My name is Abe Burmeister, I run a company called Outlier, and what we do is make tailored
performance clothes.
You can think about it as a 21st century version of menswear.
We take high-tech fabrics and make clothes that you can wear any day, anywhere, whether
it's climbing a mountain or just going to work in the morning.
But five years ago, I had no idea how to make clothes.
I was a graphic designer.
I spent all day staring at a computer screen, and that was it.
But because I was spending so much time sitting down, staring on a computer, I got really
into cycling.
I'm a native New Yorker.
I grew up here in the city, and it just woke up one day and realized that it felt better
to ride my bike into work over the bridge.
I'd walk into the office and feel great, I'd feel fresh, and I'd feel free, and I really
got into cycling.
Not really as a cultural thing, just as a means of transportation.
It really felt like a better way to move around the city.
But I started having issues, just really simple issues with my clothes, really, was destroying
my jeans, like nonstop.
Every six weeks, every two months, I'd buy another pair of jeans, I was just tearing
them up, and then there's huge weather issues when you're cycling, like what do you do when
it snows?
What do you do when it rains?
What do you do when it's 50% chance of rain, and it looks gorgeous out, but there's a 50%
chance that you're going to show up and be drenched and be uncomfortable all day just
because it might rain.
What do you do when you have an important meeting and you want to wear your best pants
and you're worried that your bike is going to tear them up, and then you just suffer
on the subway like a sardine instead?
So like any good American, I just went out and I went shopping and I said, all right,
I'm going to go buy myself a pair of pants that I can wear every day and ride my bike
to work.
They should be water resistant, they should be durable, and I should just, I'll be able
to go buy them somewhere.
So I went shopping, and I guess I'm not a really good shopper because I started looking
for these pants and I kept looking for them.
After about a year, I gave up and I said, all right, these things actually don't exist
on the marketplace, and if nobody's going to make them, then I guess I'm just going
to have to figure out how to do it myself.
So I went here, this is the button, the fashion center information kiosk, I wouldn't know
that if I didn't read it off the screen, but it's not far, it's a couple miles from
here on 39th Street and 7th Avenue, and I literally just walked up to this kiosk and
said, hey, I want to make a pair of pants.
And lo and behold, they said, oh, sure, no problem here, and they literally printed me
out a big list of different companies in the garment district, which is still here in New
York and still thriving, it's just a couple blocks from Times Square, and I started going
down the list and calling companies, and some of them were out of business and some of them
had no interest at all in talking to me.
But a surprising amount actually were quite open, and some of them said, yeah, we can't
help you, but go across the street, the guy over there will help you, and some of them
said, yeah, we can do it, so I found myself in a factory in the garment district, 38th
Street, and they said, yeah, no problem, we can make you a pair of pants.
And I also found, during all my shopping, I actually did buy one thing, I bought a pair
of shorts from a small company, and it was made with an incredible fabric, made in Switzerland
by a company called Shoulder Textiles, this is their mill, making a fabric very similar
to the stuff we use, it's probably the most advanced textile mill in the world.
And I had found these shorts, and I called up the company and said, hey, are you going
to make a pair of pants, like these shorts are great, but I can't wear them to work.
And they said no, but I had the fabric, and I was like, I think I can make pants with
these, and I contacted the company, and contacted Shoulder, and I convinced them to sell me
a small amount of fabric, and I took them into the factory, and I sewed together one
pair of pants, this is our original garment, the OG pant, and I had them, and I took them,
and I put them on, and I rode my bike, and I kept on riding my bike, and I basically
wore those pants for a year, almost every day, and I started thinking, I really could
use another pair of pants.
