Today we’d like to introduce you to Tanya Zhang.
Tanya, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
My co-founder Wesley Kang is a slimmer Taiwanese-American who was at the time working in finance and had to wear a dress shirt everyday to work. He often had a hard time finding a good fitting dress shirt off-the-rack that fit his build at 5’5” in height and 140 lbs in weight. I saw the same issue with my father who immigrated to the states from China and always stated that “American dress shirts didn’t fit [him]” because they were either too baggy, long in length, or had excess fabric when tucked at the waist. Traditional dress shirt retailers size through a function of neck size and sleeve length e.g., 14.5” neck / 32 sleeve length (usually the smallest size offered… which was still too large for Wesley) and we knew we could create something better for slimmer guys who’ve felt averaged out by the dress shirt industry.
We came up with the idea in March 2018 to create high quality “actually slim” dress shirts that fit off-the-rack without a tailor on the greater mission of increasing Asian American Pacific islander (AAPI) representation in fashion. We clocked in at night to get our business idea to MVP before leaving our full-time jobs six months later. We conducted initial market, user, and competitive research to inform our sizes and produced samples with a manufacturer we found online. Once the samples came in, we had different guys try on the shirts and give us feedback on the fit, meanwhile collecting their measurements. With my background in brand/design and Wesley’s in finance/data, we hosted a launch party with our three initial dress shirt styles in 5 actually slim sizes in NYC and left our jobs a month later. We’ve been on the brand full time for over a year now and have expanded to 11 shirt styles (soon to be 21 in various styles) and are seeing incremental growth through our efforts. We were also featured by Money Magazine and Huffington Post last year!
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Being self-funded, we’re incredibly scrappy with everything we’ve done which has its pros and cons. Pros: we’ve learned everything ourselves e.g., how to run our own ads, better optimize our website with SEO, how to take product photos which gave us a solid knowledge foundation for when we started to contract out the work to freelancers and agencies. We were able to call out agencies when they were lazy or trying to pull the wool over our eyes because we knew the intricacies of the systems or processes, having done them ourselves in our first year of running the business.
Cons: we were too penny-pinching with our expenses, trying to save a dollar here and there for supplies that we needed more of. For example, we ordered the bare minimum in inventory and ended up not having enough shirts to prepare us for our first Q4, leaving us empty-handed during the holiday season. We ran out of our mailer boxes and had to ship our $80 dress shirts in USPS boxes and apologized to our customers for the lackluster packaging during the holidays. We were constantly running out to the store to get more tape, tissue paper, extra clips, etc. I learned to not underestimate myself, the business, and to take bigger risks when it comes to putting down money to grow the business.
Nimble Made – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Nimble Made is a direct-to-consumer “Actually Slim Fit” dress shirt brand. While the dress shirt industry still uses “neck & sleeve length” to determine sizes, our unique sizes are a function of height and weight with a trimmed shirt length, sleeve length, and back/shoulders for a better slim fit. We strive for more size inclusion and AAPI representation in fashion to include men of all body types, starting with a slim fit that actually fits.
We have six actually slim sizes that scale numerically from smallest to largest, N0 to N5, and are a function of height and weight. Wesley, my co-founder, is 5’5” around 140 lbs and he wears the N2 size. We have a size calculator on our website where we recommend one of our actually slim sizes! We believe height and weight to be a better indication of fit especially when it comes to a better slim fit.
We want to be very intentional with a brand and increase cultural awareness for our Asian American heritage so we name the dress shirts after symbols and themes in Asian culture. For example, our pink dress shirt is called the New Year after Lunar New Year and the tradition of wearing new red clothes for celebration.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
We get feedback from happy customers who say this is the only dress shirt brand they’re going to be buying from now on which makes us very proud! We strive to fill this gap in menswear where slimmer men can feel confident in their work clothes again without needing a tailor or sacrificing quality.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nimble-made.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: instagram.com/nimblemade
- Facebook: facebook.com/nimblemade
- Other: https://www.nimble-made.com/pages/fit-guide
Image Credit:
Jayne Chong, Tiffany Lo, Josh Foronda, Hannah Cristina, Steve Collective
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