In this episode, John LaRoy, CEO of Apparel Redefined, chats with fashion tech trailblazer Dana Todd, CEO of Balodana. From pioneering early SEO to revolutionizing apparel manufacturing, Dana shares a powerful journey of innovation, disruption, and purpose-driven leadership.
Dana reflects on her early days in digital marketing, founding SEMPO and pushing boundaries in a then-unregulated space. But her true disruptor moment came when she entered the apparel industry—not as a fashionista, but as a problem-solver.
Frustrated by poor garment fit and industry waste, Dana set out to change the game. Balodana was born from a simple but radical idea: clothing should fit real bodies—and it shouldn’t harm the planet. With a focus on made-to-measure clothing and on-demand production, Dana is tackling the fashion industry’s waste crisis head-on.
Dana explains how traditional sizing models ignore most of the population, leading to poor fit, costly returns, and environmental damage. By using body data and lean manufacturing, Balodana helps brands serve customers better while reducing excess inventory.
Dana also shares insights on B2B strategies, trade shows, and overlooked digital opportunities like TikTok Shop. Her message to apparel entrepreneurs? Use data, test often, and never stop evolving.
If you’re curious about the future of sustainable fashion and what it means to blend tech with textiles, don’t miss this inspiring conversation.
Key Highlights
• Introduction and Initial Remarks 0:02
• Dana Todd’s Early Career and Search Engine Marketing 1:41
• Evolution of Dana Todd’s Career and Site Lab 4:43
• Transition to Apparel and Balodana 6:55
• Balodana’s Business Model and On-Demand Manufacturing 9:42
• Marketing Strategies and Digital Advertising 11:13
• TikTok and Social Media Engagement 16:38
• Impact of Customization and Personalization 20:34
• Future Plans and Technological Innovations 29:40
• Closing Remarks and Final Thoughts 32:04
Transcription
Curt Anderson 00:02
Alright, here we go. Welcome guys. John Leroy, how are you brother
John LaRoy 00:05
doing? Great. Got little taste of summer on Friday, and now it’s back to winter. Yeah,
Curt Anderson 00:13
yeah. We, we, I was told this morning we have two seasons. We have winter and construction, right? Those are our two
John LaRoy 00:19
seasons. That’s it, right? It’s definitely construction season, yeah, construction season, and
Curt Anderson 00:23
we’re back to winter. So, alright, this is such an honor. What a privilege to have this guest, man, we go back a few years, I won’t see how many, but Dana Todd, how are you? Thank you for joining us.
Dana Todd 00:36
I’m great. Thanks for having me on board today. Oh, this is such
Curt Anderson 00:39
an honor and privilege. I always just quality time with you is just, it’s like a masterclass every time I want to take a little step back. So I met Dana first time, John, I know you’re probably in diapers in 2003 I know we’re reading 2000
John LaRoy 00:55
Oh, so John Carroll. Oh, we’re at John Carroll. So John
Curt Anderson 00:58
Carroll University. My new So Dana, my new favorite unit. Well, I’m not when I’m writing the checks, but because of my dear friend John, my I have a daughter who’s a senior in college, and so we’ve been we did a massive we visit every college we could think of. I get a little postcard from this college called John Carroll University. I’m like, You know what? I think a client of mine graduated from John Carroll. I think we should check this college out. Well, guess what? We checked out probably 20 colleges. Which one did she pick? John Carroll University, thanks to my dear friend John LeRoy. So how’s how’s that? It’s a great story. I am permanently connected to John LeRoy, so how’s that,
John LaRoy 01:34
John, hey, I’m okay with it. You are. Yeah, just as you know
Curt Anderson 01:39
when I’m writing those tuition checks, right? All that. So anyway, so we’ll get back on track. So, Dana, I met you in 2003 back these were early internet days. I mean, we’re just coming off the.com crash, right? And, you know, eCommerce and websites, and that was kind of like a bad word back then, but you were a dynamo just so I go to this conference in Silicon Valley. Didn’t know a single person there. I walk in, and I was completely captivated by this keynote speaker, Dana Todd, so, Dana, I know you’re very humble, modest, but take us back in time, because you are now the CEO of a wonderful apparel company that we’re going to dive into. But take us back to 2003 and you’re a keynote speaker, like, what was going on back then.
Dana Todd 02:22
So that was early days of this brand new industry called Search Engine Marketing. And back then, the the way we do SEO now and pay per click marketing, all of that was, was really in its very early stages. Back then. It was completely unregulated, completely unmodulated, and, you know, a bit of a wild west type of industry, and at that time, you know, we were considered to be snake oil salesmen and not a particularly revered industry, nor a very large industry. But there were, there was some of us who really wanted to professionalize it and grow and learn. And so thanks to folks like Danny Sullivan, who wrote a specialty wasn’t even called a blog back then, but essentially it was an online hub and then ultimately creating these search engine strategies conferences and creating a space for all of us who were literally on the bleeding edge of the pioneering parts of the early stages of digital marketing as we know it today, were sharing and learning and growing together and having their little trade shows. It started out as a few 100 people. Now, obviously, it’s a trillion dollar industry, so, you know, we were on the right track.
