It started, as so many things do, as a happy accident. Introduced by a perceptive barista, Abe Burmeister and Tyler Clemens found they had a common problem – how to bike into work without, well, looking like they biked into work. With cycling gear not quite board meeting appropriate and your everyday chino not suitable for a long, active commute, they’d identified a gap in the market. And thus Outlier was was created. What started as one pair of pants has become a full-fledged business pursuing the union of sharp, casual aesthetics and high-performance capabilities. Brooklyn-based and online-only, Outlier offers not only an alternative to how our clothing is made, but how it’s sold, too. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Outlier runs on a direct-to-consumer business model. That model is fairly common now, but when you guys started in 2008, it wasn’t so much. Was your plan always to go direct-to-consumer?
Abe Burmeister: Yeah. First of all, when we started, we knew a lot more about making websites than we did about making clothes. So, it was easy for us to build the website. It tied in, actually, to some projects that I had done before. I had built a sort of blog-as-commerce platform for a store that I was really into and that they didn’t actually end up using. So, I guess I had been thinking about some of that stuff before we launched. We started with one pair of pants that I had developed and priced out. I made them for myself, and I was like, “Oh, is there more to it? I really like this product. Is there another audience for it?” I started studying how the industry works and I realized pretty quickly that if I wholesaled it, it was going to be really expensive. And having all this experience with the web and a tiny bit of e-commerce experience, I was like, “What if I put it online? What happens and then where do we price things?” And I was like, “Wow. We could sell this for a much more reasonable price [online] than if we sell it to Barneys or whatever. First of all, we’ve got to sell it to them, and they’ve got to sell it to customers, and it’s going to be a $500, $600 product.” I figured if I could get these pants to the price of designer denim, stuff that I’d bought before, a $200 pair of pants, then maybe there was a market for them.
Tyler Clemens: Also, it came natural to us because we were both online shoppers. As you pointed out, the clothing industry hadn’t adapted to selling online at that time, in 2008. It was still quite new for that. But we were online shoppers for other items and we saw that there was a strong parallel, that you could buy online, and it was safe and, actually, it was pretty easy.
AB: Want to talk about Norman’s?
TC: I started back in 2007 at a record store, and that’s one thing that we saw there is that as soon as we put some records and CDs online, they would sell. So, we kept doing that and we built that business to about 250 orders a day. We saw tons of movement online, and with ease. It’s fairly easy to do exchanges and things like that if you needed to. So, we were versed in that. It just came natural to us in that sense. The companies that have now adopted similar models, I guess we’re calling them Retail 2.0 now – the Warby Parkers, the Bonobos, those types of companies – they seem to all be adopting bricks-and-mortar as part of their strategy. Is that something you guys have ever considered?
AB: Yeah, we used to actually have a storefront that was our friend’s living room. They had a street-level thing, and it was on a residential street. We would open it up on the weekends only and people would come by. One of the things that was really nice when we were starting off is that when you’re online, your sales are basically during the week, whereas traditional retail is the inverse, and it’s all sales on Saturday and some on Sunday. So, that balance is really nice. Our friends kicked us out of their living room, eventually, and we were like, “Okay, let’s start another store.” Then we were like, “Whoa, this is a lot of work,” and online was working, so we figured we were better off focusing on the online. But, yeah, it’s obviously something that we’ve considered. Online is still only 15% of commerce, right? So there’s a lot of people out there who won’t ever shop online. I think there’s a lot of people who would prefer to shop offline but will [shop online] if it’s the only option, and then there’s people who love to shop online. Eventually, I think we’ll have to dive into that area if we want to keep growing, but we’re not racing for it by any means.
TC: We’re playing with it a little bit right now where we do an open studio every Friday from 4PM to 7PM so our customers can come in, try things on, and we get to know them and get to see how things fit them and all that sort of stuff. It’s pretty helpful, and we’re playing with it. We’ll see where that takes us, I guess.
