| Lindland inspires Kogod entrepreneurs
By Sally Acharya Chris Lindland is the reason they went to business school. Not Lindland himself, but the idea of Lindland. The young entrepreneur incarnate. The guy who can start with a flash of inspiration and a couple thousand dollars and take it to the bank. The 33-year-old San Franciscan spoke at the Kogod School of Business last week about how he has turned corduroy pants into something of a phenomenon, and a case study of what is known these days as “viral marketing.” Lindland is the founder and CEO of cordarounds.com, an online business that in its first year of operation has caught the attention of Newsweek, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and countless other newspapers, magazines, and Weblogs. It also caught the attention of the Entrepreneur’s Club at Kogod, whose members, mostly MBA students, were curious to hear how someone else did what they’d all like to do someday. The business was born at a party, where the beer was flowing and Lindland, who was chatting with a designer but had no particular clue about fashion design himself, just sort of blurted out a question. “Why don’t they make corduroy pants that go horizontal?” It was good for a laugh. And it turned out to be good for a lot more. Lindland put in $8,000, and cordarounds.com came to life. Perhaps every great invention started in a similar way. Velcro. The Slinky. Those little plastic things that keep the cheese from sticking onto the pizza box. Or maybe not. At any rate, by the end of the first year, if sales keep up at the present rate, Lindland’s initial investment will have brought in close to $200,000. It’s all about vision. The sometimes frustrating, sometimes million-dollar gift that Paul Newman, in his pre-salad dressing days, expressed so well as Butch in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Sundance to Butch: You just keep thinkin’, Butch. That’s what you’re good at. Butch: I have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals. Lindland does not wear bifocals. He wears Cordarounds everywhere he goes. He was wearing a rust-colored pair at Kogod, and he once got mad at his partner because he did NOT wear a pair of Texas Red pants on a trip to Texas. Because in addition to vision, it’s all about persistence, and the energy to sell, sell, sell. He’s selling his vision 24-7, and he does it with a staff of two: himself and his business partner. He does not have an advertising budget, he told the MBA students. What he has done supremely well is to get other people to do that work for him, by talking about his pants. That’s what “viral marketing” is about. His business philosophy? People like ideas, and they like magic. “We’re telling a story,” he says. If his pants were just Item Number 311 in the Gap catalogue, he told the students, there’d be no magic. “Everybody who buys these things know they’re just pants. But why not wear pants that are a topic of conversation?”
When sending out press releases, “Be interesting. Anything that sounds like what everyone else is saying is not going to get read, because you’re too small.” Instead of designing a standard Web site with a serious corporate image, he created one that is so funny, people pass it around. It’s full of mock data on the benefits of wearing Cordarounds, mock fan mail from people like a Civil War reenactor, a mock fund raiser for the Sultan of Brunei, and a mock business plan to start manufacturing pants from a zeppelin. There are even mock job openings: “Aerochef: Duties will include overseeing the harpooning and gourmet preparation of geese and other migratory fowl.” People enjoy it so much he even gets mock job résumés. “They’re having fun,” he says. And that’s the whole point. Viral marketing is a strategy that exploits common motivations—in this case, the desire to be cool and have clever things to say at parties. He’s not just selling a product, he said. He’s telling a story and making it one that people can participate in. They write in to his Web site—and then he has their e-mail address for his tongue-in-cheek newsletter. Some people may just delete it as spam, but “a lot will read it, and someone will talk about it at a party, and everyone will hear about the Web site, and one person will check it out.” And that’s what it has taken to get him from $8,000 to $200,000 in barely a year. The Kogod students listened. Then they went home to their shared apartments full of used textbooks and second-hand futons. Home to their late-night conversations and their million-dollar dreams. And probably Lindland got a few more hits on his Web site—from Kogod’s would-be entrepreneurs, taking notes for the future. |
