Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention, and the maxim certainly holds true in the case of forward-thinking menswear label Mizzen+Main. Launched in 2012, the company’s mandate is to produce sharply-tailored menswear with high-peformance features — classic-looking button-downs and slacks that stretch and breathe. We chatted with founder Kevin Lavelle about their relationship with wholesaling, working with brand ambassador and NFL star JJ Watt, and the importance of inventory management. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You published a really great article on Medium at the end of January about Gilt Group and the danger of pursuing scale for scale’s sake. In discussing Mizzen+Main in that article, you referred to what you were doing as creating a “new industry.” Can explain to me what you mean by new industry?

In bringing Mizzen+Main to life, the initial concept was bringing advanced performance fabrics to a traditional men’s dress shirt. We launched almost four years ago, and the idea of bringing advanced fabric to traditional menswear had not really happened. What we’re seeing now is a whole bunch of companies that are very, very interested in bringing these fabrics to everyday menswear garments.

At first it was just the polo, about 15 years ago, where something that traditionally hadn’t had athletic fabrics incorporated started to become mainstream. For me, this notion of a new industry is performance menswear, where garments don’t need to be ironed or dry cleaned, they have stretch, they’re wrinkle-free, and these are properties inherent in the fabrics themselves.

A lot of people don’t realize that wrinkle-free dress shirts have a pretty harsh chemical treatment that’s applied to them, and it actually washes off. Most people just assume that it’s some special type of cotton. It’s not, it’s a harsh treatment to make them wrinkle resistant, and the more you wash and wear them, the less potent that treatment becomes before it eventually disappears.

So, it’s just your standard, 100% cotton shirt, then treated afterwards?

Yeah. You treat the fabric at the end of the production cycle, and then you cut and sew it, and then it only has so many washes and wears while the treatment is still a part of the shirt itself.

Right. Mizzen+Main uses a lot of proprietary fabrics, I believe. How do you protect those innovations?

There’s only so much protection that clothing companies are ever be able to have. We work with really great manufacturers to create the products that we want, we tweak the fiber contents, the weight, the stretch, and the direction of the stretch. Those are ours. We’ve worked with fabric and cut-and-sew experts to come up with something extraordinary. We don’t have the R&D lab ourselves. We’re not NASA scientists — we’re bringing together these two worlds to make something your everyday guy wants to wear.

We’re not on the runway in Milan, and we’re not on the sale rack at your generic department store where a guy doesn’t care at all about what he’s wearing. We’re in the middle, and so when it comes to the protection of what we’re doing, it’s all about building a brand that people want to be associated with, and want to have as a part of their daily life.

It’s not about suing someone for copying us. We could have pursued design patents, but design patents are so easy to get around, so they’re almost not even even worth doing.We’ll work with our vendors around developing the types of fabrics we want, but most of the patentable intellectual property has already been done, or is done at the chemical or molecular level that’s so far away from where we are in the process. We buy the fabric, or threads, or fibers, or treatments that others have created.

Tell me a bit about what your R&D process. When you’re working on a new fabric, or a new product, where do you start?

The idea for Mizzen+Main started with me watching a guy run into a building soaked in sweat, and I decided at that moment I should try to make a performance fabric dress shirt. That was the genesis of everything we’re doing now.

I look at tens of thousands of fabrics a year now, and I may see something in a fabric catalog that I really like. I like this hand feel, this weight, and I like that stretch, so we’ll work with our manufacturers to tweak those to what we want them to be. Sometimes it’s the tail that wags the dog, where we’ll say, “I really want to make something with this fabric,” and we’ll go start playing around with our cut and sew, and start making samples for various types of product.

We wanted to do chinos, for instance, but it took us a very, very long time in the context of the lifecycle of our company to find fabric that looked like a traditional dress pant but had all these performance characteristics. Other companies were making stretchy chinos that you could wear on the golf course, but they really were nice athletic pants. They weren’t something that you would wear to the office.