Curt Anderson 03:33
So, and I was actually, we talked about this before, like you started sempo. You were one of the founders of, like, an organization like to come together for search and search engine marketers. And then I started going to multiple conferences. And I just, I always look forward to seeing Dana Todd now, not only were you captivating speaker, I just never knew what color hair you’re gonna have when you showed up, right? So share with John what was, what was going on with the Dana Todd look back then, I think like maybe match, my
Dana Todd 04:01
shirt, the shirt that you’re wearing now was one of my colors. I also had a deep plum purple color. I think I had a fuchsia, a little bit darker than this. I always had a bright I always like to stay on the cutting edge of color. And if you follow the color industry, I went gray before I got popular. So,
Curt Anderson 04:21
Rob, you, you’re a great before Gray was cool, before it was even
Dana Todd 04:25
cool, I thought long before even COVID. I felt very vindicated, because all my friends who scoffed at me, they were like, What are you doing? You’re losing your brand. I’m like, because now everybody’s got it all. You got to be different in marketing and business and everything. You got to do the thing that’s different, right?
Curt Anderson 04:41
Well, the big thing that I’ve admired with you in your career is, like you’ve always evolved. So you founded a company, site lab, if I’m not mistaken, right back in the day. So you know, cutting edge web design, SEO, all the digital marketing and like you, like and I and again, very humble, but you were a pioneer in those early like, there was no social media. Media back then. You know, Facebook was, was, wasn’t even birth yet. You know, something like you were on a cutting edge. Walk us through a little bit unlike your, your technology journey. But then we want to slide up to your CEO of a wonderful company called Balodana. We’re going to be talking about that. We’re going to take a look your website, but just walk us through the evolution on, how did you get to how did you How does a technology pioneer get into apparel? Sure. Well,
Dana Todd 05:23
you know, we just I came from an advertising background, so for me, I was brought in to manage the accounts at a small digital agency, and within about six months, some partners that I internally bought the agency and spun it out to become site lab. And at the time, there were really very few people building websites, and they cost. My first website cost a million dollars. Oh, my God, it was insane. I mean, it’s kind of like aI now, you know where, you know, a really good AI prompt engineer was getting, what, 200 bucks an hour, or something, I’ve had for a hot minute there. So it was like bleeding edge. We were out there building things that had never been built before. We were doing the early micro payments, like long before PayPal existed, we had a virtual bank, we had clients who were just doing all kinds of interesting things, and we were just facilitating it. So it was, that was the really, the first time I understood that I liked the engineering aspects of it and the thinking of the logical structures of it, and because I have, like, my my mom’s an artist, my dad is an engineer or work, both of them have passed that they kind of gave me that left brain right brain combo. So I can appreciate not just engineering for engineering sake, but thinking about it as it plays a role in psychology, both on the receive side and the, shall we say, motivate side, not going to manipulate you, but you know, we can certainly motivate you through our words, through our actions, through the experiences that we create for you online. And so that was sort of gen one. Was building these experiences and understanding what we could do to help help clients, you know, help our customers who were small and large businesses to to connect and to do business online. But then kind of part of that was we always had to learn about data, and data was not something that I ever really considered much, but it’s such a key part of the of the the digital advertising side of the marketing side of things. So everything from just tracking the data of movements on your website in order to make decisions. So the very idea of data driven decision making was still pretty new back then, and you had companies like FICO who were tracking your credit score, but they may or may not have been utilizing that data yet in external fashion to make decisions. So this very idea of business decisioning, data driven decisioning and having highly automated decision cycles grew out of that. And so when I first encountered the clothing industry, because I was really frustrated with finding clothes to fit, and I was wondering like, Well, hey, why just go make a great fit and shirt? What does that look like? And so I hired a consultant to take me up into the bowels of the garment district there in New York City. And there was such a disconnect, no data went into a lot of imagination, a lot of creativity, a lot of entrenched practices, a lot of skill. But it was very Yeah, it was, it was following an artistic path of expression, as opposed to a data driven perspective, from what I saw initially, which is like, no. We even talked to me about body fit or body data, or demand data, or how to incorporate this into a business. And it was all just like, nope, here’s how we make things. And, you know, we, we make a grading chart, and we stick it out, we stick it on a physical model, you know, either a person or a dummy, and then we make it and then you, you make a pattern out of it, and some lady does it out of paper, and then maybe you’ll have it digitized. It was so fragmented, I was just going, well, this is insane, and this is probably why things are so broken, and why this so for me. Instead of getting upset, I was like, well, thing, there’s an opportunity right there. And when I realized I couldn’t change the way the supply chain worked, I worked to create my own supply chain. So that’s what we’re doing now is creating a different kind of approach to supply chain, rather than just traditional factory where you go in and like, here’s your 1000 shirts, it utilizes data, both in terms of thinking through the demand, thinking through the projections on what you’re going to need for various sizes and types, as well as thinking about incorporating body data into your size planning and assortment planning, and then on the backside of that, working with our factory to create a whole new business model for on demand manufacturing. And it’s something that John and I have have bonded over, is this idea that small batch does not have to be small business or small profit, or, you know, it. You can make this business model work, but it’s not like the others. You do have to do it differently, and you do have to plan for it differently. You have to have a different relationship with customers. So earlier this year, we transitioned completely away from a business to consumer model where we were making things on demand, made to your body measurements you didn’t on our old balladana. You if you wanted to Curt, if you really wanted the lovely dress, you could go in there give us your body measurements. You could scan yourself using 3d AI, and you would order anything that you wanted off of our catalog, and it would be made to your body measurement, shipped directly to you. So that was a really unique like Macy’s for made to measure. But the the pivot for us has been a good one, moving into the business to business support, because we can actually get our goals faster by supporting businesses and leveraging their brand, their audiences and their designs to still keep doing what we’re doing, which is making it all data driven and making it highly efficient and not over populating The Earth with badly fitting clothes or unwanted clothes.
