Why thinking like a designer is key to solving founder challenges

In this episode Phill talks to Finn, the founder of Both &, and discusses the journey of creating a fashion brand specifically designed for trans and non-binary individuals. The discussion covers various themes including the importance of community engagement, the challenges of designing an entirely new approach to clothing ecommerce, becoming a figurehead in the community, and the future of the brand. Finn shares insights on navigating visibility in the fashion industry, the iterative design process, and the importance of building a diverse network. The conversation concludes with his personal reflections for aspiring founders.

Takeaways

• How Finn approached redesigning some of the most common design patterns in clothing ecommerce.
• Design Sprints and extensive design research informed several unique features required to make the web UX work.
• Community engagement has been crucial in shaping the brand's direction and offerings.
• Finn founded Both And to address a personal need for better fitting clothing, which helped him keep going throught the tough times.
• Open-sourcing the brand's tech packs to encourage industry collaboration should make the research project have even more impact beyond Both And.
• It's not always easy to put yourself out there as a community figurehead but it may be the right thing for your brand.

Creators & Guests

Host

Phill Keaney-Bolland

Co-founder of Yaya

Producer

Alexandra Pointet

Producer of the Cult Products podcast

FS

Guest

Finnegan Shepard

What is Cult Products?

Dive into the essentials of start-up success with Cult Products, hosted by Yaya's co-founders, Adam Yaya-Durrant and Phill Keaney-Bolland. This podcast delivers sharp insights on creating revolutionary products, radical branding, and attracting a loyal following of early adopters. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, each episode is packed with actionable advice and stories from those who've built successful businesses. Join Adam and Phill as they help you transform bold ideas into start-up success.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (00:17)
Hello and welcome to today's Cult Products podcast. I'm Phil and today I am joined by a, I think our first ever American guest, very exciting, coming in from across the Atlantic. We have Finn with us today. Hello mate, how are you doing?

Finn (00:38)
I'm feeling very chipper after that theme tune. That was like so, I felt like I was in a little cartoon series or something. It's very, we'll have to talk about the thought process that went into that theme tune. I'm fascinated. But yeah, I'm doing well. I do have a cold. I will lead with that. So if I sound a bit weird or blow my nose, heads up on that. But other than that, I'm doing really well.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (00:59)
hear it. Yes, I also have a cold and a little behind the scenes tidbit for people listening is we've come up with a series of hand signals to say when either of us needs to blow our nose so that we don't spend the entire time sniffling our way through the podcast. But yes, pepped up full of caffeine and hopefully, hopefully ready to go. We were also just before we came in as talking about I suspect that I may have got

given myself this cold by jumping in freezing cold water like every other idiot at the minute trying to go open water swimming in October in North London is probably not the best thing to do if you don't want to get a cold is the conclusion that I've come to.

Finn (01:38)
Yeah

You'd be fine if you were here in New York. It's hot, as we were saying. So come on over and jump in cold water and you'll be fine.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (01:58)
Yeah, so it's so it's I mean, so they obviously, you know, being British, it's important when talking to people from other countries that we just get get the weather out of the way, straight away. It's really warm there, right? It's unusually warm in New York at the minute.

Finn (02:08)
You

Yeah, like, I'd say it's probably like 28, 29 the last few days. It's been really pretty staggeringly warm for this time of year.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (02:24)
It's not that warm here by any means. Okay, so that's the weather out of the way. Tick, Finn, do you wanna give, I actually have a little bit of a bone to pick with you, because I don't know if you know this, but there's a song about a guy called Michael Finnegan, which is like a children's song. And because I've just been,

Finn (02:48)
Mm-hmm.

yes.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (02:52)
I'm reading your name over the past couple of days. I've had that song stuck in my head and it will not go away. I'm not going to sing it.

Finn (03:00)
Yeah, I get that quite a lot. There's a lot of fun things to do with the name, Finn, and rhyming and internal rhyming and all sorts of stuff. And then I read recently, this is maybe fake news, but I read it's the most popular baby boy's name in America this year, which is kind of wild. It's making a real, and I'm trans and now I feel like everyone's copying me so I need to change my name again. I've already done it once, might as well do it again, but it's too popular now.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (03:19)
Really?

Is that an option? Every couple of years you're like, it's getting...

Finn (03:31)
duck it, why not, yeah, you know, just reinvent yourself. Who said I couldn't, you know?

Phill Keaney-Bolland (03:37)
fair. I mean, I changed, I changed my surname last last year. And I feel like that's me done for the for a while now, think. Hopefully.

Finn (03:47)
I mean, it's an interesting norm, right? Like it's on the one hand, we make especially certain names relatively easy. First names, they definitely make you jump through some hoops as a trans person. But it is one of those interesting things that we've kind of like decided we have like certain limits or boundaries around what feels acceptable. And that's why I kind of like to push people on the sort of like, I'm gonna change it again, why not? But there is this immediate reaction of like, but that's not quite.

fair or like it's interesting that it brings things up in a person and that prompts the question, well, why? what is that? What buttons is that pushing? But anyways, that's probably a conversation for a different day.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (04:28)
I don't, if I had to choose a new name, I don't really know where I would go with that. Yeah, it's interesting. I watched the Will Ferrell Driving Around America documentary. Yeah, really, so me and Will Ferrell have the same birthday. Interestingly, he's quite a bit older than me. But...

Finn (04:36)
Yeah.

I haven't seen it yet, I need to see it.

You

Phill Keaney-Bolland (04:58)
Yeah, he gave me like a new found appreciation. He seems like a nice guy, I think, in general, from the like one and a half hours of documentary that I've watched of him. But his friend Harper was saying that, so Harper came from Harper Lee, and there was a connection between I think her mum maybe was in like the same school class as Harper Lee.

Finn (05:12)
Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (05:27)
which so then they just heard the name and it suddenly just suddenly just felt right and yeah I don't know so is Finn like as a why is that so popular in America?

Finn (05:40)
No idea. I mean, in general, there's a number of larger cultural trends that I will never be able to prove, but I have a hypothesis are somewhat rooted in their first being a cultural freak out about trans people. So in general, people are using wild names for baby, like Elon Musk is such an extreme example, but in general, there's just like kind of odd names being used.

And so I think there's a bit of a norm that's been broken around, you know, we're past the age of, know, Sue and Richard or, you know, whatever. And to like, like I met someone the other day whose nephew is named good. Just like good as a name, you know, and like, you're just like, excuse me, what? so like there's just all these crazy names being, used. I, again, I can't prove this, but my hypothesis is that it is somewhat.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (06:24)
it.

Finn (06:38)
are rooted in more of a cultural kind of awakening or exposure to queer community and non-binary and trans people choosing names for themselves. And often if you're like already breaking certain boundaries, you might as well make that more interesting or different. I don't know many trans people who transitioned to be like Dave or John or anything. Like it is usually like Atlas or Phineas or like these kind of like slightly edgier names.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (06:58)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Finn (07:06)
And then similarly also, and this is probably more controversial, but I would not be surprised if part of the reason we're seeing this cultural zeitgeist or this upswelling of interest and support for women's sports is also somewhat rooted in the attention that was directed to it over the last five years because of trans women and sports and all of the transphobia that's come out around that.

