Written by Eric Meltzer
Tue, July 10 (13 years ago)
In the software world, products are routinely released as unfinished “betas”. The reason to release before the product is totally finished is paradoxically that it can’t be totally finished until it’s been released in a rough state and played with by the general public. No matter how much internal testing you do, users will come to you on day one with bugs that you’ll be shocked you didn’t find yourself. Not only that, but they’ll use your product in ways you never imagined, and ask you for a bunch of features you hadn’t considered.
In trying to make the perfect tee, the same issue applies. We spent a great deal of time picking a great fabric, and we put shirts on a lot of people to get a good fit, but in the end, it’s going to take a lot of use and abuse from people in the real world in order to refine the shirts. It’s tempting to assume that if it seems great to you, it’ll seem great to everyone, but that’s just not the case. So, we’re selling this first batch at cost and paying for the shipping ourselves (so we’re losing about two dollars per shirt) in exchange for a promise to give us a lot of harsh feedback about the design. If you love the shirts when you get them, that’s great, but if they’re too thin, or too thick, or too short, or whatever else, we really want to hear from you.
Over the next few days, I’m going to write up the story of how these tees came into existence. It started with me being frustrated at the utter lack of inexpensive but awesome tees, and it ended up with me roaming around southern Chinese factory towns–if you’d like to be notified when those posts go up, you can follow us on twitter (@theopencompany) or add this blog to your RSS reader.