[wsul]

Completely agree here. I've spent the last year and a half building Pistol Lake - we make men's shirts.

There are the few of us who want to spend the years it takes building manufacturing and operational expertise necessary to build an online-first direct-to-consumer company - and there are a huge number of things in our favor:

1. easier to build audience than ever before 2. costs overseas are changing and making domestic, short-run manufacturing more economical 3. allowing you to keep less inventory, and if you don't have a billion SKUs, turnover can be rapid

That said, it takes a long time to build the expertise and a long time to make a good product, period. Nothing will change that. It also takes a unique skillset to be able to be creative in the design of things, process driven to build scalable manufacturing and logistics, technical enough to manage an e-commerce platform and sophisticated customer acquisition/economics hacking, etc.

Ultimately, I think there will be hundreds of designers going online-first, direct-to-consumer, making incredible things, and we all benefit from it. Couldn't be more excited about this maker revolution.