That was the great irony watching this debate over the last few years, is like all these people who are so against trans women's sports, like you never cared about women's sports. Like why are you suddenly a part of this conversation? So yeah, I think that these things make their way into culture in a variety of different ways and I'll never be able to prove it, but it's my hypothesis.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (07:38)
Hmm.

That is interesting. I do think I take issue with people having an adjective as a first name. think there's something a bit good, fast or something, know, it just sort of feels like it's too descriptive. And also, I kind of love the idea of being like, I could pick any name in the world. And I went with Dave. Okay, cool.

Finn (07:59)
It's a bit of a stretch. It's a bit of a stretch.

Yeah. Well these things boom around back around. That's the funny thing, is I bet the trans kids who are like 10 now or whatever and transition in the next decade will, they'll come all the way back around to the most just conservative classic names. These things always just cycle.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (08:19)
I don't mean, I don't mean.

Yeah, yeah, we had that explosion of really old fashioned names like Archie and things like that over here. I don't know if that traveled across the Atlantic as well, but.

Finn (08:44)
Mm.

I love the name Arch. It's from Archibald, right? I mean, that's amazing. Maybe that should be my new name, maybe. I feel positively about that name.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (08:51)
Yeah.

Okay, well, we'll throw a few more out over the course of the podcast and see where we get to. Yeah. I was nearly called Basil apparently when I was, during my mum's pregnancy, was Basil bump. So I'm very glad to be honest.

Finn (09:02)
Yeah, there we go

Phill Keaney-Bolland (09:18)
Because the reason I'm glad isn't like Basil isn't a bad name, but I think Baz would probably not have suited me. maybe I would have, maybe there's like a nominative determination thing, where if I was called Baz, I would have become more of like a Baz type character.

Finn (09:36)
It's true. We'll never know.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (09:39)
Yeah, I knew by the way, when we got on a podcast together, it's just gonna go off in a weird off the rails. What are we here to talk about? I haven't even introduced you properly. And maybe it's actually better if you do that. And yeah, so let's let the listeners know a little bit about who you are and what you've been doing. And then we can get into why we're talking today.

Finn (09:45)
just off the rails immediately.

you

Yeah, sure. So I'm Finn, as we have determined, at least for the moment, but you can call me Archie. And for the purposes of this podcast, I am the founder of Both And, which is a brand designing for trans-bass and non-binary people. I am trans and could never find a quality in that fit. And figured that this is a problem that if I had it, probably other people.

had it and in kind of looking at the market and what was available, just saw really an opportunity to create a brand that first worked on a fit level, you know, really just the classic solve a problem 100x, innovate a product so that it actually solves a problem. So we created the first fit and sizing system for anyone who is assigned female at birth and wants a massive silhouette in clothing.

So analogies there are maternity wear or adaptive wear, you know, it's not rocket science or that different in fashion to create basically different proportions in clothing. But nobody had thought to do that or put the work in from a data perspective to do that for trans and non-binary people. So we did that. And then there's also just a lot of brand work around what I perceived and continue to perceive to be a gap in how we are sort of aesthetically or philosophically resonating with younger generations and their relationship to gender identity and presentation.

So that's what I've been building and there are other things that I do as well, but for the purposes of this call, I think that will be the main focus.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (11:44)
Yeah. And so, you know, a lot of our listeners are the founders of businesses that are relatively early stage. It sounds like in your case, you were personally, I suppose, a potential customer of the business. And at what point did it become a business? And what did the sort of lead up to that look like as you were kind of grappling with this problem?

Finn (12:13)
That's an interesting question. How do you define a business?

Phill Keaney-Bolland (12:16)
Well, without without getting I suppose, I suppose what I'm rather clumsily trying to get to is, you you personally felt like you had a need for this business to exist before you actually formalized it and created the company and started production. You know, did you

you were you doing this on a kind of small scale for yourself and friends and things like that? And did it did it build? was it a conscious decision where you said, No, I want to, you know, I want this to be a company. know, from the day we've kind of signed those papers, that's when I'm going to start actually executing on this and solving that problem.

Finn (12:55)
Yeah, interestingly, it was the latter. I don't have a background in fashion. I'm not somebody who was ever, you know, sewing my own clothing. I would occasionally get things tailored for me or whatever, but it was very much at the right kind of transition point in my life, looking for the next thing in this kind of cocoon of healing from top surgery. And it was also locked down. This is summer of 2020. So very much.

COVID times and the first phase was very research based. wasn't, you know, we hadn't raised outside capital. We weren't selling products. There was a good really year there where it was all around the research and the building of the community and the early prototyping of the products and samples and stuff. But I would still call that very much a business to me. It wasn't something that I did casually and then turned into a company. It was something that I kind of woke up, had an idea around.

started exploring and creatively built from that point forward.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (14:01)
And you always had the end goal in mind of it. It didn't start as a research project and then turn into a company that you were working for. It was always, right, I'm going to get this thing off the ground. Now I need to start off the community, start the research. It was very intentional, I suppose, is what I'm asking.

Finn (14:23)
Yes, but I do so I think everyone has kind of a different orientation towards time Some people are very past focus. Some people are very present. Some people are very future focused I would say I'm the kind of person who's pretty rooted and the moment right after now, you know, like I'm not super forward-facing and I kind of like I kind of have one foot in the present and then one foot in This after me for instance. So I think

Phill Keaney-Bolland (14:41)
You

Finn (14:52)
In building both and, it was never cleanly delineated to me of I'm just doing research now and now I'm going to, it was just sort of, just followed one step after another and followed it where it led and used my best judgment along the way. But it wasn't like there was some transition point where I was like, now I'm going to take it seriously. I like, I always took it seriously. I just, it asked different things of me at different points.

and the goals also shifted. I think early on the goals were more humble. mean, if I remember correctly, and this is also the difficulty is that like in retrospect, we really change our memories on this. But if I remember correctly at the beginning, if you had told me you're going to create a great fitting t-shirt that you and the half a dozen trans men, you know,

can wear and enjoy, I probably would have been like, great, that's a great outcome. Like I just want a t-shirt that fits. And then a year in, you know, if you told me you're going to create like a collection of t-shirts that a few thousand people are going to wear and maybe you'll be able to make a little money off of it, I would have been thrilled. then, know, and then it just kind of grows and grows. And you realize that the North Star is, well, I guess the North, that's the last thing I'll add. North Star is maybe not the right thing.

to say, shift it, because the North Star was more of a values-based thing that always guided me, which was just pretty open for interpretation, but I was always very motivated to just serve this community and advocate for this community in a way that I didn't see in the market. So what that could actually look like took a lot of different forms and the scale of it could take a lot of different forms. But yeah, I was quite motivated from the very beginning to be like, yeah, there's just, you know.

