Connecting Busy People With Style Experts: QUINN Style Founder Story — John Orekunrin

What inspired you to found Quinn?

I’ve never liked going to the store, and I’ve never liked dealing with the people that work there because you don’t get the attention that you need. Customers just don’t have a great sense of what brands might work best for them, and the process can be overwhelming. The whole process is inherently broken. Our concept is that in this day and age of on-demand everything, you should be able to have a stylist show up magically with the clothes that fit you and look the best on you.

What drew you to Slice Capital, and equity crowdfunding?

For Quinn and our customer base, we thought it was a really unique platform that provides customers access to take part in the growth of the company. Typically, investing comes from VC’s, angels, etc, and these relationships take time to develop. We’ve been fortunate to get backed by leading angel investors, but we didn’t want to pass on the opportunity to offer our customers a chance to get a slice of Quinn. It can be awkward to go up to people and ask for money, so Slice is a good way to make these connections and allow customers to be more engaged in the company. Our customers understand that we are bootstrapping, and that our bandwidth is fully stretched. Slice not only allows them to really become involved, but it also gives Quinn the resources to grow, so it’s really a win-win.

How did you get your early adopters?

We mainly were just cold calling and emailing a lot of people, and sending a ton of messages through Linkedin. Our approach at first was just to start with personal friends, and from there get some referrals. We also reached out to people we thought would be interested in this kind of service and offered them a free styling consultation. We were able to convert a lot of folks during the consultation process to paid clients.

What about your famous users?

Celebrities are extremely busy people that need to look great pretty much all the time. One celebrity client of ours had a stylist in LA, but couldn’t use them when she was in New York, so she kind of made Quinn her New York stylist. Being on TV means you have to look great, and you don’t really have the time to look your best. Quinn makes perfect sense for these people.

What is your long-term vision for Quinn?

Our near term goal is to stay focused on the busy, senior-level professional women segment. They have a lot of events on their calendar they have to look great at and they don’t always have the time to put the effort they want to into their looks. Given this, Quinn has a lot of opportunities to evolve and we want to change the way people experience clothing. In the long-term, we want to create a robust personal styling marketplace that provides a hyper-personalized shopping experience at scale. We’re trying to change the landscape and provide more accessible personalization by providing technology that meets the needs of modern professionals.

What is your favorite book?

Currently my favorite book is “Antifragile.” It’s a great book about how being antifragile is a good thing, meaning you are gaining from stress as opposed to not. This is a fairly new concept of how to be resilient, gaining from chaos and getting better because of it. The book has really changed my outlook on how I view events and situations that aren’t necessarily ideal. I think there are a lot of applications to the world of startups and the startup mentality.

What’s the most important thing you’re working on right now?

Just trying to talk to customers. We’re about to start a new round of surveys to dive deeper into why our customers use Quinn. I’m always surprised and fascinated with some of the reasons why our customers decide to use Quinn. It’s a constant learning process that informs everything we do as a company.

Do you have any mentors/role models?

Lately some of the best form of mentorship I’ve had is just peer-to-peer mentorship. Through an incubator program we did, I met a lot of other entrepreneurs that have a similar mindset and are tackling big, real world problems while going through a very similar process. Having people like this has been tremendously helpful.

We went through the Launch incubator program, which was overall a pretty great experience. The program was really focused on understanding your value proposition and refining your pitch. When you go through the process of getting funding you start to realize how difficult it can be to use a 2 minute pitch to get backing from investors. The incubator was very helpful in this process because it helped us with improving our story. We had weekly demo days where we pitched to a set of investors and got feedback, so by the end we had a pretty good idea of every question we could possibly be asked.

We also worked with XRC Labs, a specialized accelerator program that has a focus on retail innovation, crossing over software and hardware. This was a really great fit because we are a new form of retail. We are unlocking in-home or on-location experience to deliver clothes. They helped us hone our business and make partnerships with clothing companies. As well, funding and mentorship to grow our company.

If you could partner with any company, which would it be?

Soulcycle. We might have some overlap in terms of customer base, and I think there is a very large fashion element to what they do even though they are a fitness company. The Soulcycle customer is somebody that wants to express themselves and feel confident, and that customer fits in with Quinn’s mission perfectly.

What culture do you try to foster within your company?

I’d say the culture we try to foster and what really works for us is keeping the focus on the customer. We essentially have a thesis on what we think is a good product for the market, but the real innovation stems from understanding the customer. Having a deep understanding of what they like and dislike about your product and coming at it from an open-minded perspective is really vital. We preach “active listening,” deeply listening to customers and trying to understand that they are the guide for what we should be building, not the other way around. Hard work is another aspect of our culture. Starting a company takes a lot of effort, and we want to make sure hard work is part of our MO. At Quinn we try to get a good sense of whether or not people have a strong work ethic, and that’s the most important thing for our employees.

What was your founding process like? How did you go about choosing who was involved?

The founding process was fairly simple. Diana and I were friends for years. I’d call her a fashionista at heart and I’ve always hated shopping. She wanted to leave finance and do something more interesting, so we decided to give our company a shot. We added Gloria to the team because of her extensive experience working in fashion and experience working at Rent the Runway. She absolutely loves styling people and seeing how confident they feel when they wear outfits that match their personality. Our goal is to find people that love fashion and use it as a way to make people feel great about themselves. The initial thought was that some friends would use this, but from testing different things we realized that a lot of senior level people were craving a service like this. It was really at that point that we thought this could be a big business.

What challenges did you face?

Understanding what exactly was our value proposition was a big challenge. Styling is one of those terms that has been diluted in recent years, because a lot of department stores offer “stylists.” What we offer is a little more personal than that. We want to get to know you before we even make an attempt to try to shop for you. This is different than what you get at most stores, and it’s really a fundamentally different approach. This vision makes sense, but it is hard to articulate it as a value proposition. Another challenge we faced is gaining the trust of our customers. Sometimes people don’t trust others to shop for them, and I’d say this is one of the biggest reasons people give for not using Quinn. We are doing a better job of earning their trust through investing time to learn about their lifestyle and styling preferences.

Tell me about your biggest success story so far as a company?

The fact that people love using the service in its first few iterations is very promising. There’s so much room for improving the service and that gives us a lot of confidence and excitement about what the next chapter will look like for us. We’re working really hard to improve the product and make it better for all customers.

Who are your biggest competitors, and how do you plan to maintain an advantage over them?

Our most direct competition comes from companies like Boon and Gable and Trunk Club. In reality though, our competition is whatever method people use to choose clothes to wear when they want to look nice. We have to consider, if Quinn didn’t exist, what people would use to fill that need.

The main advantage we hold is just how we understand the customer. We have a very deep understanding of their needs and styling preferences, and that builds trust. We have dialogues with our customers to find out what they are like, and what clothes they prefer to wear. We take this personalization very seriously, and give in-person consultation options. Online forms don’t always capture all of the nuances surrounding a person’s style and needs. For example, sometimes you want to push your style boundaries, and try something new. You can’t always show this on a form. Style is really a lifelong journey, and nothing is worse than wearing an outfit without really knowing how you feel about it. With Quinn, you know you’ve been validated by a fashion expert.