 It's not that we necessarily even want people to dress up. We just want people to dress sharp, right? And I think that's a big, big nuance of what our goal is. It's not about business casual or suits or any specific category. I mean, we've seen dress codes change so dramatically in the last decade. Dress sharp, right? If you're gonna wear a t-shirt, make sure it's not a ratty t-shirt. If you're gonna wear jeans, make sure that they're sharp, kind of monochromatic nose holes, right? And cut to the right length, you know? Make sure they're sharp. And so in that way, it's not that you care that much about how you look. It's just that confidence that's built when you feel kind of sharp and clean. This is Started to Store Front. Today's guest is Aman Advani, co-founder of Ministry of Supply. If you've ever worn a traditional suit, you've experienced the problem that Aman and his co-founder, Gihan, wanted to solve. They're stiff, uncomfortable, and they let the entire world know just how much you sway. At first, they stitched fabric from their favorite athletic brands into acceptable office wear before developing their own blends. And just to prove how versatile their suit is, co-founder Gihan ran a half marathon while wearing it and was rewarded with the most literal interpretation of proof of concept and a Guinness World Record. So listen in as we cover everything from why there's still a ton of great opportunity in retail, why word of mouth was crucial to their company's growth, and why the inspiration for the company name came from none other than James Bond himself. Now, back to the episode. Welcome to the podcast. On today's show, we have Aman, founder of Ministry of Supply. For everybody listening, what is Ministry of Supply? Yeah, it's a great question. We are a clothing company based in Boston and founded in 2012. And our focus is pretty simple. It's taking all of the engineering and performance attributes of your favorite gym clothes or lounge clothes, everything that makes us comfortable and perform well, and applying that to your least favorite out of gym clothes. The thick dress shirts that are super soft and stretchy, machine washable and wrinkle free. The one thing I would always do when I lived in Boston is every summer, right? There's so much finance activity in Boston. So you see all these guys and gals wearing suits and they would walk to lunch. And I would always just stop and salute them because I knew for a fact that their backs were just gonna be drenched by the time they got back. And it's this uncomfortable predicament, right? Where it's you don't wanna take off your sports coat because we know your shirt's wet. And so your only option is to either wear a shirt under your dress shirt. So that way you hide your sweat or just leave your sports coat on. A no win option. That was me. That was absolutely me for a long time. So those people that you were pitting was exactly why we started the company. I was getting on a plane every Monday morning and off a plane every Thursday night and consulting. And my clothes were just terrorizing me. And it was this idea of just getting off the plane and your back is sweating. Your shirt's half untucked. You've got sweat stains. You gotta sometimes try to sneak by the hotel to sneak in a quick iron before you show it to a big client presentation on Monday morning at 11. And it was just awful. And it was exactly why we birthed the company was to fight that exact moment of misery. What was some of the science that went into making the fabric? The science is our entire secret sauce, right? That's what we care about the most is really the engineering behind the product. So we start by looking at exactly how your body works before we ever touch pen to paper or in our case CAD for design, right? And so we understand how do you expel heat, odor, moisture, pressure, how do you sweat? How does your skin kind of let that moisture out? How does, you know, we perform strain analysis to see how your skin stretches. And by understanding the body quantitatively before anything, we're starting at a very different point than a traditional design process. So just like the scientific method, we start with a problem or opportunity statement, not with an end goal in mind. I just remember this one visual that I would always see it was basically it was like the human body and then there was a bunch of like red patches, right? Where the sweat usually comes up for people listening. I mean, obviously I think people know intuitively but where are the problem areas or where you guys put extra attention, extra fabric on the human body? Yeah, so the innovation comes in many forms. It can be fit, it can be fabric, it can be fabrication method, it can be how we construct the garment whether it's 3D printing because shaping is really important. So you'll find all over the place little examples of where we took those kernels of problem statements and we infused that performance of technology sometimes very subtly, whether it be coffee beans in the recycled coffee beans used in the fibers of our dress socks to avoid that odor when you take your shoes off on a plane, let's say. Whether it be six tiny laser perforations under the arms of most of our dress shirts to expel heat exactly where you let it out. That kind of rear portion of the underarm it's just a vent that's providing that airflow. So you'll see these small nuances all over our garments and almost all of our knits are engineered to actually have a dynamic ventilation pattern. So you'll