Getwear - an honest story of creating an innovative service
Hello friends!
We are a getwear company. A few years ago we decided to create an Internet service that would allow anyone without special knowledge of design to create their own high-quality, beautiful and well-fitting clothes, and then receive them by mail.
')
During these few years, we have experienced a lot: repeatedly exceeding budgets and changing the concept, names and performers, working with developers in the USA, India and Russia, tasted onion soup at the Bureau of Artyom Gorbunov and learned what a Tome effect is. We will be glad to share all this experience with you in our blog. Let's start with our difficult history.
Getwear was coined almost by accident when two of its founders, Yasha and Masha, studied in St. Petersburg at St. Petersburg State University. Masha at the same time attended the courses of fashion designers, who, however, were more similar to cutting and sewing courses. From there she made one very interesting fact: 99% of all clothes sold by fashionable and not very fashionable brands are created from standard elements - such a large LEGO, where collars, sleeves and pants are used instead of cubes. A thought flashed through our heads that it would be great to create a standalone application that would allow brands to design their collections. Services to customize computers were popular and really wanted to extend their principles to other areas. Around this time, Tim O'Reilly's famous article on Web 2.0 was published in Computerra - the era of the Internet based on user creativity began.
A few years later, Yasha and Masha entered the European Institute of Design, where they met their classmate Nickel (Nikhil). Nikil, in addition to the innate Indian industriousness, had one important quality: the experience of working as the lead designer-technologist of a large jeans production in the country of elephants and sacred cows. So the initial Getwear team was formed.
Initially, they planned to create an Internet service that would allow creating a full range of clothes: not only jeans, but also T-shirts, hoodies, and others like them. In order to embody such an idea, we clearly lacked our own resources, and we decided to look for an investor on the side. Fortunately for us, an Angel Angel was ready, who was willing to invest initial capital in the project, 25 thousand dollars (10-15 thousand were planning to spend on production, and 10 thousand - to leave on the site). However, as you will see right now, this is where our happiness is over.
Since we had no experience in web development and web design, we decided to outsource everything.
All scripts were drawn in the vector editor themselves, everything was described in detail. It looked like this:
Together, they came up with the first name - BrandFactory, which due to legal difficulties was soon changed to ItsWear, and then to the final one - Getwear.
We did a survey on Russian studios, paying special attention to those that specialized in creating interfaces - it was already assumed that he would play the main role. Of all the options I liked the Gorbunov Studio the most. Yasha traveled to Moscow, where Artyom Gorbunov treated him with onion soup and voiced his price tag. The soup was delicious, but the price tag - not very. Then the angel advised to pay attention to American designers, since the project was initially focused primarily on the Western market. So the American web studio was chosen. To no one guessed, let's call her Stone-Scissors-Paper.
It is said that creativity is a struggle with the original idea. If this is the case, then working with Rock-Paper-Scissors was a constant, continuous, hellishly intense work. We struggled with a huge technical task of 100 pages, explained, advised, begged and argued. Tired of the prototypes of a high degree of gloom and pattern, we ourselves drew the main page, on the basis of which the Stone-Scissors-Paper did the rest. At the same time, our Angel paid, paid, and paid money. We will tell you more about the difficulties of working with Americans in one of the following articles. We can only say that with the Stone-Scissors-Paper, we parted on the threshold of the court, having on our hands several dull pages and such a logo:
The most offensive was the fact that the Americans were not able to create a normal interface web configurator clothes. Without him, continuing to work on the project was pointless. What was there looked just awful:
We sighed sadly, asked Angel for more money, and Yash flew to Moscow, to Artyom Gorbunov. To Gorbunov, the task of creating a jeans configurator seemed very interesting, and he agreed to implement it on very democratic terms.
It became clear that without a real experience in the conduct of IT business and knowledge of the subtleties of development and automation, we will not go anywhere. Therefore, the last co-founder joined the team, Slava - Yasha's school friend and fidosh node, with whom they were still in the 90s, made friends on the basis of a common love for ZX Spectrum. Slava had practical experience in creating an IT business from scratch: he ran an IT company with a good portfolio. The company was eventually sold to them, and the proceeds invested in Getwear. By this time, the draft design of the Configurator from the Gorbunov Bureau was already ready, and the first task of Glory was to find artists who would perform it in Flash. About why Flash, we will tell in a separate, technological article.
For layout and programming a large Indian company was chosen. To no one guessed, call it Kryptonite. Kryptonite bribed managers with seeming responsibility, ISO-certification and low prices, which was a very weighty argument: the budget was already exceeded about four times, and the Angel gradually turned into the Devil.
With the Indians, we also did not really work out. Yasha taught them to export files from Illustrator to Photoshop, and Slava literally programmed the whole frontend for them. More information about the Russian-Indian friendship over the project will tell a separate material. The last straw in our patience was that Kryptonite, which allegedly specialized in flash technology, could not make a full-fledged “engine” of the configurator. After this, I wanted to do terrible, physiologically unnatural things with Kryptonite, but as a result I simply parted peacefully.