Curt Anderson 11:04
Absolutely love it so. And what’s a common thread here is disruptor, you know? So when I think of Dana Todd, I think disruptor, John. What are your thoughts? I just want
John LaRoy 11:13
to take a step back in the digital the advertising space, right? Like you have this infrastructure the internet that, you know, has created so many different vines that have died and grown of advertising, right? You know, like when MySpace came out, you know, we didn’t have social media advertising 30 years ago, and now it’s, you know, probably in the top five of ad spend for companies, phone books, you know, mailing all that type of stuff that was like the dominant form of advertising. And now with your own business, and my whole engagement with Curt and his wonderful team at at B2Btail, focusing on the marketing and someone advertising as well, how do you position yourself. Like, especially now on the internet, like, the rules of Facebook, LinkedIn, all these different digital advertising strategies that were great, six, five, maybe even two years ago, have now all changed, you know, and like, how do you climb organically? How do you do this? Your SEO is your blog is the Google algorithm? What like, all these things to consider that you didn’t have to consider before, and now advertising your own company to get in front of businesses. Like, what are some strategies you say don’t go look at, or what do you focus on? And what’s kind of like, the diamond in the rough that no one’s looking at or re looking at. Like, for us, it’s email marketing, right? Like, if that was dead, and now it seems like it’s coming back, but there’s going to be a shelf life on that too. So loaded questions. Sorry, there’s
Dana Todd 12:45
a lot of questions in there. I think there’s, there’s still a little difference between a business to consumer ad play versus a business to business, and particularly in the manufacturing space. So it, it is, if you’re business to business in manufacturing, it is very much a relationship visit. It’s a trust issue. It’s I see You face to face, I shake your hand at the trade show. It is a very old school industry in terms of walking in, yeah, like that first and that last connection are almost always human to human and but what you what you need to do is plan for everything in between. Right? How do you activate that? So, you know, we’ve worked with partners to, like, go to trade shows and trade shows again, still work, but, I mean, you’re lucky if you come out a lot of them with maybe 50 qualified leads or interested leads, and then, but still, getting those 50 over the hurdle to actually do something is requiring a lot more heavy lifting and a lot more attachments. The used to be that you would just send like one or two email follow ups, but now, because of people’s email box overload, you actually have to send a follow up email at least five times five follow up emails to finally get them, you know, to be like, All right, let’s just do it. Let’s talk, right? It’s so that’s hard, because I think a lot of us think we’re spamming them or annoying them. So you have to think through what those five touch points look like. They could be an outreach on LinkedIn. Doesn’t all have to come through email, but you basically have to hit them with at least five touch points, even after that initial handshake. Yes, I’m interested where they have raised their hand and said yes. So that’s where you have to get clever with your content marketing and lay in what you think. I’m actually just literally this morning planning out an email drip campaign. So we use Active Campaign for our for our CRM system and our email blasts, and it’s a fairly new change for us. We had been because we’re small bootstrap like we don’t have a big pile of VC money just to go out there and capture millions of advertisers and take out billboards and whatnot. So it’s been for us. We have to be really, really frugal and really, really. With our money. So thinking through all right, after so many submits that form on our website, which is a hand raise, right? What do we hit them with instantly? What’s that follow up look like? Is it a couple days where we follow up? What do we need to send them next? And so right now we’re planning to we hit them with that. Then we are going to follow up with a gentle request that they set up a face to face on our Calendly, so we can do a little interview on Zoom. And then, if that, then we wait another day or so on that, and then we send them a blog post about how to prepare for working with a factory and, you know, understanding your background. And so we’re just kind of softening it up for them, and we’re going to be splitting those into different personas, right? So that’s a general form, but we’re building another completely separate track for custom uniforms, and particularly for us, focusing on the casino space, because in casinos, they have need for higher end, sometimes fancier uniforms. They’re not just doing a standard apparel. They are, but like they do have a unique need among all others out there, except maybe a few in hospitality to literally, like, I need seven evening gowns in this rough color scheme and these sizes like that. They have very particularly high end needs, and usually a small number that they need built. And so their only option is to go to a dressmaker. So those conversations would be positioning us versus a local dressmaker or Amazon, right? So you really honestly have to get into every single personas thinking and understand what their objections and interests and content strategy would be. So that’s why I do it for a B2B. On a B2C, it’s gotten quite expensive to get people in social media advertising, and the algorithms have been good and bad, etc. What I will say is that consistently, Tiktok is such an overused, overlooked concept or a channel, I think a lot of people don’t, they don’t think about they’re like, oh, Tiktok. But Tiktok, shock, shock. I cannot talk today. Tiktok shop. Try that three times fast, is honestly one of the fastest growing channels period. It is blowing the others away, where you actually have the embedded shopping inside of the Tiktok environment, and consistently, in terms of engagement rate, the and you can Google this that the stats are astonishing, how much higher the average engagement rate is on Tiktok versus any other social media out there. So if you’re looking at you’ve been watching your engagement rates on Facebook or on Instagram, go like, dick, dick, dick, dick, where you’re lucky if you get seven likes and maybe a heart emoji comment. You know, that’s the that’s the norm right now, unless you’re out there paying for it or buying a lot of ad space, or you’re a superstar who just is really great at engaging people, and most companies, they’re not getting that kind of engagement. But if you do it right, and you do it well on Tiktok, you’ll consistently see higher engagement rates. And so the engagement is really what drives that algorithm that reinforcing So, yeah, don’t, do not overlook Tiktok this. The demographics on it are far more broad than you think.
