Name: Suzanne Xie
Job Title: Co-founder of Weardrobe
If you like flipping through fashion magazines for style inspiration, you will love Weardrobe, an online social platform that gives you the opportunity to not only follow fellow fashion enthusiasts with great style, but also to produce your own lookbook—essentially creating your own virtual closet. Co-founded by Suzanne Xie and Richard Tong in 2008, Weardrobe is on the cutting edge of fashion and social media, attracting over 35,000 visitors daily and shifting the source of fashion inspiration from highly edited magazine pages to everyday street styles. The start-up has quickly garnered an impressive list of achievements in less than two years—it hosted the first ever conference for fashion bloggers, got start-up funding from Facebook’s development fund and was acquired by Like.com last November. Xie recently left Weardrobe for some much needed time off, and in this edition of 20 Questions she reflects back on Weardrobe’s humble beginnings (a simple Excel spreadsheet), why she thinks social media is not just a temporary fad, and hints at what might be next for her.
Jennifer Sung: How would you best describe Weardrobe?
SX: Weardrobe is really about people sharing their own personal styles online. It’s a fashion community for bloggers and people who want to be bloggers to share their daily outfits, get style inspiration, etc. The user base—the people who are actually posting photos—is generally fashion bloggers, but in terms of who visits the site, it’s for anyone just looking for style inspiration. [The fashion blogging community] is pretty big now. We are close to about 20,000 users and the actual [fashion blogging community] is in the hundreds of thousands and their reader base is in the millions. As Weardrobe continues to develop there will be more features [and] more interviews, but the site is really about inspiration.
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Peek through the window of Minar’s store front, catch the slogan “Indian Fast Food,” and you’d be tempted to make a 180. From one foodie to another, don’t.
With a 20-year history in Manhattan, this South Indian mainstay serves traditional, delectable Indian fare at bargain basement prices and is a perfect takeout or delivery option. An $8 combination platter will secure you either one meat and two vegetables or two meats and one vegetable. Tikka masala was comprised of fresh, flakey chunks of high quality white meat. No mystery meat disguised by potent sauces here. Roasted cauliflower and potatoes were accented with curry that carried a spicy punch. Pureed spinach with cheese was typically prepared. Nan or rice, you ask? Doughy, warm nan was the size of a large pizza pie and was devoured before I could say yum.
They’ll even deliver from river to river from 14th to 57th streets.
Minar Indian Restaurant
138 West 46th Street
212-398-4600
–Melissa Matarese
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Of all the fantastic restaurants in the city, I decided on Freemans as my Supper Club restaurant choice. Why, might you ask? Is the food to die for? No. Is the service impeccable? No. In fact, most of the time you have to wait almost two hours for a table due to their no reservations policy, only to cram in between tables of other diners. Then why in the world would I choose Freemans? Two words–time travel. The moment you step in Freemans’ front door, you leave behind a world filled with iPods, Facebook and Starbucks and are taken back to a time when Abe Lincoln ruled, people traveled by horse and carriage and a man’s favorite pastime was hunting buffalo.
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Degustation is a small-plate oriented tapas restaurant in the East Village that incorporates molecular gastronomy essentials and is a great choice for any foodie. The 15-item menu utilizes 16 seats to frame out three sides of the open kitchen. Despite close quarters with neighboring diners, the setting is ideal for a duo (particularly a date). Larger parties should shy away from this restaurant as a side-by-side group discussion would be nearly impossible.
Though the menu is particularly meat-oriented, the servers will zealously accommodate any dietary restrictions or preferences. Lured by the exotic and gourmet nature of the offerings, my companion and I dove into the five-course tasting menu for $55. The first course was cuddle fish, decorated with red radishes, essence of hazelnut, and dressed with yogurt and green pesto. Next was a pureed sunchoke soup, poured on top of salmon colored sea urchin and garnished with diced apples and fresh tarragon.
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Name: Kim Phan
Job Title: Founder, CEO and Head Designer of Yumi Kim
Meet fashion designer Kim Phan, founder and CEO of clothing line Yumi Kim. A self-described “Jane of all trades,” Phan launched her own clothing line in fall 2008, focusing on vintage prints and silhouettes with a touch of funk and urban femininity. Sold at upscale boutiques and department stores including Saks Fifth Avenue, Intermix and Bloomingdale’s, Yumi Kim has quickly become a favorite among the Hollywood crowd. In this edition of 20 Questions, Phan tells us about her love for Twitter, why her clothes give her customers an instant mood boost and why you should have paid attention in that accounting class you slept your way through.
Jennifer Sung: You started out in the music industry but decided to take the jump into the fashion world. Why the career switch?
Kim Phan: I moved to New York in 2001 and I ended up working for the president of Arista Records from 2001 to 2003. I was there for almost two years and when you work for the [president of a music company], you get to see the whole entire operations of a record company and learn how music is made. You also work with a bunch of different celebrities. However, I realized in the two years working there that I wasn’t passionate about music. I just wasn’t for me. So I decided to pursue what I love, which is fashion.
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The Supper Club’s most recent outing took us to Yerba Buena, the East Village location.
The service was anything but Buena. Our group was awkwardly forced to cram in the front corner of the bar while we waited for the restaurant to honor our 8pm reservation on a Wednesday night. Four of the five us were present, and the maître d’ brashly asked how long our final guest would be, as he blatantly wanted to pass our table along to another waiting group. Our waiter too had an attitude problem, smacking his pad against his hands impatiently while we rattled off our orders. He continued to pressure each of us (five dainty females) to order more food.
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Name: Andy Dunn
Job Title: Co-founder and CEO of Bonobos
Launched in 2007 by two former Stanford Business School roommates Brian Spaly and Andy Dunn, Bonobos is an online retailer that has quickly built up its reputation for selling kick-ass fitting pants–by men for men. In less than three years, it has sold more than 55,000 pairs of pants and eliminated “khaki diaper butt.” With free shipping & returns and great customer service provided by Bonobos “ninjas,” guys no longer need to leave the couch to up their fashion quotient. In this edition of 20 Questions, Dunn tells us why men hate to shop, the biggest challenges in running an online business, and the importance of hiring a good team.
Jennifer Sung: How did you get started with Bonobos?
Andy Dunn: [My business partner and I] couldn’t find pants that fit so we came up with a design of pants that fits better for a guy’s anatomy. Our pants are made with a contoured waistband and they are medium rise–so they’re not too tight or too droopy. And they have a tailored cut in the thigh that eliminates that frumpy mass-market fit but is a little more comfortable than your typical super tight Euro fit. What we saw was that people who were trying these pants on were telling us, ‘This is the best pair of pants I’ve ever put on.’ We tried to figure out how to bring these pants to a wider audience and we decided to put them up on a website. When we did that, a whole group of people were telling us, ‘You can’t do that. You have to launch a brand through traditional channels, you have to launch through stores, you have to do wholesale, you have to sell through your own stores.’ But we figured we’ll put them up on the web, we will get started that way and see how it goes. And we ended up growing like crazy just through our website. What we discovered is that guys can’t find pants that fit and they don’t want to go into stores to look for them. So we married those two things together and that’s really how Bonobos was born.
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