Manpacks

In 2010, we started a company that mailed underwear to people.

Well, underwear, socks, T-shirts, toiletries, and other things men tended to run out of but rarely enjoyed shopping for.

The idea was simple: instead of remembering to buy everyday essentials, you'd set up a subscription and they'd just show up when you needed them.

This was before subscription commerce became a category unto itself, and apparently the idea of receiving underwear in the mail was interesting enough to get us a rather unreasonable amount of attention.

Manpacks was covered by The New York Times, Inc., TechCrunch, The Boston Globe, Maxim, and others. We ended up speaking about the business at events in Canada, the US, and even Ireland.

It was one of my earliest experiences building a consumer product where the idea, the brand, and the distribution were almost inseparable.

I worked across product, design, development, and fundraising, helping build the experience and tell the story to early investors. We attracted venture backing and participated in the early startup accelerator ecosystem.

What sticks with me is how much of the company's initial growth came from having an idea people immediately understood and wanted to share.

We weren't selling revolutionary technology. We were making something ordinary unexpectedly interesting.

Sometimes a good product idea is as much about how you frame the problem as how you solve it.