Aman Advani pitches his clothing business as the best of two very different worlds.
“It is the cutting edge of technology meets the most approachable and human brand that you can get,” says the cofounder and CEO of Ministry of Supply.
The largely direct-to-consumer retailer, launched in 2012, specializes in performance work apparel for men and women. “We’re engineers, and we approach it from a fairly technical standpoint,” Advani tells me from his company’s hometown of Boston.
No kidding: Ministry of Supply makes dress shirts with the same materials that NASA invented to control astronauts’ body temperature during spaceflight.
But the founders also do something decidedly old-fashioned: make time to speak with the people who buy their products.
“I talk to five customers a day on email, and my partner, Gihan [Amarasiriwardena], video-chats with one customer a day,” Advani says. “So we both spend 15 to 30 minutes a day directly communicating with customers, which I think builds that trust well over time.”
Those conversations help people understand exactly who Ministry of Supply is and what it stands for, he adds. “God forbid, [if] anything goes wrong, they can get to us,” Advani says. “They know that we’re real humans who are kind.”
For Advani, it’s a crucial connection. “Our competitive edge is certainly always going to be within the clothing itself,” he says. “But that doesn’t matter at all if we’re unable to communicate that value to customers through our brand, but also through our direct communication.”
No machine can replicate the latter. “Part of its beauty is that it’s not repeatable,” Advani says. “We’ll cross that bridge if and when we need to, but for now, it is intentionally not yet scalable.”
Still, Advani wishes he could boost his own efforts. “If we can make more time and spare more time to do that—take that from a half-hour a day and five emails a day to 100 a day—this is the most valuable thing we can do.”
At first, talking to customers helped Ministry of Supply ensure that it wasn’t building solutions for problems that didn’t exist, Advani explains. “Over time, we figured out there was a second goal,” he says. “That human connection with the customer—to understand not just their problems but what their day looks like, what their home looks like, what their commute looks like, what their problems are at a really visceral or deeper level.”
The company makes its 20 employees part of the conversation too. “Probably twice a day, we’re posting on various…channels or forums for our team to be able to have that direct exposure to customers’ words,” Advani says. Those comments are unedited and sometimes critical, he notes. “We are showcasing exactly what people need to see and sharing that out.”
Ministry of Supply, which has a store in Boston and a shop-in-shop in nearby Cambridge’s Harvard Square, also sees physical retail as key to its humanity.
After shutting down its six stores during the pandemic, the company made a point of reopening in its hometown, Advani recalls. In his view, having a real storefront is as important as traditional trust tools like Trustpilot, Yelp, and Google. “I’m here. You can find me,” Advani says. “This isn’t an algorithm in someone’s basement.”
In a digital world, that still matters: “There’s several customers we know that have either…driven a couple hours to come see the store, or visited the store once and became a massive customer and advocate for life because of that experience.”
Any advice for other retailers who want to build trust? Nail the basics, Advani suggests. “There’s a lot of wonderful trust tools out there,” he says. “Public third-party reviews are a great one. Certainly, reviews on your own site help to do that. And let customers talk to each other instead of always getting in the way.”
Advani also recommends following his lead by chatting with those customers too. “Putting yourself out there personally feels scary, feels daunting, feels insurmountable,” he says. “But I would certainly encourage others to do the same.”
Spoken like someone with a good sense of human.
Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com