see that down the center of the back under the arms really subtle geometric patterns to allow that heat to escape and really let your body and skin breathe in the way that it intends and wants. Did you have to go through a couple different prototypes before you finally settle on the design where you felt comfortable launching it? Yes, I mean the very first one and we were, Diego and I were talking just before the show, the very first product we made despite about 14 prototypes and sometimes those were small batches sometimes those were one of one. You know, we nailed the engineering coming out of the gates. We felt really good about that but we did not feel good about the fashion piece of it. It turns out that the engineering piece in isolation is quite simple, right? To engineer a garment, that's what our backgrounds were. It wasn't until 2013 a year in that we hired a design director that had come from Brooks Brothers in theory to make sure that we didn't ignore that the actual problem, it's not just performance. It's how do you marry and gracefully marry form and function not one or the other. What was that like? I mean, was it like magnets at the beginning where you're just, you're clinging quickly or is it just that, you know, there's a polarity there? What, I mean, how do you even achieve that? Yeah, I mean early on we tended to think of it as a bit of a trade-off, right? Is where you infuse performance you would lose on aesthetic. And I think over the course of several years we figured out that actually the two could actually be additive or even multiplicative, right? A really flexible fit for instance, if you infuse stretch in the correct direction and amount across your body, your body could move better even if you had a trimmer fitting garment. So you could achieve both a comfortable fit but without the restriction, right? Historically in a broad cloth dress shirt, for instance, you'd pick really good fit but then you couldn't move, right? You couldn't lift your suitcase up onto the overhead or you couldn't jump onto a train or you're getting the car comfortably without feeling like you're sure it's about to come on top. And so it's a small and simple example I like to give of where form and function can actually play really well together. They don't have to be enemies. And it took us a long time to figure out that the two weren't successful despite each other but because of each other. I wanted to ask you, so yesterday I had a meeting and I had to put on jeans for the first time in probably quite literally 40 days or something like that. And I've just remembered this like why this is uncomfortable. And I had purchased the pair that you had recommended the kinetic pair and I was trying them and I was like, these feel amazing, right? It doesn't feel like I'm making a sacrifice. It feels like it feels comfortable kind of like the sweatpants thing. Do you think post COVID you're in a prime position to, you know, for your brand, for your company? Because now people will seek that will seek the comfort as opposed to this, you know, uncomfortable garments that we're so used to wearing pre COVID. Yeah, you know, I think the first person outside of our team to see the silver lining exactly the same way we do which is that we've been trying to convince the world for years that you wanted something as comfortable as your favorite sweatpants that was sharp enough to wear in a more kind of formal or in a casual just out of home setting. You can't wear those sweatpants to a restaurant or to a bar to work or to, you know, on a flight, right? And so the entire world learned this lesson all at once that they can be wildly more productive if they're comfortable and that comfort and productivity are actually really directly correlative. And so we've been fighting this fight for so long and all of a sudden at once the world learned this lesson. And so all of a sudden, instead of us having to educate you on why this matters we now get to focus all of our attention on now you know what matters. Here's why we're the best at it. And so it really changes our messaging game dramatically to know that everybody has the same opening premise in mind already. And so is there all new marketing going into a factor? How are you guys getting the message out there? Yeah, you'll see everything from us kind of continue to evolve. It's one of the things we pride ourselves most on. I mean, whether or not we're in a pandemic the evolution of our companies are probably our single greatest assets. You'll see constantly us entering new categories us entering new messaging us entering a new website or a new logo or wordmark. And we love the idea of testing and playing and learning. And so absolutely you'll see an extension of our product line that kind of really comfy cozy stuff that we've been doing for years but we'll kind of blow out now into a full collection. And then certainly the messaging side making sure that we remind people or draw back to these days as things were rough in general absolutely there's no silver lining to that. But don't you remember that maybe you were a bit more productive when you threw those sweatpants on and got in front of the computer than when you had your really kind of super tight skinny jeans or you're a really restrictive dress pants. I think about it like, so I saw one of your co-founders ran a marathon, right? Complete each your own dog food type startup moment you're running a marathon in your suits, in your garments. And now I'm thinking like the