I am of this group of people that have been largely ignored by design and that's not great and it's not fair and it's also a business opportunity and I'm just going to do my best to solve for that.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (17:01)
Yeah. I love it when I talk to founders and they say things like that rather than, yeah, we just, you know, saw the market opportunity and we thought, you know, we can do this for a few years and then we can like flip it and get out of here and cash out. And you know, that, that's it. It's like, I think when you have that, that actual, skin in the game and you're like, okay, I know I'm solving a problem that actually matters to me. It gives you so much more resilience when things get, get tough to just kind of keep, you know, pushing through and keep going.

obviously, things will at some point will will get really tough. By the way, I what you said about you feel like you have one foot in the present and one foot in the future. When you said that I was about to just scream, yes, that is that is how I feel all the time. Especially and I think it's you know, it's been exacerbated by by running a business. Because you you

Finn (17:49)
Ha

Phill Keaney-Bolland (17:58)
obviously have to be thinking about, where are we going to be in the next couple months, years, and what are we moving towards, but also, you'd kind of anchored back into reality where you're like, okay, I need to, you know, actually make sure we're on track with all that kind of stuff. And I think that's a personality thing, but it kind of feels, I don't know, a bit like one of those science fiction films where like somebody's left half their brain in like 10 years time, they're still kind of present in both spaces.

So I thought that was really good.

Finn (18:29)
Yeah, it's a real tension in leadership, I think, that it's not as though you should have half your brain focused on right now and half focused on the future or even an analogy people lead of like zooming in and zooming out. There's like a messiness to the analogy that could equate to like you need to kind of balance between these competing factors. But I found it's actually that you need both of them in a pure sense. You need to be like 100 % capable of focusing.

on the present and 100 % capable of focusing on the future. And I mean, it's both and, like most things in life, it's a both and, that is a bit of a riddle and you you have to fit two 100 %s into one brain, which we all do to varying degrees of success.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (19:06)
Mm.

Yeah. You mentioned, you know, that you have certainly become a prominent figure within your community as a result of the work that you've been doing. What was the journey there? Did you start off with that level of prominence and that feeling that you wanted to be?

prominent figure or was that just something that came naturally over time as you as you built up the business?

Finn (19:49)
That's so funny. I've never thought of myself as a prominent figure. Just hearing that from you is sort of like, huh, that's funny. I mean, I guess on some level you're correct.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (19:57)
So when I said to...

When I said to my wife that I was speaking to you today, she was she was really excited because she was like, my god. You know, she she bought clothes from your website, and she knew who you were. And, you know, she hasn't had that reaction necessarily to me just having a conversation with Adam or there you go, some celebrity.

Finn (20:13)
Mm.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My, we were on the subway recently, my wife and I had walked down the, I'm also extremely on the observed. I'm very observant about, like psychological, emotional things and incredibly on observant about like sensory information and environments from me. And we're walking down the subway platform and my wife was like, my God. And I was like, what? said, did you see that person? I was like, no, what happened? And she was like,

It was like this like baby queer who did like the biggest double take I've ever seen in the world. Like they saw you and then they just like fully turned around to look at it. And I just like completely missed it. So that's a long, I guess actually in a way maybe my answer to you is my side stepping your question is an answer in of itself. I was certainly not prominent in this community before but then I think I knew three or four trans people.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (20:58)
You

Finn (21:19)
And that's where I started is like literally interviewed the few trans people I knew. I was not on social media before both end at all. And I'm still not really on social media. I technically have a personal account, but I don't really use it very much. And I'm not even really on the both end socials that much. It has been a constant tension throughout the years of most of my investors and advisors.

really want me to be like really the face of the brand and like all over social media and like constantly on TikTok kind of thing. And I really have no desire or will to do that. It's kind of a running joke in the team that I'm just like very technologically inept and like never know what's trending or anything like that. And so that's almost become kind of like my character on social media is like, let's kind of just like laugh at Finn as like the well-intentioned verbose.

founder who doesn't understand how social media works. I'm very comfortable with podcasts and panels and talks and generally, you all of that I've done quite a bit and I'm very happy doing and very comfortable doing, but those are, these are spaces I see as conversations, whereas social media, just like inherently see as an argument, not a conversation. And I'm just not very interested in it. So I guess I would, yeah, it's somewhat, it's somewhat complicated. I think I have a complicated role in relationship.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (22:17)
Hmm.

Finn (22:44)
to the community, think people who have the attention span to actually listen to what I have to say, I think can feel very advocated for and feel a kinship with me and appreciate my transparency and appreciate how hard I've worked on this. There's also people in the community who really don't like me. There are multiple people who've tried to cancel me over time. There was one really interesting phenomenon early on on Twitter, not on Twitter, but I heard about this through someone else where like,

there were some people who were trying to claim that I was like fake trans and was like just trying to like profit off the trans community, which is a really interesting one. That was sort of like a, I guess like compliment if you're trying to pass was sort of like, guess people just thought I was a cis man impersonating a trans man because everyone knows there's just so much money to be made in the trans community. So, you know, that's another, that's another example of like the internet. It just like loves to be angry. And sadly, and this is the

the last point I'll make. And this is not limited to me. Many of the trans people I know who are more public figures and have a sort of thumb prescribed power to them on social media often become kind of like receptacles for the collective anger and hurt of this community that feels very un-listened to. And there's a lot of people who, yeah, they're really angry and they're really hurt and they don't feel listened to. And they can take it out on the people in the community who

are perceived to have a bit more power. And I've definitely been on the receiving end of that, which is really sad and really frustrating when you feel like you're putting all of your energy into supporting and advocating for a group of people and then they try and attack you. You're like, why, you know, why do this? But, know, then you think about how for every one of those messages, you're getting hundreds of messages of support and you keep going. But yeah, there's a, there's, it's a complicated.

I think social media and personas and being recognized or not, it's complicated for everyone and I would say I think it's particularly complicated in this community.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (24:51)
sort of like I've recently become a lot more active on social media, I've posted a lot of videos and things and I was like, I don't want to put myself out there, do I want to deal with the hassle of that?

like the hassle that I have to deal with is a infinitesimally small fraction as just like some white guy who's like, yeah, here's some stuff about business that I'm posting on LinkedIn. Like there's just a whole series of things that I just, you know, I'm privileged enough to not have to worry about, right? But do you feel from a business perspective that

it was important that you were so you know and were and are so visible. I mean I the first time I ever went on the website I think you personally greeted me in the form of a little video. You know do you think back on that and think yeah it was the right decision for me to do that it had a meaningful impact on the business it wouldn't have been possible to do what we did if I hadn't taken that step into the spotlight.

Finn (25:57)
don't know the answer to that. And again, it's interesting when you say that, that kind of visibility really never bothers me. It's really just the culture of TikToks and Reels and the founders who essentially like creator brands. I didn't want to create a creator brand. I'm very happy to be like a very visible founder.

who is like vulnerable in speaking about the process of what we're doing and the difficulties and the challenges. Like none of that bothers me in terms of vulnerability. I think I just am somewhat allergic to kind of the mechanisms of creator economy and consumerism and how that works and really didn't want to

Phill Keaney-Bolland (26:45)
Me too, me too. I sort of do feel like it's become a necessary part of the type of business that I'm working in. And partly, I think because, you know, what we do is very kind of dependent on networking and that has become more of a digital thing since COVID than it was when, you know, we would just...

take people to the pub or for coffee or for dinner or things like that. So yeah, it is. It is a difficult thing to put yourself out there, I guess, I guess for anyone. But I was curious, actually, you know, if we go, you know, from your sort of personal brand, to the actual brand of both &, tell me a little bit about that. And how did that fit in with the

the research that you were doing in the early days.