As a result, we were left with the design of the site, which caused the target audience serious moral suffering, from which shy pieces of code stuck out. The budget has already grown five times, and Getwear has actually made a full turn and returned to the starting point - to the concepts and beautiful configurator layouts made in the bureau. We already had a team and understanding of our project, but so far there were no sane developers.
Having compiled everything that we already had, we were able to launch the site and even sold jeans in the States and Europe, but quickly realized that in this form we could not be successful. There is a need to redo everything anew.
Since we already had a pleasant experience with the Gorbunov Bureau, we decided to order the design of the rest of the site’s pages from them. We did not have money, we had already exceeded the budget many times, and the classic situation was “pan or lost”: if an investor gives money, we continue to work, if not - the project dies, even without really being born. Fortunately, Angel found additional funding, and we began work on the site from Gorbunov. In the “Bucket” of the studio there is a lot of interesting things about the process of working on the site, and then we will write about our experience.
In parallel, we hired our developer for fulltime - he quickly rewrote the Indian code. The main functionality of the flash configurator was ordered from a great company, DataArt. All this got into each other with almost no lapping and gaps, and Getwear finally began its work.
It was a very difficult path, but everything that does not kill you ... well, you know.
We implemented many new, sometimes even revolutionary solutions in the project. For example, Getwear has a very special customization system, which does not require step-by-step and allows you to create truly unique jeans, which made you happy with the web customization guru Frank Piller. We are especially proud of the unique production management system, the automation of tailoring to measure - we literally digitized jeans. We also have an interesting order management system and other goodies - we will tell you about them.
Before we launched our project, we had to solve hundreds of problems: from philosophical and evangelical (forgive us for this word) to non-trivial technical and production. We have exceeded the initial budget by about 10 times, spoiled several million of our own neurons, came up with a bunch of cool pieces, which were later abandoned in favor of other, more cool ones. In addition to the project , which works, bringing pleasure and income, as a result we got the most important and interesting experience. That experience, we are happy to share with you in our blog.
As we have already announced, in the near future we will talk about the features of working with American, Indian and Russian developers. There will definitely be articles about the technological stuffing of the project, its offline component and much more. In the meantime, we will be happy to answer your questions, listen to comments and suggestions on the topics of future publications.
Thanks for attention!
We are a getwear company. A few years ago we decided to create an Internet service that would allow anyone without special knowledge of design to create their own high-quality, beautiful and well-fitting clothes, and then receive them by mail.
')
During these few years, we have experienced a lot: repeatedly exceeding budgets and changing the concept, names and performers, working with developers in the USA, India and Russia, tasted onion soup at the Bureau of Artyom Gorbunov and learned what a Tome effect is. We will be glad to share all this experience with you in our blog. Let's start with our difficult history.
Getwear was coined almost by accident when two of its founders, Yasha and Masha, studied in St. Petersburg at St. Petersburg State University. Masha at the same time attended the courses of fashion designers, who, however, were more similar to cutting and sewing courses. From there she made one very interesting fact: 99% of all clothes sold by fashionable and not very fashionable brands are created from standard elements - such a large LEGO, where collars, sleeves and pants are used instead of cubes. A thought flashed through our heads that it would be great to create a standalone application that would allow brands to design their collections. Services to customize computers were popular and really wanted to extend their principles to other areas. Around this time, Tim O'Reilly's famous article on Web 2.0 was published in Computerra - the era of the Internet based on user creativity began.
A few years later, Yasha and Masha entered the European Institute of Design, where they met their classmate Nickel (Nikhil). Nikil, in addition to the innate Indian industriousness, had one important quality: the experience of working as the lead designer-technologist of a large jeans production in the country of elephants and sacred cows. So the initial Getwear team was formed.
Initially, they planned to create an Internet service that would allow creating a full range of clothes: not only jeans, but also T-shirts, hoodies, and others like them. In order to embody such an idea, we clearly lacked our own resources, and we decided to look for an investor on the side. Fortunately for us, an Angel Angel was ready, who was willing to invest initial capital in the project, 25 thousand dollars (10-15 thousand were planning to spend on production, and 10 thousand - to leave on the site). However, as you will see right now, this is where our happiness is over.
Since we had no experience in web development and web design, we decided to outsource everything.
All scripts were drawn in the vector editor themselves, everything was described in detail. It looked like this:
Together, they came up with the first name - BrandFactory, which due to legal difficulties was soon changed to ItsWear, and then to the final one - Getwear.
