Six years later, while riding his bike around the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an engineering student, he realized he needed a dress shirt that could withstand the rigors of bicycle commuting. This time, he teamed up with a classmate and set out to make that missing item in the clothing market.
But they weren’t the only ones at M.I.T. to identify such a problem. Two students at its Sloan School of Management soon got together to develop their own version of work-appropriate clothing made with practical fabrics.
One was Kit Hickey, a former investment banker who had been frustrated that her Brooks Brothers suits were so stiff compared with her rock-climbing togs. The other was Aman Advani, now 28, who in his previous life as a management consultant had begun cutting the tubes from his dress socks and stitching them to the feet of his sports socks to build better footwear for his rigorous travel schedule.
The two groups, potential competitors, met each other at M.I.T.’s entrepreneur center in 2011. But instead of seeing each other as rivals, they decided to work together. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy.’ I can’t believe we found each other,” Ms. Hickey, 28, says of the meeting.
“It was promising to know that there might actually be a market for this,” adds Mr. Amarasiriwardena, 24. By this time, he and his classmate Kevin Rustagi had started Ministry of Supply, a clothing business based in Boston that specializes in high-tech office apparel. Soon after the meeting, Ms. Hickey and Mr. Advani joined the company.
Business partners often cross paths in the early, brainstorming stages of a project. But it’s unusual for alliances to form further down the line, after each side is emotionally invested in its idea, according to Joseph B. Lassiter, a professor at the Harvard Business School and faculty chairman of the Harvard Innovation Lab.
“Everybody wants to have a baby, but your baby is different than the other guy’s baby and you’re in love with it,” Professor Lassiter says. “You think the other guy’s baby isn’t as cute as yours.”
A similar apparel company, called Outlier and based in Brooklyn, was also formed by people who might have become competitors. Abe Burmeister and Tyler Clemens, its founders, were two bicycle commuters who met at their local coffee shop after one had already been stitching prototypes of cycling-friendly dress shirts and the other was making durable dress pants.
“Turns out we had been working with the same fabrics and looking at very similar problems,” Mr. Burmeister wrote in an e-mail.
With complementary products, the two saw that their babies would make excellent siblings. “Within a couple months of that meeting we teamed up to launch Outlier,” Mr. Burmeister added.
In Ministry of Supply’s case, the concepts of the two potential competitors were nearly identical. True to their M.I.T. backgrounds, the founders are focusing on technological innovation.
Mr. Amarasiriwardena and his team have relied on an engineering process used in aerospace design to help understand how the body’s skin moves, so that their garments will stretch in a similar way. They use thermal imaging to find the spots in the body that generate the most heat, so they can determine where to place vents in the shirts.
Some of the fabric was created with a material that NASA had designed to regulate astronauts’ body temperatures in 200-degree heat changes. Ministry of Supply has a license to use the technology for the material. While the primary task of most athletic apparel is to manage sweat, this fabric keeps the body cool, preventing perspiration from occurring in the first place.
To execute some of the designs, they use computerized knitting. “It lets us dictate if we want a lighter mesh in the underarm in the back, but we want more coverage in the front,” Mr. Amarasiriwardena explains.
But for a high-tech apparel product to achieve mass appeal, it must also be aesthetically pleasing. “If it doesn’t look good, it’s over,” says Mark Satkiewicz, president of SmartWool, a company that sells high-performance merino wool socks and clothing.
The key is finding a balance between looks and performance, which is no simple feat, Mr. Satkiewicz says. “It’s very difficult,” he says. “I don’t think any brands have hit a home run every time.”
To address this issue, Ministry of Supply tapped its customers from its beta stage for feedback before it opened to the public last June. A New York fashion designer then incorporated the suggestions into new designs. “We did more than 20 iterations of the dress shirt and we were progressively able to improve the aesthetic,” Ms. Hickey says, and as a result, the clothing now has a far more tailored appearance. Since last June, the company has sold 12,800 shirts and pants through its Web site and its Boston showroom (Mr. Rustagi left the company last year.)
One of the early adopters was Craig Breslow, 32, a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox whose fiancée bought him a shirt as a birthday present. She thought it would “appeal to the nerd” in him, he recalls, while he was “just hoping the fashion side of things would be passable.” Mr. Breslow is a Yale graduate with a bachelor’s degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry.
Mr. Breslow decided to take the shirt on the road during the baseball season, testing it in the disparate climates of places like Texas and Toronto. It came in handy after games, when he and his teammates “have about 30 minutes to eat, shower, stop sweating and put on a suit,” he says. He liked the shirt — and its look — so much that he bought two more shirts, as well as a pair of slacks, whose comfort he compared to that of sweat pants. Then he decided to invest $50,000 in the company.
“It’s like the scientific method,” Mr. Breslow says of Ministry of Supply’s approach. “Find a problem, develop a hypothesis, test it and reach a conclusion. That’s something I can appreciate.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/business/at-ministry-of-supply-teamwork-in-making-high-tech-apparel.html?partner=rss&emc=rss