My dad works in China and so I would only ever get to see him during major holidays like Christmas. We spent most of our time together shopping.
“Dad, you’re a businessman in China. Don’t you need some new clothes?” I asked, eyeing the same red striped polo he wore every time I saw him.
“What? My clothes are good!”
“Jokes aside,” he said, “American dress shirts never fit me.”
I didn’t believe him. There were petite lines dedicated to petite women. I knew there were slim fit shirts for guys so maybe it was all about finding the right brand that had his size. But he was right — a few hours in Macy’s or JCPenney confirmed his statement. I found myself asking the sales representatives if they carried XS or even XXS sizes.
We had tried on every brand only to find dress shirts that were so long they looked like dresses, sleeves that were so big they made my dad look like he was drowning in fabric.
Wesley Kang and I swiped right on Coffee Meets Bagel in 2015, right when we both moved to New York City to start our careers. He had just graduated from Boston University meanwhile I was on the West Coast graduating from University of California San Diego. When we met, he was at Citi as an analyst and I was at TBWA as an art director in advertising.
He was always frustrated with shopping and finding the right fit because every dress shirt he tried on was too baggy. The experience was all too familiar. Wesley is 5’5” and about 140-lbs as a leaner Taiwanese-American man. Working in finance, he had to wear a dress shirt every day.
In March 2018, we had the idea to create a men’s actually slim fit dress shirt brand, selling dress shirts with trimmed shirt length, sleeve length, and back/shoulder measurements for “Actually Slim” sizes. At the time, we were still at our full-time jobs, clocking back into working on Nimble Made after a quick dinner and often working from 8 p.m. to midnight or 1 a.m. for the next six months.
With no experience in manufacturing products or fashion design, Wesley and I picked up everything from researching on Google. By Sept 2018, we had 3 dress shirts designed – a solid white, blue, and pink dress shirt – which we named our Essentials collection, a small batch of inventory, and a packed launch party in the Lower East Side in Manhattan. We quit our full-time jobs one month later.
Photo credit: Darlena Chiem
As Asian American founders, we strive to change the dynamic clothing landscape to include men of all body types, starting with a slim fit that actually fits.
Since starting the brand, we’ve been able to create dress shirts that fit Wesley (who wears our N1 size), my dad (who wears our N3 size), and others who’ve never been able to find a good fitting dress shirt without needing to pay a premium for it or fixing it up at the tailor.
Photo Credit: Ray Javier
As founders of Nimble Made, we create opportunities to collaborate with talented Asian American photographers, models, makeup artists, content creators, influencers, fashion bloggers, and more, and work with them to be a brand that strives for more Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) representation in fashion together.
We take pride in naming each one of our dress shirts after a symbol in our Asian American identity. Our pink slim fit dress shirt is named The New Year, after the Lunar New Year and the Chinese tradition of wearing new red clothes to start the new year.
Check out our slim fit dress shirt collection to see how we’ve named the other ones.
Building a brand from scratch is the hardest thing I’ve done. Taking that leap of faith and leaving my corporate job to make zero dollars. Telling my parents that I wanted to pursue entrepreneurship. Changing my lifestyle to self-fund a business with my personal savings. Going all-in with my life partner on a business idea we have no idea might be successful.
But being my own boss. Challenging myself on a daily basis. Investing in my own personal and professional growth. Building a platform for AAPI representation. Working with Wesley (and our dog!) side by side every day. Definitely worth it.
Nimble Made was featured by MONEY Magazine this year which was a great validation to us that our brand and story is worth telling and that people actually want and need these dress shirts. This kind of recognition is important to us because Wesley and I battle imposter syndrome every day and often attribute any wins or successes to luck. We feel undeserving of them.
The most challenging part is scaling and growing our business. Being completely self-funded and bootstrapped, most of our funds go to shirt inventory. We’ve learned to be pretty scrappy like buying our own lightbox on Amazon to take our product photos, learning how to run ads ourselves, being our own customer service reps online, and fulfilling each sale and shipping them out ourselves.
It’s a lot every day and we’re motivated when we hear customers say, “I’m only buying Nimble Made dress shirts from now on,” or, “This is literally the only shirt that fits this well off-the-rack.” It’s rewarding to hear we created a real solution for people whose size and fit needs were not addressed by the dress shirt industry.
When Nimble Made launched, my dad was our first customer. He bought the New Year in size N2 (at that time, it was named “Small”). He was so used to needing a smaller size for his leaner figure that he couldn’t believe he needed one size bigger.
What can I say? They are actually slim fit.
Get 15% off dress shirts by NimbleMade using the code COLDTEAFAM for until September 1, 2019 at nimble-made.com.