marketing is just a guy sitting on the couch or a guy or a gal sitting on the couch on their laptop. And they might be dressed up but they feel comfy as ever. And it's like just packaging that message in the right way is interesting. Yeah, you've nailed a really great nuance that we have from a messaging standpoint is that line between comfort and performance, right? One is comfort, you picture the couch and performance, you picture the marathon. But actually both are attempting to do the activity that you're doing in the best possible way, right? If you're lounging, go all out and if you're running go all out. And so in that way, the technology that powers the two of those is actually quite complex but replicable for clothes that are not meant for the track or the couch but actually the other 22 hours a day. When you first launched, did you guys bootstrap this company or did you raise a little bit of capital at the beginning? You know, we raised early on and it's not necessarily something that I would recommend for companies coming out today. We raised for two reasons. One is that just seemed like the default. I mean, without sugar coating it just seemed like that's what you did when you were starting a company in 2012 is you got and raised money. You know, the question of bootstrapping had become so rare at that point that it wasn't really even a consideration. And we also had a really heavy uphill battle to fight which I do think required some upfront capital, right? We were taking on a fairly heavy problem, right? At that point, if you went to a Nordstrom you would have not seen a single item with a single performance characteristic. So we were taking on a pretty big challenge at that point eight years ago. It's become a bit of a new normal now which is great for us. But at the time we were fighting an uphill battle in fashion where it wasn't something the world really was asking for. We had to explain, here's why this matters. How did you address that fight, that uphill battle? How did you turn around and educate the market about this problem? Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of answers I'd give there. One is word of mouth played a huge role and continues to, right? Is that the best way we can do that is by you telling your friends that that was something that you found this to be useful for. So your voice is more powerful than ours. And the second way that comes to mind is that's why we love retail. Is retail, we don't have to explain it. You put it on, that aha moment, I get it happens before you purchase, right? In Ecom those two events are flipped. You purchase then have your aha moment. And so for us it was really special to open stores fairly early on. Our first store opened in 2014. You can imagine we launched the company in 2012. That's pretty quick to get that first store up. And it was really because we just saw so much value in getting that aha moment to be the first experience you had, not your credit card. So for you, that aha moment led the decision to even like, cause you see a lot of companies now they just wanna do online sales. But with you, you knew that with customers trying on your clothing it would be more beneficial to you as a brand and informative to them as a consumer than just purely an online format. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I'd also not cover the power of our own preferences as a founding team where we like shopping in person, right? You know, I think we are in a lot of ways our own customer. And I think one of the interesting things I've seen at MIT Sloan's curriculum is this evolution into user driven innovation, right? Which is acknowledging that it's okay that sometimes as an entrepreneur you're solving your own problem. And I love retail. I love shopping in stores. I love touching and feeling and trying on before I buy. So I think there was probably some mix of an intelligent business strategy that saw really great, you know conversion rates offline and really intimate customer interactions and building kind of true in-depth relationships. And then some part that was just, this would be fun. It would be really great to gather up the people that like our brand, get to hear from them directly and get to shopping in a way that we enjoy and hope continues. I love how simply you put things. So you talk about, you bucket things really nicely. Comfort, performance, e-commerce, retail and both of these things make a lot of sense. And so I can like understand your decision-making process. When you think about retail, so for me now as a real estate developer I've always thought that retail at some point will just become nothing more than a marketing exercise for companies unless they own the asset. In which case then you at least have another asset. But in terms of how you view retail post COVID is it like it's a marketing exercise for you? Is it bringing that aha moment to that specific buyer and then you have your aha moment on the e-commerce where you have to fulfill both roles or what's your thought process around that? Yeah, I mean there are certainly nuances between the channels that are not, you know, you can't ignore, right? So I mean that obviously that the order of events happening, right? You pay before you shop or you shop before you pay. That goes with that saying but beyond that I do think the channels actually have a lot more similarities than they have differences or we still think of both. I mean we won't continue to have a store unless it's four wall profitable. I mean we're