John LaRoy 18:12
It’s awesome, great stuff. Yeah, I’m not on Tiktok. So something we gotta do,
Dana Todd 18:18
somebody in your staff has to be, yeah, for sure, it’s
Curt Anderson 18:22
always a masterclass with Dana’s in the house. So Dana, let’s dive into, I’m going to pull up your website. So just you, you’ve hit on a few points with Balodana talked about when you started it up. I’m going to pull up the website. Take share with us. Who is Balodana? Well, how are you making the world a better place? Let’s just, let’s go there and talk about how wonderful your company is.
Dana Todd 18:44
Wow. I what we’re doing for humanity is making fewer better clothes overall. Because I it’s probably not a secret, if you have not seen one of those images of, you know, the giant wasteland of on, you know, of clothes, just garments that cover the deserts in various countries or the mountains, of unwanted clothes that are just festering, and they’re usually always outside of the US, where we’ve dumped them in other countries, but that is the net result of our over consumption and our reproduction in this country. So the over consumption means that, because everything’s so cheap, you can just go buy on a consumer side, and you don’t even bother to worry too much about the fit, because the cost of returns has been so low, right? You buy two return one, and that that that’s called bracketing, by the way. So that habit of bracketing the buy one, return two, or buy two return one, has become so prevalent, it is about a 60% entrenched behavior right now across all e commerce, shoppers, male and female. So people just, you know it, there’s, there’s no, there doesn’t seem to be any penalty for getting it wrong. So again, like I said, we can’t change that, but what we can do is for the. Those folks out there, either fashion brands or buyers of custom clothes or buyers of uniforms, if they do not want to participate in that and they do not want to over produce, then they do have an option with us. We can help them with highly inclusive sizing and made to measure if they need it. We don’t have to do it that way, but we can do really unique approaches to grading. We can do populations at your geographic location. So if this location has a different set of bodies than this location, we can actually create different size charts for that, and then we deploy them in either a small batch or an on demand model. So I want to make sure that people understand the difference between on demand, the way we describe it, versus small batch. So small batch is a pretty known concept you’re buying. Usually it’s defined as lots of less than 100 per colorway or per SKU or per style, however they batch it. But essentially it’s it’s less than 100 sometimes people think of it in the 50 plus range, but that’s like a one and done. You’re like, Okay, here’s my styles, here’s my let’s get my my fabrics and execute them, and then I’m going to go sell them, and then if I need more, I kind of have to start all over again. The on demand model means that you can actually think about your pre planning for a season or a year, or even evergreen. That is, if you think you’re going to be selling 1000 of a colorway over the next eight months, then we’ll actually work with you to create the minimum possible first set, first batch, and then we’ll actually procure the fabric and all the stuff that you’re going to need to execute that and store that for you. So then what you’re buying is only the sizes that you’re selling out of or that you think you’re going to sell out of. So it really right sizes against the demand in a it’s a fairly low tech way of doing it right. We’re not doing anything so fancy as to plug into their e commerce and do highly predictive demand stuff that’s later, but we gotta start somewhere right, just at least creating the infrastructure to allow a buyer of any size to participate in an on demand like almost a de risked model for them, for their manufacturing.
Curt Anderson 22:16
Excellent. So John, your thoughts, as far as like on demand. You’re in a space. What are your thoughts with what Dana’s doing here?