AB: I think one important thing to note is that a lot of these big, early online vertical companies are essentially commodity companies. Everybody tries to get their edge and make it not a commodity, but if you’re talking about selling chinos online that are made out of the same fabric as the chinos next to them, it’s a commodity. And online, it’s really, really hard for them to sell it profitably because it’s a commodity, and if you’re venture funded, you’re going to use every edge you can to move it, and that essentially turns into selling at a loss. I think a lot of these companies are finding that when they’re inventory-rich and they’re selling commodity, they’re creating an offline experience where they can actually find their margin. We subscribe to a lot of emails from other big, online people and the amount of discount-driven selling that’s going on is absolutely absurd. That’s something we want to stay away from for a long time, and so we focus on the other side of the industry. We’re bootstrapped, we’re profitable but we’re not wildly profitable… It’s a different model, in certain ways. It’s more, I guess, designer-centric in a way, where we’re trying to create what we want to create. We’re not trying to just pump commodities out the door.
TC: That also brings up another point about retail – online, it’s a little bit hard to convey some colors. It just doesn’t come through the screen as much, so retail is really where that shines. When you have a unique product with sensitivity to colors and fabrics, it’s really advantageous for people to come in and check it out.
AB: When we started, we were all pretty gung-ho — like, maybe, Everlane gung-ho — about how we were saving all this money going direct to the consumer, and then we realized that was not as accurate as we thought. Definitely, cutting out the wholesaler reduces the price, but there’s also a massive world of vertical shops. So, if you’re competing with the Gap, or Banana Republic, or J.Crew, whatever, they cut out the wholesaler, too, and they did it a long time ago.
And, so, where we’re at is we found a pricing model that’s online direct, and there is a certain level of pricing advantage, though we don’t actually try to stress it. We’d rather use that pricing advantage to create a higher quality good rather than a cheaper good.
We’re a little wary of going into the full-on high street type retail because prices go right back up when you start paying rents on Broadway and in SoHo. All of a sudden whatever pricing advantage we’ve managed to get by being online direct disappears. We’re not interested in just turning around and becoming a vertical mall shop, right? When we look at retail, we look at how to do it creatively.
I think Bonobos is interesting because they’re creating a different type of shop model where they’re not really carrying inventory in their stores. Something like Warby, in the end, to me, they’re just making eyeglass shops. I don’t know how they’re different than the other eyeglass shops except that they have their own supply chain.
One thing that a lot of e-commerce retailers seem to be struggling with are returns. Do you guys find that you’re getting product returned at a comfortable rate? Or is that something that you’d consider a challenge that you’re working on?
AB: It’s a couple of levels. It’s funny, our return rate, the first couple of years, was shockingly low. So, we had a couple of, “Whoa, the return rates are going up, what the hell’s going on” moments. But we got pretty comfortable with it quickly. You read about some other people’s return rates and you’re like, “Okay. We’re in this space.” We’re selling product online that you need to try on. Not everything fits. If you look at it in a pure numbers standpoint, yeah, it sounds really high. You know, 20, 25, 30 percent is where most people are at. I think that Zappos has stated that for their expensive shoes, they’re at 50 percent. That sounds shockingly high, but in the end, what mostly comes back is re-sellable.
Me and Tyler both get emailed every time somebody initiates a return. We don’t read every single one, but we still try and stay on top as best we can on what’s happening, and our customer service people are, obviously, well on top of it. We put a lot of energy into that, making sure that we’re providing a good experience for people. So, for the most part, it’s not about the numbers, it’s about an organic feel of whether people seem to be liking the clothes and keeping them. Our customer service philosophy has always been that we want people to be happy with the stuff that we sell them, so, if somebody’s not happy with it, we want them to send it back. We’d rather have a person who wants to wear it be wearing it. For the long term strength of the brand, that’s going to be better for us.
Let’s flip and talk about your design process for a bit. Obviously, there’s a lot of R&D that goes into the products you’re making. Can you take us through the life cycle of an Outlier product?
TC: I think it kind of stems from two directions. In the beginning, we started with a problem set and then we’d go out and we’d try to solve that problem set.