big believers that anything outside of that unless it is mathematically approvable is just a guess and probably a risky one that it's affecting your online business in some massively profitable way, right? We do find that customers are often really tied to a channel. They're either offline shoppers or online shoppers. They tend to stay with that initial channel where they purchased. They can compliment each other from a messaging or impression standpoint but when you actually swipe it tends to be in the same place that you prefer. And so we still think of stores as a great way to have commerce and a great place to have an actual contribution margin coming from. And that leads to these higher AOVs, longer customer relationships, higher lifetime values, deeper insights, conversations from our GMs with our design team that are just incredibly informative on what people prefer and what their sentiments are. There's a ton of opportunity for retail still to be a really, really great channel. I think maybe now more than ever the intimacy of perhaps fewer people in stores just the upside there is more time with the sales that you associate. So I think it's as alive as ever as soon as we're able to kind of find a new normal and let people be in stores again. When do you think that'll be the new normal? So I know, well, let's skip that question for now because none of us really know. How much time do you have? Yeah, I've seen your store. I think you have one in Fillmore or at least the ones I've seen in San Francisco and then obviously Newbury Street in Boston. How big is ministry of supply now in terms of your team and in terms of how many stores you have across the country? Yeah, we're about 50 people in total, about six stores. All six as you might imagine are closed to the public right now. And in terms of reopening, God, your guess is as good as mine but as soon as we safely can. And in terms of investment, where are you guys at? Did you follow the traditional route, seed series A or what was that like? Yeah, we did. I mean, it's interesting that that's traditional, right? You're right. I think you're probably right that that is kind of how the world has kind of played out. We've always been pretty focused on making sure that we maintain a pretty healthy bottom line too. So in that way, we've balanced, I think, health and growth in a nice way but no, we have absolutely gone and gotten a serious seed A and B at this point. And ideally at this point are kind of surviving more on revenue than we are on outside funding. And what does growth look like for you guys as you think about, I guess the future post COVID or non, is it new products? Is it moving more into athleisure, right? You guys started sort of focusing on solving your problem as it relates to suits and dress shirts. Is it moving in that direction or is there a completely new space that you're thinking about? Yeah, it's a really good question. My co-founder partner, Gihan, has a really bright approach to product expansion where he's both the most cautious person in the world when it comes to adding new styles but also really loves testing, right? And letting kind of the customer tell us what we have permission to do. So I think over the next year you'll see quite a few extensions of our brand, some of which will stick around and many of which won't, right? Some of which will just be a one time enjoyable experience for us to launch something new into the world. And others will become part of our core business and maybe a significant part of our core business. So an easy example of that being that we launched masks a couple of weeks ago and it quickly became our number one selling product for the last three weeks. So I think we'll see that evolution and iteration happening quite a bit but within our playbook, not in any sort of inauthentic way. So you go in, you know, everyone goes on lockdown and you decide to launch masks as a product. How long did it take you before as a team, you were like, okay, we need to move in this direction? And was there a problem in getting supplies with everyone being interrupted? Because I heard a lot about supply chains being disrupted and things being put on hold just because not that they weren't available but because they were hard to get from point A to point B. Did you experience any of that in creation of the masks as a product? Yeah, we experienced, I think all of that. You know, we shut our stores down March 11th and I think somewhere around March 20th or so we kind of got word that this PPE shortage was happening. Our first instinct wasn't until well over a month later, you know, closer to a month and a half. We didn't think at all about selling. We never thought we'd sell masks. I mean, even on March 20th, when we kicked that off it was how many can we get to local Boston hospitals? And we ended up putting a lot of our own money forward raising money from our customers and ended up donating over, I think it ended up being 40,000 respirators and another 30,000 masks are on the way. For over a hundred grand, it was just incredible, I think to watch both kind of our team support and our customer support saying, hey, people need this, let's get it out. It was only once we caught our breath and had delivered 40,000 masks that we even thought about selling the first one and realizing, hey, we just built the supply chain overnight for donations. Now that donations are starting to kind of be, we're continuing to donate one for every sell out sale. Is there an opportunity for