The Idiotic So-called Plan

I've been dreaming about making MY OWN clothes for fifteen years or so and IMAGINING that if I figure that out, other women might actually want to buy them and then I could afford to dress the way I want.

I'm a BLOGGER so those ideas have so far resulted in this BLOG. Go me.

I've spent a bunch of time on Hacker News. People sometimes imagine their brilliant idea is worth big money and they can hire coders to make it real because that's a not very important part of their business. 

November West Wears isn't intended to ever be a brick and mortar store. The website is the front end. A knitting machine (aka ability to MAKE clothes) plus a means to ship clothes is the back end.

Would-be founders who imagine they can hire coders trend towards failure. People in those circles frequently say "Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything." And that's not entirely accurate but it's trying to explain something important. 

Conceiving of an idea is a little like conceiving a baby. Cool, something came together but there's a zillion things between a zygote and imagining your kid is a college graduate somewhere down the line.

You can hire a surrogate mother to carry a child. You can't conceive a baby and then say baking this bun is an annoyance. You do it for a few paltry bucks.

Anyway, there are Tech Notes on a different site and I didn't look at them for a long time. They are more bare bones than I recall. But hypothetically this so-called business can start with me working out the website piece and making a mockup of pictures you can play with for funsies and change colors etc.

And buy a knitting machine and try to actually create an MVP (minimum viable product) of a basic monotone wardrobe so I can hypothetically buy ONE knitting machine and THREE colors of yarn and keep it simple and see if I can get orders, process payments, make clothes, ship clothes and work out 5000 annoying pieces of being in business. 

I'm aware I'm nuts. I know I grew up in the 'burbs and think dressing like an heiress should be easy and affordable. 

Donna Karan is probably the closest existing big name designer doing something vaguely akin to what I want and she once said something about the insane price of quality materials and how she just can't charge less and make the clothes she makes because the material alone is some stupidly high price per yard.

I'm aware Egyptian cotton is substantially more expensive than "regular" cotton and natural materials don't come cheap and people buy cotton-poly blends in part because they wrinkle less than 100 percent cotton and no one wants to iron, least of all ME.

I quit ironing ages ago. If I'm not sewing, I'm not ironing and I quit sewing not long after I traded in my bright yellow rotary phone and pet dinosaur for a dinosaur of a marriage.

Rest assured, I know all that.

I'm not interested in making haute couture. If you are a fashion industry insider with a retarded hobby of reading my blog, my desire to make "custom" clothes fit to measure doesn't mean I'm planning to make the kind of "If you need to ask the price, you can't afford it." stuff you make.

I spent my twenties as a full-time wife and mom and I periodically took measurements of my kids and sent them via written letter to my mom who would buy discount material from the bargain bin and spend a dollar on a yard of material and an hour of her time and sew something for my kids.

I'm an insane person who thinks like "Why can't we recreate that process for the masses and create something reasonably affordable for office drones?"

I'm not trying to dress peasants. I'm not trying to compete on price with Walmart. I'm not expecting shirts to be $5 apiece.

But I'm hoping to achieve a price point such that if you are a working stiff office drone or secretary, you create drawings of the wardrobe you want and you wishlist it and send the link for the wishlist to friends and family and tell everyone "Buy me ONE piece of that." And then, say, ten friends each spend $100 on you and now you look like a million bucks though YOU can't possibly afford to drop a thousand dollars at one pop on a new wardrobe. 

And either I make it possible for you to send individual links for specific items to specific people or I track on my end which pieces are already bought and what's left on your list so you don't get duplicates. 

This is currently A BLOG aka all hot air. I don't own a knitting machine. I haven't got any clothing designs nor an online wardrobe design game to play. 

There's twelve zillion steps between here and graduating this baby from college and one of those is figuring out realistic pricing for a business, not a charity, that will pay the bills involved in making the clothes.

I have absolutely no idea how you do that as a clothier. I'm a former homemaker and environmental studies major whose only full-time job was in insurance. 

I'm not talking out my ass. I've not actually listed tentative prices anywhere. 

But in my mind, this is clothes for working stiffs, for the people, and has nothing to do with the nutty world of fashion where they make stuff you have to invent BS excuses to wear.

And that means it needs to be some kind of affordable for people with paychecks from day jobs, even though presumably they are probably making better than minimum wage. I made better than minimum wage at my entry-level desk job in insurance, but I was far from wealthy. 

Working out the details is kind of a hobby or occupation in the sense of keeping myself occupied. I have no boss dictating deadlines and no investors expecting evidence of progress that they will get a return on their money.

I'm not currently in any position to buy a knitting machine and make clothes. The next step is likely to be working on creating a wardrobe design interface to play with as a game not attached to a sales funnel at this time.