Building in Public — Eazybee

How did we start?

The most daunting part of starting up was answering all the ‘hows’. Honestly, we had no idea how we would do 90% of the things we listed down, but we knew one thing — we just had to start.

Our Hero Fabric :

A no-brainer with this one — We had to finalise a fabric that would have the least impact on the planet! We had a couple of options shortlisted:

• Organic Cotton — A proven champion. As good as it gets, but the hand-feel wasn’t as soft.
• Bamboo — A heavyweight in this category, with just a significant drawback — inconsistency and lack of availability.
• Tencel™ Lyocell — Hello there, champ! The toughest nut to crack due to its lack of availability and knowledge to develop it. As soon as we felt this fabric and learnt the manufacturing process, we were obsessed with it. Thanks to the Lenzing team, who helped us immensely in developing this fabric.

Vendors :

Thanks to my previous job, this was relatively easy for me to figure. I had developed a good supplier base. All I had to do was tap into that and figure out the best person for the job. Tencel™ Lyocell is the latest introduction by the Lenzing group, which meant not many suppliers had the capabilities or knowledge to handle this fabric.

Was it a boon or a curse, not too sure about that, but because it was so new at the time, we had to get involved and take control of every step within our supply chain — Fibre — Yarn — Fabric — Garment.

We couldn’t be more grateful to the following people who helped us figure it all out :

• Fibre — Lenzing
• Yarn — Sambandham Spinning Mills
• Fabric — Sudevi
• Garment — NJA Garments

Budgeting :

The most stressful part of starting up. How much was enough? It was all about making appropriate assumptions with whatever information we had at the time. The only cost we did know was the cost of the product. Other cost assumptions we made during the time were sampling, marketing, packaging, admin, and a bit of buffer.

Now we did have a bit of saving, and we were ready to go all-in, but even then, we didn’t think it wasn’t enough.

Should we try and raise funds? In a world where we constantly keep hearing about startups raising funds, this was an option. However, having worked in a startup, I was also aware of the pressure that came with it, and more often than not, it’s not pretty. We spoke to a couple of angel investors and soon realised we weren’t ready for it. We don’t know what the business was worth, and giving up a big chunk of equity so early in the day just didn’t make sense.

Next best option — Friends and Family. We are blessed to have been surrounded by people who truly believed in us to make something out of it and join us on this crazy-ass journey.

Brand Vision :

The only thing Aali and I were sure about from day 1 was what the brand would stand for. People, Planet and Profit, were the three pillars we built the entire business on. Sustainability for us is not just about taking care of the planet, but it also means taking care of the people in it.

Brand Marketing :

We had a couple of ideas. Few of them worked, and few didn’t, but we had the most fun planning and working for this.

A. Brand Feel :

• We kept it simple. Let the images do all the talking.
• Work with nude colours. The product colours needed to stand out.
• Stay true to our values (be kind) because that’s how we’ll build a community.

B. Photoshoot :

• Work with relatable models. The customers are smart enough to know real vs aspirational.
• Location: We did our first photoshoot in Badlapur. Our close friend was kind enough to lend us his farmhouse to make sure we could bring our vision to life.
• Photographer and Shoot Direction: This was the dream team. We worked with friends who understood the direction and our vision so well that we just had to show up while they delivered magic.

A special shoutout to Tiana Kamte Photography and Ria Punjabi (The Hot Box Company). Do check out their work, they’re absolutely amazing.

• Learnings — We had no idea that not all models are comfortable doing underwear shoots. We thought it would be a simple process — we like someone, speak to their agent, and boom, that’s a done deal. But after being rejected by a whole lot of people, we finally came across 2 guys who we loved, and they said yes.

C. Content :

• Quality over quantity.
• Educate the consumer on why making sustainable choices is essential.
• Simplify content, so it’s easy to digest.
• Every piece of content should have a purpose. (Sales — Informative — Emotion driven)
• Make sure at any given time we have a content bank for 30 days. This gave us the freedom to not get swamped with just content creation but to focus on other operations in the business well.

D. Performance Marketing — 3 months into the business, and we are yet trying to figure this out. A few early assumptions :

• Make great ads.
• Find the perfect target audience.

While these are on point, little did we know that this would be the toughest and the most complicated task. Although we often heard other brands and marketers talk about getting a 2–2.5x ROI on ad spend, we knew it wouldn’t be that easy. We knew we would burn some cash trying to figure this out, but we also knew that we’d learn only if we tried.

Website :

Relatively an easy decision — We built our website on Shopify. It wasn’t complicated and much cheaper than building it out from scratch. So Aalisha designed the entire website, page by page. Then, we got a third-party developer to help us customise a Shopify theme according to our design.

Mistakes we made along the way :

1. Sampling — A necessary evil.

We had to place mini orders that were ridiculously expensive, not just once, but thrice. The only regret with this entire exercise was that we should have been a little more mindful of the costs. This can be called a learning cost, but we would have preferred it to be a bit cheaper. When you’re on a tight budget, this one stung!

2. Factory change last minute.

Our first garment vendor was based in Tirupur. Everything was set to start on time, we had set our date for the launch, and then one week before the start date, we got a call saying the deadlines will be pushed by a month due to a festival called Pongal. For those of you who don’t know, Pongal is the biggest festival in Tamil Nadu. No one works during this time, literally not a soul! So there was no chance in hell we were going to push our dates again, so now we had to find a new factory that could deliver, and that was the biggest mistake we made.

3. Quality Check.

After speaking to roughly 20–25 factories, we finally shortlist one in Mumbai to deliver the products to meet our launch date.

Everything was great, but midway through production, we realised these guys hadn’t made briefs before. Hence, the rejection rate was extremely high.

I’ve seen this time and again and I have never understood why vendors have this habit of saying — Yes, we can when they most definitely cannot.

This cost us a good 20% of our order. As much as we blamed them, this was on us. Our impatience led to this, and not hiring a professional QC consultant made it worse.

4. Website.

The developers did an outstanding job with our website. So no worries there. But with all the customisations, we overlooked changes that we would make in the future. The website is so highly customised that we have to contact our developer every time we need to make any changes. So be it changing images or text, adding products or modifying them, we have no option but to rely on our developers. This is time-consuming, and it’s a cost. We defeated the entire purpose of working on Shopify — to make this job easier for us.

5. Budgeting

We thought we covered everything, but the biggest ones — sampling and rejection weren’t accounted for. Unfortunately, our buffer covered these costs, which meant that we had to cancel/rethink our plans to make sure we don’t hit a financial roadblock in the future.

All of these mistakes are recorded, and we’ve learnt immensely from them. But the most significant learning from the entire process was PATIENCE. We were in such a hurry to launch, we rushed through a lot of the operations. So the mistakes we made were definitely not business killers. Still, it would be nice to find a time machine that could help us go back in time to do a few things differently!

What’s next?

We are 3 months in, and I’d love to share our wins and losses with you! Basically, a report card with learnings!

— Shail Madlani. Co-Founder — Eazybee

Making great underwear and trying to save the planet!

Visit our online store to learn more about us!