Andy Dunn

Started by Stanford graduate students Andy Dunn and Brian Spaly, Bonobos was created with the goal to provide men with better-fitting men's pants and a better shopping experience by building the brand on the internet.[6] The company launched with pants that eliminate "Khaki Diaper Butt”[7] and now offers a full line of menswear,[8] including shirts and suits.[9] Bonobos pioneered the internet-driven direct to consumer (DTC),[10] or digitally native vertical brand (DNVB), retail model.[11][12] The company launched online and was exclusive online for the first few years. It was the first American brand to use the web as the primary means of story-telling, service, commerce and distribution. The innovation led to the birth of an ecosystem, largely based in New York City, of DTC brands, including Warby Parker, Harry's, Glossier, Allbirds, and Away. Core to the idea of DTC brands is bundling product and service together to drive a higher NPS customer experience than legacy brick-and-mortar driven competition can deliver. To deliver the experience, Bonobos created a customer service team in 2008, the Ninjas, located at the Manhattan headquarters of the company. The Ninjas became a key part of the Bonobos experience in serving customers.[13]

In 2011, the company invented a new retail model: apparel stores as fit-to-ship showrooms.[14] The innovation resulted from an experiment in the lobby of the company's headquarters in the Flatiron District of New York. The stores enabled the company to deliver long-tail assortment of size, color, pattern and fit without having to stock inventory. The small footprint stores are called Guideshops, and are an innovation made possible because the core engine of distribution for the brand is on the web. Without inventory in the store, the company's associates, the Guides, are able to focus on customer service. As of 2019, the company had 65 Guideshops.

The company raised over $100 million in venture capital from investors including Lightspeed, Accel, Forerunner, and Nordstrom. The founding angel investors in the company are Joel Peterson and Andy Rachleff. Lightspeed and Accel co-led the Series A round. At exit, the Board included Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed, Sameer Gandhi from Accel, and Kirsten Green from Forerunner.

In 2011 Dunn cofounded the angel investment firm, Red Swan,[15] which is focused on investing in consumer retail and consumer internet companies.[16]

Dunn was a consultant for Bain & Company in the US and Latin America following college. His time at Bain included consulting for catalog-based retailer Lands’ End, which served as inspiration for the direct-to-consumer business and customer service model of Bonobos.[17] Afterwards, Dunn worked as a private equity analyst at Wind Point Partners before business school.