Finn (27:45)
I think when I was healing from top surgery and imagining the light at the end of the tunnel, kind of emerging from the healing and emerging from lockdown, and that first visual for me was like, I'm going to be to go swim topless in a public pool and that's going to be amazing. But like, my swimming trunks have never fit me. But like, surely someone will have solved for this by now. And then they hadn't. And the more I got into looking at what was available,

there were just a number of things that were really missing for me. And one was product that had actually really been innovated to fit my body rather than, you know, the main things that I saw on the market were either just sort of merge with the pride flag on it, which is sort of tantamount that the analogy I always use is like, it's like giving a pregnant woman a regular t-shirt that says I'm pregnant on it. Like you're not trying to signify identity. You just like need a shirt that fits a different body shape.

Or there's sort of the movement towards like really oversized baggy clothing and sort of unisex or agender or non-binary and this, you know, pretty lazy claim from a product perspective that it's for everybody when it's like, well, yeah, if you make anything baggy enough, like technically anybody can fit into it. But that's not like real product innovation in my mind. And it is somewhat of a trend, know, baggy clothing is very in right now. And so some people like that and, but you know, that's a market in and of itself.

But my hypothesis is you have a not insignificant number of people who are probably choosing that not because they actually like it stylistically, but because it is the least dysphoric experience. And what they would prefer is clothing that actually just fits their body proportions well. So there was the product side. And then there was the fact that sort of aesthetically or from a brand perspective, of the brands that were out there and that claimed to be designing for this community, for lack of a better word, like they just, weren't cool. There was nothing sort of like,

aspirational or cool about them. And I find, I found that really puzzling because the queer community is so often kind of on the front edge culturally and like we're trendsetters and like we are inventing things and we're deeply creative often out of necessity because like the systems that currently exist aren't built for us. So we have to be creators. So the fact that there was this kind of backward facing or anachronistic, it's not anachronistic. There was just a way in which

the queer brands on the market felt very antiquated to me, like really relying on this kind of pride aesthetic. I often go off on the rants about pride as a concept. think it's a long conversation, but in a way, pride in a way presupposes shame. Like it's a reactive feeling in some ways. And I think with younger generations, it doesn't.

resonate philosophically as much. think that there's the sense that this is just the new normal. Why are we making such a big deal about this? Obviously, I'm not binary. This is not something I need to go march about. It's just who I am, and it's just a part of the fabric of the world. And so I felt that there was a brand that needed to really aesthetically and philosophically represent this different worldview.

which I think of as the both and world view is moving away from these kind of false binaries to this, to, to multiplicity really, to both and this. And so I wanted to encapsulate all of that to the best of my ability. And I was also very limited from a resource perspective. You know, I wasn't, I didn't have a big VC check from the start.

So I really, like I pulled favors from the people I knew. I had a good friend growing up in the UK actually, who's a really talented photographer. And so I brought her in, really it's kind of like an art director and she really set the initial tone of the brand in terms of the types of models we were shooting and the vibe of those photos and everything. It's interesting, we're like a basics brand, but London feels very present in the brand because she was shooting every, they're all UK models essentially.

So there was kind of interesting undertones there. And then I had another friend who's very accomplished in graphic design who created the logo and the typography and the initial color palette and all of that. And so I really liked both of those elements. It's not that I wouldn't have chosen them, but I was also somewhat at the whims of the visual geniuses I knew in my orbit who I could pull favors from. And so it's sort of like, I have this general concept.

let me pull all the favors I can to put this initial brand identity together. And it's somewhat evolved over time. We've done a bit of a rebrand, but that, that core genetic structure is still very much in place to this day. And, and I think encapsulates pretty well what I wanted to do from this more, philosophical perspective.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (32:38)
And so you were quite heavily involved in the creation of that, not you personally sitting at a MacBook doing the design of things or taking the photographs. What was it that you wanted to try and get across in your brand strategy and the underlying thinking behind those things? And how did you come up with that idea?

Finn (33:03)
I think you might need to ask that question again, because I could go in a lot of different directions, but I want to be sure I'm answering specifically the question you most want me to ask. The answer.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (33:13)
You know, as I was asking, I thought, I bet, you know, if you were a proper interviewer, you probably wouldn't just ask two questions in one go either. probably not how it's how it's done in the in the big leagues. But yeah, so, you know, we obviously, as a business, we do a lot of brand projects. before we start thinking about aesthetics, we get into who are the people that we're

trying to, who's our target audience for this thing? And what do we want them to feel when they interact with our brand that we're creating? could be could be for a security product could be, you know, could be a fashion brand, all of those kinds of things. There's a there's a there's a sort of core to that brand that is strategic, emotional, all of those kinds of things. And then

aesthetics are all derived from that so that you know that there are all these sort of subtle cues that help to bring that and realize that that feeling to life. What I'm really curious in I suppose is for you what was the core of your brand and what did you want to convey to your target audience?

Finn (34:28)
I mentioned this when we first met and talked, but when I'm really forced to sum up how I want Bothand to feel as a brand, and I think I always felt this way, but I discovered the language for it a couple years in, I would describe Bothand as the cool friend of your older sibling. So the person who's like around the house and is like friendly to you and includes you in conversations and you feel like really excited that they're paying attention to you.

And there's also like, there's that edge to them having the self assurance and the self realization of being older and like march into their own drum beat and not being like lost in the sauce of becoming. You know, we always ascribe that to people like in those like kind of roles we admire. Of course, we're always all lost in the sauce of becoming, but like from a perspective, there's something very attractive about

that role that kind of creates the promise that you can get to a place where everything that feels so complicated and messy will be resolved. And so I wanted both them to strike that balance of being simultaneously inclusive and obviously welcoming. I'm not trying to do some like austere, I'm cooler than you, you know, like luxury fashion brand at all. You know, definitely this community needs to feel

loved and seen and reflected and supported. I just didn't think it should come in the form of like a bunch of people like jumping on a beach with a pride flag behind them as inclusivity. was like, can have that inclusivity and the like, come like sit at the table with me, like be with me in conversation. And you can also have this air of authority and self-realization and confidence that I think every trans person so desperately wants. It's like we want...

Phill Keaney-Bolland (36:08)
Yeah.

