Manpacks. Yes, I Said Manpacks!
Manpacks. Yes, I said Manpacks. Stop snickering and keep reading!
Manpacks, a startup founded by Andrew Draper and Ken Johnson, is a subscription service for the essential items in a mans life. From shaving cream to underwear, socks and t-shirts, Manpacks has you covered. Place your initial order and every 3 months thereafter a new kit arrives with all of your essential Man-items.
I will be the first to admit how much I hate shopping. Even worse than just shopping, I hate shopping for things as mundane as toiletries and underwear. The idea that every three months they magically appear at my front door by the Manpacks Gods has my attention.
I recently had the pleasure of asking Andrew Draper some questions about Manpacks and where the service is going:
1. When did you start Manpacks?
We launched in January of last year and started to see real traction the first week in March, 2010
2. What was the inspiration behind Manpacks?
The genesis started during a Skype call Ken and I were having, talking about another project we were working on to simplify booking tours for bands which we discovered had a long path to revenue. We decided we needed something that could see revenue quickly so we could free up our time to continue building it and started brainstorming.
Very quickly the basic concept of Manpacks was born, both of us being big fans of simplifying our lives and optimizing tasks that take our time away from the things we really want to do. The irony being that we were quite naive about the actual amount of work required and Manpacks has taken a lot of effort from us both to get to where we’re at now.
Another big factor was we had both just read 2 books that in hindsight put our thoughts in the right direction, 4-hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss and Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank.
3. How has it been received?
We think it’s been received pretty incredibly and we’re both happy and been pleasantly surprised with how Manpacks has grown over the last year. We have some of the best customers any business could ask for.
4. Did you get funding?
We’ve been mostly bootstrapped to-date but were part of Betaspring, a startup accelerator, over the summer which provided a small amount of funding, but more importantly a fantastic mentor program and networking within the greater New England area – as well it allowed both Ken and I to work from the same area for once as we’d always been used to being geographically distributed (at the time him in Florida and me in Ottawa, Canada). We’re currently fundraising a seed round that will allow us to further expand on what we’ve found by experimenting with our model over the past year and to achieve some of the great things we’ve been planning for the coming year and beyond.
5. Will there be a womanpacks
Never say never, but no, not in the foreseeable future. What we have planned for Manpacks is going to take all of our effort to accomplish and we see Womanpacks as a distraction at the moment. Also, not to stereotype, but there’s quite a difference between the expectations of men and women. Women like to browse, like to feel like they’re shopping, the men we’re targeting don’t, they’d rather get that stuff out of the way and get down to business – whatever that business might be.
6. Why should busy entrepreneurs sign up?
As someone who often gets caught up in what i’m doing and is always short on time while trying to still achieve some level of work/life balance shopping for things like underwear, socks, shaving products, or other toiletries is constantly lowered on the priority list. With Manpacks you don’t even have to have it on your list – freeing up your brain to focus on bigger challenges, like building your business.
An entrepreneur’s time is a valuable commodity and one we hold dear. Andrew and Manpacks found a way for all of us to free up a little more time to do what we really want to do.
Oh sweet Manpacks…where art thou underwear? and every three months for this writer and entrepreneur I know exactly where they will be. On my front door step waiting to be worn.
