Two Brothers’ Journey to Redefine Manliness in the Modern Era: One Leather Jacket at a Time.

How an online leather jacket cult disaster, a few entrepreneurial failures, and a fresh perspective helped two brothers take on one of the most firmly entrenched fashion industries.

The Fashion Cult That Was a Disaster

In 2014 Reddit’s fashion community for men, aptly named r/MaleFashionAdvice was in a bit of a crisis. TempleOfJawnz, a south-korean based online-only manufacturer of custom fit leather jackets with a devout cult following had started to push stretch jacket timelines to well over a year. They simply became too popular, too fast, and hundreds of anxiously waiting customers who had shelled out upwards of $800-$1000 per jacket were becoming impatient to say the least. News of the embezzlement of funds in a restaurant venture and the owner showing off luxury vehicles on Instagram began to surface throughout the community. One of these customers was Scott Kunz, who had been waiting 9 months at this point with no end in sight. He immediately sought a refund which was granted (but only when another customer simply took his place in line by buying him out) and thought to himself, there has to be a better way.

The Start of Something New

Over the next 2 years he worked on weekends and nights after his engineering job, taking individual orders from customers on Reddit that he reached out to personally, making barely a profit but providing impeccable customer service. “I knew my business would live and die by my online reputation, so every customer to me was essential to make 100% happy, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to run a business where I wasn’t proud of what I had made.”

A Breakthrough in a Small Town

Then one day found their holy grail. After a few samples from various factories and tanneries they found a smaller, family owned shop that was used to doing one-off, custom orders and was willing to work with the brothers’ high maintenance needs and demanding customers. “Frankly, most manufacturers in the world try to cut costs as much as they can. I don’t blame them for it, but there’s a good reason why American manufacturing is respected so much today. When we found this little shop in Mexico I was beyond ecstatic, I knew I could finally put manufacturing in the back of my mind and move on to other tasks.”

First You Must Fail

Throughout this all, Scott’s brother Robbie was working diligently behind the scenes on marketing. The brothers had been entrepreneurs since they were in grade school, Robbie had started a manga import business before Amazon even existed, contacting Shonen Jump magazine in Japan directly using his high school Japanese knowledge to bypass language barriers. Scott was an avid videogamer and would buy and sell World of Warcraft accounts through eBay. In college they had a few briefly successful ventures such as selling SEO/website design services to American companies and also selling a language learning book Robbie had written on his own website. “…ultimately, I’m glad I had those failures because it because it led us to this jacket business which takes elements from everything we’ve learned and puts it together.”

A Fresh Perspective

New startups these days in the fashion industry are a dime a dozen, from subscription boxes to custom tailored suits. These companies all offer a new way of thinking about fashion which is born from a growing understanding about how fast fashion is ruining the world’s environment and increasing the wealth gap. Instead of shopping at retail stores with thousands of garments that get thrown out after the season (infamously burned in huge garbage heaps a la Burberry recently), customers are now headed increasingly online, purchasing more expensive but ultimately better made, and often custom-tailored clothing.

Future Ambitions

Scott and Robbie one day hope to bring their manufacturing efforts home to Pennsylvania. “Ultimately, our dream is to have my own manufacturing shop in Philly. I would love to bring manufacturing back to America but currently it’s just too expensive for a small brand like ours.”

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Hi, This is Nahid Hossain. I am a passionate Digital Marketer, works hard to grow my client online business through brand awareness, and generate more traffic.

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NahidCse

Hi, This is Nahid Hossain. I am a passionate Digital Marketer, works hard to grow my client online business through brand awareness, and generate more traffic.