The Curvy Coach

I’ve been interviewing a series of successful plus-size entrepreneurs to share with my readers. These interviews turned out to be really informative workshops, coaching sessions, and offered a behind-the-scenes look of what it takes to be a business owner in the plus-size industry all wrapped up in one!

I know that many of you are interested in designing your own plus-size clothing line, so consider this your VIP pass to find out out about what it really takes. Even if you aren’t, you will still learn a lot from this discussion.

Here’s an excerpt of the interview; click on the link to the bottom of this post to hear the full interview.

 Special Guest: Doug Hill of www.mightybigman.com

How did you get started?
This company started 2 years ago and it was something that we had not planned. I had always manufactured women’s clothing from stores as small and special as Fred Siegel in LA to Wal-Mart. I got out of the business and decided that I never wanted to be in the clothing business again. A partner of mine decided that he wanted to do promotional products and that led us into Nike and we did some cool things for Nike. One of their recurring problems was that some of their athletes would show up at Nike headquarters either not wearing Nike merchandise or they were too big to fit into anything that Nike made and it kind of drove the people at Nike crazy. They asked us if we could replicate some of the warm-ups and the fleece pieces that these athletes were wearing and just kind of get it off their plate so the people inside would not be ticked off that they were walking through the halls not wearing the swoosh.

So we did that and it was a good project and I never thought anything about it until we really started showing it to some of our bigger friends, and said ‘hey, look at this’. The comment back was, ‘why not just make it for all of us?’ For the younger big and tall guy there really wasn’t really a lot of what I would say what the smaller guys get to buy for them. We started looking at it and gave it due diligence and looked at the retail landscape and the manufacturing landscape and the demographic charts and said, you know, there might be something here. So we started doing it and it kind of morphed into an entire line and that’s where we’re at today.

Oh wow, that’s an awesome start to a business. The first thing that I noticed is that you noticed there was a gap first of all, and then you decided to do some market research and see what is already out there. How did you go about differentiating yourself from what was already there?

You take a look and see what really is in the marketplace at the time, who’s the big retailers out there, what’s your distribution channels, where could you go with this? Really at the time, and it’s still like this today, there’s only three traditional channels you could go to. You could go direct to retail. You have some of the big box guys who carry it, let’s just say they carry big and tall product. There are good specialty stores, whether they’re traditional big and tall or urban stores. Then there’s the big retailer which is the Casual Male guys. If you took a look at each one of those things they all had tremendous holes in the product and this business has really been very boring, very staid, very khaki pants and kind of traditional polos, that type of look. There are a few reasons. Number one, let’s be honest, a lot of the brands do not want to see a size 4X coming down the street in their product. The other thing is some of these stores from a physical layout in the store are not able to handle a larger customer coming in there. It means that they have to move the fixtures around, and then have bigger dressing rooms, and there all about how much goods can they fit in a square foot? So it got down to ‘wow, there’s really nothing gout there, no manufactures really want to do that because where do you go with it?’ We kind of just jumped off the edge of the cliff. It’s been challenging because putting product like this in a traditional store, they have a 40-year old and up customer and that guy’s son and grandson are not coming into there to shop. A lot of these guys don’t want to just buy urban stuff. Casual Male is 70% private label and J.C. Penney and Wal-mart do what their good at doing. We’ve really come out with a great product. Guys like it when they see it. Our struggle has been getting it into enough places where it can be purchased. We really are at a juncture. The juncture is that we have to be more web centric.

Just to back track because that was a lot of information you just shared.  Do you manufacture the clothes yourself or are you carrying other lines, or both?

No, the set up has always been for me, after so many years of being in the business, it’s not what you know but who you know. There are good people in place, particularly in China, where 90% of this is made, there are people in Mexico. We’ve noticed that there’s some products we could replicate here is we needed to. We’re taking a look at that just to quicken the turn into the marketplace. We go out and try to find what we think – look, we’re no fashion geniuses.

Who actually comes up with the designs and how does feedback from your target market play a part in your designs?

A lot of times we put the cart before the horse. That’s been a challenge because we’ve had to buy inventory with a lot of hope surrounding it. Just because of the lead times, we’re thinking ‘well, we need to be in shorts, we need to be in t-shirts’. What you do is really like what most people do is there’s very, very few pure designers. You can really shop just about any specialty store and you can shop any place and go in and get inspiration. Since really this market is probably moving a little bit slower than a quicker more fashion marketplace is you go out and you say ‘I love this treatment on this shirt, I love this treatment on this pant, just make it bigger.’ We’re in factories too that have people that have a lot of product going through there. There are a lot of samples coming out and we could piggy-back on a lot of some of the sampling and see if it works for this marketplace.

That’s at the heart of any business you form, doesn’t matter how great your product is, or how great it might not even be, but if you know how to use marketing to get your product in front of as many people as possible, and attract the type of client that you want, then you will see success. How would you actually define your target market? Is it all big and tall men, is it even a smaller niche? Who are you trying to reach?

I want to do all my business 50 miles east of Los Angeles and 50 miles west of New York. That for me is where business starts. Meaning that there are so many more choices that a lot of people can have in these big metropolitan areas. When I get into towns like Lubbock, Texas and I get into some of those kind of college towns. I get the football players wearing it, and guys like that, and they’re great guys. They’re the kind of guys who call me up and say ‘send me 6 more t-shirts, send me this and this and this.’ They just can’t get it. And when I ask them point blank where do you shop, they kind of look at you like deer in the headlights. It’s tough, very tough. Our focus down the road is really going to look at some of those types of towns where it will be pushed to the web, we will be conversing with these guys directly, and we will get input from them. That’s kind of where we see it going. My customer really is, let’s be honest, America’s not getting any smaller. In my son’s high school, there’s a boy there who at the age of 15 was 6’9”, 280, and he was able to wear clothes like this. By putting him in these clothes, his whole personality changed. So there’s guys, kids, 14, 15, 16 years old who you can hook early, follow them all the way up. When I say your client, I mean, we make product that has skulls on it, but we also make some spectacular mineral wash thermal that guys 50 and 60 years old will want four or five colors…back to the jeans.

