This week’s episode of the Zero to a Million Podcast with Zach Rego features Gihan Amarasiriwardena, Co-Founder and President of Ministry of Supply. Today, Gihan shares how he and his brand fulfill the market desire for performance apparel that goes beyond the gym.
Gihan wanted to create apparel that is not only versatile but comfortable and stylish as well. He shares that he and his co-founder, during the market research stage, even had a competition as to who can pack the least when they were traveling to prove the utility of their product.
Shopify and Kickstarter have also been instrumental in the brand's success. Gihan shares how they launched on Kickstarter and the massive amount of work required before the launch could even happen.
He also shares the dev work needed to make an enjoyable user experience on the site and how other brands should take note of its many features to tailor the experience according to their ideal customer profiles.
SHOW NOTES
HIGHLIGHTS
00:40 A passion for materials innovation, comfort, and human performance
04:55 Market research: Figuring out how to make the most versatile products
09:09 Launching on Kickstarter after many product iterations
12:36 Creating a Shopify product page for your brand and ideal customers
20:35 The user experience of Ministry of Supply's website
21:06 The brand's future with video ads
24:57 Connect with Gihan and Ministry of Supply
QUOTES
02:43 Gihan: "What we both did is we were Frankensteining our own products, so I was cutting running shirts and making dress shirts out of them and Amman was making dress socks by cutting the bottoms of Nike dri fit socks and sewing them to Gold Toe dress socks, essentially."
06:08 Gihan: "The antithesis of fast fashion is if you have better products, but you can't just do that by just saying the product is more expensive and thicker and whatnot, but really making sure that it's versatile to be used in a lot of different scenarios."
18:25 Gihan: "Be very judicious on where you want to innovate on your site experience because iterating something like a nav, a Shopify theme for example, like you can kind of swap that out a little bit easier. It's a little bit more dev work."
23:38 Gihan: "Most of the people who land on a Kickstarter video, it was like 60% of it, of the people that came to the page would watch the entire two minute video. And nowhere have we seen a conversion experience like that."
You can connect with Gihan in the links below:
- LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/gihanamarasiriwardena/
- Website - https://www.ministryofsupply.com/
- Ministry of Sound’s five year plan: https://www.ministryofsupply.com/about/5-year-plan
For more tips for starting and launching your business, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on Apple or Spotify today!