Finn (36:25)
we want to feel fully realized. want to feel fully seen for who we are. And we want that to be cool and like sexy. And you know, we did this boys, boys, boys campaign with Grace Francis from, from long duty, another London connection. That was really cool where we basically like reshot the 90s style Calvin Klein ads with Mark Wahlberg with trans mask bottles. And they were just like in denim and they were topless. And we did this global campaign around it and everything.

and we launched on Trans Day of Visibility. we got, you know, looking at the photos, you can't even really tell that the models are trans. Like if you like really stopped and like stared at the posters, you might see like top surgery scars, but somewhat by accident, all of these models were like very tattooed you can't like actually, like you could easily just like that, like cis men. And we got so many messages from the community in terms of the impact.

of that campaign and a lot of it centered around this like, this is the kind of like empowering imagery I so wished I had growing up of like growing up, you know, in the 90s or 2000s, you just have this like incredibly binary world of men and women. And if you were a trans mass person somewhere in between, was like, just like, don't fit anywhere. And I feel like not sexy and not cool and just like lost and lost in myself between the two and to just like,

then suddenly be like, bam, here's just like, the phrase I gave Grace to ground this campaign, I said somewhat facetiously, but not that facetiously. was like, trans masculinity is the new masculinity, right? Like we're in this crisis of masculinity, especially in America. And part of the reason I think people are so threatened by trans men is like, here we come along and we are kind of like picking and choosing maleness and what we want to.

It's like a curated maleness. It's like, here's what we've decided should hold and carry forward. And I want to embody, and this is my definition of maleness. And I'm going to like get away with the pit that I, or do away with the pit that I don't want. So that level of agency and articulation, but also like hyper masculinity as this kind of sex object is not, it's somewhat been done with trans women, but it hasn't really been done with trans men yet.

So, again, very long-winded. You haven't interrupted me yet. We had a hand signal for you to interrupt me when I go off the rails, and I think I've definitely gone off the rails this time. I don't even remember the initial question you asked me at this point.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (38:56)
Hang it. Hang it. Hang it.

I'm hanging on every word. I was struck listening to that, but it would be very difficult to get to reach that level of understanding of your target audience. you obviously are literally walking in their shoes all the time. So you've got that depth. But I really loved your articulation of the

brand is feeling like that, you know, you're that cool friend of your older sibling, because what you could have said to me is, yeah, we want it to be reassuring and aspirational, which, know, probably two words that in this brand consultancy space, might put up on a slide and say, but there's something sort of very, very specific and very easy to comprehend and feel about about the way that you articulated it as, as this sort of person in in your life who

know, you could you could look at and go, yeah, okay, they're like, a couple years older than me, they kind of figured things out a bit more than me. It's aspiration or sense of like, right, you know, I want to be on the same. I've realized, by the way, that it's now very difficult for me to just have a normal human conversation without saying words like trajectory and things like that, just jargon stuff. But you know, my point really is that you

instinctively seem to have a the brain of a designer. And I thought this last time when we when we first met. And as I understand it, that that is something that is instinctive. It's not something that you've, you know, studied or practiced prior to going into starting both &. Is that right?

Finn (40:33)
Mm.

So this is another moment, it's at the prominent moment when you call me a designer, I'm like, interesting, I don't think of myself as a designer. And this is making me sound like very self-deprecating. I'm not a self-deprecating person, I am quite a confident person. I don't think I identify as a designer, think I, but that makes me question the distinction between what I do identify with and like what truly defines a designer. Like I think I have incredibly high,

EQ and an instinct for people and for language and I'm incredibly good at synthesizing.

hard ideas and vast quantities of information into...

understandable and like flexible ways of explanation.

I think I'm really good at surrounding myself with designers.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (41:39)
I think, I think what you have said there about EQ and empathy and, you know, being able to take complex things and simplify them down into whether it's something usable or something understandable is, is a lot of what design is.

So to give you some context on why I find this specific, very granular thing so interesting. At the time when you and I first met, we were just coming off the back of doing a retail, an e-commerce project. And it was a clothing apparel website. And in the course of

designing that website, we, looked at information architecture. For those listeners who don't have a design dictionary in front of them, essentially, what we're talking about is where do all the things on your website go? What pages do they go on? What sections do they go on? How do you make them easy for people to find? So if you think about clothing, and maybe it's best just to use the example of an actual in-person shopping.

experience. You walk into the shop, and let's say it's, you know, it's got multiple floors, you might find that you've got a big G on the sign and G says, women's wear, one says kids, two says men's wear, you're instantly walking into the store and you're going right, I've now divided all of the possible products that I could buy into three categories. And then you, you know, might then look at

Okay. In the menswear department, there's a sports section and in the sports section, there's a golf section and then there's a shoes section. And you work your way down through all these categories until eventually you're like, okay, great. I found my golf shoes. So I know why I picked golf. I don't play golf. I don't own any golf shoes. But you get the point. The other thing you can do is you can walk up to an assistant and say, hi, I'm looking for golf shoes. Can you tell me where they are? And, those two things are basically replicated on

websites. So if you go on ASOS or wherever you go into their sort of top navigation, you can usually hover over typically, it will be men, women, and then there's a drop down and you can see all the sort of subcategories or you can click search. Search is sort of broadly the equivalent of going up to a shop assistant and saying, can you tell me where the thing is? And

When we were designing the site that we were working on, we really tried to pull apart the issue of whether having menswear and womenswear made any sense for a number of reasons. Firstly, is it important that clothes are gendered? secondly, in this specific case, we were talking about sort of running gear, did it make sense there? Is the...

You know, there's all sorts of cultural things, you know, where they sort of have to have times fundamentally changed and people identify in a different way. So actually, it's not quite as logical as it used to be to just say, pick one of those things when there's other things. And the challenge is, if you have 100 things, you need to start whittling that down based off something, some some categorization to say, all right, I've got 100 things, I'm trying to get to one.

How do I knock out the most amount of things that I don't want to buy as possible in order to get to the one thing that I do want to buy? this is, you I'm getting to a point, don't worry. Obviously, if you're then like you're creating a non gendered clothing product, you don't have the luxury of taking the

slightly lazy route of saying, right, just pick either men's or women's and you eradicate 50 % of the things in our collection and you get yourself down to the thing that you do want. So that is a really interesting design problem. And I'm really interested in how you thought about that and what you did to try and crack that and find something that worked.

Finn (45:51)
You're opening a real can of worms and something I have thought about for years now. So, and I certainly want to make it as interesting for your listeners as possible and also answers directly a question as you would like. So I guess why don't I start by trying to just set the table with a few directions we could go in and a few of the kind of key problems or findings. we found them and you can tell me which direction you'd to go in.

So one direction we could go in that I think is really important in the industry in general and a big distinction between both and and what other brands are doing or how they're responding to gender diversity is the distinction between, I think the word you used is agender. There's a lot of words that fit that general label of unisex, agender, even to a certain degree non-binary, I think is used in a sense, genderless clothing versus what both and is doing, which I always say the distinction is that

were not agender or unisex were gender specific. So gender actually matters very distinctly to what we're doing. Sex assigned at birth matters really distinctly to what we're doing, which has follow on issues for the community because of sensitivity is around how things are talked about. mean, an example of this is that we have been very selective in our use, but do use the word AFAB, which is assigned female at birth, because in many ways it is the most

potent descriptor from a design perspective of what we are creating or who we are creating for. Our clothing is not just for trans men. It's not just for non-binary, mask of center people. It is for anyone who is assigned female at birth and wants a masculine silhouette. And that is because of body shape. is because of statistical averages in proportions, a very specific design reasons that needs to be the case. Whereas,

But there's a tension there because a lot of people in the community object to that term. There are people in another potential or attempted to canceling with me on Twitter, there was somebody who got very angry about this and like went off on a rant about how we shouldn't even say we were designing clothing for trans men because to say you're designing for trans men is to say that like trans men aren't real men and we should just say we're designing for men. And my response to that is like, that's the stupidest pit I've ever heard. But I'm not gonna get into an argument on Twitter about this.