us to make this part of our core business and go from there? That's exactly what happened. We decided on March 11th not to furlough or fire anybody, we have 30 retail staff members at those six doors and for their livelihood and for our economy, we decided to keep them all fully on payroll. And so we had to make sure we kind of took care of our business as soon as we took care of our community our next thought had to be, how do we make sure we sustain our business? And that's where selling masks became an option. And with that decision to not fire or furlough anyone, were you also thinking that you would apply for SBA loans or the PPP? And did you go forward with that? Or were the masks enough to kind of sustain you? Yeah, so I think just by the nature of our investors and background, one, we don't have a full understanding of where we'll land with PPP and anything like that. We haven't applied for anything else, but we've explored PPP. But generally are kind of keeping that one, personal until we know more, but have explored all the programs to see what those benefits and helps are. And our only kind of goal is to make sure that if or where we do take any support, we make sure that we use it for the exact intended purpose. So in this case, keeping all of our retail staff employed, although from home and not in revenue-generating positions, that that's what PPP was built for. So that's why we felt comfortable exploring that. I know you have your son in the room. Are you guys making or expanding to, do you guys do children's clothing? We did one, a sock as an April Fool's Day joke a couple of years ago, but now beyond that, we have unfortunately not gone any further. I think down the road, it's entirely possible. I think our brand's premise is very much scientifically better blank. And there's no reason that children's clothing or children's anything shouldn't be scientifically better than what's out there. That's so true, especially if it's washable, right? That's the whole secret. When you think about a potential exit plan for you guys, do you think about that often? Do you think about acquisition or do you think about something that you just wanna run? This is your baby and you just wanna run it for the foreseeable future. Yeah, it's a really good question. It's one that comes up a lot. This is our baby, much like the baby that's about five feet away from me right now. You're in the eight to 10 year window. You're in that moment. Yeah, I think we'd always kind of rejected the question early on mostly just because we didn't start this, we weren't entrepreneurs. We still don't think of ourselves as entrepreneurs. And I think this idea of kind of an entrepreneurial journey or a serial entrepreneur have never really appealed too much to us. We've made commitments to our investors that we very much need to deliver on. We've made that commitment to them and we wanna be, hold true to it and we're on track to do so. But in terms of exit or liquidity event, these are things we tend not to really think about. What we've generally kind of held close and presented to investors upfront from a timeline perspective is that we'll continue to build a really valuable business that is driving value to customers and to our investors in that order. And that the right thing will happen as a result of that, right? If we build meaningful value, then everybody wins, right? And so I think in that way, we've just stayed the course on that and if and when the right opportunity comes up to find a new partner, we're certainly open to it. But I don't think you'll see us seeking any sort of kind of exit, liquidity event anytime soon. Well, you guys are in prime position. I mean, I really love how I remember buying a shirt probably when you first started, your very first store, you had a store in the south end, I believe. It was like your very first shop. And I remember going in there and it was like appointment only. I think so anyway. I remember knocking on the door, it was locked. And I think I bought a shirt. And then quite literally, I mean, I was just thinking like clothes has to change. I don't want to put on jeans anymore. As a real estate developer, I almost always wear jeans to every public hearing. And every time I'll have a public official come over and say, hey, where's your suit? And I'm like, hey, I play this like tech guy. I'm like, hey, I'm a tech guy and this is my suit. Cause I have a sports coat on. And it's this like, ha, ha, ha moment. But as I was thinking about this, and we have a hearing coming up on June 17th, I thought I should probably get some slacks. And then it was like the daunting, all the feeling of those slacks just hit me like, I really don't want to put these on. And then I immediately thought of you. And I thought, let me, let me at least send an email and say, what, you know, what, what is the pair to buy? And sure enough, I tried them on two days ago when they arrived and game changer, it was amazing. So, I mean, it's a really great, a great point on kind of this idea of rejecting an entire category like suits. One of the things we have in our internal speak, we don't tend to use it externally, but as this idea of clothes, you actually look forward to wearing and that kind of dread that you felt is the exact emotion that we want to eradicate. Like if you brought our entire business down to one point, it's that moment of dread that you just felt. How do we get rid of that? How do we end that? Right? And I think that's exactly what we're going after is