We know you love IH, but where do you think we can improve?
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Havent tried them Graeme but have checked them out. Bigger thigh then i need really. 36 would be good except the waist is small and everything on the 38 is too big except the hem lol
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Thx for the suggestion, but 55's are not for me. Rise is much too high for my liking (front and rear). Im not old enough to cover my belly button yet hahaha
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@grandmasterben What so because someone has big thighs they automatically would want 9" hems and want to drown their shoes.?
Out of interest Giles what sizes sell the most in say 634's. Is it the smaller or larger sizes?
i'm not saying they automatically do…but people who neeed to worry about thigh measurements (such as myself) generally have not stick-thin builds which imo look better with straight jeans. also, i manage ~9" hems and i only wear converse and not heavy boots.... just sayin...
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I have massive thighs from cycling, and am quite thin in the waist and calfs. Everyone is built differently. As I am also about 5'9 I would really appreciate a taper that takes inseam length into consideration as I have to hem to around 29" to get the length I like from a single cuff
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Continue to do stupid human tricks & entertain me. Keeping people on the forum fuels a lot of demand for great product (just look at the 107). SO continue to try to improve the forum & suckers like me will peak in from time to time to see what's happening & will stick around when you deliver the goods.
oh & get the madame to post more, nothing like some eye candy.
as far as product goes auction items from time to time & if you all really start making money give a trip away to a forum member to Gos Vegas or even the bi-annual Japan trip. that would be insane.
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Your service, products and whole staff is aesome, so first of all, thank you for that
There are some items like black heavy flannels (87, 107), block check flannnels etc. that sell super fast and come in very limited numbers. Even though this has improved, i feel like there are so many customers to the brand now, that you could do & sell more of these shirts. Would take away the hassle of getting one in the very first minute (but I see that this is the perfect thing from a salesmen's view) and leaving people with none after a few days. 4-5 years ago these shirts were available at least for some weeks if I recall it correctly. But I do also see, that it feels good to grab one of these things. I'm not saying you should do this with all stuff, but it seems pretty safe to me, you could have doubled the sales of the (black) 107 in the common sizes.
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that would take away all the fun though mate @Max Power so imo (from a buyers/collectors point of view) be ready when the items drop or step up your b&s game a bit to get'em in the aftermarket…nothing more fun than tracking down your grail item
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IMO this is bollocks. I want to wear the shirt & stuff I like and it doesn't add any value if 100 other people in my city own it or just 5 over the globe. It's clothes that are meant to be worn, not collected.
I never got the "Look, I got something that you don't!"-attitude. I just think that the increasing demand is not reflected in some prodcut numbers. Not everybody has the chance or money to get something in the very moment the shirts drop.
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From the limited knowledge I have of the way these things are made (through trying to get things made myself), I know a couple of things.
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There is no such thing as tweaking a cut, making alterations in one area invariably leads to alterations in other areas if you don't want to throw off the entire look of the jeans. This means an entirely new pattern.
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Predicting and facilitating customer demand is by far the hardest part of retail, especially when you're talking about investment in items this expensive as a stock holding. Get it wrong and you could find yourself with lots of stock and less money to invest in new items, get it right and people tell you that you should have bought more of certain items. I am absolutely sure that Giles could provide many examples of both of these scenarios over the years.
imo Iron Heart gets it right far more often than it doesn't, and they actually cater for us bulky westerners which is more than most do.
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I totally agree and understand, Gav. That's why I limited my remarks towards the buffalo and black Flannels. I think the plain ones next season are another safe bet. If an item (let's say the black 107 or 87) is sold out in XL the day they went online, I'd think to myself: Damn, I could have sold a lot more of those over the next weeks. But I might be wrong, as many guys anticipate this scenario and buy in the first minute they go online and it's not my risk.
Nobody wants to have huge stocks that don't sell, but I think I would do these in larger numbers. The IH followers a large enough in numbers that a good / classic looking Shirt should sell over a few months. The autumn / winter hasn't even properly started after all.
Other items like the prisoner stripe or green & orange Shirts that had to be overdyed are more "Special" and I see why These are not brought over in large amounts.Enough of my 2ct, just throwing it out there.
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People, I hate not fulfilling demand, believe me I do. I'm in this game to make money as well as have fun. But if we over produce, it is us who sits on an investment that is not providing a return. If Haraki and I do that too often, we go bust and there is no new or no old product.
Demand is impossible to predict, it is the hardest part of retail. If it were easy then everyone would be good at it and products would never go on sale.