That's one route we could go on of like the tensions between ways people are talking about product and therefore how you would organize information around it. Another way or another entry point and a lot of the work that we've done is around the tension between fit and sizing as organizing principles. And because of the way that the fashion industry has evolved,

We by default approach things through a sizing first association. Association is probably the best way of putting it. And what we needed to do at both end was actually reverse that and make people come to things first through fit and secondarily through sizing and how we have achieved that or to what extent we have achieved that is a long discussion.

And then I think you could also just talk about kind of information architecture more broadly and our process of building the website and the way that we built it. didn't have our current website for the first two and a bit years. We didn't really have any money and we just doing out of the box Shopify templates. And so there were the constraints of like, if you're working within just what you can do, what do you do? And then once you have a bit of cash and you can do, you know, these design sprints with the community and really think through and do research about.

the feedback you're getting and what would make people feel most seen in an e-commerce experience and what are the tools they actually want versus the ones you might think they would want or are claimed as best practice. What did we find there? And then how did that translate to the website as it currently exists? So I will pause there and you can tell me which direction you'd like to go in.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (49:57)
Can we please talk about all of those things, please, because I'm really interested in all of them. And maybe we start with the first one, because I think what you're talking about in sort of design languages and information architecture is about labeling. And labeling is hard enough by itself, because you have to actually figure out, if you think about you take all this information, take all these products, what do you

Finn (50:00)
No.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (50:25)
of call them sometimes that's easy you you've built its shoes and sometimes it's hard because you have a bunch of stuff that you know maybe it doesn't it doesn't have an obvious well understood universal label that is used for it so it's hard on that level in most cases i will say that you know as i was just trying to explain like to lead us into this conversation i'm very conscious of the the language

that you use to talk about this. As you said, it has also got the potential to stir up an emotional reaction. And, you know, it's not necessarily just about saying the wrong thing, different people ascribe different meanings to different terms and...

So as well as having that problem of do people understand what's within the category that you've labeled, you then have another problem, which is you might label a category in a way that then makes people feel in general put off by the brand and upset or hurt and all of those kind of things. it feels in terms of

Finn (51:38)
And the two can unfortunately inhabit the exact same space simultaneously is very interesting. There are certain terms you can use where people know exactly what you mean, but they'll be angry about it. So yeah, there's all sorts of implications. And language is such a moving target. I think it's one of the tensions I have with the trans community in general is that, and obviously not all of the trans community, but at times in certain ways in which the kind of movement exists is I think language.

is one of those things where like you can win all of the battles and lose the war. It's not that it's not important. Of course it's important. The fact that people use he, pronouns with me 99 % of the time, exponentially increases the quality of my life. And it would be death by a thousand paper cuts if they didn't. So it's not that it doesn't matter, but also if you put like full stock of your entire being is invested in language and the correct use of language.

You live in a very precarious position and I think there's a lot of kind of net negative impacts of that. that was something that, I mean, the shortest way of putting it is that you're never going to solve for that. Like you're never going to solve for language period. And I would say, especially within a community that is as quickly evolving as

the trans or gender nonconforming community. mean, probably even the word trans is, you know, like, you know, this might be an artifact where five years from now, half the words I'm using on this podcast, or somebody listened to it, is like, my God, what a asshole. Like, how was he just using those terms and throwing them around as though they were correct terms? And so it's a constantly moving target. Like, I even remember when I was in college, this was a decade ago, it was really revolutionary. I went to this very liberal college that a lot of professors would

us at the beginning of the course introduce ourselves by our name, our preferred pronoun, right? And like preferred was a marker of respect at the time. And it kind of acknowledged that there might be a different pronoun than the one that people would assume that you would prefer to be called by. And five years ago, I remember, in fact, in early research, I remember one of my first interviews, I said, are your preferred pronouns? And this person really bristled and they're like, they're not my preferred pronouns.

They're my pronouns. They're the pronouns I use. And so, you know, like these things, change so, so, so quickly. I guess I would say that the great learning for me around language with both & is twofold. when it comes to design, I think you have to err.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (54:00)
Hmm.

Finn (54:15)
more on the side of specificity at the risk of potentially, making a few people bristle than on the side of pleasing everybody. And I think that's true for brands too. You know, like when, when a brand says that they're for everyone, I'm always like, well, then you're for no one. Like there, there has to be a distinction. There has to be an offset. There has to be a reason why you feel a kinship with any particular thing. And, and sometimes that's around aesthetics. Sometimes that's around products. Sometimes that's

around the founder story, there could be all sorts of different reasons for that line to be drawn, but you do need to delineate who you are and what you do and why that matters. so language is a part of that. And in an effort to be like fully inclusive, I think you can kind of like miss the point some of the time in design. So I always aired more on the side of let's be specific.

let's obviously constantly have our finger on the pulse of the internet and how people are responding to that and feedback that we get from people and also be really transparent and open of like, okay, you hate the term AFAB. What is a good alternative that would have the same meaning and see what people say and see if you can evolve it and change it. And then also learning like where there are better or worse places to put different kinds of language. Also the reality of being like a D to C business.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (55:22)
Hmm.

Finn (55:36)
there's really different rules applying to the website when, lack of a better word, you're like deeper down a funnel with a customer than their first ad they come across on Facebook or in an email that you send out. They're even further down the funnel. so, you know, awareness at all the different levels of how you can be consistent in language and also aware that you'll have

Phill Keaney-Bolland (55:52)
Yeah.

Finn (56:04)
varying degrees of tolerance or interest or engagement in all of these different spaces.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (56:09)
like if you listen to that back, you'll start to definitely think, yeah, that sounds like a designer speaking. I suppose the two things that stood out there is, you aren't gonna, you know, this isn't a, it's a moving target, basically. And, you know, part of that is just having a mindset that this is going to change, and you're gonna have to optimize and, you know, that's pretty much true of everything. But also just having like

Finn (56:17)
you

Phill Keaney-Bolland (56:36)
good relationships with your community so that you're able to actually get qualitative feedback on what you're doing and try and use that feedback to then iterate and improve while also not being afraid to not be for everyone. And I think in general terms, we always say if you're trying to design for everyone, you ultimately can end up designing for no one.

Tell me about how you organized around fit, please, because that's honestly dying to know about this.

Finn (57:03)
Yeah.

