When Glove.ly was just starting out, the model was simple: Oscar and Sol Hedaya would make warm, fashionable smartphone-friendly gloves in their spare time and drop off them off in a post box on the way to work. But then one day they ran into a problem: there were so many orders that they had filled up the mailbox. “We looked at each other,” Sol recalls, “and we’re like, “Okay!”. Things got a bit more complicated after that, as they both quit their jobs and decided to go into Glove.ly full time.
This isn’t the flashiest way to start up a clothing brand, of course. Oscar and Sol are both well aware that the easiest way to get headlines these days can be to launch a crowdfunding effort for your clothes. Looking back, they admit they might have been tempted to go with the starry-eyed Kickstarter route, but are happy with what they did. The glove, Sol admits, is not the sexiest piece of clothing. In fact, he says, it’s “the most boring product in the world”. The decision to not crowd source gave Glove.ly the patience to focus on making a strong and unique product, one that lined up with their vision of clean, minimalist design with thoughtful features. “When we looked at it, we looked at our logo and thought, ‘Why don’t we stick a magnet inside?’ That way, you’ll never lose your gloves. The cleaning instructions inside? They’re made out of a cleaning microfiber. The glove itself? It looks like a regular glove, but it works with your phone”.
“We didn’t start with a huge product line”, recalls Oscar. “Just one product: the perfect glove. The glove that everyone wants, that everybody can use, that’s perfect.” Glove.ly has lived up to its URL-friendly name by producing gloves in a way that coders would recognize: come out with a stable product, and then upgrade as frequently as possible, tweaking things both big and little. Comparing today’s Classic glove to the one first produced in 2011, Oscar says, “It’s like jumping into a Prius today. If you’re a person who never drove a Prius before, you imagine it’s the same as the original one. After the first Classic started doing well, we started talking the best ways to improve the line. The body of the Classic is black, and the second color is this silver. It’s a great glove, but not everybody wants a silver and black glove. We were trying to look for the best way we could put a fashion aspect on the glove…Today’s products, compared to last year, have improved tenfold.”
Taking a note from Apple’s legendary designer Jonny Ive, Glove.ly has set up to make a seamless product that can be enjoyed by both casual and heavy use customers. Both Oscar and Sol, whenever they discuss their origin story, jokingly mention that they started the company “because we were cold”. However, it’s grown far beyond a simple need to heat up, and with its hyperfocus on making a perfect product, it’s exciting to think what will be in their next iteration of the search for the perfect glove. More stuffed mailboxes seems like a certainty.
Photographs by Lauren Kallen.