The art of being a good retailer is not getting it right all the time it is getting it wrong less than everyone else…..
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Regarding sizing. It is like asking 100 people what the would like to see out of the next flannel, we'll get 101 answers.
There is no one cut that works for everyone. Everyone would like to tweak something. I said to winchy yesterday, in an ideal world we'd make 1 off 10.000 cuts. Therefore we have to compromise, do we get it right all the time? of course we don't. Just adding a bit of taper to a current jean is not just lopping some fabric off below the knee (unless you want a bad cut and no selvedge side seam), it is a completely new cut that needs to be sampled etc etc etc.
Creating The 633 sounds a simple tweak from the 634. It wasn't.
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Continue to do stupid human tricks & entertain me. Keeping people on the forum fuels a lot of demand for great product (just look at the 107). SO continue to try to improve the forum & suckers like me will peak in from time to time to see what's happening & will stick around when you deliver the goods.
oh & get the madame to post more, nothing like some eye candy.
as far as product goes auction items from time to time & if you all really start making money give a trip away to a forum member to Gos Vegas or even the bi-annual Japan trip. that would be insane.
@madmonday Now (IMO) here are some brilliant suggestions…...
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This is sort of along the same path as what Max was saying. Would a "deposit" scenario work for the once a year models that get released like the 107? When the product is anounced, you pay a sizeable non refundable deposit on the item to secure it when its released.
This would suit people on different timezones or situations that can't be up all night or around for when they go live.
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This ties in with the sizing issue.
To the uninitiated making one run exactly the same as the last seems like should be dead easy. It is if you are a large company making 10's if not 100's of thousands of meters of fabric on a projectile loom and then sewing runs of jeans from the same fabric.
Because we make everything from first principles we often have no history to review as to how a fabric behaves.
Even if we do have history, no 2 batches of fabric behave exactly the same. State of service of the loom, air temperature, humidity etc all make the end result not exactly the same as previous batches. Here is a good example, the guy who makes our Buffalo Check has moved companies, you can be 100% sure that the next batch of Buffalo check will not behave the same as the purple/black. How will it be different? we have no feckin idea…..
Also (for example) making a 634 pattern out of 17oz requires a completely new pattern from the 21 or any other weight denim. So we have to sample everything. I am doing a new jacket for a retailer, it is 18oz, last time we made it for him it was in 19oz. He did not want us to sample, we insisted, and yes, you got it, we had to make a load of tweaks before the production run. Assumptions about how a fabric will behave are just that, assumptions.
So my dilemma is thus:
- Make one sample and tweak for production and live with the consequences. We always publish the measurements, so there is objective data available when you come to choose your size.
- Make multiple samples (samples cost at least twice as much as a production item) increase the R&D costs and increase delivery time frames and get it almost perfect.
I choose #1. Because we get product to market sooner, which goes down well with our customers and it costs less to produce which means I can price it lower.
Why am I telling you all this? Because on the basis that there will be sizing variation, then if we ran a pre-order, and XL turned out as XXL all the orders would be wrong. And we would have a heap of shit to deal with.
When we run a pre-order for say the HWDC, I have to make extras of every size on the basis that we will have to juggle if sizing is off. Or, as happened last time, loads of people decided they wanted a different size between deposit and final payment.
Finally, if I were to pursue option #2, I would have to run samples of an existing jean every time we got a new batch of denim. For a company our size that is just untenable.
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Continue to do stupid human tricks & entertain me. Keeping people on the forum fuels a lot of demand for great product (just look at the 107). SO continue to try to improve the forum & suckers like me will peak in from time to time to see what's happening & will stick around when you deliver the goods.
oh & get the madame to post more, nothing like some eye candy.
as far as product goes auction items from time to time & if you all really start making money give a trip away to a forum member to Gos Vegas or even the bi-annual Japan trip. that would be insane.
working on it, as said, getting some brushes out, is also up to….
for more competition things, the last one did get 63 entries and just over 50 forum members voted for their favorites, we do have 3800 forum members, so if you want more stuff like that, more interaction and contributions from all forum members wouldn't hurt...
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That last point by Rocket is IMO pertinent. We tried to make it fun, we gave away USD850 of prizes and the response overall was very disappointing. I'm more than happy to give great prizes away, but I'm only going to think it's worth it if we get some reciprocal interaction and involvement. I have to say after the last competition my view was "OK, so the forum has evolved, people don't appreciate this shit any more, I won't bother again". Is that what I want to happen? No, but this is a 2 way street guys…..
