Young Entrepreneur Interview with Peter Crawfurd and Michael Yang

This week I caught up with Peter Crawfurd, an inspirational entrepreneur who had an amazing story to tell!

Peter Crawfurd and Michael Yang are cofounders of http://www.ShirtsMyWay.com, a great website that lets you design your own dress shirts in detail. They’ve been featured on sites like Financial Times, NBC, Tech Crunch, Mashable, Fast Company and a whole lot more.

With their option of full customization such as designing the color of buttonholes to the color of the pocket, customers have the opportunity to get designs exactly according to the personal style they want. They also get shirts that fit them incredibly well because the shirts are tailor made after each persons dimensions. Give it a try: ShirtsMyWay.com.

Adam: You launched ShirtsMyWay.com only 5 months ago, and are now selling shirts worldwide. Tell us about your experiences with this, and how you’re managing your phenomenal success.

Peter: More specifically we actually launched in February. We have been seeing a lot of PR attention surrounding our platform. This has included postings on some of the largest websites on the internet. This has really helped us get the word out about our shirts. Since our launch we have not spent anything on marketing.
Adam: Like all the best ideas, it seems really simple, but it is in fact quite clever. How did you come up with it?

Peter: Well Michael Yang (my partner and cofounder) and I came up with it together. We had been travelling a lot and got shirts tailor made from many different countries. We wanted to bring this to a new level where you could actually design your own shirt and get an idea of what it would look like before buying it.Although the platform was extremely tough to build, we have managed to make a live preview of the shirt possible no matter what combination shirt you design. This shirt design model is actually made up of thousands of images which is required as there are over 7 trillion different possible shirt design combinations on the site.

Adam: Obviously, undertaking a venture of this magnitude takes a great deal of input. How did your partnership work in terms of accomplishing all the necessary tasks, from system development to marketing the product?

Peter: We started from scratch which involved finding producers and building the platform. Michael Yang is in charge of the technology front and has a great background in it. He has managed the progress well, but we did have a few bumps in the road underway. We are very persistent with what we do and that in combination with working hard is really what gets us some where. We actually worked about 1 year on it before launching it.

Adam: What lessons and skills have you brought to ShirtsMyWay.com from the earlier stages of your careers?

Peter: We have both started smaller business projects up in Denmark and India. This helped us get a feel for the entrepreneurial spirit and what is needed to get some where. Michael has had years of programming experience earlier with various projects as well.

Adam: Do you intend to stay focused on your current product range, or do you plan to expand the brand into other areas?

Peter: Our future plans do involve diversification, however we have not yet decided on what that could be. There are a lot of possibilities though.

Adam: You’ve achieved an incredible amount in a relatively short period, and at a young age. How do you manage your own time, and how important do you consider a work/life balance to be?

Peter: Honestly, working is pretty much our lives at this point. We have decided to dedicate ourselves to this 100%. If you ask our friends or families they would probably expect us to be sitting and working a Saturday evening (I’m writing this Friday night at 12.30 am). This is a true contrast to how I lived earlier however, as just two years ago I had a small business arranging parties.

We really want to get real traction before we can start to let go a bit.

Adam: How do you see the business developing over the next 2 years?

Peter: We have a lot of ambitions for our company and are looking to expand in all aspects. In 2 years we have hopefully multiplied our current size several times over.

Adam: There must have been challenging times throughout the whole process. How do you stay focused when the going gets tough?

Peter: It definitely gets tough. IT can get really complicated really quickly and that can get frustrating especially when things drag out. After all the more time that goes by the slower you get anywhere and the more money you spend. One thing we have really learned is that starting a company is a very emotional process and keeping each other motivated and on top of the game is important.

Adam: It’s remarkable that you’ve attained such success in the current economic climate. What do you think are the factors that made this happen?

Peter: I think generally it is the degree of work we have put into it. As I mentioned, we have been working constantly on this for over 1.5 years now.

Adam: Do you have any key advice or guidance you’d like to pass on to Young Entrepreneurs who want to emulate your success?

Peter: Keep your business concept really really simple. Although we kept saying this to ourselves, we still found ourselves losing a lot of time and effort because we complicated matters or concepts more than they needed to be. There will be enough other external factors to complicate matters for you.

Adam Toren

Adam Toren

Adam Toren is a serial entrepreneur, mentor, investor and co-founder of YoungEntrepreneur.com. He is co-author, with his brother Matthew, of Kidpreneurs and Small Business, BIG Vision: Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right (Wiley). He’s based in Phoenix, Ariz.