Full House

It appears we moved uptown just in time, as our Upper West Side apartment survived Sandy with electricity intact. (We did, however, watch a gust of wind take out a row of trees outside our window, smashing a couple of parked cars in the process.)

This evening, we’re playing hotel for family that wasn’t so lucky: my 90-year-old grandmother is up from downton, where last night cars floated down her street, and today her apartment is still without electricity; my brother-in-law is down from Columbia University Medical Center in upper Manhattan, where he just finished a 48-hour hurricane shift in the ICU; and his wife is in from Fort Lee, NJ, where she was stuck at home in the dark on her own day off from the hospital, unable to cross the GW bridge.

Plus we have Gemelli, who’s weathered the storm completely unfazed. (Though, as Jess pointed out, he’s young enough and a recent enough transplant to simply assume we have howling winds like this every week here in NYC). It’s a lot of people all at once for a puppy, especially for a puppy who’d already started to go a bit stir-crazy in the apartment during the hurricane lockdown. (He terrorized Jess this morning with manic misbehavior while I was out opening and inspecting [the gym](http://www.crossfitnyc.com).)

I’m happy to have them all here, in part because it’s nice to spend time with family, and in part because I feel like I’m helping out with storm recovery in some small way. But also because, like [the man in the old Jewish parable who’s rabbi instructs him to bring all his chickens into the house](http://www.beliefnet.com/Love-Family/Parenting/2000/10/Teaching-Tales-The-Way-You-Like-It.aspx), I’m sure things will feel awfully quiet and spacious when we’re *only* dealing with one crazy little dog, rather than an entire house full of guests.

|   

Guest Post

[Courtesy of Gemelli, who just discovered the excellent clicking noise a keyboard makes when pounced upon.]

“??///////////’;ij;/;/;;;;jn.”
??vbvvbffdn b cx b hv,nbbbnmnmn g xvbgb //./. // ÷
]’/. ..zxclzxczczc,k, ˘”
“?
>. fgvc nvbbkib . lkm ;.ljn mbkn j jjlklk,nv b b v  .m
>?bxvcb b  µv©v√©h bbvvffddc cvvvbbhbvvvgvgtgbbvnm b

|  

Gemelli

Welcome home to Gemelli “Mel” Newman, nine weeks old, and ready to rumble:

|  

IRL

This morning, on the way to work, I passed [Bob Balaban](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000837/) helping an elderly homeless man on the corner.

And, really, I wasn’t surprised. It seems like something the characters he plays would be likely to do.

That, in turn, reinforces my belief about actors, honed during my years running Cyan Pictures: an actor’s personality ‘in real life’ is usually the average of the characters he or she plays.

That may not hold true in the theater world, where people are willing to suspend disbelief, and actors can further diverge from their actual selves. In a play, if a black guy and a white guy are brothers, we write it off to creative casting; if someone ‘opens a door’ by miming turning and pulling an invisible doorknob, we call it minimalist staging.

But if that happens in a movie, we assume that one of the brothers must be adopted, and that the guy miming opening a door must be nuts. In movies, we’re simply less willing to believe, to diverge from reality. That, I think, constrains much further the range of characters an actor can believably take on. (Unless you’re Meryl Streep.)

Which is all to say, most characters end up only a standard deviation or so away from who an actor actually is.  Average those characters out, and, in my experience, you’ve got a pretty good sense of the real person beneath them all.

|   

Dear Lazyweb

On Wednesday, I’m driving up to Boston to pick up a new addition to the Newman family:

 

He’s a Havanese, and just turned eight weeks old. So far, the main thing we know about his personality is that he’s very outgoing, and he seems to think he’s much bigger than he actually is. (Sounds familiar.) Here he is, trying to butt into a backyard throwdown between his dad and uncle:

 

We’re excited to have him coming, and have been getting the house (and our life) ready.  But we still don’t have a name. So, web friends, weigh in! Email ideas my way, and let us know what to call this guy.

(Nota bene: My first choice of ‘Brain’, in homage to Inspector Gadget, was already vetoed by Jess.)

|  

Go Fish

It’s been about a month since Jess and I moved to the Upper West Side, a stark change from our prior life on the outskirts of Times Square.

The biggest change, really, is the people. We traded tourists from Ohio and Geneva for a lot of old Jews. Fortunately, Jess’ favorite foods line up pretty squarely with old Jews’, so, from a culinary perspective, it’s been a big step up.

Within a block of the new apartment, for example, are both [Barney Greengrass](http://www.barneygreengrass.com/welcome.php) and [Murray’s Sturgeon](http://www.murrayssturgeon.com/), two of New York’s more storied appetizing stores. Appetizing, Wikipedia explains, “is best understood as a store that sells ‘the foods one eats with bagels.'” Lox, whitefish, smoked herring. It’s even better understood, I think, with a quick gloss of kashrut, the laws that govern kosher eating: those laws prohibit eating milk and meat together; they also, in turn, prohibit preparing and selling both milk and meat in the same restaurant. So if deli’s are busy selling meat (think Katz’s, Carnegies, or 2nd Avenue, serving up pastrami on rye and Reuben sandwiches), appetizing stores are the flip side of the coin, selling dairy – cream cheese, pickled herring in cream sauce, whitefish salad.

And it is, as Wikipedia point out, all excellent with bagels. Sort of Jewish soul food for Sunday mornings. Time to eat.

|   

Three Weeks

Most of the year, I wonder why I live in New York City. During summer months, the air weighs down, hot and humid; clothing sticks to skin, garbage piles up fetid in the streets. During winter months, it’s rain, snow, sleet; cold bites numb hands and toes, makes even eardrums ache. And through it all I think, “why did I possibly leave San Francisco?”

