JackThreads Offers E-Clothes for Guys and Bros

JackThreads Offers E-Clothes for Guys and Bros
Ben Lerer, the 34-year-old co-founder of the manly-man lifestyle site Thrillist, came along a little too late for the slacker clichés of the 1990s. It’s too bad, because there is enough dude-centric rambling to his back story to suggest an Owen Wilson movie.

Even though his father, Ken Lerer, is a media power broker (a founder of The Huffington Post and chairman of BuzzFeed), Ben’s wardrobe up until college was not exactly C-suite appropriate. “I was 20 years early to the athleisure trend,” he said jokingly. His abiding passion in life was not art or music but the New York Mets (he attends at least 40 games a year).
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Mr. Lerer graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a political science degree, but his first job out of school was being a gofer for the hotelier and night life impresario André Balazs. “I didn’t think about what having a job would be in college,” Mr. Lerer said.

Now, it seems, he has two of them: helping run the Thrillist empire, which, according to Mr. Lerer, has revenues of upward of $100 million; and, as of this week, bidding to become the official clothier of the brah class, with JackThreads.

On Oct. 1, the former flash-sale site, which for years catered to the surfer-skater crowd under the Thrillist umbrella, reinvented itself as a head-to-toe men’s wear line with industry behemoths like J. Crew squarely in its cross hairs.

The once-sweatsuit-clad prince of New York digital media may, at long last, be ready to assume the throne himself.

With tousled blondish hair, stubble and an easy smile, Mr. Lerer has the look of a someone who just got back from body-boarding. That laid-back image evaporates when the subject turns to business, which it invariably does.

Mr. Lerer is the kind of person for whom the term “tech evangelist” was invented. When he talks about start-ups, his green eyes widen, his adrenaline seems to surge. A routine question about site traffic might be resolved four minutes later with a breathless tangent on Series C financing.

“I don’t think I ever thought that I wouldn’t be an entrepreneur,” he said. “It didn’t feel like, ‘I’m so brave to start a company.’ It was, ‘Of course!’ ‘What’s a job?’ My dad’s never had a ‘job.’ ”

He means that figuratively. In addition to helping start two of the biggest digital media companies, Ken Lerer is also a former AOL Time Warner executive and a fund-raising rainmaker for the Democratic Party.

Ben, who attended the Dalton School in Manhattan during his teenage years, was faced with a choice: Compete with Dad or run from his shadow. By the time he was 23, he had chosen the former.

Photo

The JackThreads showroom in SoHo. Credit Ike Edeani for The New York Times
He conceived of Thrillist with a University of Pennsylvania friend, Adam Rich, who is now the site’s editor in chief. They reasoned that there were legions of young men out there who had graduated from reading Maxim but still hadn’t quite figured out how to be cosmopolitan grown-ups. They needed a Time Out magazine or a Zagat, of their own to tell them what to drink, eat and wear. What started as an email blast to 600 acquaintances grew into an institution.

Success whetted his appetite for more. At Lerer Ventures, the venture capital firm he founded with his father, he spearheaded early investments in start-up hits like Warby Parker and Everlane; he is now an equal partner in Lerer Hippeau Ventures, the latest iteration of the firm. In 2010, he made his move into fashion when Thrillist Media Group bought JackThreads, an advertiser on the site.

It was the heyday of flash-sale sites like Gilt. And JackThreads, using a similar strategy, took off, rising from about $1 million in annual sales to nearly $50 million within a few years, Mr. Lerer said. But by 2014, Mr. Lerer had tired of trafficking in remaindered merchandise.

To build a bona fide label, he hired Mark Walker, a veteran of the Gap, Levi’s and the flash site Rue La La, as president of commerce, and Tony Kretten, a former vice president of global design at the Gap, as creative director. The guiding principle, Mr. Lerer said, was clear: “Don’t sell anything that’s not awesome.”

“With traditional fashion, the men’s side is always sort of second fiddle to the women’s business,” Mr. Lerer said. “That opens up a really big opportunity for us: to create a safe place for guys to come to, their little secret.”

It’s an interesting, if debatable, notion: that affordably chic guy’s wear — “men’s wear” sounds too Seventh Avenue for the Thrillist set — is lacking on today’s fashion landscape. America would seem to need another label catering to post-hipster 30-something males as much as it needs another hype-swaddled Silicon Alley start-up. In addition, Mr. Lerer is not someone who will leave fashion mandarins quaking in their monk-strap oxfords. “I’m not a great dresser, I don’t have an awesome art collection, I don’t actually have great taste,” he said. “But I can identify people who do.”

But like the average Thrillist reader, Mr. Lerer has cleaned up his act as he has moved into his 30s. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Emily, and their 11-month-old son.

On a recent muggy afternoon, he visited the JackThreads showroom, two floors above the loft-style Thrillist headquarters on lower Broadway in SoHo, wearing a black JackThreads cashmere sweater with evident pride.

“Now that the brand has come to life, I wear the stuff,” he said. “I don’t need to go to Rag & Bone to buy a sweater that for me is, I wouldn’t say it’s indistinguishable — they have their little design flair, we have our little design flair — but this would cost $450 there. This costs $99 here.”

With the new collection (which in true web spirit will evolve throughout the year, as opposed to once a season in the manner of traditional brands), the guiding sensibility seems to be J. Crew on a Uniqlo budget.

Featuring 32 pieces, the collection leans on the staples like jeans ($60) and T-shirts ($18) but also features aspirational items like a camel topcoat ($229) and a slim-fit merino wool suit ($279).

It may seem more evolutionary than revolutionary, but that is the point. “The way guys shop, they’re category killers,” said Mr. Walker. “Seventy percent of their closet is core items: T-shirts, khakis, woven shirts.”

Unlike other new businesses, JackThreads has built-in advantages: namely, the more than 100,000 daily visitors to JackThreads.com, plus the 14 million monthly unique visitors to Thrillist, according to recent comScore and Google Analytics figures. And as an e-commerce site, it has no need to pay rent for retail spaces worldwide.

You might say that JackThreads, like its founder, was born to privilege. But it, too, will have to make it on its own merits, Mr. Lerer said.

He pointed to the sleeve of his sweater, which Mr. Kretten designed with elastic cuffs. “You can pull them up all day and every day and you don’t blow out your sleeves,” Mr. Lerer said. “It’s these little thoughtful details that are the difference between you buying something and wearing it twice,and buying it and wearing it 50 times.”

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