This article was published on March 30, 2010

Blank Label – The Future of Men’s Fashion or a Passing Trend?


Blank Label – The Future of Men’s Fashion or a Passing Trend?

In light of the continuing success of Custom Shoe site – Shoes of Prey, I thought I’d take a closer look at another co-creation startup – Blank Label.

Blank Label is a provider of co-created men’s dress shirts.

Not unlike Shoes of Prey, Blank Label has a simple to use shirt designer with a huge array of choice across fabric, cut,  colour and more.

What’s more, the shirts start for as low as $45 and come with a full money back guarantee. Nice.

The site’s executive team is made up of ex-pat Australian Fan Bi and American Danny Wong and the full team is split between Orange County (California), Boston (Massachusetts) and Shanghai (China). Despite this split they’re doing incredibly well to have put together what I feel is an amazing site.

But therein lies a question that’s puzzled me  – why has one site, Shoes of Prey, taken off, while the other, Blank Label, struggled for growth?

Check out the graph below to see what I mean.

That could very well be at the heart of a philosophical debate about the whole tech startup industry – I mean we all know of startups that have succeeded that oughtn’t have (Twitter succeeding despite its terrible early stage uptime is an example) and others (too many to name) that have struggled despite having what appears to be a great product.

Sure you can put it down to timing, or execution or market – the latter of these may very well be Blank Label’s main issue – perhaps women designing and buying custom shoes online is a better use-case for co-creation than men are designing and buying shirts. I’m not too sure.

What I do think, however, is that as people move away from overt consumerism, the type of buy and throw fashion that can be found on main streets across developed nations (and even in some not so developed), that sites like Blank Label are going to become more and more popular as an alternative.

And so they should be. Then again, and unfortunately for Blank Label, that’s no guarantee of success in this game.

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