John LaRoy 22:23
Yeah, it’s like on demand on steroids, right? There’s, it’s difficult. I mean, there’s so much customization that needs to happen before you can even get to somewhat of a finished product or prototype. There’s definitely a need for, I mean, one of the initiatives in our industry, and one of the brands we work with, they constantly show the the landfills filled with, you know, T shirts and apparel, and it’s, it’s a lot, you know. I mean, it’s not, it’s not going away. But how do you reduce that? Well, a lot of that stuff that is in landfills never even was worn, you know, it’s and that’s the old school model of print and pray kind of thing where it’s like, hey, what? What’s going to sell? Is it going to sell? Do I get the right sizing? If not, is it relevant? And if the second is not, it just becomes garbage. And in this world too, you know, it’s, it’s one of those things where, again, 1520, years ago, at least in the promo apparel type stuff, everything was like a 2x 3x XL, especially like MBNA. You remember, like there was entire industries and companies built on promo t shirt giveaways, you know, like you go to a professional baseball game, hockey game, whatever you sign up for a credit card, get a t shirt. And there was, you know, hundreds of 1000, millions of T shirts printed that way, but it was not fit. And an entire industry, like all these, all these brands, started working towards, how do you get more form fitting? How do you get more of an athletic more of like a European type fit and feel, where it’s not just 100% cotton boxy t shirt, and then you take all that into what, what Dana’s doing? You know, in high fashion, it’s incredible. I mean, we have a couple customers that do high end golf attire for all the major golf clubs across the United States. And it’s really, I mean, the thinking has to be, you know, 1824, months ahead of time before you can even start, you know, looking at you have to be thinking in the future, even deal with the present and selling stuff that you don’t even have, right? It’s, it’s pretty it’s pretty crazy to think about that, but companies like Dana take that where you can focus on the cell and on the design and rely on partners like Dana to get it done right? Because it’s not like it’s done over here in Indiana, you know, it’s done all over. The world and sourcing the fabric and getting the fabric to mills that will cut and process. You know, it’s there’s a lot of steps and Curt we always talk about, I feel like our industry is one of the last and probably most disrespected, where you look at all the hands that touch a garment from the time it’s, you know, turned into a fabric loom to cut, to sewn, to shipped, to unpack, to decorate it, to reship. You know, it’s easily 60 to 100 hands depending on the garment, and it’s still expected to be sold at a commodity price, you know. So it’s pretty crazy. And there’s a lot of skilled people all over the globe that probably fill one of the biggest needs that humans have, is to wear clothes, right, you know. So it’s not going anywhere. But how do we get it to a point where, you know, you’re ordering what you need, and that’s it. And I think Dana is doing a really good job that,
Dana Todd 26:04
yeah, I’m excited. And I think there’s a natural partnership between what we do and what apparel redefine does as well, because there’s an additional level of personalization that is is consistently desired out there consistently, so especially when it comes to uniforms or team things or anything where the marketing department, marketing departments still have budget, marketing departments buy a lot of clothes, right? Because what your employees wear reflects your brand. So part of that yes is the fit and the quality and making sure people feel comfortable in their clothes. They feel confident wearing their work uniform, but being able to then additionally brand it. So, you know, so you were mentioning, we were talking a little bit. We were recently had a conversation with a company trying to create scrubs, you know, sort of high end hospitals cause, and we had a conversation around the idea that this should be something that you could wear to a secondary event, right? And which is really kind of an astonishing idea, that you could go from your work clothes, you know, a uniform. Most people don’t feel comfortable going in their work uniform, other than to maybe the local neighborhood bar or something like that, right? But you’re not going to go to a nice restaurant, usually in your work clothes. But maybe you should that give. Maybe we should raise the bar a little bit and have this be something that you love wearing so much that you’re happy to be out there. You know, have it living your life and wearing your uniform or your team, obviously, your favorite teams, those definitely, I think people are a little bit more because then you’re advertising your fandom less, more or less about like where you work.
John LaRoy 27:52
That’s pretty wild. Like when I look at old pictures of, you know, White Sox games, or insert whatever team you look at, like, you know, early 1900s even up until post World War Two, you know, everyone was in a suit and tie, like the entire stadium in a top hat, black suit, white shirt. And it’s like everyone looked good he met. Like, if you showed up at a suit and tie right now to a to a Yankees game or a Cubs game, like they think you’d work for the team, you know. And, yeah, you know, like, what are you doing here? Like that, you know. But you have options now. But it’s like, it’s crazy how, like, the American and just global consumerism is, like, it’s very modular, like, even the way people bought houses, you know, post World War Two. It’s like, here’s a here’s a suburb, and you have five options, you know, do you want the ranch? Do you want the split level? Do you want to buy that type of thing? And then kind of customize within that? But, like, everything was very modular, you know, and then the clothes were the same, you know, like you had, here’s your suit, double breasted, single breasted, couple pockets, whatever you want. To change the color of the color of the shirt, maybe have a pinstripe, but everyone’s wearing a suit and tie. That’s all change, you know. And people aren’t doing it, and they’re looking for more customization. But in that more customization becomes more opportunity for stuff that doesn’t sell because you don’t hit it, right, you know, or you don’t market it, you don’t have the budget. So how do you kind of blend mass customization with on demand type, you know, reduce of of efficiency, or increase efficiency, but reduce waste. And it’s a, it’s a real big challenge, because the Amazon effect is real, right? And like people, they associate e commerce with customization, and that’s not the case, right? There’s, there’s, there’s e commerce of buying a product that you could get, you know, at Walmart or Target, and now you don’t have to leave your comfort of your home, but they expect that same experience with premium apparel, you know, and high fashion. And if the expectations that. Or someone will figure it out. And that’s where I feel like it’s, it’s going,
Dana Todd 30:03
Yeah, well, and then you throw in AI and the generative AI stuff, which is like such a whole new world. So I, you know, I hang out with a lot of people on the the innovation side of fashion and fashion tech, and we’re so close. We’re still, it’s we’re still miles away, but we’re still, we’re very, very close to being able to create a system in which a designer can literally throw some, you know, do some sketches, turn them, not in right now, you can actually do a sketch, upload it into a fashion AI, and voila, have three dimensional, rotating game. Make videos out of the stuff and slap it on any model you want, have it resized instantly. That’s all happening right now. But where there was gaps is that okay? That basically just got you a prettier picture. You could use that and put it on your website and try to sell it so you can get a pre demand going. But then what happens is you still would have to start all over again. When you went to the factory like, okay, execute this. You didn’t have a pattern. You didn’t you still had to go back to square one to do the product development of it as if you had never done what you had. The only thing that really saved you was trying to getting the demand going and testing out your styles a little earlier. So there are a lot of people now working around this idea of parametric patterning and having the patterns themselves come out directly out of the 3d design programs, and have them actually be pretty close to perfect, so that they just require a little bit more refinement on the back end, and You can get a lot faster to that sample, as opposed to but he still doesn’t save you on sourcing. You still have to find the fabrics, you still have to engineer test. You can’t cut every step out. There are realities, particularly in highly structured clothes and women’s clothes. But it’s, it’s coming, you guys, it’s really coming.