that you don't think suit. Oh, no, you think suit. Oh, I have that one suit. And I really enjoy wearing it, although I don't wear it when I don't have to. When I do, I look forward to it. Do you think you could ever get people working out in suits? Is that like a big, a big audacious, hairy goal of yours? You saw Gihan running that marathon. No, I, you know, I'm the first person to throw on a pair of gym shorts when the time is right or a pair of shoes. So it's not that we necessarily even want people to dress up. We just want people to dress sharp, right? And I think that's a big, big nuance of what our goal is. It's not about business casual or suits or any specific category. I mean, we've seen dress codes change so dramatically in the last decade. And they really have shifted from this really prescriptive, here's exactly what to wear to a much more descriptive, here's how to dress, right? Dress sharp, right? If you're gonna wear a T-shirt, make sure it's not a ratty T-shirt. If you're gonna wear jeans, make sure that they're sharp, kind of monochromatic, not nose holes, right? And cut to the right length, you know, make sure they're sharp. So in that way, we give ourselves permission to do whatever in terms of category, including gym, right? We love gym, we wanna enter gym even more. But when you're working out, make sure it's sharp, right? It's not that you care that much about how you look. It's just that confidence that's built when you feel kind of sharp and clean. Pricing something I always love talking to founders about because you're in a category where suits can range. I mean, people can buy a $5,000 suit, $2,000 suit. I can go to Jose Bank and maybe spend 200 or whatever, right? And so how is it that you guys arrived at your price point when you could have theoretically gone way higher, right? Cause you're competing in a category that people are used to spending a lot of money. So what was that like? Yeah, it probably comes back to one of the statements I made earlier on this idea that we're not necessarily, you know, in this for the same reasons as your average startup in that we didn't just want this to be kind of big and, you know, exclusive, right? And a luxury brand. The idea that I couldn't afford one of our own pieces was terrifying as a 26 year old founder who he didn't only had one paying job, you know, at that point in his life, right? That was a pretty low bar. So even the idea of charging over $100 for a dress shirt really bothered me for a long time. And I think, you know, inflation's caught up and our customer, you know, we have opportunities to cut that down on an occasion but I don't think we ever want to be a company that makes clothes that are truly just absolutely inaccessible because I think it would hurt on an emotional level that we were excluding, you know, a large audience on price point, right? That's gonna, any price point will exclude somebody but to the degree we could, we wanted to lean into premium, not luxury. Affordable luxury. There we go. Something like that, yeah. I would do the fashion people like do, what do they, how do they view your company, your products, you know, the mega elites, let's call them the snobs of the fashion world. Yeah, you know, early on we used to, we used to kind of, I think, probably just as a bit of a defense mechanism they were rejecting us because we were confusing them, right? We were trying to create a new category of clothing that was, you know, the antithesis of a department store, right? If we're a new department in that way, it is, you know, jarring, right? When we say this, you know, early on we used to use this phrase performance professional and now we may be saying more like smart comfortable but this idea of taking, you know, your active or sportswear and, you know, formal wear and kind of mixing them all into one big batch doesn't work well for a department store or the average fashion designer who thinks very categorically in department focus. I think probably early on we just weren't executing that well, right? In those first couple of years we were so focused on engineering that we were missing the fashionable element and so I think it took us growing into that. I'd say in their defense they were probably right to reject us early on as we had a lot of stuff to fix. And I think, you know, fortunately five, six, seven years removed from that period of our kind of early growth and our confidence being high and our team being spectacular that now not only have we evolved but the industry has evolved and now there's really great marriage where we embrace and love the fact that we're in fashion. I think early on we used to almost say we're a tech company that happens to make clothing that today we feel the opposite and we embrace the fashion industry and I think it's reciprocated and it's hard to say credit at a higher level but I think the fashion industry as a whole has really started to embrace not just us but in general the idea of evolution, iteration and new in a way that we really appreciate. Leaning into the industry itself I wanna know how did you settle on the name and who came up with it? It's evocative. We love the name, it's Q from the Bond films. We all love a good Bond film and the character Q who makes all Bond's gadgetry, right? So all the things that make Bond head to that gala but still be ready for anything, right? Q we say is the ultimate empathetic inventor he's thinking what could Bond possibly need today and how can I make it seamlessly fit into his persona