The other direction is, sometimes we’re actually shopping at these trade shows around the world and looking through fabrics and we’ll find something that piques our interest. It’s just amazing stuff and we need to do something with it. That leads us to a direction where we eventually end up solving a problem, or come up with a solution to something that we didn’t know that was there. So, I think that’s really the core of it.
But then there’s quite a bit of process involved in terms of finding the fabrics, and building them, and tweaking them, and a lot of trial and error in terms of fit, a huge testing process in that sense. We want to put it through the paces and really make sure that this stuff works.
AB: When we think about a new product, there’s three things that we really look for.
One is just a level of passion about it. Ideas are a dime a dozen – there’s too many ideas around. We’re looking for ones that people are really passionate about, whether it’s us or other employees.
Then, we’re looking for logic, as well. The passion has to be there, and it has to actually, logically make sense, why we should make a particular product. We’re not interested in making products that already exist. We’re just here to make new products that aren’t on the market. Are we trying to solve a problem, is it an aesthetic thing? We need to have a logical reason why to do it.
And then there needs to be a follow-through. Anybody in the company is allowed to develop a product, and that’s very deliberate because me and Tyler started with very little knowledge and wanted to create an environment where other people could come in and, whether they’re trained as a designer or not, create something that they’re excited and passionate about. But they have to put the follow-through in, too. So those are, sort of, the three ingredients.
I think a lot of the reason Outlier exists beyond the initial pair of pants we made was that me and Tyler fell in love with the technical fabrics. We started digging and exploring. We were like, “Wow, this world is fascinating and super under-utilized.” A lot of what we do is just go out there and find fabrics that are meant for one thing and use them for another, basically.
Some of your biggest hits have come from fabrics that have actually been around for a while, like Supermarine [Outlier’s take on Ventile, invented during World War II]. What’s been your favorite historical find?
Now, we’re at the point where we can actually develop things with the fabric mills. There’s a second level where we can work with people we’ve been working with for a long time and actually develop things, usually starting from an idea or a base and say, “Let’s take this further.” That’s been really exciting as well.
AB: On a really, really base level, just the idea of performance wool, from a fabric standpoint. That’s what we really like, actually. I like ideas so simple that they’re boring. Dull. But they actually work.
Wool is thought of as this itchy, scratchy thing, or you thought of it as fine suiting. In the outdoor world, merino wool is an amazing performance fabric, and we love working with it. We do a lot with it. It’s amazing. The reason why it works now in the 21st century and it didn’t work as well when you were a kid, even, is literally the ability to sort the wool better. The ability to isolate the finest fibers and create a 17-micron merino fabric.
That’s half of it. The other half is this superwash process, which is a process for removing the scales from wool, and making it washable. It makes it softer, it makes it less scratchy, and it makes it a lot easier to wear. This is actually the technology that drove Armani in the ’80s. Armani was all about making a softer, finer, drapier suit for men, something that was closer to your pajamas than your structured, British suit. Just bringing all the technology together into making wool base layers and performance hoodies and things like that is kind of exciting.
TC: We did have trouble trying to get just a wool shirt on the market. We went to suit makers who would make the fine wools that Abe’s talking about. They’ve been doing this stuff for decades, right? This is not new technology. All we wanted was a superwashed process on this wool so that we could wear it as a shirt as well. Then you’d have a shirt that was also a base layer and was comfortable in all of these environments.
That process took a long time. We talked to a lot of people, and we finally found someone we could convince to make a dress shirt for us. Or, a shirting fabric at least. Now we’re starting to incorporate that into some of our shirts with our Merino/Co and some other things you’ll see in the future.
AB: One of the amazing things about dealing with fabric is we’re talking about a millennium-old market. Fabric and spices were the original global marketplace. Silk Road, right? Especially when you’re dealing with European suppliers, stuff has roots, and with it comes a lot of cultural baggage that you need to work around sometimes.
If you’re dealing with an Italian fabric maker, that family’s probably been doing it for four generations.
This is not Internet speed stuff, right? We’ve got our online site where we’re publishing and trying to move at Internet speed, and then we’ve got our fabric side where it’s, like, glacial, almost.