You’ve developed some pretty unique expertise — do you do any consulting for larger manufacturers or retailers, or are you 100% focused on Mizzen+Main?

We are 100% focused on Mizzen. We’ve had a couple of much larger department stores express an interest in a private label for them. I appreciate the interest, but I respectfully decline it, because we are building this industry ourselves, in my opinion. Other people are now doing similar things, but when people think about performance menswear, I want them to think about Mizzen+Main. I don’t want it to be some generic thing that’s just available anywhere.

Our fabrics are unique, but on top of that I feel like we’ve really nailed the fit of the dress shirt, and spent an extraordinary amount of time perfecting the cuffs and collars. A regular, cotton dress shirt has interfacing for cuffs and collars to give it its shape, and it took a lot to design interfacing that works with stretch fabrics.

You started out selling online, direct to your customers, but you also do wholesale. I was just looking at a list of your stockists earlier today, and you have quite a few.

Yeah, we’re in 200 retail doors.

I had no idea you were wholesaling to quite so many. What’s the split between online sales and wholesale?

So, it’s 80% is online, and 20% is wholesale.

For you, how important is wholesale beyond just pure sales figures? Is there another purpose behind wholesaling?

We’re definitely not doing it for just dollars. We make a lot less money selling through wholesale than we do online.

It’s about finding retail partners that have established relationships and an established presence in their cities, their communities, their state, where we benefit from their relationships and they benefit from having an exciting new product and brand. We’ll direct people who are interested in us from online to our retail doors, whereas many brands just want to funnel all the sales through their website, because they make more money that way.

To me, whether a customer buys it from a wholesale account, or a customer buys it from us directly, a customer is buying a Mizzen+Main product, and that’s all that matters. It’s trying to grow the brand, and get as many people exposed to and excited about our products as possible so that we can continue building over the next two, five, 10-plus years.

And these aren’t retailers focused in your traditional major fashion centers, or even major urban centers. There’s a lot of retailers from smaller towns as well, which to me seems like a great growth strategy.

Yeah, we’re very excited about our retail partners. It’s been a very solid initiative since the start.

In terms of developing the brand from a perception side, you use a prominent brand ambassadors, JJ Watt. What motivated you to go that route rather than a traditional ad buy?

We have done one magazine ad buy, and it went really, really poorly for us. We got basically nothing out of it. The brand ambassador for us, JJ, is our only official brand ambassador. He’s a partner in the company, he has an ownership stake. We don’t pay him anything for it, it’s an equity only deal. That’s a huge testament to how much the number one athlete in the country believes in us and our product, that he wants to be a part of it.

I know in talking with him that really is excited about being able to play a meaningful role in building something outside the world of pro sports, and outside the standard contracts. He has ideas about marketing, and how we can grow, and things that we can do together, and that’s getting to play a role in the business world that he wouldn’t get to play otherwise. All of his contracts that he has with big brands that work with him, certainly they respect him, and they’re excited to work with him, but he’s probably not having regular conversations with the CEO about where the business is going.

I think you’re probably right about that.

All of those are positive elements that I was excited to be able to offer someone like JJ — you can really help be responsible for this success story, and then obviously participate in that upside.

We’re looking at adding other partners over the coming weeks, and months, and years. We start working with new athletes in the middle of April. They’ll be short-term partnerships to begin, and hopefully we’ll work together in a bigger way over the coming months and years. In the middle of April we start working with Jake Arrieta, the National League Cy Young Award winner from last year, and just an all-around bad ass. Great father, great guy, great athlete, great team member. Then we’ve got a couple of others that we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks and months.

One of the big topics not just in fashion but across the tech world this week was Facebook opening up the Messenger platform to companies that want to build their own chat bots. I think “conversational commerce” is the term we’re going with for now. Is Mizzen+Main is interested in actively looking into these kinds of new technologies, or new avenues of commerce?

