Struggling With Features

Trust you're having a lovely Sunday so far.

The gift and the curse with men's fashion is there's always a brand rolling out new features, new fabrics, new this, and unique that.

There's always something that could make it better, more comfortable, or solve a problem folks are having (or think they're having) or do something the competition doesn't offer to create an edge.

You might not even intend to go from a simple uniform to a more complicated one. Still, over time, tiny feature by tiny change, motivated by creative marketing and sale racks, it moves you further away from your ideal presentation.

One day you wake up and hardly recognize things in your closet, and the clean-out begins.

This cycle continues.

This is even hard for me and the ABBEYDALE offering.

Is "simple" dying a death by a thousand cuts?

I don't believe a single, small feature will take our offering from simple to complicated, but if you summed all the new features I've been asked for, as a whole, it would become too much.

Maybe I'm at a point where the product is enough. Enough for the type of customer I want (and enough of them to generate sufficient revenue) to feel there's good money for value exchanged.

New features won't necessarily make it easier to keep them on as customers. And if folks "need" a feature that my product doesn't have, then maybe they're just not the right customer, and that's OK.

I believe less is more and simple is more comfortable to implement consistently. And being consistent makes you well dressed.

So, while I don't think we'll get involved in a new "drawstring trouser" or "jackets with iPad pockets,"…you can count on our offering serving a purpose and solving an issue we all have.

Ideal fit.

Stay focused on that, and we'll all keep winning.