We know you love IH, but where do you think we can improve?
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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…..
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Or, as happened last time, loads of people decided they wanted a different size between deposit and final payment.
Gotcha,
Thanks for the explanation G.
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And….Everything we do is predicated on "Is this good customer service? Will the customer leave this transaction with a smile on their face? Will they think 'Wow that was better than I could have imagined'"
So, when we do have a "non-refundable deposit", it is typically bullshit, because we hate pissing the customer off......
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Creating The 633 sounds a simple tweak from the 634. It wasn't.
And as an owner of both, I will attest that they are not the same at all.
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@Max:
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.
+1. Seems pretty selfish to want to have exclusive items while others are deprived of the enjoyment. How exactly should it affect my enjoyment if hundreds or even thousands of others have the same garment, as long as the quality and characteristics that make Iron Heart Iron Heart are reflected in it? And what if you're on a plane, in a meeting, or otherwise having a life when an item drops? I know predicting demand is hard, but it would be nice to be able to secure some of the desirable items that drop more reliably. I say this as someone who has been able to get all the grail drops he's wanted.
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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…
so the question becomes how to get more crowd participation while keeping your core base?
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…..
& this is one of the reasons i shower praise on people who contribute faucets of their lives on the forum & just do stuff. can only speak for myself as a sensitive mad person, (on a closely related matter) if you are concerned with why someone isn't posting or posting weirder than usual send them a message or email or something.
@madmonday Now (IMO) here are some brilliant suggestions…...
here's my bad idea of the thread. as Europe has a few Iron Heart retailers . . . . do the same for North America. i know it isn't going to happen, because IHUK tends to keep their word even when it's not in their best interest . . . but it's really limiting the people reached by the product.
i mean this guy & max p said it best.
@mclaincausey:+1. Seems pretty selfish to want to have exclusive items while others are deprived of the enjoyment.
& finn i understand your view (sorry too lazy to grab & quote from the previous page) & collect tons of clothing, books, dishes, cars, women . . . really just name it if my bankroll allowed it i collected it. everyone does things differently & part of the charm of the brand in my humble opinion is it is sort of like a natural resource where once a product is gone it is usually gone for good.
makes me respect & appreciate the items more, of course i realize this isn't the view shared by most, but that doesn't make the differing view bollocks or rubbish . . .
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Bulky westerners? Did you just call me fat??
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I think that it is awesome that your brand is so open to suggestions and that the higher-ups themselves respond. I recently made a purchase that qualified for the starter kit (which entails a discount) and did not know it. Several weeks later I received an email from pay pal indicating that I had been refunded 65$. In other words, somebody at iron heart realized I could have saved that money and a posteriori refunded me. In my experience this type of customer care is rare, and I thank you.
That said, I do have a suggestion for where you can improve. Similar to some of the above comments, I am going to talk about sizing. Not between cuts, but rather within cuts. My main frustration when shopping for jeans has been related to this area. After misjudging my first pair, I've come to realize that the key measurement for me is the waist to thigh ratio (I'm sure for other people it is something else). I'm a fairly large human, but hardly an outlier with regard to height and weight, so I think this might be a similar issue for many people.
When I finally found the ideal size (36 ± 1 in waist, and 13 ± .3 in thigh), I figured I could just select the same measurements in the same cut, but different models of jean. For example, I wear a 36x36 in 666xhs and a 38x36 in 666d and the measurements are right in the 'golden' region (I'm not concerned with tag size, as this is arbitrary). Now, my understanding of cut, and I may be mistaken here, is that 666 is a cut… 634 is a cut. Therefore, one would expect every model of these cuts to have similar measurements (I am talking averages, as I know that measurements will always vary to some degree). Therefore, if I can find my ideal measurements in a 666xhs, then theoretically I should be able to find them in the different models of the 666 cut (i.e. ducks, sb, etc.) and my experience is that this is not the case. Here is a line graph showing the waist sizes (in inches) as a function of thigh measurement (in inches) for my three favorite jeans:
Basically what you can see is that the XHS and the ducks follow each other in waist to thigh ratio (the lines are more or less on top of each other for all sizes); however, the sb, for example, is pretty far off. This, in my opinion, is why this model looks different from the other models of the 666 cut. What this equates to is that I won't/can't by a 666 cut in black. My loss. But really it is a double whammy because iron heart sells one less pair of jeans (we all lose). I don't know how often this actually stops people from spending their money, but I do feel that it adds frustration to the buying/shopping experience, and, for that reason, I think it is an area in which you can improve.
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^well put. In my case, I didn't get the 666SB because of the small thighs (think I mentioned it back in the dedicated thread back then).
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@DrBabyhorse Thank you for your analysis and data. I do know exactly what you mean, and you should have heard the choice language that pervaded IHUKHQ when we measured the 666SB. But I understand why it happens and am thus reasonably tolerant of it. I work on the basis that Haraki nor Tom nor the cutters nor the sewers are trying to ruin my life, so cut them some slack.
