Like many professionals who travel for work, Aman Advani often found himself frantically ironing a button-down shirt in the wee morning hours, wrangling with a cumbersome hotel iron.
“I think I applied more of my engineering degree to hotel irons than anything else,” jokes Aman, who worked as a consultant during his first few years after graduating Georgia Tech. But the iron was not the real problem. It was the clothes.
As you may recall, it wasn’t that long ago that business clothes were anything but wrinkle-proof, travel-proof, sweat-proof, flexible, machine-washable or even all that comfortable. A decade ago, there was no such thing as a “stretch suit.” Aman was perplexed that work clothes hadn't evolved as clothes for exercise had.
Aman saw the void in the marketplace and did what many innovative visionaries do—he headed to MIT.
Serendipity leads to startup
In 2011, Aman came to MIT Sloan to complete an MBA, armed with a business plan, a vision for merging the best aspects of performance apparel with the aesthetic of business wear, and a sewing machine—which he used to sew the soles of Nike socks into dress socks. He knew that MIT was the right place to discover how best to use science and engineering in order to create high performance business wear.
Serendipity struck almost immediately. In his first week on campus, Aman met a recent MIT School of Engineering graduate Gihan Amarasiriwardena, who had been manually replacing the backs of dress shirts with running shirts.
“We crossed paths for the first time in the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. In any other institution, the odds of an MBA student and engineering student being in the same place at the same time might have been unlikely, but the geography of the MIT campus is meant to create just this sort of collision … the Trust Center is essentially between the Media Lab, Sloan School, and engineering school. Gihan and I quickly realized we were after the same thing, and that we had been hacking apparel in our respective living rooms. Right away we thought, ‘great, why wouldn’t we work together?’”
Both Aman and Gihan had business partners in place; all parties combined to broker a deal, and they moved forward immediately. Aman and Gihan were invited to sell their shirts at MIT’s Entrepreneurship Development Program (EDP) in 2012. They sold out. And Ministry of Supply was born.
"If fabric and designs could be engineered to be better for athletes, why couldn't they be redesigned to perform better for professionals who need to start their day at 6 a.m. and still look crisp for a meeting at the end of a day?"
Aman and Gihan introduced their first performance dress shirt, the men’s Apollo dress shirt, via a Kickstarter campaign that rapidly set the record for the most-funded fashion project at the time, raising over $400k. Made with the same Phase Change materials NASA invented to control an astronaut’s body temperature in space, the Apollo gave way to the full line of garments that continues to evolve for optimal comfort and capability. The fashion line utilizes modern, sharp silhouettes with deep engineering down to the fiber level. Among their many awards, the team has garnered two Guinness World Records for Fastest Half Marathon in a Suit (men and women), as well as NASA's Innovation Award.
But this is not to make the journey sound easy. “We needed to create an entire ecosystem,” Aman explains. “A customer who ‘gets it’, a manufacturer that can make it, and an investor who is willing to invest with no precedent,” he explained. They also needed employees who could think with two minds in order to gracefully marry form and function. All this while continuing to respond and adjust to a market that would change exponentially in coming years.
So how did they come out on top?
“First and foremost, quality. In a now-crowded field, one-upmanship is a hard game to play. We win on trust and the fact that we make a better product.” Aman also credits using the scientific method to uncover problems in apparel design (what he calls the “quantified empathy process”) for the company’s continued success. By focusing on human-centered design and user feedback, the brand creates—and iterates to quickly improve—garments that solve everyday wardrobe problems.
Aman pays his success forward in many ways, not the least as a guest lecturer and coach in EDP, returning to where it all began to share his company’s mindset to apparel design, which is closer to that of a tech company than a fashion brand. He also likes to talk about the challenges he and his co-founders have faced along the way.
“I love talking about where we messed up … the setbacks that challenged our entire business model for the better.”
Today, Ministry of Supply has seven stores around the country and more than 50 employees. They recently launched their first wearable, the Mercury Intelligent Heated Jacket, which is voice controlled, automatically heats to the right temperature, and learns your behavior to get better over time.
They’ve come a long way since Frankenstein socks.
Learn from Aman and other innovative entrepreneurs firsthand in the upcoming session of the Entrepreneurship Development Program.