Curt Anderson 31:59
I’ll tell you a couple of things that I love, John, you know, working on with apparel redefined, is the print on demand. And Dana’s you knife come back together and just really understanding your business model. I’m an old time like, logistics turn, you know, the inventory turn. And so, you know, I think maybe, you know, I hope I’m not sure this sounds like as a guy, but Dana, what you taught me for like, you’re really targeting, like, the uniform market, you know, say, so let’s just start with casinos or any workplace that has, you know, and like people, you know, dress for success, like people want to feel good about themselves. And what you’ve helped educate me, if we want to kind of dive, dive into, like, a little bit of the B to B, John, and I’d love for you to piggyback off of this, but Dana, you know, like the inventory turn the reducing waste, the the opportunity to, like, you know, everybody is conscious of like, they’re off size. Like, gee, I can’t find the right pair of jeans. I can’t find this. I’m too short, I’m too this. I’m too that, you know, like, your motto really helps conquer so many things. From like, an HR standpoint, build like, John, we talk about, like, building culture. So I’m throwing a ton at you, Dana, but talk a little bit like, all the vast benefits that you offer with this on demand manufacturing, from like the the efficiency cost inventory and just from, like the culture making your employees feel good. Well,
Dana Todd 33:16
I’ll start with the last because honestly, that was, that was our why, and it’s still our why? Because what led me into this industry was being dissatisfied with how clothes fit me and my immediate brain, the psychology was to blame my own body. And if you talk, and this is it, it’s endemic to women. If you talk to almost any woman out there about this, you know, she’ll say, I can’t fit into that, right? It’s her it’s her fault. And so we internalize this, the shame. And so what happens is that we actually just spend less money. We just don’t buy stuff. So it unlocks a considerable it’s not just making women happy, it’s making women happy, but when you do, they’re going to buy some more stuff, right? So it’s unlocking the missed opportunity there that happens when you create something someone feels proud and comfortable to wear. And to this day, if I’m in a hurry and I just like, Oh God, I just need something that looks good and it’s going to fit, I will meet go to in a heartbeat, I can grab any of my custom made clothes and know that when I walk out the door, I’m going to look great and I’m going to get compliments, like, that’s the kind of confidence that you want to have. And it doesn’t have to be the fanciest garment. I literally have, like a standard white business blouse that because it’s custom made, I just know it’s going to fit every time. I’m not going to have to fight it, you know, as to what, how it’s going to tuck or whatever gap. And that is like an it’s not discussed very much outside of just, you know, person to person. And by the way, it’s not just women. Men are experiencing this more and more because they’re gotten away. If you ask most guys, they think their waist size is the number that’s on the inside of their genes. It is not gentlemen, it is not so. If you were a 32 gene, your waist is probably not 32 inches. If you ever picked up a tape measure and measured yourself, you’re going to find that out. So what we think of as being a standardized set of numbers for both men and women are deeply, deeply flawed, and the result of that is that we’ve created a world in which fully half of women are not even given the opportunity to buy clothes that fit their bodies, other than really stretchy, things you know, that aren’t particularly powerful, shall we say? So, starting with that, why there’s two parts of that right? One is the waste. The other part of it is that 20 to 25% market growth opportunity that is not being touched. And we get to that number from a couple different ways. I mentioned half so in the United States, women, the average size of women in for us, standardizing is 16 and above. Some people say 14 and above. So it’s just just go. It’s just going to be 16 and above. So that’s half the population is considered plus size. But when you actually look at how most fashion collections are done, most of them actually stop at an XL, maybe a 16. So they literally are ignoring half of the female population, right there. So, like, just slice that off. You can say, Now not all of those are going to be buying your clothes anyway, maybe because of price point, or, you know, job, or something like that, but you can pretty much consider that it’s it’s going to be somewhere in that between zero and 50% secondarily, when I’ve talked to body scanning companies. So there was a company called Fit match, and they were out scanning bodies. They had a really highly accurate scanner where you go into it was like a room, not just a mobile app. And they were scanning bodies at malls, and they were getting lots and lots of women and men through there to understand their bodies. And I talked with the founder, and I was saying, So are you a so their whole point was to, like, try to match you up with inventory. So they were working with the retailers to say, Alright, we’ve got tech packs and, you know, some specs on these clothes to try to match them up to human bodies. So they were going to follow up with the people who got scanned and be like, these are the things that are going to fit you. Well, go buy them now, and that recommendation engine is still, it’s still a very prevalent thing out there. You see it in a lot of websites now it’s become a de facto standard. But what he said is that every day when they scan, there was about 20 to 25% of the people they scanned that they could not find inventory for. Now, that’s either because it wasn’t tagged correctly or it didn’t exist. And I’m willing to believe that the majority of it was because it didn’t exist. So if you but there have been really scary risks. Old Navy, just before the pandemic, made a huge investment and not to double down, but trickle down and put so much money into creating a lot of extended size range clothes, and they got stuck with them. They didn’t sell. Yeah, it was actually an economic disaster.
