TechCrunch
After Kickstarter Success, Ministry of Supply Lands $1.1M To Expand Its Tech-Savvy Men's Line
Founded by a couple of MIT grads in 2010, Ministry of Supply set out on a mission to breathe a little fresh air into the starchy world of business attire. Using some of the same technology found in NASA’s space suits, the Boston-based startup developed a line of more “technologically-savvy,” adaptive dress shirts that help control perspiration, reduce odor and wrinkling but don’t make you look like a goon.
Knowing they’d need capital to scale, Ministry of Supply went to venture capitalists, but were rebuffed by investors that wanted to see more proof of concept. So they went to Kickstarter instead, where the shirts took off, bringing in almost $400K more than they set out to raise. The team has since gone back to Kickstarter, raising another $200K for their new, hi-tech sock line. But today, having proven the concept and demand, Ministry of Supply is coming full circle on the financing front, announcing that it has raised an additional $1.1 million in seed financing from a handful of venture capitalists and angels.
The round was led by former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s Vegas Tech Fund, with participation from SK Ventures and angels like Boston Red Sox pitcher Craig Breslow and Kevin Henrikson. Of course, few campaigns are lucky enough to raise a collective $600K and have two of the most successful campaigns in a particular category, so why is Ministry of Supply raising the additional money? As one might expect, it’s because the team of eight want to turn this into a real business, a viable men’s eCommerce and fashion brand and secure those retail partnerships that can help take the company to the next level.
Ministry of Supply co-founder Gihan Amarasiriwardena tells us that the company wants to build a new category of men’s clothing — products that, like workout gear, are actually functional and comfortable but can be worn in the boardroom. In other words, combine Under Armour with a tech-savvier Brooks Brothers. To get the ball moving in that direction, the startup hired eCommerce and UX design veteran, Brian Kalma, an early Zappos employee and former UX Director at both Zappos, Gilt Groupe and Gemvara.
Kalma is helping the startup to define Ministry of Supply’s brand as one that has a foot in eCommerce as well as the brick-and-mortar world. The startups has a showroom in Boston and has done a few pop-up shops on the East Coast, with others in the works. In turn, it’s also started to develop partnerships with eCommerce brands to increase its distribution in reach, including an upcoming deal with Birchbox that will put its “Atlas” line of socks in the company’s subscription boxes for men.
The company now has four main lines, including its original “Apollo” dress shirts, a line of performance boss pants, base layer shirts and core performance t-shirts, but is in the process of expanding with new products, like its Atlas sock brand. As to what makes its socks different? Amarasiriwardena tells us that the socks’ fabrics are “infused with coffee beans” to help control odor and features “robotically knit, pressure-mapped” design to ensure fit.
A lot of it sounds more like branding and PR than reality, and the company has to be careful to be transparent about how it’s measuring results. It’s one thing to promise a space-aged dress shirt that works the same on the field as it does in the boardroom, performance-wise, and another to deliver that. Though I can say from my test-driving the company’s Atlas socks for a few months, they work as advertised so far, but how much further can it go in delivering performance than your average Walmart socks? That remains to be seen. But as long as they don’t retail for $50, I can see there being a big market for these, take it from me, Stink Foot.
Cloud-Based Phone Service RingCentral To Debut At $13 On NYSE, Offering 7.5M Shares To Raise $97.5M
RingCentral, the cloud-based phone service, will open trading tomorrow on the New York Stock Exchange at $13 per share, offering 7.5 million shares and raising $97. million. It will trade under the ticket symbol “RNG.”
Violin Memory, a Flash memory provider, will also debut tomorrow under the symbol “VMEM.” Its final trading price has not been disclosed but a mid-range of $9 per share woild not be unexpected.
RingCentral helps small businesses manage mobile, fax and e-mail communications through its cloud service. It is on of an emerging class of companies that fits into new world of the workplace by using the cloud to automate the phone tree. It abstracts the PBX just as software and service providers are abstracting almost any hardware you can imagine, turning every mobile device into an extension designed in particular for today’s work. It helps remove the struggle that comes with typing in a password for conference call while in the car or routing SMS messages to the right people.
The IPO had been expected to open between $11 and $13 per share. By opening at the high-end, the company is signaling it is pretty confident about the market and its chances in the public markets.
Founded in 1999, RingCentral has $44 million in funding. It raised its first $12 million round in 2007 from Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital.
According to public documents, the company posted revenues in 2012 of $114.5 million. In 2011, it had revenues of $78.9 million and $50.2 million in 2010.
Violin Memory’s Flash memory technology adds storage performance for applications, servers and networks in enterprise environments.
Both the IPOs reflect the strong IPO market, especially for enterprise startups that leverage the cloud and the need for applications and infrastructures to manage large amounts of data.
House Republicans Want To Kill Net Neutrality As Part Of Their Debt Ceiling Bill
Not sure what to make of this episode, but it matters and so here we are: A draft of provisions that Republican leaders in the House are attempting to demand in return for allowing the debt ceiling to be raised includes the elimination of net neutrality.
The language of the legislative outline that the National Review obtained calls for the “blocking” of net neutrality.
Net neutrality, if you didn’t know, is the set of rules forcing ISPs treat traffic on their networks equally, not speeding or slowing any one piece of content more than any other. This matters as many companies that provide Internet access are also part of larger conglomerates that produce media. Those companies have an inherent incentive to speed their content and slow that of their rivals.
Also, net neutrality protects companies that provide content, such as Netflix, from being unfairly charged by ISPs for the dissemination of their wares. There is much legal wrangling over this issue in courts at the moment, mostly centered around a long-running lawsuit between Verizon and the government.
I’ll be plain: You want net neutrality if you want the Internet to run much as it has these past few decades.
Tying net neutrality to the debt ceiling, however, is bonkers. The two have no relation. Instead, it appears that House Republicans are tacking porkish requests to their coming compromise to raise the debt ceiling to appease their own members, and thus not abrogate the Hastert Rule while also not causing a Federal default.
The most asinine part of this episode is that we are discussing fiscal politics in relation to a technology regulatory issue. Josh Barro of Business Insider was blunt in his assessment of the inclusion, stating that Republicans have “finally admitted that the fight over the debt ceiling as nothing to do with debt.”
In some bizarro scenario we could, at least in some wild-eyed House member’s visions of Things That We Shouldn’t Do, ax one of the most important pieces of technology regulation in place, simply to buy off part of one party in the lower chamber of Congress so that we can pay our national bills.
This is precisely why you like technology more than politics.
Top Image Credit: ttarasiuk
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