These are great, luckily it's incredibly durable fabric, they weren't actually falling apart,
but I really could use a second pair, a third pair of some other colors, some variation,
another style, and I realized that if I was going to make more pants, I really was going
to have to think about starting a company, I was dealing with real businesses, and I
was able to make one pant, and if you could also go to the garment district to make one
pant, but dealing with factories that are trying to make a lot of pants, and I'm dealing
with companies that are trying to sell a lot of fabric, I was going to have to start a
company, so I started doing the research, figuring out, I knew nothing about how fabric
business runs, but I figured I could make a pair of pants for $75, most of that cost
is actually in the fabric, but making things in New York is not cheap either, and traditional
clothing business, this is how the outdoor industry still works, you buy it for $1, you
sell it for $2, I would take it, sell it for $150, and if I was selling it to a store,
it's going to go take it and sell it for $300, so call it the Prop Joe model of business,
buy it for $1, sell it for $2, it's known as key stoning, there's still parts of the
clothing industry that work like this, but I live in New York, and it's the luxury world,
and it's expensive, and there's also a lot more people involved, so that same $75 pants,
I start working with a showroom, they're going to sell it for about $200-something, they're
going to sell it to a store that might triple the price, they're sort of extreme, but you
end up with almost a $650 pair of pants, and I'd never bought pants for $650 before, never
really bought pants for $300 before unless it came with a sport coat on top, but what
I had bought was, like I said, if I can figure out how to make this around $180, that was
sort of like the zone I was looking at, I'd bought nice pants for $180, that's where the
high-end jeans market was, I was like, okay, if I can figure out how to do it, if I can
cut out all these other costs and make a pair of pants for $180, I think I could actually
start a business like this, and so it's been a lot of time staring at screens, so I was
like, I'm just going to take it, I'm going to put it online, and I'm going to try and
sell directly to people online for $180, so that was my first hypothesis, it was just
like, okay, if I can figure out how to take these pants and just make them myself and
cut out all the middlemen, put them on a website and sell them to people, there might be other
people who have the same kind of issues I have, and I could build a business around this.
That's really all I had, I was like, okay, I'm going to try and start this, I knew how
to make a logo, I knew how to start a website, and I knew how to talk to people, I didn't
quite know how to start a business, and then one day I walked into my local coffee shop
out in Brooklyn, Gimme Coffee, and the barista, Jenny Bryant, she's a painter and set of outlier,
she said, hey, Abe, you really got to meet this guy, Tyler, he's doing exactly what
you're doing, except with shirts, and Tyler's out here somewhere, so if you see him, say
hi, but Tyler was, he actually lived a few blocks away from me, and he worked, he had
been working for a year at a shirting company in Lower Manhattan, and he would bike over
the bridge, and it's a 10, 15 minute bike ride, and every day he would have to come
into work and change his clothes, and he thought, this is crazy, why do I have to ride my bike
for 15 minutes and need a new shirt, and so he was actually working with this very same
fabric mill with shoulder tech styles, trying to develop a better form of shirting, project
was a little bit further behind mine, but he had the same idea, we were both just tackling
the same sort of problems, and took a little bit of time to get used to each other, but
in two, three months we had formed a company, and Outlier was born, we just said, all right,
let's do it, we still have full time jobs, but we incorporated, and we were like, all
right, let's figure out how to make this happen, and we set about trying to actually produce
pants in volume, building a website, and trying to get it together, and then one day in September,
2008, my friend Roy, who also should be out here somewhere, called me up and said, hey,
Abe, you might be getting some internet traffic, I was just hanging out with my friend, Damon
Way, and he works at Incase now, and they're making bags with the same fabrics you're working,
shoulder tech styles, and so naturally I started telling him about your company, and I showed
him your website, and I think he's going to put it up on his blog, and this is the actual
post, Spelling's Not Perfect, and it's one sentence, but all of a sudden we went from
having a website that didn't really exist to one that actually had an audience, and
really quickly, all of a sudden other sites started picking it, just weird little site
called PSFK that some of you may have heard of actually picked it up, some high-end sort
of menswear, streetwear sites, Core 77, the design blog picked it up, and all of a sudden
people wanted our pants, and we didn't have them, we had really nothing, I don't think
you can read what's on the screen, but we literally were like, oh my god, now what do
we do?
And so we just put a line on the site that said, email us, and we'll get in touch, we'll
put you on the list, and we thought we were going to have pants in about a month, it turned
out as things go that it took a couple months, but finally we put it together, we put the
pants on our website, we were using PayPal buttons, we put a PayPal button and a couple
pants up on the website, and we sent out an email, and we started selling pants, and
so that was the first hypothesis that if we could just put them online and sell them for
$180, people would buy them, and it turned out to be true, the math changed a little
bit, we were selling them for about $188, some of the prices changed in the process,
but it worked, we had a start of a company, and we sat down and said, okay, now what do
we want to do?
