 11:46 AM Taylor said... I absolutely love it! 12:45 PM FarFromFound said... Brilliant! Although, I don't see the obsession with being web-only ... for anyone really. Can someone answer this? Does it have a strong tie-in to a certain business model? I'm in orange county, and I watch hundreds of retail outfits thrive on being anything BUT web-driven. I still love their concept, I just had a soap box moment of sorts. -W 1:44 PM Mareen said... ... and I am Ramen Noodles! 2:28 PM Mareen said... Oh, PS.: I love the watch! 2:30 PM David Cho said... There is a lot more capital involved with opening a real store. It's a lot harder to finance an actual upstart tshirt/apparel/robot store/kiosk than it is to pay for a $8 domain name and $40 webspace. For every "hundreds of retail outfits" that thrive, there's about a million that fail. You also allow yourself a wider market by being on the internets. I mean, it grows everyday. I think ideally you'd be able to dominate both the web and the real world as well, but they're two completely different beasts shouldn't be thought of as something that can be handled the same way. Love, David 3:02 PM FarFromFound said... totally agree ... allow me to clarify. if you sell your products - tees/wrist bands etc - to retailers that assume the big risk: i.e. Pac Sun, Urban Outfitters, boutiques etc, you not only develop more brand loyalty, but high volume (at the risk of not getting your ideal price) that in the end helps your economies of scale ... right? i just think there is a solid market in the nordstrom's arena for nice tasteful items like the defunkers (keep up the good work)of the world. i think that these folks can move product through middle man agreements and get them into boutiques and high end shops nationally without assuming said risk. that's precisely what "hundreds of retail outfits" do, they just all play a role in the food chain, all the way down to manufacturing. (sorry if i was vague) the branding - retail - manufacturing industries are all very new to me, and my questions and rebutts are out of intrigue and respect not debate. i talk to people everyday that only play a certain role in the chain, i'm merely just trying to piece it all together. respectfully, Will 6:28 PM David Cho said... Sorry, my last comment sounded really agressive, and I didn't mean for that at all...I was trying to edit but couldn't figure out how...heh. :) I think ideally, we would definitely sell to just the bigger retailers; but unfortunately, it's hard to convince the buyers for an Urban or PacSun to see it your way. Not to mention the significant--very significant-- lower prices that an Urban or PacSun likes to buy at. Best case scenario, you sell your brand on your own, but also have a large market retailer carry you as well. The problem with getting defunker in a Nordstrom, or something like that, is that there's a lot of new tshirt companies that have really good designs. Getting your shirts in their stores is less about the quality, and more about whose hands you can get it into. The retail price of your shirt also dictates a lot of who ends up carrying you, which is also deeply rooted in who your target market is. I apologize again for before, I didn't mean to come off as rude and/or snarky as I did. Oops. 6:57 PM said... These are great. Even I love them and I'm old! 3:22 PM Post a Comment |
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 Hi, I'm Zach. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana and graduated from Wake Forest. After college, I moved to Manhattan to get serious about a company I ran with friends. We sold it to Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp in 2006. I just wrapped up with a project I co-founded called Vimeo and left CV to focus on being a twenty-five year old. I have another blog called Copy and Taste, where I post about learning to cook. I live in Brooklyn now.  Del.icio.us My Flickr Me on Flickr Last.fm Linked in MySpace Netflix History Vimeo  Amir Blumenfeld Chris Bodenner Mareen Fischinger Fort Wayne Observed Nick Gray Hype Machine Jake and Amir Jakob Lodwick Oh My Rockness Jonathan Marcus Youngna Park Megan Scheminske Eliot Shepard Shorpy Signal vs. Noise Alex Soth Stereogum Ricky Van Veen Khoi Vinh Eugene Wyatt   Postal Skype SMS (via AIM) |