So I still have not fully solved this problem. But one of the things that I thought about a lot at the beginning, did a lot of research on, actually I have a dear friend who does work in UX and who was very helpful to me was the fact that if you kind of map a trans person's regular journey of trying to find clothing that...

works. It's different in person and online, but online, a pretty typical thing is like a person will go to a website, they will be funneled into like men's versus women's. If you're a trans man, you'll like probably go to the men's section. Say you're trying to find a teacher, you go to the product page and it's, you know, usually like a six foot two dude wearing a medium. And you can't really begin to map yourself onto that, you know, right? Like if we take me as an example, I'm five foot three.

So almost a foot shorter than this person. I have relatively wide shoulders. I have had top surgery, so I'm not thinking about a binder at this point, but I have wider hips than him and my torso's shorter. So I look at that and I go, well, our shoulders may be somewhat comparable. His shoulders are probably a bit bigger than me. I have a shorter torso, which would suggest I buy a smaller size. So maybe I should buy a smaller, an extra small, but my hips are wider than him.

And probably my biggest trigger point as a trans person is to feel that my hips are like being emphasized in a shirt or that it's clinging or bunching around my hips. So then I go, wow, pit, like a small is probably better in terms of length, but like the organizing principle, like the most important thing to me is for a shirt to not cling to my hips. So maybe I'm actually going to order a large. Sometimes people will order multiple sizes and, you know, none of them work and you send it back or one works sort of okay and you send it back.

But what I found in this is that in terms of sizing, most trans people don't really have any accurate understanding of what their size is because they're used to not ordering based on any kind of a holistic sense of sizing so much as what is the size that has triggered the least dysphoria. And the size that triggers the least dysphoria is a size that is really just based around like one proportional measurement and not the way that all of these proportions work together.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (59:14)
Right.

Finn (59:24)
So when I was first designing the Finnegan t-shirt, the way I put it, was like, it was like basically Frankenstein-ing men's shirts of different sizes together for what my body needed, which is that like I needed the length of a small, I needed the width of the shoulders of a medium, and I needed the width at the hips of a large. So the challenge there was if you change the fit pattern,

so that you're solving for the point of dysphoria. So say that both & t-shirts solve for the primary point of dysphoria, which is hips. You need to then train a customer to find a shirt that's really based around solving, like knowing that that point will be solved without the other ones being totally disproportionate to it.

that like now you can buy a shirt that will fit around your hips and also it won't be too long. And also it won't be too wide at the shoulders that will actually all fit together. But that requires you kind of rewriting your often on like subconscious association with size. then it was like, okay, so people are gonna arrive at our website, both and medium is entirely different than a cis-men's medium.

But the customer who arrives at both ends has a lifetime's experience of shopping and they have an association with what size they are that isn't going to map onto this. And so then one of the questions that I explored with my friend Pete is, so should we just have an entirely different sizing system so that people don't have those associations? And we played with these that like, maybe we'll do like numbers of dots. So it'll be like little constellations or like shapes and they're like, it's not going to map on to the extra small to Forex methodology.

But then what we found in doing that and like doing a bunch of user interviews is people conceptually like that idea because there's a lot of baggage attached to current sizing, but they would always try and translate it back into frame of reference of what they knew. So we would like show them the dot system and they'd be like, cool. is that a medium? And so what we kind of figured out through all that is like, well, it would be nice, but ultimately we're just creating more work for people. Ultimately they're going, no matter what they're going to try.

and translate a new system back to the framework they already know. So we threw out that model of like, let's entirely like reinvent everything so people come fresh. And then we really worked for the last few years of like, okay, if we still need to use the same language around sizing, how can we train users to think through this fit first framework and figure out their fit at both ends and have trust as a consumer going through that process that,

once they know that the fit has solved for the thing they're used to being the biggest problem, it's going to work on the rest of their body. And so their fit in both and is most likely going to be a different size than the size they're used to shopping in cisgender fashion.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:02:13)
like you're just peeling away layers and layers of stuff and then finding more and more deeper problems. I suppose, you know, people, it's interesting, I guess, people have a schema, don't they? They're like, okay, media means the thing that I can recognize and get into. How did you train people to rethink something that must be just ingrained in people to a massive extent?

Finn (1:02:38)
Well, then you need to learn on the fact that people don't like to read and no one has any attention span. So then it really became a question of like, what are all the different forms of information we could give people to help them in this process? And I would say, I don't think we fully solved for this, but I do think we've gotten this close to solving for it as possible. Like a very early, like V1 of how we got people to understand their fit. was I literally just got on zoom calls with our early customers.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:02:41)
Yep. Yep.

Finn (1:03:08)
Like they, if people come to the website and be like, if you don't know your size, email me. And they would email me and we would like literally get on the zoom call and I would like stand up and like try on shirts and explain it to them. And they would tell me about their past experience. And I was like, literally just like a translator for them. was like, okay, in both ends you, would be a medium. Finn doesn't scale.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:03:28)
Like a pilot. Yeah, a non scalable pilot scheme is often the best way to go and test whether you're delivering something that people actually want and delivering it the right way as well. So yeah, very cool.

Finn (1:03:46)
Yeah. So I learned a lot in that and it also created a very like evangelist loyal community at the start. So that was great. But as we grew, was obviously like, we can't do, we can't scale that. and so we did a number of like design sprints with the community to try and understand what are the things that people would ideally enjoy the most,

basically we have landed on in true both & fashion, a very both & way of doing things, which is that we give people like a variety of different ways and a variety of, levels of engagement required to try and figure it out.

So, you know, probably the most traditional of which is that we just have a regular size guide. One of the simplest things, but that we've gotten a lot of positive feedback on is that all of our model photos have like hard written on top onto the website. It has the model's height. It has whether they're binding or not, or if they're wearing like a sports bra or if they've had top surgery and what both and size they're wearing.

Probably the biggest piece of feedback we got is that what people really want is to feel actually reflected in the e-commerce experience and that they kind of have doppelgangers or people that they can like map their own experience onto.

So yeah, so you can begin to sort of understand mapping yourself onto the experience.

We have the nesting tool story videos that allows people to see all of these different comparisons or ask different questions about what's different in our fit and sizing system. We have a whole fit and sizing page with all sorts of different information. We do have a quiz people can do. You can still email hello, Bothandapparel.com for like personalized advice. So we basically just started layering on more and more options for people as people requested certain features and

I don't think, I think I came to a place of accepting that we're never going to solve for it fully. but that we've done all things considered a hell of a good job. mean, our blended return and exchange rate, has historically been between like 10 to 12%. And the average for apparel companies is 30 % plus. So even though we have an entirely different fit system, and even though people are coming to our website and trying things for the first time all the time,

that shows that the information we're providing people is doing a pretty good job of making sure that when they order the first time, they're actually getting the correct sizing.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:06:06)
Mm. They're all just so awesome because you've had to unpick the established design patterns behind how e-commerce sites work. They're very basic level, sizing, navigation, all the rest of those kinds of things. The way that you went about it leaves me in no doubt. It's very design.

led approach. then you've, and then you even mentioned you've got metrics that you're tracking that, you you can look at kind of industry benchmarks and how you're tracking against them. It's like, really just sounds awesome. I'm curious about the actual design sprints that you said you run. So all of these innovations around sizing and fit, they were done in tandem with the community. Is that right?