There’s never going to be a shortage of changing methods with which to engage. Ultimately, a lot of those tools require significant development, and resource commitment to adequately utilize and engage them. If you don’t put the right development behind it, and the right effort, you come across insincere — “Hey, let’s just try this platform, let’s just throw something here, let’s throw something there” — and you end up turning people off.

Mizzen+Main is not currently on Snapchat, and I don’t know if and when we ever will be. It’s not because I don’t think that Snapchat is a powerful platform, it’s just not how we’re engaging with our customers, and not what our customers are begging for us to engage with them on.

We’ve focused on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, because that’s where our customers are, and that’s where we’re engaging successfully. Honestly, to this day, email is one of the best things that we have. We’ve got a very limited and curated email blast that works very well for what we want to do.

You just announced a Series B raise. Why did you feel the need to go and raise more cash?

The trajectory that we’ve been on has been extraordinary, and things have been working very, very well for us.

You’ve been profitable for awhile, right?

We had several months of profitability in 2015. The months that we weren’t profitable were because we ran out of inventory. We only had three or four shirts even available online, and so that top-line dipped while the expenses we committed to were still there.

Not the worst problem to have.

No, not the worst, but certainly a problem nonetheless. We raised money to be able to go out and pay for inventory, because we needed to build an inventory position, and we’re still falling short day-to-day. We needed to go out and buy more inventory, and banks really had no interest in lending to startups. Given the realities of the ups and downs of e-commerce, I wanted to make sure that we weren’t in a cash crunch where if an opportunity came up we would have to pass up on it because we didn’t have the money to do so.

We’ve made some investments in growing our wholesale team. We’ve hired two more people to help with customer service and office operation. We went out and took some shots in the advertising world that seem to be working, and we’re growing our monthly ad spend online — digital seems to be working very well for us. All of those things together are because we have that nest egg with which we can take advantage of some interesting opportunities.

Can you tell me a bit about where you’re focusing that ad spend?

All of our ad spend is digital at this moment. We have a mix of just traditional BSB advertising, we have Facebook. We’re pulling back on Twitter, we’re pulling back on Instagram — not bad branding tools, but not necessarily great ROI. Then, we test other platforms overall that different ad serving venues online. There is no shortage of different ones that have access to either proprietary groups of individuals, or just a different set of ad inventory.

Looking forward, do you see a ceiling on the potential growth of Mizzen+Main? Are you thinking sky is the limit?

Sky is the absolute limit. I want to build the next great American brand, and we’re only just getting started.

Do you have any designs on opening standalone Mizzen+Main retail outlets?

It’ll be awhile before we do that. The cost and resource commitment to do so is pretty high, and since everything we’re doing is working really well, we don’t need to open a store at this point. That doesn’t mean if we got to a point where we did I would say it’s because we simply had too, but rather because it makes sense from the return, and why we would need to engage in that manner. We’ll see.

In this day and age, and going forward, is it even necessary to have dedicated retail outlets to build a great brand, or do you think it’s possible that you could completely forgo that?

I think it’s possible we could completely forgo that.

You’ve already mentioned one mistake that you made in building Mizzen+Main — that first magazine ad. Are there any other things that you wish you’d done differently?

I wish I had made some more timely inventory moves last year. It takes a tremendous amount of foresight and planning to get it right. We don’t do any sales or discounts, so we always want to be very careful on not ending up stuck with lots of old merchandise.

The reality is all of the decisions we’ve made have led us to here, and so if I had done one thing differently, it may have affected three others, and maybe we wouldn’t still be doing this.

Do you not discount because you have that much trouble keeping inventory in stock, or was that it a more calculated decision — like, we see everybody else discounting, we’re going to go the other direction?

It was a very calculated move. It was hard at first, because we weren’t necessarily growing all that fast, but I knew over the long term it would be a better choice for us.

If we end up with some old merchandise, we’ll donate it. We work with a lot of veterans’ organizations, and I would so much rather give it to some very well-deserving guys than just slash it so we can bring in a little bit more cash, especially because when you do that, your ability to say, “this is how much my product is worth,” is lost forever.

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