And we started thinking about just what had just happened, like what went on, and we said,
hey, we put a really product that we spent a lot of time and thought into designing a
well-designed product, and we put it on a website, and it sort of sold itself, there's
no sales people on a web page, right, it's just text and graphics, and there's exceptions,
there's video sales and whatnot, but for the most part it's a web page with a description
of a product, and we said, hey, maybe a well-designed product really can sell itself online, and
we said about just going out and saying what's the next product we want to make, we didn't
want to be just a bike company, that was one of the few things we wanted to know, we were
making clothes for cycling, but it wasn't because cycling was our lifestyle, we wanted
to be more than just a cycling company, we wanted to make really well-designed products
and put them online, so we started making stuff, made the shirt, worked a lot to develop
a sweat-resistant cotton, and we also spent a lot of time working on the actual cut of
the shirt, changing how your arms move to liberate the movement, open up the way you
move when you're wearing a shirt, from the front it looks like a really classic men's
dress shirt, but when you wear it, you sweat, and they won't see you sweat.
We work a lot with Merino wool, which is one of nature's most amazing technologies,
grows on the backs of sheep down in New Zealand, and it's actually just really incredible fiber,
it's nothing like the wool that you're used to, it doesn't itch, it doesn't scratch, it
feels incredible, and it's actually a performance fabric, it pulls sweat away from your body,
it keeps you cool in the summer, it keeps you warm in the winter, so we built a lot
around that.
And then these are our shorts, three-way shorts.
This is one of our first big blog hits, a blog called Bike Snob, took them to the beach,
poured snapple over them, it rolled off, but they're really designed just so you can go
to the beach and also look good in the city and climb out of the water and you'll be dry
and comfortable immediately, better short.
We started making women's clothes, really difficult, it was a lot easier when we were
just making clothes for ourselves, but these pants are great and we really hope to have
more, kind of tack a lotchino, try to bring a little nature back into the technology,
we were using really high-tech fabrics and we wanted to see if we could splice nature
back in.
We made a waterproof shoe, we're getting tired of getting caught out in the rain and walking
around in waterlogged shoes.
And we tackled a jean as well, these are slim dungarees, so we said, okay, can we make a
more durable jean, can we make a more comfortable jean, one that's not going to wear out when
we walk around and also handles better in the weather.
Submarine cotton, we dug this one out of the archives, it's old World War II British technology,
it's sort of like a 100% cotton vortex, it's really amazing.
And the backpack is one of the last things we did, it's a super lightweight backpack,
you can fold it up, put it in a jacket pocket, it's 10 times stronger than steel, floats
on water, fabric is called Dyneema, it's pretty amazing, all that's available on our site.
So that was the second hypothesis.
We had a company, there's now 10 of us growing, Outlier.cc is the website and there's no sales
people yet, so we just try and make good things and put them online.
So you might be saying, wait, that sounds kind of easy and so I just want to distress
it's not easy at all, it's incredibly hard, an awful lot of work, but at the same time
like that, I think that it is sort of easy in a way because the market had left an opening
for us, where there are too many companies that are just focusing on making cheap crap
and shipping it across oceans and selling it and there was a big opening, people weren't
making quality goods and people responded to what we were doing because we said we're
going to put quality first and we're going to make products that we can believe in and
products that will tell a story and resonate with people rather than just another cheap
disposable item that who knows where it came from and who knows what landfill it's going
to end up in.
So that's sort of the third hypothesis, this is more for the future, I want to step back
from what I did and talk about the way, you know, what we learn, that the internet is
actually changing the way that products can be designed and how they can be sold.
So this is just sort of an abstraction of the design process and the chain in a lot
of ways, where designers are working in an organization and they're working with sales
teams and marketing teams and those sales teams are selling to another organization
that has its own planners, its own salespeople selling to another organization that might
actually be talking to the end user and, you know, we live in an internet age, you can
cut a lot of that out and just connect directly to customers and build products and you can
do it cheaper and you can sell things all over the world as well, I think that's one
of the most important things.
Our first customer was actually in Australia, when we sent out that first email, we sent
it out at midnight and we figured okay, when we wake up in the morning, hopefully we'll
have sold a product or two but turned out within a minute or two, somebody was up in
Australia, it was morning and boom, first sale and right now we sell 30% of our sales
international, you can put something on the internet and sell anywhere and you can sell
it for cheaper and you don't even need salespeople, you do need to sell but, you know, anybody
can do it, I knew nothing about making clothes five years ago and the same thing can work
with any industry.
So this is an old illustration from punk rock fanzine, you know, here's three chords,
let's go start a band, three concepts, go start a brand, you can do it.
