Blank Label
What it Does: Sells custom clothes online
Founder: Fan Bi, 23
Website: blanklabel.com
Based: Boston
Revenue 2010: $450,000
Revenue 2011 (projected): $1 million
Fan Bi’s finance internship as a student at Babson College taught him one important lesson: The best-looking dress shirt is custom made. “But it’s also expensive,” Bi says, “so I thought: How can I make the luxury of custom affordable?” He took his last year off and used $35,000 he had saved from jobs in high school and college to launch Blank Label, an online custom men's dress shirt company, in 2009. Customers select fabrics, buttons, collar types, and stitching to design shirts on Blank Label's website. Their creations are stitched in Shanghai and shipped directly to customers for around $75—a fraction of the price charged for custom dress shirts at traditional retailers. Bi says the eight-employee business is profitable and he expects to break $1 million in revenue by the end of this year. To diversify, he plans to launch custom women's blouses this fall. —Sommer Saadi
Founder: Fan Bi, 23
Website: blanklabel.com
Based: Boston
Revenue 2010: $450,000
Revenue 2011 (projected): $1 million
Fan Bi’s finance internship as a student at Babson College taught him one important lesson: The best-looking dress shirt is custom made. “But it’s also expensive,” Bi says, “so I thought: How can I make the luxury of custom affordable?” He took his last year off and used $35,000 he had saved from jobs in high school and college to launch Blank Label, an online custom men's dress shirt company, in 2009. Customers select fabrics, buttons, collar types, and stitching to design shirts on Blank Label's website. Their creations are stitched in Shanghai and shipped directly to customers for around $75—a fraction of the price charged for custom dress shirts at traditional retailers. Bi says the eight-employee business is profitable and he expects to break $1 million in revenue by the end of this year. To diversify, he plans to launch custom women's blouses this fall. —Sommer Saadi