Now with all of these challenges, what are some successes that you have seen in the past couple of years?

Well, the successes that we have seen are that we can live off very little money. It’s taught us humility. It’s taught us how to sleep on few hours of sleep. Really what it’s taught us is all the things we don’t know. It teaches that you can’t be all things to all people. I think that’s really critical. What we did in the beginning, and maybe it was the right thing to do was we threw a lot of categories on the wall. I’ll use one as an example. We got into the denim business, there are some good factories I can go into and do denim but really it’s been the most difficult category to really get traction off of and for a number of reasons. You really have to make sure the fit on these things is just so perfect. The difference between making a pant and a top is night and day. There are just so fewer critical fit points on a top than there are on a bottom. So what we see is it’s almost like in the women’s marketplace is that it’s still like 3 to 1 tops to bottoms. We take a look at this and after a year and a half and we think, let’s let someone else do the denim business. Our short business was fantastic. We’ve also seen that there are so many more niches in this business that we don’t even know. If we did them right, we can exploit them. Underwear, for one, is huge. It’s a huge thing for guys. My partner and I are not big. I’m 5’9” and 155 getting out of the shower. I don’t wear any of it. What we have to do is kind of learn that you can’t assume anything and you have to be talking to these guys a lot. And a lot of time they’re going to tell you ‘oh yeah, I really like it.’ And I’m saying, ‘do you really like it, what really is going on here?’ Instead of a push world, it’s a pull world. I don’t know, I think that what we’ve learned is the eyes were big in the beginning and the appetite was huge, but at the end of the day, what do you really sell? So do what you’re doing well, and based on that, you can kind of expand your product base as much as you want. The other thing you learn too is how important money is.

 Skip convincing the Vendors there’s a market for big and tall/plus-size and go directly to consumer.

The more you say that I’m even getting more excited. One other thing is, and correct me if I’m wrong, is I think that you focused a lot on the women’s side, I used to do plus sized tops for Sears, and I used to see how the sell-throughs on the plus size would dominate the regular size just because there was this appetite. Getting back to focusing on marketing to women is to me the other thing that is very fascinating is how many guys will come in with girlfriends, sisters, mothers, wives and everything else and really because they haven’t had a lot of this product to look at, they really don’t know if they look good in this. So the validation that comes from the female side is huge. The word I hear a lot is ‘really?’ ‘Does this look good, really?’ It’s getting them educated that you can have exactly what this little guy has. And you will look good in it.

Business is not just about transactions, you must be emotionally connected with your consumers.

That’s why I think the internet is so wonderful is because you can set up the sites there and actually ask questions ‘what do you like, what don’t you like, what have you heard, what am I missing?’ and I want that information and I want them to kind of be my partner and eventually set something up where they’ll be voting on things and maybe sending things in. Hey, if it looks good I’ll have the factory set up if everyone thinks it looks good, we’ll make it. I have some spectacular belts here that I haven’t started on yet. Just some tremendous jean belts. I walk into some of these stores and they’re either 19.95 or 119.95. The real fashion stuff in the middle where a guy can buy an all leather non silk belt for 40 or 45 dollars and it’s really very cool, it’s another niche.

How important has mentorship, having a business coach or a support team, how has that played into your business and how important do you think it is?

Well, I would imagine it would probably help but since we’re a three headed monster and we’re a bunch of old guys we kind of lean on each other and don’t really have that. Sometimes we’re just so presumptuous and we think we know it all. Talking to someone like you who has her finger on the pulse of what’s going on here is something. Every day you learn something. Every day I’m walking around handing out a business card because what I now realize is that there is someone I could bump into who is 5’4” and 112 pounds but they know someone who needs big and tall merchandise. Everybody knows somebody so the more we have to talk and the more we have to get our message out and the more people who are the conduit for that, the better off we all are. We’re all connected, we can all connect to one another in a split second so how do we get more people who understand what we’re trying to do on as part of the team. That’s huge. When you know if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re running it with no overhead and as few people as you possibly can and you walk in one morning and you think there’s six things to do and by 10 o’clock that went to 60.

That’s why it’s important to love what you do.

Or have some excuse for your family why you’re having tuna fish again for dinner tonight.

Doug, thank you so much for your time. I enjoyed talking to you and I can’t wait to see the success that you have in the next few years. Any last words that you’d like to share with those who will be listening to this call?

Persistence. That’s it. Faith and persistence. Be thankful for what you have. It’s the toughest thing to just give thanks every day for what you do have. If your business model is sound and if you really do have faith in it then you just have to grind it. You just got to keep grinding it. Sometimes you just want to shut the door and throw a fire bomb in there then all of a sudden you’ll get a phone call, and you’ll think ‘man, that was really good what you shipped me, let’s do some more of it’ and it seems like a lot of that happens just when sometimes the persistence thing can waver. You just got to keep grinding it.

Thank you so much for your time and be sure to visit Doug’s site http://www.mightybigman.com and check out his designs.

Listen to complete audio interview here (35 minutes)