Day 1, Unicorn Jerky

I’m so excited to announce that today is Day 1 for us here at Unicorn Jerky. It’s the day we open our doors to the whole world to partake of our T-shirt goodness. It’s the day where we figuratively drop trou — embarrassed, scared, nervous, and ready to get it on.

But for us, Day 1 isn’t just the first time the world sees us naked. We use Day 1 in the Bezos-ian context (If you haven’t read Amazon CEO’s 2016 letter to shareholders, you’re a boor). For the Unicorn Jerky executive team, our advisory board, and the numerous consultants and experts we’ve consulted with to launch this puppy and make it happen, we’re obsessed with making our business a generational enterprise.

“Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making,” Bezos writes about how he continues to ramp his company.

Customer obsession

We’ve done countless user groups, trying to understand our customers’ wants, needs, and desires. We’ve polled them, studied them, spoken to top behaviorial economists. We’ve tugged and nudged them.

Listen, there are a lot of shirts on the market. We started out with the commitment that we’ll not turn into just another t-shirt company.

We believe our first class of shirts represent the best of this understanding. If not, hey, well, we tried.

Skepticism of proxies

When Bezos talks of this Day 1 attribute, he emphasizes the need to not give up our power as business people to external things. Don’t give over your customers to research and polling firms. Don’t let process control the process.

We don’t fully get what he’s trying to say, but are sure there’s great wisdom (and $$) in his thoughts. Regardless, we’re all about agile and moving fast and breaking stuff.

Eager adoption of external trends

The T-shirt industry is a trillion dollar racehorse that’s still just a couple of lengths outside the starting gate. Unicorn Jerky has the opportunity to disrupt and challenge and disintermediate all the giants that came before us.

Shopify and Teelaunch are the enabling technologies powering our finely-tuned warship.

High velocity decision making

It’s hard to put to words just how quickly we’re able to turn around fresh ideas here at the Jerky. Sometimes, it feels like literally just minutes go by before we’ve spec’d out a shirt, gotten consumer feedback on it, delivered it to our offshore design team, and have the awesome end product up for sale on UnicornJerky.com

We don’t build walls or layers around management. We knock them down…one shirt at a time.

Please join us on this exciting journey! (and buy a shirt. Please?)