Running a startup is full of ups and downs, when you’re inventing something new and different it can be a perilous journey at times. As a founder, finding people who believe in our vision and want to join us on this journey, then helping them build a career they truly enjoy, is one of my greatest joys in life.
While you’re always going to be fanatically product-focused as a founder, without a great team, it will be hard to build and maintain a great product. And yes, with a great product comes happy clients and that leads to happy investors. Seeing clients use our product and loving it is an incredible feeling.
And then there’s press. As a founder I’ve never focused much on press because I’ve always wanted to put my focus on our team, our product, and our investors first. At the same time, sometimes a little serendipity happens and you wake up to find you’ve been featured in an article and it just feels good.
Today is one of those days.
Bold Metrics was featured in RollingStone in an awesome article about AI and retail highlighting the impact we can make on reducing returns. Our mission at Bold Metrics is to change the way clothes are made using AI and lots, and lots, of data. Our technology dramatically reduces waste and helps apparel brands become much more sustainable.
You might be surprised to learn that when you return clothes bought online, they don’t always go back into circulation, in many cases they actually go into a landfill or incinerator. If you think of the carbon footprint involved it’s crazy – first the clothes are made which can take hundreds of gallons of water to make just one $10 garment. Then the clothes are shipped and warehoused, then put on a truck and delivered to you. You try it on – doesn’t fit? Back onto a truck and then into a landfill or into an incinerator.
We’re going to look back on how clothes were made today fifty years from now and be shocked at how wasteful the whole process is. And consumers, yeah – we’re all going to laugh when we remember websites with size charts expecting us to measure ourselves to find the right size.
Like I said in the beginning of this post, the startup journey is full of ups and downs, but if you have a mission you truly believe in, it’s worth every down, no matter how low they end up being. At the same time, the little ups along the way make a different, even if only for a minute. And with that, my time is up, back to work!
If you didn’t click the link to the article above and are too lazy to scroll, here’s a link – How AI Could Help Fashion E-Tailers Reduce Retail Returns.