John LaRoy 38:16
I feel like people that went to those machines, I’m kind of not surprised by a 25% number, because you wouldn’t go to that machine, in my mind if you didn’t have a problem with everything that you ordered online not fitting, right? So you’re probably looking for that solution.
Dana Todd 38:33
Or no, I’m gonna, I’m gonna give you some more stats. So we’ve run stats of our own to all women, all ages, all body sizes, and 75% of them expressed frustrations buying close to fit. So you could have the skinniest person on the planet, and just because they’re being asked to fit into something that is a cookie cutter, it’s really challenging. There’s another norm for you. Here’s another fun one. So there’s a concept of an hourglass figure for women, which is where you have a very perfect 10 inch difference between your your your bust and your waist, and then between your waist and your hips, so you’re perfectly, let’s say 3620 430-636-2636, right? So that perfect 10 inch difference there, that is sort of the gold standard of how things are actually graded for women, they start with that assumption is that all the bodies are hourglass, all women are hourglass, and you’re going to have that much gapping. That is actually so by the way, that’s 90% of clothes are manufactured to that standard, or size to that standard. But that standard, that particular morph type, only fits about 10% of women. So you got 90% of the clothes made for 10% of the bodies.
John LaRoy 39:48
Wow, yeah, it’s,
Dana Todd 39:49
it’s just a math mess. Y’all, it’s a math mess out there.
Curt Anderson 39:56
I’m here to fix it. You’re out. You’re in. There’s, hey, there’s no greater person to fix it than Dana Todd and Dana, like, when you were, you ever, like, are you ever does? Ever cease to amaze you, what you’re discovering. Like, every time I talk to you, like, I learned something new. Like, I’m taking tons of notes right now. Couple things I want you know, you know, unlocking the missed opportunities. Just, you know, so powerful. I think I caught you. You know, quite a while ago you were saying, you know, motivating, uh, compared to marketing, right to Mo, when, uh, back into your tech days, does it ever cease to maze you of like, these stats at your point that you’re talking about, like, I’m like, I’m blown away right now with what you’re describing, I’m just not in that industry. But as you’re describing it, it’s saying, it sounds very
Dana Todd 40:40
logical, right? It is, well,
Curt Anderson 40:43
no logical, but it sounds, yeah,
Dana Todd 40:45
bonkers, bonkers. And the fact that it’s so well known, like I this is not a huge secret in the manufacturers that they know this, but they just don’t change. Because
John LaRoy 41:03
they’d be able to sell, right? But if those channels aren’t buying anymore, like the retail sites, the Kohl’s, the Macy’s, the Marshall Fields, I mean, you would have 10s of options before for all these retail sites, and now those are all dying and dead. So like, if that sell through, if they didn’t care because it was selling and they had it on the rack and the manufacturer made it. But now there’s a real thing where, you know, all these malls are shutting down and it is really going online, and you don’t, no one wants to sit on an inventory. So yeah, I feel like the problems be attacked by a multitude of different reasons. But, I mean, yeah, I remember, like my late 20s, early 20s, you know, like still going to like Marshall Fields downtown to get nice clothes, and being five six and stocky, everything was either too tight, and if it was too big, it was way too long. So my one buddy got like, a similar frame as me. And he worked for one of the local news channels, and, like, they had to have everything tailored because they were on TV. So he introduced me to his tailor. His tailor started a company. Company was like, it was like, tailor box or something. But like, you would, it was a subscription, like an early subscription day, where you would couple 100 bucks a month, and then they would send you, like, custom tailored clothes to fit your body type. It was great. And you saw, you know, that company untucked, you know, like male clothing that was shorter, for shorter also, yeah, there’s, there’s definitely, people want stuff, especially if you’re going to pay a premium, you want it to fit, right? Yeah,
Dana Todd 42:38
by the way, marketing tip untuck it got their start in advertising almost entirely through full page ads in airline magazines. Really. Wow. Okay, that’s where they invested very heavily, and from that they just built up a little oil following, and then took it ultimately to you know where they are now. But yeah, they started out very old school. There’s no such thing as an airline magazine anymore. There’s no really place to trap somebody.
