What’s your white shirt product?

Many, many years ago, I was between businesses. As well as sitting in the grove of Redwood trees in Edinburgh’s Botanical Gardens, I took three months out to go travelling. I was backpacking and spent a whole month in Vietnam. This was quite the experience for me. I learned how a whole nation of people can go through the most horrendous stuff and come out extraordinarily entrepreneurial and resilient in the face of all of these terrible things that happened – just getting on with it.

Get on with the white shirt product story

The white shirt product story I’m going to tell you today is a slightly different one. And it stayed with me for 20 years. While in Vietnam, I visited a small town called Hoi An. Hoi An specialises in tailoring.

the white shirt product story

The whole market is pretty much all different shops with large bolts of fabric, and you can go and get anything made.

This was good timing for me because I’d taken two pairs of trousers with me backpacking; I’d already been away for a while. And one of those pairs of trousers in particular was just about to go. In fact, five days later, they split right across the bum, which is not a good look.

I had a couple of new pairs of trousers made and enjoyed pottering about in Hoi An. I got chatting to a guy there who had come with a particular mission. He already knew about this town and its tailoring. And he’d worked out how he was going to approach this. He was on his two-week holiday from the US.

A white shirt from every shop

He went to every stall in that market, every single tailoring shop, and he got all of them to make a white shirt. Just a simple white office shirt. Each white shirt was about $3. You always need a white shirt; this would keep him going for years.

He went away for five days on a trekking trip in North Vietnam, having fun. When he came back, he looked carefully at all the white shirts and chose who had made the best one. And then he went to that shop and asked them to make him five handmade suits.

Obviously, still a good price for him. Probably the best customer that month for the shop owners who had made the best white shirt.

What do we learn from this?

There are lots of business lessons when we think about what our white shirt products are. There’s a lesson about going on holiday and getting your entire business wardrobe made for next to no money by being well-prepared. But that’s a different one.

In business, you don’t know who will order a couple of white shirts and who will come in with the big order subsequently. So we want to make sure that we’re being nice to everybody, doing our best work, and always looking for the upsell.

How can we move somebody on from the white shirt to buying five suits? Or whatever your equivalent premium product is.