Finn (1:06:54)
Yeah, and not always in sprints. sometimes I was doing IG lives. And then we also did, I don't know if you know the organization, UX for Change. And they were sort of like, we want to work with you on some kind of a project. And I was like, I'm thinking through this kind of custom website build. Maybe we can work together on that.

And so I worked with them and we hosted a number of these design sprints with the community that were pretty in depth and had a number of people come out for. So, then, but you know, even when we did that, like we didn't have toll start videos that for, know, like things just have kind of constantly evolved over time.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:07:28)
And when you say design sprints, are we talking about the Google design sprints as in kind of workshops with people and creating prototypes and things like that? Amazing. Amazing.

Finn (1:07:37)
Yeah, less prototyping, more kind of ideating, you know, throwing a lot of post-it notes of wild ideas out there coming together and discussing them, putting forward certain proposals to community members to kind of get their immediate gut reaction, you know, like the AR-VR example, like would you, would you enjoy that? And this kind of like immediate consensus of like, no, absolutely not. so stuff like that. then, but like I said at the beginning,

I think I'm pretty good. If this does mean I'm a designer, I'm pretty good at taking all that information and synthesizing and being like, okay, I got all these thousands and thousands of points of data. And what I'm really hearing is this profound human need to feel represented or reflected in the e-commerce journey. And what are all the ways that we can do that and continue building on that to make more and more people feel that when they arrive at both &

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:08:35)
And it strikes me that you've now, I think this is hopefully not a controversial statement, but it sounds like you have the biggest body of research around this specific area in e-commerce that I'm, well, certainly that I'm aware of, but potentially anywhere in the world, right? So that then has the.

Finn (1:08:57)
I think I do, yeah, and some people keep saying this is such a monetary value and I'm just like, I've never really thought about it in that way, but yes, I am kind of a walking treasure trove of insights about this community.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:09:10)
Yeah, and so, and well, so there's the there's the potential of that within the community, which is, you know, obviously huge and hugely exciting. And a lot of what you spoke about in terms of, you know, people having specific triggering things about their bodies and the fit of clothes and, you know, that that that is, I think, probably quite

common across the whole spectrum of different people. I do also think that, you know, things are moving very, very quickly. And the way that people think about buying clothes is changing and will continue to change really, really rapidly. You've got all this research.

What is your plan? What are you gonna do with it next? What does the future look like?

Finn (1:10:02)
I really don't know. As we were discussing at the beginning, despite all of our pretty extraordinary progress and metrics really in the 99th percentile, we have not been able to get the institutional investment we need to keep growing.

In that process, one of the things that I've done is, I don't know if you saw this, but I open sourced all of our tech packs, made them all available on the website and posted about this on social media and stuff, which is very well.

received, we'd had a lot of community requests, you know, people were really devastated when they were saying, you know, we're closing down being like, my God, like, please, like, release the patterns. So we did that partially for the community, partially, honestly, as like a call to action to the industry of like, you claim you want to serve this consumer base. Here you go. Here's all the IP I've spent years creating. Like if you actually want to do it, do it. It's right here. and in terms of like my own value or

place in this, there's a way for me to impact the industry more broadly. I don't really know. I guess I feel whether it's in both and or in another form or pass the baton along. In many ways, I feel like I've done what felt like my true duty, which is to prove that this is a real problem, that there's a real need for this, that this community deserves to be designed for.

I'm quite hopeful and optimistic that...

that will continue on in some form or another, whether it's both-hand or something else. It's kind of like an inevitably foregone conclusion to me that the point has been proven now, and the question is what shape it will take in the world. I think that there's, in a way, it would be a shame to not utilize all of the knowledge that I have gathered if I can be fully utilized in this process.

But yeah, it remains to be seen.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:11:57)
Very cool. I did see the open source, the open sourcing thing. And I thought that's just a wonderfully, it's one of the altruistic thing, but you know, it really, it really does make real the things that we spoke about at the start of this conversation about, there's a real mission and a real drive to solve, you know, a real challenge that a lot of people have there. I really hope that, you know, that

that being out there, people really do make use of it. I just think it's one of the most incredible design projects that I've heard about recently. I think it's very inspiring, actually, what I think you've been able to achieve there.

Final thing, I suppose you've been on this incredible journey over the past few years. To the other founders sitting, listening to this now, have you sort gleaned any words of wisdom, any things that you would do differently, or what would you like to sort of pass on to people who are setting off on that journey themselves?

Finn (1:13:03)
One piece of advice I always give people, especially when they're like college students, you're reaching out to me, is to make friends with really diverse people, both because it will just enrich your life. But when I started Both& I didn't have the capital, I didn't have the background in the industry, didn't have a background in business, but I had like this really like rich in skill and passion network of people.

had a friend who did finance. I had a friend who did fashion. I had a friend who did graphic design. I had a friend who did photography. And because I had really nurtured this community, I was able to get a bunch of people really inspired and have them put effort into creating this thing that if I just had to go out and pay market rates for people, I never would have been able to do. And so because the early stage of business building often is so bootstrappy, especially if you're an underrepresented founder and especially in a market like this,

Yeah, I think it's like one of those kind of life hacks you can do and you shouldn't do it with the aim of like, I'm gonna intentionally go make like a computer science friend because ten years from now I'm gonna like build an app and I'll need him kind of thing. But just like as a lifestyle, it's like be curious about people. Be curious about people who know really different things than you and like nurture that community, nurture those relationships because creating things really does take a village and it can be such an incredibly empowering thing to have that.

And then I would say, you know, this is maybe the philosopher in me, but you have to simultaneously be really comfortable with not knowing what you don't know and accepting that and having humility in the face of that. And also needing to make decisions every day and trusting your intuition and your judgment and making these like incremental leaps into the unknown. So,

I guess at the outset, as much as you can skip the imposter syndrome phase, as much as you can be like, no, that's just like what it is. Like you don't know what you don't know. You're going to uncomfortable all of the time. Like you're never going to feel like you figured it out. That's just like, that is the status quo. That is not a phase and there's nothing wrong with you for feeling that. Do your best for that. think part of it is a learning curve.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:15:16)
very good advice. Well, wait, I think that is probably about as much of your morning as we can monopolize. It's been really great chatting to you. And I'm really grateful that you've come and shared all that with us. So thank you so much. And yeah, let's hope both of us get shot of these colds over the weekend. Thank you. Thank you very much. If people want to

Finn (1:15:42)
course.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:15:42)
want to track you down on the internet and find you and follow you and things like that, what are the best places to reach you?

Finn (1:15:50)
Like I said, I'm not on the internet very well. Send me a letter. No, I'm kidding. I do, guess I technically, I have a LinkedIn, I'm Finnegan Shepherd. then Bothand is pretty much Bothand apparel across all socials and that's the website as well. But yeah, I will be posting updates about the kind of development next iterations, whatever will happen with Bothand over the coming months. So you can follow along.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:15:53)
me that.

Great, cool. Okay, and as of if you enjoyed this, please like and subscribe to your podcast and share it with all of your friends, please. That's all we've got time for this week. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next week. Goodbye.