But then, for three weeks in the fall, and three weeks again in spring, New York is the most beautiful place in the world. The air is crisp, the city clean, everything full of possibility.

Right now, we’ve hit those three weeks. The afternoon sunlight is golden out my window, autumn leaves just starting to turn. Sadly, I know it won’t last. But while it does, there’s no place I’d rather be. I’m off for a walk.

|  

Smashed

My good friend and former roommate James Ponsoldt’s new film, Smashed, is in theaters this weekend. It was much-loved at Sundance (where it won a Special Jury Prize), and has garnered great critical reviews since (according to Metacritic, ‘universal critical acclaim’).

Here’s the trailer, which looks awesome, and gives a great sense of both Jamie’s knack for spotting and directing talented actors, and his subtle but highly visual shooting style:

 

Sony Pictures Classics is releasing it in New York (with the impressive double-whammy of the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza) and LA tomorrow, then more broadly over the next few weeks; you can check the list of theaters to see when it’s coming to you.

|  

Why E-Commerce Works

I helped Jess research a piece for the Dobbin blog, about why they chose to launch their fashion line as e-commerce only, rather than selling through department stores and boutiques. I’m cross-posting it here as it’s a great illustration of the power of disintermediation; in almost any industry, leveraging the power of the web to cut out middle-men leads to happier customers getting better stuff at better prices while companies make more money in the process. It’s something I’ve long appreciated in theory, but was struck by anew after diving through chain retailers’ annual 10-k’s, and calculating how little of the price of a piece of clothing actually goes into making that clothing in a traditional business model.

Behind the Scenes Dobbin: Why We Sell Online Only

When we launched Dobbin, we decided to sell our line exclusively via e-commerce.  In many ways, it would have been easier for us to sell through boutiques and department stores.  We wouldn’t have had to worry as much about finding customers, or take on the financial risk of producing clothing without a known buyer.  But had we sold through a retailer, they would have needed to mark up our Dobbin pieces 2.3-2.5 times from what they are listed as on our site today, so that they could make a profit.

We decided to go the harder route of selling via e-commerce because we wanted to produce the best, highest quality goods we could, without charging customers $300-$500. We wanted to keep prices at or below a fair $200 for luxury clothing, and we wanted to be in direct touch with our customers so that we could learn about what worked and what didn’t for women all over the country.

These lower prices mean that that we’re spending a higher percentage of the price on fabric and the fit process, while taking a lower profit margin than many of our peers.  We feel it’s worth it long term, as we think we can grow more by give our customers real value than by simply maximizing short-term profits.

Recently, we pored through the public financial filings of a major womenswear brand, to figure out what percentage of their dresses’ prices were actually paying for the dresses, and what percentage was covering overhead like store rents, sales staffs, and large corporate infrastructures. Here’s what we discovered.

Consider our Belle Ponte Dress (on the left), and a similar-looking ponte dress the chain store sells (on the right):

 

The dresses are priced equivalently, yet Dobbin puts more than five times as much of that purchase price into the dress itself.

Not surprisingly, the Dobbin dress is much higher quality than the chain store dress – we use the best fabric available on the market (ours is typically $18-$30/yd where theirs is typically $3-$8/yd), has a better fit (we spend more time and money fitting our pieces locally as opposed to outsourcing the design and fit process to overseas factories), and has better construction (we produce locally in the same NYC factories as Thakoon, Rachel Roy and Theory, while theirs is produced overseas). Still, despite the smaller investment in the product itself, the chain store needs to mark up the price of their dress by more than $100 to cover their pricy overhead.

By the same token, consider dresses that are priced much lower than ours at discount chains and mass retailers. Those retailers typically use incredibly inexpensive fabric (under $5/yd), outsource the fit process and sewing overseas (often getting sub-par fit and construction as a result), yet still mark their goods up quite a bit (even on a dress that’s $50 or less) meaning that you’re getting even less for your money.

Of course, some other high-end womenswear brands use the same luxury fabrics that Dobbin does, shopping at the same Italian mills. They even manufacture side-by-side with Dobbin in the same New York factories.

Consider again our Belle Ponte Dress (left), and a similar designer ponte dress (right):

In this case, the other high-end designer’s dress is equally well made – the same fabrics, the same factories. But the difference in price is large — our dress is $168 versus their dress at $425. Like the chain store dress, we just don’t think you get what you pay for here.

The difference in retail price occurs in the wholesale process. When high-end designers sell their designs to department stores and to boutiques, they sell them at a wholesale price. This wholesale price provides the designer with a small profit margin above the cost of the goods. Again, we’re similar to these designers here; we make a small profit above the cost of the goods. But things change when stores buy wholesale goods. Department stores and boutiques take the wholesale price and mark it up the aforementioned 2.3 to 2.5 times BEYOND the wholesale price. So now, the consumer is paying for both the designer’s overhead and markup AND the retailer’s overhead and markup. We don’t think that’s fair and that’s why we chose to avoid the wholesale path.

Launching a new fashion brand is tough; launching it online only is even tougher. We don’t have the same exposure as a brand sold as stores all over the country or as a mass/chain retailer with hundreds or thousands of stores.  But we believe that selling directly via e-commerce is a worthy approach to take. We are dedicated to providing our customers with higher quality designs, luxury fabrics, better fit, and made in the USA production at fair prices that don’t include huge markup. If you have any questions about this post, we’d love to chat. Email us anytime at hello@dobbinclothing.com.

So there you have it. I think this is pretty awesome, and not just because my wife is CEO. While I don’t wear the line myself [in public], they’ve received amazingly positive feedback from a slew of women who do, and a large percentage of their customers in these first two seasons have even already come back to place additional orders. If you’re curious, it seems that the clothes really do speak for themselves, and they offer free shipping both ways so you can give them a try.

|