and to his body, right? And so similarly we think of ourselves as Q and you the customer as Bond now can make sure that you look just pristine and perfect but you're ready for absolutely anything that your day may throw at you. And so we are Q and it happens that Q is a real person based on a real person, Charles Frazier Smith who operated under the cover of the Ministry of Supply. And so in that way we're Q we're operating under the cover of Ministry of Supply and you are Bond and so it just fit quite naturally that that would be our company's name similarly our customer services Q at MinistryofSupply.com for that exact reason. That is pretty amazing and really cool that your whole company is based around something as iconic as Q and James Bond. I mean, as far as the fabric of your company that's pretty suave and really it elevates you guys. I would imagine it elevates your thinking to a sort of global level like James Bond. It's fun. We enjoy the again, I comes back to this idea that we started this to have a little bit of fun and to enjoy it and make products we really loved. And I think the Q story just reminds us of this idea that empathy and invention are really the two critical ingredients for our process. Just playing out to James Bond, what I'm wondering out loud and maybe you've thought of this like what would it take to be the official clothing supplier of Bond film? We've never approached it but we've definitely thought about it. We've said we should maybe just drop a couple packages in the mail and see what happens but definitely a conversation worth having. Maybe we'll do it for whoever the new Bond ends up being. You know, if anyone deserves clothes that you can be athletic in and comfortable and look sharp, it's Bond. I mean, with all the stuff that he does, yeah. It would be a company defining moment if we were able to get that. One of the questions will wrap on two questions here. One of the ones I always ask people is like as an entrepreneur, what advice would you give for people holding out on the sidelines? But I really wanna, I'm curious in your answer because to your point, you said you don't view yourself or as like a serial entrepreneur. And so what advice would you give someone who's either looking to solve a problem or start a company? I'm gonna leave it there. I don't know how you think about this. I'll give you I think two distinct answers, two distinct questions but I'll mix them together a little bit. The first in terms of advice that we got that I'll just pass for and I won't take any credit for but I love it was find believers, don't spend your time convincing non-believers. And this idea that the second somebody really doesn't like your idea, learn from them, don't dismiss it. But make sure you find those people that believe in it and still push you, right? The idea of it not necessarily being a yes man, right? But rather someone who believes in your vision but challenges you on how to get there. And I think that's just been critical for us whether that's finding customers who are believers, finding investors, team members who are believers. But the second you get that kind of, hey, this person really just doesn't like the vision then I think move on and keep searching. And I think in terms of the second question which maybe kind of just a nice part two of that answer is just this idea that this stuff's really hard. It is difficult, it is emotional, it is stressful, it is at times the most fun you can possibly have and at other times the hardest work you've ever done. And so one of the things we always tell people is if you're doing it because you saw white space on a diagram you drew in a business school whiteboard, you'll get burned out pretty quickly and you'll end up kind of leaving and wasting a lot of time. If you're doing it because you're genuinely passionate about the problem and the product that you're using to solve that problem, then you'll get through those tough parts and you'll get to really celebrate and enjoy the best parts. But if I didn't love clothing and its impact on the world and its impact on my productivity and my own kind of dreams, let alone our customers, if I didn't love it as much as I did or my partner Gihan didn't, you know both of us would have gone years ago because it's an industry that can definitely kind of eat you up if you're not in it for the right reasons. I love that, that's so true. And lastly, where can everybody find you? Where can everybody find the company, the brand, Instagram, all that good stuff? Yeah, I mean it started MinistryofSupply.com just because our stores are still shut down, of course. Our Instagram feed's pretty fun, it's of course Ministry of Supply. So look us up, M-I-S-T-R-Y-O-F-S-U-P-P-L-L-Y and check us out on any of those channels. Well the stores open up, we've got six stores around the country that we would very much enjoy having in it. And I love it, I think you guys are in a prime position, I mean at least for me personally to reconnect with you 10 years later pretty much. And I think you nailed it, I think there's a big silver lining, if anything the hope is there for you guys and the product is certainly amazing, I mean amazing and the timing of this, right? It's like you're gonna be a genius in 10 years, people are gonna be like, how did he know this COVID world needed this product? We hope so, we're having some fun in the meantime. Well I appreciate you coming on the podcast Amon, thank you so much. Thanks Amon. Thanks Steve both, thanks for having me.