John LaRoy 43:07
That was like my favorite thing. My dad would bring home all the Sky Mall magazines, the hamilcular Slim. I don’t even know how to say it, but I was supposed to looking at those magazines. Yeah, yeah.
Dana Todd 43:16
I missed those days, and we had fewer channels to look at, but it was more immersive, yeah, but yeah. So stats are galore, but people don’t change. They they are afraid to change because they need someone to hold their hand through the business model changes. And for the big players, the big retailers, they are so complexified in terms of their structure. Understand that when things don’t sell at a department store or any retailer store, the buyer already got their bonus for getting a lowest cost per unit by over purchasing, right? So they got their quarterly bonus because they’re based not on whether it sells, but whether they got a good deal on it and got it to the shelves on time, right? So everybody’s incentives are not necessarily aligned to a unified kind of thing, right? And then it gets thrown to somebody else’s spreadsheet, because it goes down to the resale market, and then off Florida, it just, it keeps moving from one person’s spreadsheet to another. And so it’s really not ultimately felt until you get to that landfill in Ghana. Yeah,
Curt Anderson 44:18
I tell you, this is a so fascinating what you’ve how you’ve come into this market. And just really, again, I used that word earlier, disruptor, and just, you know, you’re calling it like you see it. And you know, just tons of opportunity. So I know we could geek out and keep you here all day. You’re a busy CEO, John’s a busy CEO, Dana, we’ll start winding down, looking forward to the future. What are you super excited about? Balodana? We’re gonna we’ll have a one year anniversary. We bring it back a year from now. Where do we see Balodana? What are you excited about for the rest of the year? I’m
Dana Todd 44:53
excited to have our our tech, our new tech, fully built and deployed. I. Among a very well curated set of on demand manufacturers worldwide who are not being destroyed by tariffs.
Curt Anderson 45:10
All right. Well said, John, your thoughts takeaways from our conversation today with our dear friend, Dana Todd.
John LaRoy 45:18
No, it’s just incredibly fascinating. We talked a little bit before our show here today about all the tech that she’s been working on and pushing, kind of like in parallel of what you’re doing at Belladonna, and it really solves a problem. And I was showing her through, like, our main distributor websites, and all you really get, like, when people say, and they come in and say, Hey, I got corporate event. How many I need? 100 shirts. What? What sizes do I get? It’s like, you send them to a link, and the link will show like, garment specs, right? And it’s like, unless you’re a tailor or a seamstress, and even then, it probably doesn’t even make sense to you. You know? It’s like, that’s what you’re expected to judge and base, because an Under Armor fits different than a Nike. A Nike fits different than a Bella. And all the you know, at our level of apparel, how do you communicate that? Because the worst thing you want to deal with, and regular, whether it’s E commerce or anything, is returns. And not only did you disappoint the customer, because it’s an event based, they’re never going to wear again. So it’s going to happen at landfill, maybe, or they don’t feel confident and they don’t feel good because they had to squeeze into a medium, and they should have got a large, or vice versa. So delivering, like, a really premium experience, not just from like the logo and the service and the face to face, but actually the hard, good, the apparel, part of it is complicated, and I feel like what Dana and her team is doing from a digital side of being able to visually communicate that information that would transfer into the physical world, it’s a big need, and I’m really excited for what she’s going to do. There
Curt Anderson 46:58
Dana parting thoughts, words of wisdom that you want to share with folks. Any our other apparel entrepreneurs? What do you want to share with folks as we
Speaker 1 47:05
close out
Dana Todd 47:08
data? I would say, don’t be afraid to try things new and don’t. Don’t be afraid to experiment even with small pieces of your existing process, and a lot of the assumptions that you have may be wrong, but they may be wrong in a different way than you think as well. So don’t well what you can apply from digital marketing, and you know 30 years of accrued knowledge there is that experiments, small experiments, will give you the next step in your pathway and will ultimately create far more effective and efficient methodologies no matter what you’re doing.
Curt Anderson 47:49
Love it. Absolutely love it. So Dana, thank you. I appreciate you. Applaud you and just we wish you massive monster success. Can’t wait to see now. John, I don’t know if you knew this. Dana actually, years ago, she rang the bell on, on, NASDAQ. Do I have that correct? NASDAQ, she rang the bell. And so hopefully John and I will be invited when you ring the bell the next time when you’re doing your IPO for Bella. Dana. So just don’t, don’t forget the little guys when you make it big. Okay,
Dana Todd 48:14
you’re all invited to the bell ringing party. Awesome. All right. Well, Dana,
Curt Anderson 48:18
hang out with us for one second. John. Thank you guys. Stop by Apparel Redefined stop by Balodana. Connect with Dana on LinkedIn. She puts out great, amazing content, and as you can tell, she is a powerhouse. So we will catch you next time with another wonderful, amazing guest, and we thank you. See you next time you.