High-end T-shirt electric dealer Pickwick & Weller closed: It's not that easy to be a electric dealer.

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"Jobs" Ashton Kutcher's high-end T-shirt electric dealer Pickwick & Weller closed, once again reminded us that E-commerce is not so simple.

Success in the field of E-commerce is largely twofold. If you want to create a successful online retail company that faces huge operational challenges and costs a lot of money, startups in the electric business can grow exponentially or wither quickly. If your E-commerce company does not have a certain competitive edge, then the cost of maintaining it is very high,

Pickwick & Weller Company is located in Culver City, California, they designed and sold personalized high-end t-shirts, Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher is also the company's "star co-founder", Pickwick & Weller Company A total of 4 million dollars raised , and their investors include industry-renowned venture capitalists and angel investors, including: SV Angel, Baseline Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Mousse, Forerunner ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures, David Gilboa, Nellie Levchin, Max Levchin, and of course, the famous "Jobs" actor Ashton Kutcher.

Currently, if you open the Pickwick & Weller website, it only shows one sentence:

"Pickwick & Weller's holiday break may be longer and hopefully we'll be able to provide you with the best T-shirts when we get back." ”

But in fact, the company's founder, Ryan Donahue, has confirmed with the media that Pickwick & Weller is not in the restructuring, it is actually closed. He admits that the company is currently in the liquidation of assets and the potential "buy-and-invite" talent acquisition phase, and the company's six founder team has been dissolved, some people also find another job.

From the most basic point of view, the successful E-commerce companies are not in the acquisition of customer costs, and the value of each customer's life cycle to find a balance between. If the customer is worth your cost to attract them, then your electric business company may develop a healthy business. In the cost of getting customers, you must pay attention to the need to maintain sustainability, of course, spending money will also be meaningful.

In the field of E-commerce, other companies will often use the above-mentioned theory, for example, in the field of the purchase of footwear, JustFab in the competition to win the ShoeDazzle and Shoemint of the two companies, precisely because the JustFab company has a marketing in effect the best team.

According to Donahue, Pickwick Company began to think that the most effective way to obtain customers is not online, but in the more common offline retail outlets. For example, they set up a number of temporary physical stores and launched a "Try at home" campaign, hoping to get users to make their own T-shirts. Although these methods have achieved good results, but it will cost a lot of time and resources, and it is difficult to large-scale promotion, which has created a very big problem. Why? Because the vast majority of e-commerce companies take the "economies of scale" model, that is, if you want to succeed in the field of electrical business, it needs to scale, so as to reduce the cost from production to marketing every unit link. ，

"The more we look at our company, the more it feels like a traditional fashion company," Donahue said. "We've always thought there's still a chance in the high-end boutique T-shirts, but we have to get a lot of money, and investors have to be patient and allow the company to grow slowly." This is not the style of Silicon Valley. ”

The high-end t-shirts industry is not an easy business, and it has been a cautionary tale before, like JLo and Brian Lee's Teeology, who have finally come to a dead end. Of course, there are some successful examples in the industry, such as the two companies Teespring and Threadless. But the two companies were able to succeed because they didn't create an isolated online brand, but instead built their own distribution and crowdsourcing design platforms. Other fashion industry product categories, such as footwear, glasses, suits, underwear and so on, in fact, these products e-commerce trends and high-end T shirt industry exactly the opposite.

In addition to the aforementioned investors, Pickwick has a number of other investors, including the best in the field of electrical business, such as Birchbox, one Kings Lane, Fab, Bonobos, Threadflip, Harry's, Dollar Shave Club, Wanelo, and Shopify. From the investor and investor lineup you will find that all of them are smart people, how to finally let the company closed down, in fact, such a result can only be explained in one sentence, that is Pickwick Company does not revolve around the market demand, and in the customer work, execution is very poor.

No matter where the company is going wrong, we need to treat Pickwick & Weller as a negative example, reminding us of the e-commerce sector and startups trying to get into e-commerce. E-commerce is a very difficult industry category, Pickwick & Weller founder Donahue and Green are two admirable people, because they stood up bravely and shared their failed experiences openly, The lessons of these failures are all the founders of any business should try to avoid.

"I feel very satisfied with this failure," Donahue said, "and most people are unwilling to share it openly after a failure." But I would like to speak frankly about my failure, and learn a lot from it, I will continue to move forward. ”