Abe, I was reading an interview you did at Columbia [University] a couple of years ago where you talk about how the advent of the personal automobile indirectly caused people to stop wearing hats. The interplay between our built environment and the clothing we wear is something I find wildly fascinating. I’m wondering if you guys have noticed, or could imagine, how this dynamic is playing itself out today.
AB: There’s a snap company we use occasionally from Germany. They’ve been making snaps since, like, the 15th century. They’ve been incorporated since the 17th century or something like that. And it’s family-owned. The Prym family still owns this massive, global snap company.
AB: Our first pair of pants was really built around bicycle commuting, but we pretty quickly decided that we weren’t interested in being a bicycling brand – we like riding our bikes, but as transportation. It’s not a lifestyle for us. It’s just, that’s how I wanted to get to work. I didn’t want to be the bike guy in the office. That was the point of making the pants – anti-bicycling wear, in a way. Levi’s came in pretty quickly after us with their commuter line, which was interesting, but then there’s a whole slew of the market that came behind. That was cool.
It’s my hope that that stuff just kind of percolates through the whole culture of clothing. Nobody makes clothes that you can’t ride the subway in and nobody makes clothes that you can’t drive a car in. And they could, you know – top hats and petticoats, stuff doesn’t work in a train or an automobile. But, nobody makes that stuff, so it’s my hope that nobody will make clothes that you can’t ride your bike in in the near-term future.
Design piracy is a hot button topic in fashion these days. With the rise of fast fashion, that stuff kind of happens all the time. Is this something that you guys have had to deal with?
AB: People have copied our stuff.
TC: It’s going to happen. It’s just part of the industry.
AB: You just shrug and try to invent something better.
TC: It is what it is, you know? The point is that we need to stay a step ahead. It pushes us to some degree.
AB: It’s pants. It’s, like, nobody… You’re making pants and shirts and, yeah, sometimes people copy it more directly than is comfortable, but we don’t think about it that much. We’re interested in making new stuff. If people want to copy us… I’d rather they didn’t, but, whatever. What’s interesting is almost nobody uses the fabrics we use because they’re too expensive for them. And that’s where we like to distinguish ourselves. The design is there, obviously, but we just try to keep the quality as high as possible.
TC: And more and more we’re trying to build our own fabrics. So, we’re the first people because we’re the ones building it with the suppliers.
AB: There’s a lesson there, too, because the first time we developed a fabric, we were like, “Oh my God. This is amazing. We have our own fabric. I can’t believe we were able to do this.” And then we quickly realized that, no, actually, we’re just giving free consulting services to the fabric mill and they’re trying to sell it to everybody.
TC: They do put it into their collection after, yes.
AB: Well, it depends on the mill and the relationship. But, yeah. That was a quick, fast lesson in real economics.
TC: You’ve gotta move quick.
AB: We’re a small company so we don’t have the illusion that people are going to try and build us custom stuff exclusively for us forever. It’s a huge, international business and we’re a pretty small piece of that machine.
When I say wearable technology, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
AB: Um. I’m gonna go take a nap.
We spend a lot of time reading about the history of apparel, and the Industrial Revolution started with spinning jenny machines to power cotton mills. None of that stuff ended up in your clothes. It changed how clothes were made radically, but there’s no motors in your clothes, right? Like, almost none of it actually made it into the clothes. Velcro is a very simple machine. A zipper is really the main thing that came out of it that made it into your clothes. So, there’s an information revolution going on, and it’s going to radically change how clothes are made, but whether it ends up inside your clothing, who knows? A lot of people are trying, and I think some interesting stuff will happen, but we’ll have to wait and see.
I find the obsession with designing and iterating smart watches weirdly conservative. Like, my favorite thing about having a smartphone is that I don’t have to wear a watch anymore. I never really liked wearing watches, and now I feel like we’ve freed our wrists. Why do we want to go right back to this centuries-old design paradigm?
