Past Mistakes & My New Stalker
This is not a story I love telling, but for reasons I’ll explain below, I am doing so publicly.
In 2002, while a student at Columbia, I started a business with an old friend called Rational Fashion, selling discounted designer clothing on the web through eBay and own website. My partner handled the money stuff and the product sourcing (those who know me well understand that I have little fashion sense) and I took care of the technical details including imaging, basic web design and listing product to eBay. We had modest success, made some money, won a national award for collegiate entrepreneurship, and had planned to take the business forward after our 2004 college graduation.
We had big plans, but in late 2003 my business partner died in a tragic accident, which was both personally and professionally devastating. I was left without one of my closest friends and running a business I only really understood half of. I salvaged relationships with some suppliers but had no frame of reference as this was one piece that was handled entirely by my partner. I kept things afloat and decided to continue the business as I believed in the concept and wanted to keep alive what my friend and I had started.
I was profiled in the Job Market section of the New York Times, In August 2004, under the headline Entrepreneurial Success via the Internet. Many interesting things came from this publicity, including an introduction to a clothing wholesaler in the garment district of NYC where I ultimately set up an office and warehouse. I shifted the focus of my business to become an online sales channel and consultancy for clothing retailers and wholesalers, leveraging my expertise and 10,000+ positive eBay reviews to help these businesses sell product online. I basically outsourced the parts of the business I wasn’t ready to handle on my own.
In September 2005 I learned that one such client had passed off around 100 pairs of counterfeit designer jeans through my sales channels and was sued by jeans designer Seven For All Mankind for $4.45mm. The case settled for about $20k, all of which was paid for by the client that had given me the fake jeans to sell, but there was a bit of nasty press that included my name and dominated my Google results for a few months.
While this marked the end of Rational Fashion on eBay, the entire legal bill and settlement amount was paid for by the client. A couple of months later I started consulting for a slew of other businesses, spending most of my time with a chain of Army/Navy clothing stores running their internet business. Then came IAC/CollegeHumor/BustedTees, and you know the rest.
While I didn’t intentionally sell counterfeit goods, I was not blameless. I did not perform due diligence on my sources. I did not insist on proper paperwork describing the origins of the items I was selling under my brand. It’s not as simple as counterfeit electronics as fake jeans look and feel and function just like “real” jeans, but there are ways to tell with serial numbers and documentation and I failed my customers, my employees, and my business by not being on top of those details. I trusted someone I didn’t know very well, and was more interested in the low wholesale cost than in doing my homework. It constitutes one of the greatest failures of my life and I think about it all the time.
So why am I putting this on my blog?
About a year ago I received an anonymous letter addressed to the “Boss of BustedTees” describing the law suit and suggesting that Josh Mohrer be fired immediately because of these events. I had a laugh and threw it away because I was the boss of BustedTees and didn’t think firing myself made much sense at the time. I disclosed all this information to IAC when I was hired in 2007 and nobody cared.
A similar anonymous letter was delivered recently to one of the founders of my current company and representatives of the three venture capital firms investing in our business. My bosses here laughed it off and advised me that the longer you’re in business, the more people you’re going to piss off. And I agree with them, but its still embarrassing to have people that don’t know you very well receive an anonymous letter of this nature. So, I’m putting it out there in the public domain (even though it already was, via Google Search)
This “anonymous” person thought they had leverage on me, but now that leverage is gone. I don’t know who they are, and I don’t know what I did to them to fuel this crusade, and I probably never will, but it’s a poignant reminder of this humbling experience and the important lessons that came with it.
