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
IN OTHER NEWS
Apple watch
Trust-wise, it’s a bad look for Apple: A manager with the self-styled privacy champion has filed a lawsuit accusing it of snooping on employees via their personal devices, Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez reports. Because many staff use their own iPhones and other Apple devices for work, the company allegedly claims permission to access, search, and use their data—including personal stuff. The tech giant also makes employees agree that it can search any Apple or non-Apple device while on “company premises,” which can include home offices, the suit says. Not creepy at all.
Hiring blanks
You can’t blame job seekers for losing trust in the hiring market. In a recent survey, more than 70% of U.S. adults said that “applying for jobs feels like sending a résumé into a black box,” Chloe Berger writes. Although the number of people looking for work has reached a 10-year high, 40% of unemployed hopefuls haven’t landed one job interview this year. In stark contrast to the job seekers’ market of just a couple of years ago, employers have pulled back on hiring, partly thanks to economic and geopolitical uncertainty. Tough break, Gen Z.
Beijing calling
To help restore customers’ trust, the feds want telecommunications companies to beef up their network security. The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) sounded the alarm after a vast Chinese hacking campaign let Beijing eavesdrop on Americans’ private texts and phone conversations. Although the true scale of the effort—known as Salt Typhoon—is unclear, officials believe the goal is broad access to information. Even if telecoms turf the hackers, they’ll be back, a CISA official warned. China’s response? The usual blanket denial.
Rave reviews
When it comes to performance, Yahoo trusts its employees to be adults. In 2022, the web services titan traded biannual evaluations for less formal reviews. Managers now create their own systems for keeping tabs on direct deports—with no set number of meetings. Twice-yearly reviews left staff feeling let down, but the new approach is a hit, chief people officer Lisa Moore told Emma Burleigh. With constant check-ins, Yahoo aims to avoid surprising employees and gives them and managers more ownership. Good chat.
TRUST EXERCISE
“Some of the world’s largest aircraft manufacturers seem convinced that adding new technologies and increasing automation will allow airlines to reduce the number of pilots on the flight deck. For them, it is a question of when, not if. Despite the misconception that planes largely fly themselves, they can’t. Autopilot on commercial flights is simply a tool designed to assist pilots, not completely replace their training and experience. As these manufacturers push to advance technology on the flight deck, there is a red line that must not be crossed: any effort that removes pilots from the controls.
As we prepare for a busy holiday travel season, our industry’s paramount commitment to passenger safety must never be in doubt. That’s why it is essential to sound the alarm before a bad idea—like removing pilots from the flight deck—takes root. Unfortunately, this isn’t some far-fetched, far-in-the-future proposition; it’s something airplane manufacturers are actively working to implement as soon as possible. Already, European manufacturers Dassault and Airbus are pursuing designs that introduce new technologies they say would allow a single pilot to actively fly a commercial plane.”
As a frequent flier, I don’t find much holiday cheer in that scenario. Jason Ambrosi, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, International, obviously has skin in the game. But he raises serious questions about the wisdom of putting too much trust in autonomous flight systems.
Ambrosi cites two recent incidents where potential disasters were avoided—thanks to a pair of pilots on the flight deck. In those and many other cases, he notes, people rather than technology saved the day by swiftly sizing up the problem and making the right decision.
To be clear, Ambrosi is no Luddite. Sure, tech can shrink workloads and improve passenger safety, but the push to automate flying and remove pilots is all about boosting profits, he argues. He also points to U.S. and international surveys showing that most people wouldn’t feel safe without a real pilot—or two—at the controls. I wonder how that lands with the aircraft makers so keen to clear the decks.