I don’t see any of it as inevitable. It’s inevitable that it will change the environment around apparel. We’ll see about the watch. Ringly just got a bunch of funding, maybe that’s something. Personally, I’m trying to eliminate as many beeps and buzzes from my life, so, it’s interesting. I’m probably going to buy an Apple watch just to see what it’s like. But, at the same time, I’m like, “You know what? I’m trying to turn off as many of those buzzes as possible, not get them closer to me.”
AB: If you look at Jony Ive talking about the watch, there’s a weird… I guess it’s a cockiness, or something, like, the wristwatch evolved as the right medium. It took centuries before clocks became on wrists, and then they dominated there. He’s obviously studied that, and they think that means that’s where the future is. I don’t necessarily agree. If you stick an iPhone or some sort of interactive device on your wrist, it’s a really bad place to interact. It’s not comfortable at all. Obviously, we’re carrying screens around and they’ll probably evolve somewhat into slightly better positioning, but I don’t know if the wrist is really the best location or not. We’ll see. It’s a good place for men to wear jewelry.
If you guys had to bet on one of these information revolution era technologies to vastly change how we are producing clothing, whether that’s 3D printing or VR fitting rooms, what would you put your money on?
TC: It’s good for that. And it’s good for functional activities. For runners and things like that. It’s actually a great place to look at, because there’s nothing else really that you can put it on. It’s hard to pull out a phone and look at it while you’re running.
AB: It’s a better place than your eye. I think we can agree on that.
TC: For me, I think it has something to do with health. So, if there’s a way to put
AB: We’re talking about clothing!
TC: Yeah, yeah, that’s what it would be! If there’s a way to be able to read something as simple as your skin temperature, that, I think, could improve health and well being over time. I don’t know how that’s integrated or how it’s done, but I could see that that would be one that I would certainly look at.
AB: To me it’s been, and I’m surprised this wasn’t Tyler’s answer, actually, but we’ve been looking at bonding technology and how garments are actually put together. It’s super labor intensive.
We make most of our stuff in the U.S. We visit the factories where we’re fairly certain people are getting paid at least minimum wage, they’re treated well, they’re not locked in, you know, things like that. That was a really early lesson when I started visiting the Garment District. I was like, “I have no idea what a sweatshop is.” You have this vision in your head, like, sweatshop, but when you actually start going into the ground, you don’t know what it is. It’s immigrant labor. There’s never been any success in getting anybody but the bottom rungs of the economic labor market to sew on a mass level, right? So, you even see it in China. People don’t want to be sewing anymore. The market’s moving to Vietnam. And there’s also fantastic, really beautiful, high-end factories emerging there, which is great. But to me, chasing the labor to the bottom rung… We’re less price-sensitive than more commodity-driven companies, but if our factories said, “Hey, the price doubles tomorrow,” we wouldn’t be happy. Even though we’d be happy the workers would be getting paid more.
Eventually, if the world is going to keep developing in a positive way, we need to eliminate this kind of drudge-type labor that’s very repetitive. I’d rather have a world where people weren’t running the same garment through the machine every day, the same stitch. That’s the kind of job that would be great if it disappeared, right? There is a pleasure in making a garment. You know, you’re producing something real. But, at the same time, I’m not lining up for a job at a sewing factory. Almost nobody with fluent English capabilities is in America. I think you get the same kind of echoing throughout other countries as well. Italy, they’re bringing workers in from China to make “made in Italy” garments. And in China, we’ve talked to factories that are like, “Yeah, you know, the people just don’t come back. They go away for Chinese New Year and half of them don’t come back. They want jobs where they can sit at a computer all day now.”
The bonding technology’s interesting. The 3D printing, I think, is a long way off. Maybe one day it emerges. Some people actually try to call it 3D printing, but the more advanced knitting technologies can pretty much just print out a sweater, which is pretty cool. So, stuff like that, I think, is where I would like to see the change happen, and where we’re putting some energy in.
Q&A by Adam Wray, Curator of FashionREDEF. You can follow Adam on REDEF and Twitter (@FashionREDEF, @terminal_avenue), or reach him at adam.wray@redefgroup.com