Is Marketing a Necessity?

Sometimes word-of-mouth can create a more exclusive business.

Question: What is your advice for aspiring entrepreneurs? Matthew

Malin: [NYU's Stern School of Business] had approached us to use
our business model as a thesis for one of their semesters and I had
worked with them sort of on a weekly basis talking about our business
and it was really interesting because we have a very, sort of,
non-traditional business model in terms of how we've gone after business
from a niche perspective. And as an entrepreneur, you know, we didn't
set out in, I think, a manner from which many entrepreneurs do. It
wasn't this "Okay, well, we're going to start a business and here it is
and we know we're going to do this." It really just was a very simple
extension of things we already were doing and we knew and we loved and
it felt good because... Andrew Goetz: And that we were very
passionate about and I think that was definitely ... You have to really
be willing to roll up your sleeves and you become a jack-of-all-trades,
so to speak. And in many ways that is a great education because even as
your business grows and you start delineating responsibility to other
things, you know how to do every single job in an organization. Matthew

Malin: But even in talking to MBA students, there is this sort of,
well, "When is there a time when you don't need to get an MBA because
you have so much experience in your business that it doesn't really
matter? It's not going to take you to the next level." I think that the
time for starting this business was then, like we didn't need to have in
my opinion for what we were doing. We didn't necessarily feel we needed
to have the MBA to get us to be here. It was just really sort of
natural at that point, so experience for me... one of the things that I
always talk about is having that level of experience on so many
different directions was really what I think helped us be to get to
where we are today. Andrew Goetz: And you have to be
tenacious. There is no question about it. Question:
How is your business model untraditional? Andrew Goetz: Well,

first of all we're partners in life. I mean although I guess that's not
totally untraditional. No, I mean families and couples have done that
together. Matthew Malin: But I mean more specifically the
model itself, like having written a business plan, which we had had
some dear friends who had started quite a successful business in
Australia... I used their business model, their business plan to write a
business plan, which took me probably about six months after I had left
Prada and then another year in development from start to finish when we
launched. And the business itself is sort of a nontraditional aspect of
how to go after business and what we've done is we had setup sort of
this idea of a freestanding store sort of being everything for us. It
was the store. It was the showroom. It was our opportunity to create
sales. It was our distribution center, everything to the brand, so we
were sort of sitting in the store waiting on customers, packing boxes
that were being shipped to London. It was everything, all encompassing,
and it sort of grew organically from there. We didn't take investors. We
are self-funded. We have grown only organically. The business has been
profitable since its first year and it has been operational since its
first day, so while we put in an initial capital investment to the
company, we haven't invested any more of our own money since then. We've
only allowed it to grow naturally in its own direction. Andrew

Goetz: Yeah, I think that's actually the thing that is the most
untraditional is that we haven't had a very slick marketing world, that
everything has grown organically and that we don't actually go after
business in a traditional way. As a matter of fact we have never
solicited any of our accounts, so everything has sort of come to us and I
think that's unique. Matthew Malin: But it's left us
very exclusive and having had these backgrounds where we were taking
experience we had... I had many beauty editors who knew who I was and
what I was doing and Andrew had design editors and so we already had
sort of a built in platform with those. I had had experience doing
retail distribution, so there were a certain number of retailers who
already knew me and would talk to us about our brand, so in all respects
we had sort of set the stage in sort of a nontraditional manner with
basically no money. Recorded on March 19, 2010