Style never dies: Luxury clothing maker J. Hilburn raises $4M

April 9, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

J. Hilburn, a company that sells custom men’s clothing, has raised a $4 million first round from Battery Ventures.

The Dallas, Tex. startup may seem like an odd investment for a tech-focused venture firm, and its luxury product line sounds like even more of a stretch given the economic climate. I would imagine that many folks are cutting back on their clothing expenses until the economy improves. And as for those who are still wealthy, do they really want to do their shopping online?

That being said, here’s why the investment isn’t crazy: J. Hilburn is actually using technology to create a smaller, more efficient supply chain. The company buys the fabric directly from Italy, then sells it directly to consumers, which means it can sell at a lower price. So if you want a custom dress shirt that doesn’t cost too much, J. Hilburn might be the way to go.

The company prices its shirts at $79, $99, and $149. Now, I’ve never bought a custom shirt before (what can I say, I’m just not that classy), but I’ve paid just as much money for non-customized dress clothes, so this sounds like a decent deal. The only drawback is you have to wait five weeks for the shirt.

You can buy clothing straight from the J. Hilburn site, and the company says it has more than 300 “personal style advisers” spread throughout the U.S. who take measurements, place orders and deliver shirts to its more than 7,500 customers. You can locate nearby J. Hilburn style advisers on the company’s web site.

The press release announcing the funding doesn’t include the size of the round, but VentureWire reported that it was $4 million, which Battery has confirmed. The venture firm previously provided the company’s seed round.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • swag
    $4MM for what should be a pretty pathetic volume?
  • John
    Assuming its 7,500 customers average $500 of orders per year. That's $3.75M sales per year.

    It's tiny, but that's still $3.75M more revenue than twitter, which has raised 10 gazillions dollars in funding, so far.
  • Well put, John.
  • Thanks for covering stories like this Anthony. I think too many people get caught up in the social media echo chamber and are constantly trying to peg the next Google e.g. the breathless coverage of Facebook and Twitter's every move. Not that these companies are undeserving of coverage, but from a market POV social networking is worth ~$1.5B in revenue/year. By comparison scrapbooking is worth about $3B and there are some interesting businesses in that market (Provocraft and Scrablog) Toys are worth $26B/year and Smith&Tinker will probably snatch a nice piece of that this year, Jewelry is worth ~$60B, but a company like Paragon Lake is rarely discussed. VB does a great job covering companies like those and I hope you guys continue.