We did a survey on Russian studios, paying special attention to those that specialized in creating interfaces - it was already assumed that he would play the main role. Of all the options I liked the Gorbunov Studio the most. Yasha traveled to Moscow, where Artyom Gorbunov treated him with onion soup and voiced his price tag. The soup was delicious, but the price tag - not very. Then the angel advised to pay attention to American designers, since the project was initially focused primarily on the Western market. So the American web studio was chosen. To no one guessed, let's call her Stone-Scissors-Paper.
It is said that creativity is a struggle with the original idea. If this is the case, then working with Rock-Paper-Scissors was a constant, continuous, hellishly intense work. We struggled with a huge technical task of 100 pages, explained, advised, begged and argued. Tired of the prototypes of a high degree of gloom and pattern, we ourselves drew the main page, on the basis of which the Stone-Scissors-Paper did the rest. At the same time, our Angel paid, paid, and paid money. We will tell you more about the difficulties of working with Americans in one of the following articles. We can only say that with the Stone-Scissors-Paper, we parted on the threshold of the court, having on our hands several dull pages and such a logo:
The most offensive was the fact that the Americans were not able to create a normal interface web configurator clothes. Without him, continuing to work on the project was pointless. What was there looked just awful:
We sighed sadly, asked Angel for more money, and Yash flew to Moscow, to Artyom Gorbunov. To Gorbunov, the task of creating a jeans configurator seemed very interesting, and he agreed to implement it on very democratic terms.
It became clear that without a real experience in the conduct of IT business and knowledge of the subtleties of development and automation, we will not go anywhere. Therefore, the last co-founder joined the team, Slava - Yasha's school friend and fidosh node, with whom they were still in the 90s, made friends on the basis of a common love for ZX Spectrum. Slava had practical experience in creating an IT business from scratch: he ran an IT company with a good portfolio. The company was eventually sold to them, and the proceeds invested in Getwear. By this time, the draft design of the Configurator from the Gorbunov Bureau was already ready, and the first task of Glory was to find artists who would perform it in Flash. About why Flash, we will tell in a separate, technological article.
For layout and programming a large Indian company was chosen. To no one guessed, call it Kryptonite. Kryptonite bribed managers with seeming responsibility, ISO-certification and low prices, which was a very weighty argument: the budget was already exceeded about four times, and the Angel gradually turned into the Devil.
With the Indians, we also did not really work out. Yasha taught them to export files from Illustrator to Photoshop, and Slava literally programmed the whole frontend for them. More information about the Russian-Indian friendship over the project will tell a separate material. The last straw in our patience was that Kryptonite, which allegedly specialized in flash technology, could not make a full-fledged “engine” of the configurator. After this, I wanted to do terrible, physiologically unnatural things with Kryptonite, but as a result I simply parted peacefully.
As a result, we were left with the design of the site, which caused the target audience serious moral suffering, from which shy pieces of code stuck out. The budget has already grown five times, and Getwear has actually made a full turn and returned to the starting point - to the concepts and beautiful configurator layouts made in the bureau. We already had a team and understanding of our project, but so far there were no sane developers.
Having compiled everything that we already had, we were able to launch the site and even sold jeans in the States and Europe, but quickly realized that in this form we could not be successful. There is a need to redo everything anew.
Since we already had a pleasant experience with the Gorbunov Bureau, we decided to order the design of the rest of the site’s pages from them. We did not have money, we had already exceeded the budget many times, and the classic situation was “pan or lost”: if an investor gives money, we continue to work, if not - the project dies, even without really being born. Fortunately, Angel found additional funding, and we began work on the site from Gorbunov. In the “Bucket” of the studio there is a lot of interesting things about the process of working on the site, and then we will write about our experience.
In parallel, we hired our developer for fulltime - he quickly rewrote the Indian code. The main functionality of the flash configurator was ordered from a great company, DataArt. All this got into each other with almost no lapping and gaps, and Getwear finally began its work.
It was a very difficult path, but everything that does not kill you ... well, you know.
We implemented many new, sometimes even revolutionary solutions in the project. For example, Getwear has a very special customization system, which does not require step-by-step and allows you to create truly unique jeans, which made you happy with the web customization guru Frank Piller. We are especially proud of the unique production management system, the automation of tailoring to measure - we literally digitized jeans. We also have an interesting order management system and other goodies - we will tell you about them.
Before we launched our project, we had to solve hundreds of problems: from philosophical and evangelical (forgive us for this word) to non-trivial technical and production. We have exceeded the initial budget by about 10 times, spoiled several million of our own neurons, came up with a bunch of cool pieces, which were later abandoned in favor of other, more cool ones. In addition to the project , which works, bringing pleasure and income, as a result we got the most important and interesting experience. That experience, we are happy to share with you in our blog.
As we have already announced, in the near future we will talk about the features of working with American, Indian and Russian developers. There will definitely be articles about the technological stuffing of the project, its offline component and much more. In the meantime, we will be happy to answer your questions, listen to comments and suggestions on the topics of future publications.
Thanks for attention!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/150554/
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