One of our portfolio companies, Bellalete, is lead by a passionate leader with a strong history with her customers, as a softball coach and collegiate player as well as a strong advocate for the sport. One of the challenges of running a small clothing business is the issues of managing inventory in a highly seasonal sport with a high percentage of business coming from league and team sales - in the off season, carrying a large amount of inventory doesn't make sense.
Compounding this is a customer problem - what to do about a customer base that outgrows your product every year, if not twice in one year around 14-15? At $60 a pant, even the most advanced pants in the game get expensive if you are getting to the end of the year. To make matters worse, as the pants are built out of the toughest 4-way technical fabric we can source, are in perfect shape as you put them in the bag of clothes you hope to hand down someday, if you can find someone that size. Savana thought hard about the problem and came up with an innovative solution that I think is a clever busines model - she is introducing Bellalete Double Play, a program where customers can send back gently-used pants that are untorn and without stains for a $15 credit agains their next purchase. Bellalete then has the pants inspected for quality, professionally cleaned and re-bagged. Each one is rated as "good, great or perfect" and priced for sale at a discount to the new pants. Under this model, players can send in their pants at end of season or when they outgrow them for credit against their next pair and Bellalete has year round inventory flow to keep the staff busy in the offseason. We also keep perfectly good pants out of the wastestream through reuse and reach more customers. I'm looking forward to seeing how this evolves as it gets promoted to customers; it's one of the more innovative things I've seen a clothing company do, but given how bulletproof her pants are, it makes perfect economic and environmental sense!
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