It's safe to say that when Finnegan Shepard arrived in New Mexico to pursue a master of fine arts in fiction at the University of New Mexico, running a clothing company and finalizing a $1 million seed round was not in the plans.
But with about $5,000 in savings and the experience of not finding clothing that fit, Shepard did just that.
Both& Apparel launched in 2020 with the goal of bringing high-quality clothing — with a proper fit — to the trans and nonbinary communities.
"[There] is the real advantage that I haven't come from the fashion world. … I come with problems. I come with an understanding of the problems the communities [are] facing and potential solutions for what needs to happen at a product innovation level," Shepard said. "And then we're able to translate that into fashion."
Headquartered in Albuquerque, the company has built a design, sourcing and logistics team working out of New York City and works with vendors in Turkey and Portugal.
Both& Apparel is on track to increase its revenue by four or five times this year with Shepard as the only full-time employee and a team of part-time employees handling marketing, growth, design, production and sourcing.
So far, Shepard has reached about 80% of his goal of raising $1 million from those who want to "get in early on what is poised to be the ‘Nike of the nonbinary generation’.”
That effort includes money from some well-known figures and organizations in the New Mexico investment landscape such as John Strong and the New Mexico Vintage Fund.
Strong, an entrepreneur and investor in — among others — Electric Playhouse, said Shepard's pitch stood out.
"I have been pitched by hundreds of startups over the years, and by the end of his pitch, I knew I had to invest in both him and in his company," Strong said. "It is rare to find a 'virgin' market that no one has bothered to fill, let alone a very large one, but Both& has done that."
The New Mexico Vintage Fund, which is operated by four members of New Mexico Angels, went through a thorough due diligence process, said Drew Tulchin. The managing partner and president of New Mexico Angels, Tulchin said the research found Both& Apparel to be in the highest echelons.
Albuquerque Business First recently spoke with Shepard to learn about Both&, its product line and what it's like to launch a clothing company.
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
Albuquerque Business First: Why clothing?
Finnegan Shepard: Really, it was just the classic entrepreneurial journey. I had a problem my whole life that I waited for somebody else to fix. No one did it. I was also reading the room. Like when I was young, I didn't know any other trans people. When I was in my early 20s, I knew maybe one or two. And then I went to [University of New Mexico] to do an MFA. … I was teaching 18-year-olds, and half the class identified as nonbinary. When you look at the research, it's showing that 25% of Gen Z, globally, identified as nonbinary. That's not some fad. That's not some niche. That's 620 million people. … Clothing is really one of the most powerful tools of translation we have.
And if you think about the trans experience or the user experience of being a trans person and nonbinary, you're walking through the world in a kind of constant act of translation. You're trying for the world to reflect back to you what you know to be true about yourself. And if you're stripped of the basic tools of doing that. If you don't even have a T-shirt that fits you, or you can't go swimming because there's literally nothing for you to wear. ... I get an email, I would say almost every day, where someone around the world who bought our product and they say something along the lines of "I put on your clothing, I looked in the mirror and I saw myself for the first time."
What are some of the first products you shipped? I had the idea in the summer of 2020 and then I spent the first nine months gathering all of the research for a fit sizing system. I interviewed and surveyed literally thousands of people and then with that I extracted the data to build our own fit and sizing system.
A good analogy here is plus-size clothing, or maternity wear, even baby wear. The fashion world understands that different body proportions need different systems, but nobody has applied that to trans or nonbinary products yet. So, the first nine months were spent on all that research. Our early prototypes were actually just three different T-shirts in slightly different fit patterns. When I started interviewing people and asking what product would make the biggest difference, I thought people would do a really challenging design.
Everyone actually said T-shirts. … Along the way, I was introduced to this very renowned designer in New York who ended up building a whole team and coming to work for us. So with their help, which was extraordinary help, we launched three T-shirts in black and white to market last summer and they just did really well organically. … We started expanding sizing and colors on those different iterations and made a long sleeve, We made a tank top. We made it a crop top and then we also started gathering the research for more technical categories like swimwear. So we launched swimwear in June and we launched pants and hoodies last month, button-downs coming [in October]. And then a pretty aggressive roadmap for next year of all the different styles we want to launch.
How'd you come up with the name or what was the inspiration for the name? It just came to me. I mean when I started doing market research, most of the brands out there — and I don't mean this in a degrading way — a lot of them will use the word trans in the title ... I want a brand that's articulating this new paradigm of thinking about identity. That it's not an either/or, it's not about it trying to draw a fence around us. … Identity is multivalent and it shouldn't be boxed into these different categories. I wanted us to be cool and inclusive and tolerant in the root sense of the word.
