Reference no: EM133373589

Case Study: I was definitely interested in stylistic garments and you know, the fashion forward side of things, but I love snowboarding. It's my passion and being outdoors and, you know, so to put 'em together seem like that's a real idea. And, you know, you go snowboarding or skiing or you might just be in New York City in a on a rainy day, or it's negative 20 in Quebec and you just want to feel good.

1st person : Mikey

Hi, I'm Mikey LeBlanc. I'm the founder of Holden. I'm one of the guys that helps with marketing around here.

2nd person : Nikki

Um, I had a friend that her dad was a footwear designer and, um, I was just like super inspired by that and just in awe of, you know, how he would sketch my hand and just turn these like insane, detailed drawings into an actual like 3D model.

Hi, I'm Nikki. I'm the design and development manager at Holden Outerwear. I just knew I had to do something creative and something. Never the same. And that always changed.

1st person : Mikey

Um, well, definitely when Holden came out, we were the new and improved outerwear. Um, for the first five or six years it was people just waiting to see, and they still do. I mean, a lot of our accounts come in and they say, I can't wait to see the collection. What have you done this year? What new fabrics, what new designs do you.Um, so yeah, and it really affected the industry as well. I mean, we had competitors, um, at our big shows, showing pieces in their line as, this is our Holden piece, this is our Holden Que garment. We've been kind of labeled as the person or the brand that pushes that, the style portion of technical ad or.

2nd person : Nikki

Um, that's probably what I love most about Holden is the fact that they take cues from fashion and that they're not looking at what everyone else in the outerwear market is doing. They're looking high fashion and, um, figuring out a way to apply it to, you know, a garment that someone would wear up on the hill.

1st person : Mikey

We brought an element of old world Tail only to our stuff, so we really deal with paper patterns and fit. I think we stand out on the floor. Women's especially because we are designing for women and I think most of our competitors are designing for girls.So, um, they're designing for a 10 to 12 or 15 year old girl, whereas we're designing for someone who's 18 to 50.

2nd person : Nikki

You know, the pants especially are extremely slimming and that's. Really rare to put on a pair of snowboard pants and actually make your butt look good and not look like you're wearing a diaper. I have a pretty solid background in both development and um, design. So I actually do really get excited about technology, um, and working, you know, whether it's with the fabric mill or with a garment manufacturer on man manufacturer on. You know, taking something that everyone does every day and doing it slightly different, and how are we going to do it different? And how are we going to present it to the market in a way that's still, um, acceptable and functional?

1st person : Mikey

And when we started the company in 2002, Scott and I wanted to make a natural fiber, waterproof, breathable fabric, which didn't exist. So we had a ton of vendors. Every time we meet with a fabric supplier, we would say, do you have anything natural, waterproof free? We like, okay, you like, you're crazy. So basically. We had to put the pieces together. Um, we developed the world's first natural fiber, um, waterproof, breathable fabric in 2005, which was a hemp poly mix fabric. Um, we won a ton of awards for it and, uh, You know, we had our major competitors again, chasing us right after that.

2nd person : Nikki

I think our denim that we're doing is really exciting. Um, you know, a lot of companies in the outer market are doing, you know, cheap nylons that are printed to look like denim. And we're actually doing a, a true cotton twill that is denim and, um, you know, laminated with a 20 k waterproofing and is performing on the. As, you know, high performance outerwear and also looking like a real true gene when someone wears it.

1st person : Mikey

Yeah. We're a small brand and we, we aren't able to, you know, have all pieces of the puzzle. We don't own factories, we don't own fabric mills. Um, we can't fill a factory, so we gotta have really great relationships with all of our vendors. This is a hundred percent polyester tool two. It's definitely, um, getting harder and harder to be able to push our, um, fenders to new, new developments. Um, costs are going up, um, you know, and they don't want to develop something that may enter, not get used. We might go in with a new design they've never seen. They're like, well, that's not possible. And then you say Yes, and they said no, and you say, yes, this is how, and then they're like, wow, cool. And then they, their brains start working and they're like, wow, this is. This is something new our factor can doing and offer. Other people.

2nd person : Nikki

That's how we do our business, is to be able to, you know, push our manufacturers or our vendors in ways that they aren't pushed. That's how we come up with something new.

1st person : Mikey

Um, the industry loves change, um, especially the shops and the kids. So the shops and the kids were psyched about holding them. It meant, wow, this is something that looks radically different. The industry really embraced it and also the brands embraced it. Um, they've all basically followed suit. If you look at Burton de Bonfire to Solomon, to, you know, in the ski garage and a lot of brands have followed Holden's lead and gone down that fashion route. Yeah, there's a, there's a lot of ways people can rip you off. And so we're very, um, secret. As much as we can. We don't want to be too paranoid, but we don't hand out catalogs to anybody that's not a certified holding dealer or distributor, and we don't doing a lot with PDF imagery.Um, just because that starts to float around one brand in particular, um, that really copied a lot of our stuff and I didn't have to, the SL thing, they actually, they're conscious wore, wore on them. And they came up to me at a major trade show and literally the girl started crying. Um, she's like, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to.I, you know, gave all your designs and some pieces that you gave me to one of our designers and they copied it. Exactly. And I just, her punishment was her own remorse. Definitely. Her punishment was her own torture. I mean, really, like I said, we turn over design so much. And that's the fun thing about Holden, I think, is we design a collection rather than, um, we're not reacting to the, to the, um, you know, current business. We're actually like creating stuff every year. New. So that'll always be a part of holding Linda. And if people want to copy us, they're probably gonna sell a lot of pieces, so I don't blame them.

Replying to these questions:

1.Overviewing of the content of the case.

2. Identifying problems/successes.

3. Analyze the causes of problems/successes.

4. Identifying solutions that the case has found.

5. Writing about your suggestions for solutions/further improvements.

6. Indicating the relevance to the chapter.